Severin started reading the Wikipedia page on Lebanon’s Civil War; I told him I wanted the five sentence synopsis when he was done. 45 minutes later, Severin finished reading the main article but ultimately determined it was basically too complicated to explain. The war started in April 1975 and didn’t end until 1990. Beirut, though it is a vibrant, modern, cosmopolitan city, still bears very visible scars of the war even in 2017.
Case in point: the view from our window at the Phoenicia Hotel:
These pictures are both of the utterly destroyed Holiday Inn. According to friends, the Phoenicia used to look a lot like the Holiday Inn until the mid-1990s, when they began renovating it. It didn’t reopen until 2000. Both hotels, along with several others, were actually the frontline of the conflict in 1975-77– there is even a comprehensive Wikipedia page for the “Battle of the Hotels.” Nearly 2000 people died in the battle; most of them were thrown off the roof of the Holiday Inn. There was close-quarters combat happening in the very hallways of the hotel we were now staying in (which could have easily passed for Las Vegas now). Our tour guide told us a lot of Beirut buildings remain destroyed because their owners left Lebanon during the crisis and their descendants don’t realize they own the property or have the title deeds. In other cases, they are too expensive to fix and too expensive to tear down. The Holiday Inn is apparently victim to some sort of business dispute about the future use of the building.
The Burj el-Murr is another tower (30 stories tall, and significantly larger than anything surrounding. We met up with our good tour guides at a shawarma shop in the shadow of the building…all peaceful now!
A beautiful restaurant (love the vintage lamp) just down the street from the above bullet- and shrapnel-riddled building:
A stack of backgammon boards in a cafe:
One of the funny (and annoying) things about Beirut was the taxi drivers annoying tendency to slow down and honk at us every time we were walking on the sidewalks. At one point, we were with our guides, facing away from the street and looking at a building, an a cab driver still stopped and beeped at us. Those guys know how to hustle!
The yellow flags with the green AK-47 on them are Hizballah flags. Surprisingly, they were the only two Hizballah flags we saw the whole time we were in Beirut (probably meant we stuck to the right neighborhoods!) For the most part, I didn’t find the security presence particularly oppressive– it was almost worse in Ecuador, where there was a private security guard with an AK at every major shop when I studied there. There were a few heavily fortified intersections near government buildings and Embassies, and we saw one plain-clothes guy the guides insisted was “undercover police,” but for the most part nothing you wouldn’t see in Paris or London these days.
Most of the apartment buildings had balconies in Beirut, some with heavy gray and white vertical striped curtains that you could draw shut around the perimeter of the balcony for privacy– that seemed very French to me, though Beirut is the only place I’ve seen them.
I think the tour guide said the building below was an old theater. The other photos are of graffiti in the same area..
The most amazing thing about the Eastern Mediterranean in winter is that wherever you look– even in the middle of the city– the trees are absolutely laden with citrus. It’s one of the things I love about winter in Nicosia– the sandstone buildings with full green trees studded with orange polka dots. Usually they are mandarins/clementines like what this guy is hawking:
We saw a couple of incredible vintage cars in the Armenian neighborhood. This one was a beautiful teal colored Oldsmobile– unfortunately, our tour guides were moving too fast for me to get a good shot, especially because the streets were so narrow I couldn’t really get it all in view.
The plates gave a tantalizing hint of the car’s story–the Arabic script above the Latin numbers says “Aleppo.” Many Syrian refugees have moved into this neighborhood because it is affordable. It makes me wonder, would we have seen this car cruising the streets of Aleppo 10 years ago? Or is it someone’s prized possession, which never left its garage until its owners were forced to flee?
This beautiful cat humored me while I adjusted my camera settings to get the perfect shot. My lens doesn’t zoom so I had to get right up in his face for this photo– thankfully he stayed put!
Anti-Turkey graffiti (it is an Armenian neighborhood after all):
Lots of birds in cages around:
This graffiti in the hipster neighborhood seemed particularly timely at the moment:
The places we went (downtown Beirut and Byblos), Christian symbols were definitely more prominent then Islamic ones. This was a small niche near the sidewalk:
This is the larger of two mosques we saw in downtown Beirut:
Rafik Hariri was a former Prime Minister of Lebanon and a major political/business figure– he was assassinated in 2005. He was buried outside the mosque, along with several bodyguards who were also killed in the explosion:
