January 2013

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A little hubbly-bubbly after lunch

Thursday, January 10, 2013 in Beirut, Lebanon | 3 comments

Smoking my first hookah after lunch. Photo by David Lansing.

About that hubbly-bubbly: It is everywhere in Beirut. You see men sitting cross-legged on big boulders in the sand, smoking while staring out at the sea. Little groups of stylish women, out for lunch at a trendy restaurant, smoke after their meal. Even teens—some no more than 13 or 14—gather around the hookah (it is estimated that 80% of 13- to 15-year-old smokers in Lebanon smoke nargilehs rather than cigarettes).

The hookah’s tobacco and molasses mix (called sheesha in Arabic) is flavored with strawberry or melon or cherry or apple; it seems apple is most prevalent. Of course, I had to try it.

What you do is choose your flavor and then the waiter brings over a hookah and helps you to get it started, periodically checking that the coals are still burning. I took a long puff, blew it out. It tasted sweet and cool. Nothing like a cigarette.

Maybe it was just my imagination, but when I finished my smoke and stood up, I was light-headed and felt slightly stoned. Pleasantly stoned.

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A walk along Beirut’s Corniche

Wednesday, January 9, 2013 in Beirut, Lebanon

The Corniche in Beirut. Photo by David Lansing.

To walk along the Corniche, the wide and busy promenade along Beirut’s waterfront, is to see the city in all of its horror/grandeur. There are the glitzy new high-rise condo towers next to bombed-out shells of old houses and hotels destroyed in the war; brand-new SUVs jockeying for space with rusting, ancient Mercedes and Peugeots.

Miniskirted young women walk arm-on-arm behind others in full head-to-toe hijabs, both cautiously avoiding the hell-on-wheels skater dudes and spandex-wearing cyclists and elderly vendors selling sesame bread or fresh-squeezed pomegranate juice.

My head spins.

More than once a grizzled old man siddles up to me as I walk and starts a conversation. “Hello, how are you? Where are you from?” Some of them want to give me a shoeshine or direct me to a restaurant, but just as often they just seem to want to practice their English or tell me their stories. “I went to American University.” “I am an engineer.” “I used to be a doctor.” Now they sell CDs of Middle Eastern music or old postcards. One such entrepreneur has an old Polaroid box camera set up on a wooden easel and takes B&W portrait photos of lovers or children or whole families standing stiffly along the Corniche, the dark, gloomy sea at their back.

I meant to walk no further than Luna Park, a rickety seaside amusement park built in 1964 that has opened and closed dozens of times over the years, but I am drawn farther and farther into the city, lured by the sight of a group of men enveloped in a cloud of sweet-smelling nargileh smoke or a spectacular hotel, right on the beach, bombed out and vacant. Walking along the Corniche, it is impossible to turn back.

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The soldier and the Hemingway sign

Tuesday, January 8, 2013 in Beirut, Lebanon | 3 comments

Draw back the drapes of my seaside room at the Mövenpick Hotel in Beirut to a gloomy, wet morning. The weather ap on my iPhone says it’s 52 degrees out. Rain is in the forecast. Today, tomorrow, the rest of the week.

I give myself three options: Order a pot of tea and stay in bed; go down to breakfast; or get my blood circulating by going for a walk in the misty morning along the Corniche. What I want to do is stay in bed; what I end up doing is getting dressed and going out.

So now I want to tell you this story. Of what happened to me on my first morning in Beirut. Two minutes after I leave my hotel, at something like 7 in the morning, I come across a sign advertising Hemingway’s Bar & Cigar Lounge. In Beirut. This gives me pause. Was Hemingway ever in Beirut? Not that I know of. But here in this ancient city is a bar and cigar lounge named for him. Lovely, isn’t it?

I decide to take a photo of the sign. Just for the hell of it. But no sooner have I removed my lens cap than a soldier with an automatic weapon over his shoulder starts running towards me, yelling at me to Stop! At first, I feel certain that he is yelling at someone else, someone behind me that I can’t see, so I go on with what I am doing. I frame the sign in my lens-finder, adjust the focus. But the soldier continues shouting at me while rushing over to me. With the camera at my eye, he reaches for me and spins me around.

“I said stop!” he yells. “You can’t take a picture!”

“I can’t take a picture?”

“No.”

“But it’s only a sign.”

“I am sorry, but that is the rule. You are forbidden to take a picture.”

“I can’t take a picture of a sign on the street?”

“I am sorry.” He looks at my camera. “Did you take any pictures?”

“No,” I tell him honestly. “Would you like to look?”

He shakes his head. “That isn’t necessary.”

“Why is it forbidden to take a photo of this sign?”

“I don’t know. It just is. I’m sorry. Perhaps it is a stupid law. We have many stupid laws in Beirut. Don’t ask me to explain. I don’t understand them myself. I am just here to make sure they are followed.” Then he pauses and says, “Where are you from?”

“Los Angeles.”

“Ah, Los Angeles,” he says, breaking into a smile and adjusting the automatic weapon back on to his shoulder. “I hear it is very, very nice in Los Angeles.”

“Have you been?”

“Me? No, never. But I dream of going some day.” He leans close to me and says in a hushed voice, “Tell me one thing: Do you think it is possible for a man like me to live in Los Angeles?”

I give the question serious thought. “I don’t know what your laws are for visas and immigration and such, but I imagine it would not be easy.”

He shakes his head seriously. “This is exactly what I thought,” he says.

Just as I am starting to walk away, he stops me. “Please,” he says. “Take your picture of the sign.”

“That’s okay,” I say, weary of some sort of legal trap. “I don’t need it.”

“Please,” he says again. “Take the photo. It’s okay. Just don’t tell anyone I allowed it.”

Nervously, I snap a single shot of the sign for the Hemingway Bar & Cigar Lounge.

“Thank you,” I say.

The soldier smiles. “You’re welcome,” he says. “I hope it reminds you of Beirut.”

It will. I’m sure it will.

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The reluctant travel writer

Monday, January 7, 2013 in Beirut, Lebanon | 2 comments

The author and adventurer Richard Halliburton.

Over the holidays I read a biography of Richard Halliburton, an American traveler and adventurer. Nobody remembers Halliburton but back in his heydays—the 20s and 30s—he was as famous as Amelia Earhart, Will Rogers, Howard Hughes, or Charles Lindbergh.

In his lifetime, Richard Halliburton was a synonym for romantic travel. Newspapers dubbed him “Romantic Richard,” “Richard-The-Literary-Lionhearted” or “Daring Dick.” His books offered readers relaxed tours to scenic locales, and introduced them in a charming style to strange people and quaint customs throughout the world. One magazine dubbed him “the most traveled person who had ever lived and a man whose home was the world.”

And yet…and yet…according to his biographer, although Halliburton started out his career as a “naïve idealist,” anxious to see all the world had to offer, by the time of his early death at age 39, he had wearied of travel, and then of writing about travel.

The thought of this—a romantic adventurer and traveler growing weary of travel and travel writing—struck me profoundly. Truth be known, I’ve been there. But until I’d read Halliburton’s biography, it’s not something I’d ever admitted. Not even to myself. To do so, it seemed to me, would be like Alice Waters saying she was sick of cooking or that Mick Jagger had grown tired of being in a band. But that’s how I felt: Wearied of travel, and then of writing about travel.

So when my friend Wafa said she was going home to Lebanon and invited me to join her, my first reaction was, I can’t. I won’t. I mean, Lebanon, now? Really? With all that’s going on in Syria (and Lebanon itself). All those travel limitations and security hassles. Do I want to go to Lebanon? I do not.

Yet in the end, I went. After many long hours in airports and on planes, we arrived in Beirut in the middle of the night, took a long taxi ride to our hotel, where, exhausted, I fell back on my bed, too tired to even undress, and thought, What the fuck am I doing here? Why have I come? Why did I agree to this?

Tonight I don’t know the answer. We’ll see what comes with tomorrow.

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