Casa D Or Hotel Beirut

... donation. I suddenly have an idea: to show a movie in his room and invite some children. So we do it, just like that. A few children come as the sun has set, and I show a movie on the wall, until Ibrahim gets tired. It is too late to go to a hotel, so they offer me to sleep in there place and I feel very happy. I have made friends in Bourj El-Barajneh today, and I am looking forward to visiting them again. After we have made Charity Travel a success.

... of our favourite spots again. We at lunch at the Walimat Wareh, a lovely colonial looking place that had a quite little terrace away from the hustle and bustle of the street outside.

We decided to treat ourselves to an afternoon at the lavish Riviera Hotel Beach Club (which is much more impressive than the hotel itself). The beach club is a real institution for Beirut's young, chic, hip (and slightly bling) crowd. The club forms its own peninsular, jutting out into ...

... for the weekend. We went to a club that is underground called BO18. The place actually used to store some sort of military equipment so the roof was randomly closed and opened every couple hours throughout the night. I thoroughly enjoyed the place since the music was good (if you like techno) and the people were very open and didn't care what anybody else was doing-unlike most posh clubs in big cities where everybody is watching and judging everybody else ...

Well another day in Halba. We'd kind of floated the idea of going to Tripoli today, but watching the morning news and calls to friends and family kind of vetoed that idea, since pretty much everything was closed (including the Macca's and KFC. Rawda's quite keen to compare the Lebanon Maccas to the Halal one on Sydney Rd, then get me to compare Lebanon Maccas to the normal variety). Rawda called their local travel agent today, who ...

Well, before we got to Beirut, I finally got to eat Pizza during our layover in Italy. It didn't give me the rush I was expecting. Anyway, we arrived to Beirut and made our way through customs and were greeted by my cousins on the other side. As we began driving up to my village in the mountains, Katrina started getting a little uneasy. The roads in Lebanon are very narrow and close to the side of the ...

... People in Syria saw the Israelis as agresive and militant while the western press discribed Syria as just that. Anyway back to the story. So I arrive in Beiruit expecting everthing to die down. We got a hotel room and went for a wander through beiruit. The first thing that hit me was how Europen it seemed. People dressed completely different to Syria and seemed very relaxed0 The streets were clean and I could have been anywhere in Europe. Very few women ...

... felt crowded with buildings. Got our rooms and went to bed. I'm on the 4th floor in a double room alone which is very nice. I unpacked completely first and went to bed for a hard sleep till 8. Got up, showered in the bathrooom that I share with the girl in the other room of the suite. I haven't met her though. Then met the guys downstairs and Kamal rode with us to church. Kamal is a student at NEST and was giving the sermon today. Walid, another friend of ...

... but professor Naji was good enough to award us a passing grade. As we enjoyed an interesting set of milk-cream fruit dips, we realized that with the recent outbreaks of bird-flu in so many of the areas we were planning to travel to in the next 6 months, the chicken we had that night would probably be the last we had until we get back to the US. Again, after our final Naji-encouraged gorging, we had a hard enough time getting back to the car, let alone back to the US. As ...