Beverly Residence Hotel Beirut

... tempo and looking forward to the first meetings with others working on these issues which will hopefully be scheduled soon. Since today is Human Rights Day, there is also an event to go to at the end of the afternoon, which provides a chance for me to meet some other people involved in the regional conference I am preparing a background report for. The programme for the event also mentions "cocktails" which sounds promising.

... were clean in my room. Not so sure about next door though.

Having read that Beirut was once the Paris of the Middle East and is making a resurgence I had high hopes for my visit and woke up early to get a good start. The hotel was two blocks off the beach and I headed down there first. The beach was coarse brown sand and litter was strewn everywhere. About the only thing going on down there at 7am was a brown dog trying to hump a German Shephard ...

... I can say. They wouldn't let us take pics, but google it since it's in the running for one of the new 7 wonders of the world to see how awesome it was. They have an upper and lower area, the upper is a cave you walk through and the lower is a boat ride through it, crazy stuff!! We then went to Harissa which is a statue of Mary on top of the cliff of Beirut. The statue is HUGE and I will be posting pictures of it. However, the scary part was how to get there. You ...

... la brandir à vrai dire qu'après mon passage par les Emirats, entre l'Iran et Mascate. Beyrouth m'a vraiment fait penser à Dubaï, donc. Mais il serait injuste de cataloguer la capitale libanaise de manière aussi expeditive, et ce pour plusieurs raisons. Les premières images d'un peuple libanais cosmopolite, branchouille et ...

I woke up today and made plans to see Jacquie. She was going to some private club by the beach to hang out by the pool with her cousin Nadine. It was exactly the kind of thing I was looking to do today. I sensed that Claudio, the Brazilian guy I met on my bus yesterday, wanted to join me but I didn't think it would be a good idea so I didn't offer him to come. I think this bothered him a bit. Before I left to meet up with Jacquie and her cousin I ...

... In yet others it's Middle Eastern, but with a Lebanese/Mediterranean twist, and it's one of the prettiest countries I've ever visited. The other really striking thing after Jordan and Syria is just how relaxed the whole place feels. Aleppo is a very conservative city, and the burkha is a common sight - in Lebanon there are billboard advertisements for lingerie. After only a short time in the Middle East I found this quite shocking ...

... and Aanjar as well as being the homeland of Hezbollah (Party of God). Heavily cultivated over millennia (it was one of Rome's 'breadbaskets'), it has suffered from both deforestation and soil erosion and is now a relatively deprived area. Baalbek (nee Heliopolis) - 'Sun City' of the ancient world. Probably the most impressive Roman site in the Middle East. Its temples, built on an extravagant scale that outshone anything in Rome ...

As if things were not crazy enough. This afternoon (the 14th of july) another missle had been lauched against Southern Berit that sounded extrely loud so ventured up to see the comotion. It was the same vantage point I was at the previous night. We chatted for about an hour. Meanwhile a camera crew set up to film the boat before giving up and moving away. We stayed and ...

... Sooooo good! Very filling though and I could only eat half. Lunch - Ma-something or other (the same thing we had yesterday but smaller, softer, and much better) Mankousheh. You put a few slices of tomato and some sprigs of mint in it, fold and eat. That alone would have been a good lunch. But there was also fresh cooked organic spinach, rice with vermicelli and lemon, organic salad, apples, cookies with a weird sweet ...

... Lebanon is a long narrow country with two parallel sets of mountain chains, it made sense for Israel to position one army in each of the three valleys. When the Hezbollah covertly took control of the force in the middle, the Israelis were terrified and fled south out of the occupied territory almost immediately when they uncovered the plot. Naji greeted us upon our return to Beirut by taking us to a local hotel positioned on the Corniche, or the oceanfront promenade, where we ...