For Sale...

The other day I had a Couch Surfing guest for a couple of nights. I have never Couch Surfed myself (I prefer certain comforts, especially those with four or five stars attached to them...) but I occasionally enjoy hosting visitors for a number of reasons. One of those is that you are able to see your city through their eyes for a while. This guest didn't particularly want to do much except to just be in Beirut, and so one afternoon we went for a long walk: beginning in Hamra, over to Raouche, behind Verdun, down to Downtown, across to Achrafieh, Mar Mikhael, and then back again. A good five hours of treading the pavement.

Beirut is, in short, a horrible building site. Whatever it had of any beauty is now, definitively, gone. The old building behind my house (dammit, outside the back balcony of my bedroom) is now gone, replaced by a Caterpillar crushing machine and, quite soon, non-stop construction. The noise pollution is the worst I have ever experienced it, and it's all of the same ilk - jackhammers, stone-crushers, drilling. I don't even notice the traffic noise and the ceaseless car horns any longer.

And I just know that...

THIS....











....WILL BECOME THIS....












It is said that Beirut is "booming", that it is "coming into its own" again, that it is, like a Phoenix, rising from the ashes and undergoing a renaissance. Well, so it is, and it is becoming unbearable. If you have bottomless pockets of cash, and a penchant for doing nothing other than going from identikit trendy restaurant to identikit trendy bar before rounding off the evening in an American-style shopping mall then you can, for a while, forget about all of the construction work defacing the city.

This choice is, however, Sophie's Choice.