I'm here in Beirut, night #2, after an exhausting but ultimately satisfying day of wandering the city on my own. I came to Beirut like I go to most cities - grossly underprepared, having done almost no research other than reading the wikitravel article. This usually does not matter because (1) the cities I go to have almost invariably been Western European cities (or Japanese cities that I know) and (2) they all always have a G3 network, so I can use my blackberry to plan on the fly. Need to eat? Cross reference a few websites, pick a random place, search googlemaps, and wander around like a blind man with the smallest seeing-eye dog in history.
This has not worked here in Beirut.
On the way to Beirut, I stopped in Hungary and laughed at how long it took to find a GPRS connection in Budapest. Haha- what a backward country!! That is not funny at all anymore. This is because Beirut apparently has one of the worst mobile phone networks on the planet, a distinction they share with North Korea, Libya, and Cuba. What an exclusive club!! So my datafeeds on my phone don't work. It's just a phone now. But wait, there's more - my blackberry charger apparently has broken and I can't charge my phone. So it's not even a phone anymore. It's not even a clock. In a short 24 hours, my blackbery has gone from my digital swiss army knife to my least-useful-object-I-have-ever-traveled-with. Yay!
I learned this last night, so I stayed up late on the hotel's computer (the one I'm using now) to do more research on the city and mark the free map from the concierge desk with notes and reminders. This seemed like a foolproof plan until I went out and realized that navigating a city with essentially no street names with a fairly unlabeled map (just lines and blocks of colors!) and no GPS device is REALLY HARD. And when there ARE street names, no two maps agree - the names are in Arabic, French, and English, and the spellings are so inconsistent, nothing works properly, not even googlemaps (it was extremely time consuming making my map, even if it was fairly useless in the end). They have public maps on the street, the kind they are trailing in London right now, but those were REALLY useless - though they claimed to have a "you are here" marker, none did, and most had been vandalized to the point of being illegible. I somehow found a virgin megastore and started reading the lonely planet guide, which inconviently covers both Lebanon AND Syria and thus only had 10 pages on Beirut, and learned a couple critical morsels - (1) there is a hezbollah tent camp right near Monot Street (the clubbing district) that one should avoid, and (2) there is a book here called the Zawabi Beirut that is like the London A-Z guide, and that with this in hand, you'll never be lost. And it is sold in most shops. Except it's not sold anywhere! And it was Good Friday today, so Beirut decided to be really Christian and close a lot of the stores. I have no Zawabi Beirut. Great.
Despite all this, I did a surprising amount of stuff. I ended up seeing most of the touristy part of the city, including a few gorgeous mosques and churches, found the big mall right when it was closing (agh), managed to eat a lebanese lunch right before passing out from dehydration, and wandered through a neighborhood that I think was the Hezbollah tent city, which was scary, and then did a two hour exhibition out to the Pigeon rocks to watch the sunset, which was actually really relaxing and gorgeous. I ended up having dinner at this restaurant called Indigo which is on the rough of the Le Gray Hotel. I have to say, the food here is absolutely spectacular.
A few other things. There are a LOT of assault rifles here. There are military personnel everywhere, which is both comforting and a little unnerving at the same time. I also got stared at a lot today, which is either because I was wearing a really loud gingham shirt, because I'm Japanese, because I'm bearded Japanese, or all of these things. The restaurants here generally fall into four categories - Lebanese, French, Fusion, and, in a trend that seems to be global, sushi.
The other really fascinating thing about this city is that you can so clearly see the parts of the city still showing the destruction and devastation of a long war and intermittent skirmishes since, but it also has this extreme amount of investment in building and opulence that is sprouting right out from under that. My hotel is sort of a case-in-point - it's pretty nice, and right next to it are two buildings that look basically bombed out.
On to tomorrow. I gotta go find a place to have a drink.
