Six: Yallah Bye Beirut.

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It’s the end of Chapter One. Sorry that it has taken me so long to blog since my last post. Unfortunately my poor laptop went into a coma about 24 hours after the Achrafieh bomb, leaving me with limited blogging faculties and struggling to decode any semblance of meaning from Arabic news channels (it didn't work).

 So my time in Beirut has finally come to an end. Haraam (as we say here), shame! I've seen the Arabic alphabet miraculously turn from odd shapes, random squiggles and a couple of dots into some kind of coherent system and have had stilted but ever amusing conversations with locals (“You talk like a Syrian” or the ever present “Shou?” in response to anything I’d say). I also feel like this was touch down in the Middle East proper (Dubai is most definitely Middle East lite) where things like civil wars and Arab Springs have an actual on the ground meaning as opposed to something I’d read on the Guardian. I met an amazing group of people and carved out a little life living in Mar Mikael, drinking in Gemmayzeh, lounging around in Café em Nazih and navigating my way through the amazing daily hassles of not being in Europe.

Gemmayze (or there abouts...)



 The weeks after my last update were also fairly uneventful, which is not to say they weren't amazing but I had slipped very easily into actually just living; going to class every morning, learning huge lists of Arabic verbs, going somewhere dingy and fun after dark, meeting new people, making hummus, car crashes, daily power cuts, Eid festivities and fireworks (not gunshots!), finding Zeina an Armenian husband, demonstrating my ability to read Norwegian, wandering around as Harry Potter (and snapping my wand), enduring three solid days of thunder storms and realising that I really, really didn't want to leave. Yup, I really didn’t. I could have found myself a flat with a twelve month lease, settled in and found a job (if it weren't for doing that pesky useless degree…) and never ever have come home to grey, wet, cold, miserable, austerity ridden, depressing and unexciting England. Unfortunately for you lot it seems I’ll need that Masters in the end, and having met people who have studied the same thing as I’m hoping to it has only made me more excited to do so. But it’ll be a year in London and then Beirut is calling. Put the coffee on and put the hummus in the fridge because habibti, I’m coming back.

Beirut's goodbye on my last day.

 Anyway, because of my lack of update, I’m going to retroactively update on some of the things I managed to get up to outside of the city and a couple of best bits of Beirut for anyone who comes here in the future (n.b. YOU ALL SHOULD!) including the best watering holes and food troughs. Those to follow in coming days, I absolutely promise. But for now, it’s goodbye. My fingers hurt and I’m drinking cold Costa coffee (universally awful the world over) and a little bit of Dubai overindulgence is waiting. I miss you all very much (if not the locale). Next stop is a brief visit to a rather chilly Turkey at the beginning of December and this is an official invitation to all those who have stuck with reading this (and all those that didn't  that I WILL BE IN ISTANBUL FROM DECEMBER THE 5TH AND I WOULD LOVE TO SEE YOUR BEAUTIFUL FACES.

 Yallah Bye,

Gx. 

Five: Being Beiruti.

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Well, I'm sorry for the lack of updates and the seeming silence of the last couple of weeks. Suffice to say it has been exceptionally busy, hectic and, most of all, fun. 

I've spent the last couple of weeks cramming Arabic letters, words and verb conjugations into my head for three hours a day while trying to sample the best the city has to offer as well as finding myself a new place to live. I can now actually write بتعلَّم عربي كل بوم !

Flat hunting in Beirut is a fun game to play. Sifting through posts on website for apartments for rent, finding ones that are even barely suitable and then trying to track down the owner, arrange a meeting, find the apartment and then actually look around, has probably be one of the most difficult things I've done since I've been here.

The first apartment I found was located way south of where I wanted to be. The bedroom was in the living room, it had a mixture of odd furniture including one bedroom with an antique French wardrobe that the landlord pointed at triumphantly and declared "It's so much nicer than new things". The same could not be said for the 80s flatpack that littered the place. This landlord then offered to drive me and Zeina home, decided that we were fun and told us how he was an actor/videographer/singer/photographer. He regaled us with his impressions of accents including Italians speaking Arabic (which sounded vaguely offensive but I couldn't really tell) and then decided we'd like to hear him sing "My Way" by Frank Sinatra. So as we weaved through rush hour traffic he were stuck in a car with a Lebanese man crooning "I deed it mayyyyyy whayyyy" very loudly and ever so slightly out of tune. He then decided he'd quite like to come out with us to a pup quiz. Suffice to say it was all very odd, slightly surreal and I did not take the room. 

I did, however, finally find a room in the most amazing apartment I've seen in Beirut.  It's perched on the fifth floor of a building in the Mar Mikhael area of Achrafieh, only 10 minutes walk from class and across the road from a friend. It looks out over the winding suburbs of Beirut, stretching up to the mountains, and down to the sea (if you position yourself just right, you can in fact, see a slice of the Med). It's decked out in industrial chic furniture (my bed is made of pallets) and has a kitchen that looks like it's been stolen from the set of a 60s french movie. I absolutely love it. I have also been left in charge of the various plants on the balcony and am worried that my perpetually ungreen fingers, which appear to be like anthrax to plant life, will result in their untimely death. I am also able to go down four floors to the beauty salon and get "fillers/botox" without even having to step out on the street. Domestic bliss.

View from the new flat. 


Unfortunately, it hasn't all been good news. Yesterday while I was sat out on the balcony I heard a huge blast, the windows in my apartment rattled and a weird silence fell over the city. I jumped, of course, to the idea that it was an explosion. Then I chastised myself for being an overly paranoid Westerner and decided it must have been a sonic boom from a jet or something. Then I looked at twitter and saw the beginnings of the coverage of the bomb in Sassine. 

It is absolutely devastating to me that this would happen to Beirut, which I feel is finally managing to shake of it's post-war feel and is finding itself an identity that doesn't depend on sectarian violence. It is more devastating to know that 8 people have died and over 80 have been injured. These were mostly civilians, going about their daily lives. There are reports that a large amount of the injured are elderly and that at the time of the bomb (2:50) the area is usually busy with school children. 

However, as I sat holed up skipping from the Guardian, to the Lebanese Daily Star to Twitter I started to worry. When it was announced that it was an assassination of a prominent Sunni the fears of sectarian violence crept back into play. The scariest thing about this bomb is not just the death it caused yesterday but the lasting impacts it could have, the passions it could reignite. And perhaps this was the point of the entire thing. The one thing that came to mind, and I later discussed with my friend at a bar last night (I'm British, I won't be quarantined to my apartment and I deserve a pint on a Friday) was the speech that Ken Livingstone gave post 7/7:


"They seek to divide Londoners. They seek to turn Londoners against each other […] Londoners will not be divided by this cowardly attack. They will stand together in solidarity alongside those who have been injured and those who have been bereaved".


These are sentiments that I have seen echoed on social media by normal Lebanese, bridging sectarianism and turning away from divisive politics. The most we can do is hope that this is the case, that the young, bright Beirutis stand together instead of apart. 

But for now I'm keeping my head down, cracking on with the Arabic verbs and trying to make sense of the whole thing. 

Gx.

Four: Acclimatisation

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Evidence A: I wear jumpers in air-con because I am cold

Evidence B: I experienced the existential moment when you stop and realise that yes, this is your life.

Evidence points to the fact that I may, in fact, be acclimatising to life in Beirut.

So, since the beginnings and the finding my bearings I've found myself just living and existing in Beirut. I go to coffee shops, eat good, cheap Lebanese food all the time, talk about regional politics with everyone and anyone (a surefire sign of adjustment and staple of Lebanese culture). I hate to say it (nb: I don't) but this really is the life.

I spent last weekend with Zeina and went up to the mountains to get out of the chaos of the city for a while. Lebanon is full of mountains and the mountains are full of tiny hill towns and villages where the air is clean, life is calmer and you can get a man'ousheh and a Pepsi for 2000 Lebanese Pounds (less than £1). A man'ousheh is a mixture between a pizza and a fajita that is covered in herbs and oil (Za'atar, seriously the best invention ever) which is baked and folded in half. It sounds a bit odd, it tastes absolutely delicious. Driving out and up you can palpably feel the change in atmosphere and while it takes less than hour to get up it feels like driving into another country. The villages and towns are a lot like Beirut in some ways though. They too, are sectarian, with most of them having a dominant majority community. Now before I came to Lebanon I thought it was divided by Muslim and Christian, down the middle. It is definitely not. 

A lot of people talk about Muslim and Christian areas as if they are inclusive terms but it couldn't be more different. So far I've heard of independent communities of (brace for it): Sunni Islam, Shi'ia Islam, Maronite Christians, Greek Orthodox Christians, Greek Catholic Christians and the Druze and this complex patchwork of communities has both divided the country and added to it's cosmopolitan, multicultural identity. In the mountains every village is a community that has been intact for hundreds of years. It struck me most when I started comparing it to my family. My parents were both born in London, their parents were born in London and Scotland but then after that? I have no idea. We don't navigate around places in the same way that Lebanese culture does and that means that when someone talks of home it's not just their home but the “home” of their uncles, cousins, grandfathers and everything else. Those places are an integral part of their cultural identity and their daily lives and that means whether you're in Beirut or Brazil or Brisbane you still have a connection to your past and your family contained in a little village perched on the side of a Lebanese mountain. So we drove to Jouar where Zeina's great-great-great grandfather probably lived, which was utterly beautiful and surrounded by the most incredible scenery.

It's only after realising that Beirut is a macrocosm of these villages that it started to make sense. The idea that people have migrated from small communities to the city and maintained their identities is a driving force in Beiruti and Lebanese life. And after a day of lounging around, eating the most amazing lunch (including raw liver, try it folks, it's actually really nice) I was rewarded not only with break from mother Beirut but with this view. Beirut, je t'aime.



This week I also started my Arabic course and I can now inform you all of my ability to write 20 letters of the Arabic alphabet. This means very little in reality because at the moment, a) I can only make sounds like a child without any concept of their meaning and, b) I still can't actually read properly because of a hideous mount of dot placing and letter mutating rules, but it's start! I'll keep you updated on my progress but I am absolutely loving it even if I have to do homework and haul myself out of bed to sit in a classroom all over again. Suffice to say that even after being in full time education for the past 17 years I still think the only thing I'm good at is learning and I'm not bored of it.

Sorry, it has taken me so long to get round to posting this but it's been a really hectic couple of days and i've been doing my homework like a good boy but I'll update this soon.

Yallah bye,
Gx. 

Three: Beginning in Beirut.

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I have now been here for four days and I still wake up in the morning, walk down to the street and still can't quite believe that I'm here. I am falling in loving with Beirut more-so, I think, than I thought I would. The Saifi Institute, where I start Arabic lessons on Monday, and the Urban Gardens, where I'm staying, are in Gemmayze, in East Beirut. It's an amazing place with a mix of backstreet cafes, little old school eateries and hipster bars and cafes. One of which, Urbanista, I'm in now because of it's functioning internet, as opposed to the internet elsewhere, which can only be described as tortuously lethargic. It's been a busy couple of days so I will try and condense this to summarise what I've been up to.

Home for the next 7 weeks. 

Flying from Dubai at six in the morning was less than ideal. For some reason the Emirates terminal building has been decked out in Times Square-esque lights and screens so stepping out of the cab was like stepping into a shit version of the Opening Ceremony. The overpriced bars (the only place in the airport you can smoke, obviously) were crowded with people drinking Chardonnay to wash down their toothpaste. One rather elderly, hagged Australian woman asked a Lebanese man who she was chatting up if “Lebanon was in Israel now”. Swiftly left and spent three hours next to an overweight man from China who grunted in his sleep.

I made it to Saifi with indicative and expected difficulty. My taxi driver didn't speak English or French and seemed to speak only two phrases: “I don't know English or French” and “OH MY GOD”, shouted wearily at traffic in general. I asked if it was busy because of the Pope and he responded with the two phrases in order. So perhaps that was a yes.

Besides the traveling everything has become a blur of walking through streets littered with bistros, cafes and bombed out buildings in regular intervals, drinking strong black coffee during the day and Almaza beer during the night. Besides Downtown, the new precinct surround Place d'Etoile in central Beirut, which is overpriced, snooty and devoid of any culture (reminded me of the UAE), Beirut seems not to abide by the same rules as normal cities. Walking down a street in Gemmayze, Hamra or Ashrafieh, (the three main distrcits i've explored so far) you notice that you don't really get the uniformity that you do in Europe. Rue Gouraud, near Saifi, has posh cafes, dingy local cafes, restaurants that advertise 'fusion cuisine', restaurants with no menus and everything in Between within about thirty paces. They have a feel plurality that I've never really experienced before, and Gemmayze especially has drawn people from all over Beirut to make it into an up-and-coming young, artistic centre. It's full of amazing bits of urban art like this one.

بيروت‎ - Beirut Graffiti 

They're scrawled over crumbling buildings which are a constant reminder of the fact Beirut is still suffering from a war which threatened to consume it entirely and destroy any semblance to the pre-75 cosmopolitan city of the Middle East. It is beautifully, brilliant decrepit and at the same time avant-garde and exciting and seems to refuse classification as either a museum city or a sprawling modern metropolis. And I love it.


Kate, who has been my much esteemed tour guide, Arabic teacher and interpreter left yesterday and now it's down to me to take up the mantel and explore for myself. I ordered my first coffee in Arabic yesterday (he repeated it to me in English, “two espressos, yes?”) so I feel suitably equipped for anything. Luckily Zeina is still here (working at as an intern) and so I have at least one permanent drinking buddy on call. My room mate is a Mormon from Mississippi so not much hope there.

Will stop now as this is getting rather epic but I hope you're all well. Send me an email and say hello.
Love
Gx.

p.s
For those asking, my postal address at the moment is:


George Edward Connor
Post Restante 
LibanPost - Beirut Souks Post Office
Beirut, Beirut Souks, Downtown Beirut
Lebanon

But let me know if you do send anything so I can go and pick it up.  

Location: Beirut, Lebanon

Two: Dubai & the GI look.

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One thing Dubai is not, despite the efforts of Sheikh Muhammed's PR office, is a cultural capital. With it's profusion of malls, hotels and indoor ski slopes, but distinct lack of museums or galleries there is a distinct lack of "culture". But despite its wanton bedrock of consumerism it is one of the most multicultural cities in the world. Only 17% of the population is local Emiratis with the rest made up of migrant workers from Europe, America, the Phillipines and the India subcontinent and if you venture away from the glittering, towering hotels and into the actual streets you'll find some of the best food, company and crafts this side of Mumbai. You can buy fresh naan cooked in baking hot tandori ovens for a dirham (20p) and have a slap up Rajastani meal for under a tenner. Satwa and Karama are the two districts that make up "Little India" and they're undoubtedly my favourite parts of the city.

A street in Satwa 



But, of course, the other thing that Dubai does well is fun. Expats here welcome the beginning of the weekend with a singularly Dubai custom: Friday Brunch. Brunch here is less a fry up at midday but a full on buffet come banquet with rows upon rows of cooking stations groaning under the weight of the food. Reflecting the multicultural outlook of the city you can eat everything from roast beef to roti all washed down (generously) with unlimited libations. Excessive it is, and indicative of the Dubai way (the superlative city after all) but there is no doubting that it's fun. To finish my week long stay here, and to say goodbye before I go to Beirut (where my mother is convinced I am going to become embroiled in a revolution) we went to the Yacht Club for their Brunch (which starts at 7…) Today I feel decidedly fragile but not only that I realised the consequences of plying the middle aged with tequila shots. At some point it was decided that it would be amusing to shave my head even more and I woke up this morning with a headache and a lack of hair. Brilliant. 

The GI Look


Anywho, I now need to pack before I leave on Monday morning for the Paris of the Middle East. I'm more excited than ever and have booked myself onto an Arabic Course at the Saifi Institute so will let you know how ordering hummus in my best accent goes. 

Gx

One:

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If you've got this far you are either an amazing friend, a Facebook stalker or my mother. Congrats to you. First of I think i'll explain what this blog is (or will hope to be), what I'm doing, where and why. 

This blog is going to be a record of my travels around the world while I run away from the fact I've just graduated and don't want to get a job. However, as much as possible i'm going to try and make sure that it's not pictures of me at the full-moon party with captions like "THAILAND YOLO". As I travel I want to try and capture some of what I see, hear and experience through photos, videos and soundbites. For me, this is so that I can look back at where I've been and remember. But also I'd like to share this with you to stay in contact, to show you the bits of the world i'm seeing and so you don't worry (Mum) and hopefully you'll enjoying seeing some of the people, places and events that I stumble into.

For the next year-ish I'll be going to Lebanon for 2 months and then India for six, and well, that's as far as I've got with planning. Two of the aims of this trip are: to learn Arabic and Hindi at Language schools in Beirut and Landoor; and to do internships with charities and NGOs wherever I can. The reason for both of these is that I want to travel in a certain way. I want to spend long periods of time relatively static so that I can really experience the places I visit rather than speeding through various temples/beaches/museums taking photos and getting on a train to the next place. I want to really communicate with people and carry on learning (I worry it may be the only thing I'm good at) and I also want to try and give a little bit back in general (as best I can). 

Now, if you're still reading then thank you! Hopefully you'll pop back and keep an eye on what I'm up to. Goodbye to you lovely lot, and goodbye to England!

Keep in touch.

Gx. 

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