A Weekend in Beirut by Jim Keeble
Featured Hotel in Beirut
Intercontinental Le Vendome
See all hotels in Beirut >
As I jog past the hotel where Terry Waite stayed the night before being kidnapped, I almost run over a small woman in hijab headscarf and Nikes. I apologise, she smiles, we both jog on. So it is, in the new Beirut. The pursuit of ecclesiastical hostages has given way to the pursuit of the body beautiful.
I head onwards, dodging carts selling freshly-baked flatbreads, corncobs, cigarettes, past the rows of arching fishing poles like giant wands casting spells into the sea, and on through the happy tide of humanity which throngs the promenade – women in full chador, women in skimpy tank-tops, young men ogling the tank-top girls, old men putting the world to rights. All colours and creeds are here, drawn by the slow slink of the sun. On this Thursday evening, the Beirut Corniche feels like the centre... of what? The Middle East? The Mediterranean? The world?
Please excuse this burst of lyricism. It comes from the buzz of finding a place you really like. Somewhere that makes you feel, yes, the world is good, it can work, it can be a beautiful place after all.
I hadn’t expected to like Beirut so much. To be honest, I was a little nervous coming here. In the current political climate, a long weekend in Lebanon seemed about as sensible as a jacuzzi with crocodiles.
But from the moment I landed, my heart soared. The gargantuan lobby of my hotel, the magnificently marble Phoenicia (home to half the world’s press during the bad old days) was packed – UN soldiers, diplomats, wealthy Kuwaitis, even wealthier Saudis, and beautiful tiny Lebanese women with big laughs.
Perhaps it’s the legacy of 16 years of civil war (1975-1991) during which death stalked every mundane corner from cornershop to schoolyard, but Beirut in the new millennium feels completely and utterly alive. The late-1990s re-building boom continues unabated. The Phoenicia will soon have competition from a spanking new Four Seasons and Hilton. Apartments on the waterfront go for $3 million.
The greatest symbol of rebirth is the downtown Solidere district. This pedestrianised quarter is the latest in a long line of Lebanese miracles (beginning with St George dispatching the dragon at the gates of Beirut in 200AD). Thanks to the Solidere consortium headed by wealthy Lebanese businessman and current Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, an area the size of London’s West End rose from deep rubble in the 1990s. Today some complain of its bland Disneyfied appearance, but I think the renovated Ottoman arcades are elegant, housing chic cafes, bars and designer boutiques (including rising Lebanese fashion star Ellie Saab, creator of Halle Berry’s 2002 Oscar dress).
By day the numerous cafés welcome strollers sipping cafés blancs (not coffee at all, as I discover painfully, but boiling rose water). By night Solidere buzzes with al fresco revelers, all dressed to impress. It’s Boston meets Barcelona, only cleaner, thanks to a small army of boiler-suited Syrian street-sweepers with ostrich-feather dusters.
Behind the main precinct of Rue al Maarad is perhaps the only place in the world where a TGI Friday backs onto a Roman market – or at least a large pit strewn with columns and pedestals, uncovered during the rebuilding. I try to get a better look, but in 2004 Beirut archaeological restoration seems to take second place to the creation of prime real estate. There’s no entrance.
Instead I admire the enormous St. George Cathedral, originally built by the Crusaders, which stands right next door to the scaffold-clad Omani mosque, still under reconstruction. Everywhere I go in Beirut, churches and mosques are being built, often alongside each other. After all, this has always been a city of contrasts - old/new, Christian/Muslim, European/Arab, sacred and profane.
I pause on chic Rue Wegand, admiring the rooftop bar of the vast Virgin Megastore, the soaring Omani minarets, the gleaming glass Microsoft headquarters, and across the road, a huge vacant shell of a building, riddled with bullet hole acne. It’s a striking summary of Beirut in 2004 – a city accelerating forward, whilst trying to heal the wounds of the past.
I am driven around town by my guide Hassan (Beirut driving is only for the professional or the criminally insane). “We don’t have rules here,” he smiles, a good slogan for a city in which red lights mean slow down, look, then accelerate at speed, horn blasting. As we charge through traffic, I admire numerous billboards which seem to suggest Beirutis have two obsessions in life - further education and hair removal. One of the few that doesn’t offer diploma or depilatory success depicts Syrian President Al-Assad, stating; “Syria remains at the heart of Arab nations.”
“Syrians are snooty know-alls,” laughs Hassan. He suggests that even Muslim Lebanese would be happy to see them go (as proposed by recent UN resolution 1559 demanding the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon).
It’s hardly surprising Beirutis want to be left alone. The evidence of foreign interference still scars every street of this city. We drive down the former Green Line, Rue du Damas, where Christian and Muslim militias pounded each other for over a decade. The old Ottoman mansions are mere husks supported by skeletal columns; architectural ghosts seeking to remind the living of a fateful past. Adorned with weeds and bougainvillea they are perversely beautiful, like ancient tombs.
Later that day I swim in the Phoenicia’s fabulous Spa, only to find myself enjoying a massage shower while staring into someone’s shattered home. The contrast of pristine new glass and marble alongside the crumbling destruction is acute. Personally I think some of these bombed-out buildings should be preserved, as memorials to their former inhabitants.
But who can blame Beirutis for wanting to forget? The National Museum represents the way forward. Once occupied by militia snipers, situated Beirut’s bloodiest war-time intersection, it’s now been rebuilt as one of the world’s most stylish museums, with ultra-stylish display cases to render a Gucci store jealous. It’s all the more impressive knowing that many exhibits were hurriedly encased in concrete at the beginning of the war, and only recently re-exhumed.
Over the two floors, I trace Lebanese history from Phoenician, Persian, Roman, to Arab, marveling at the influences that have laced this country together. My favourite exhibit is a case of chubby marble babies, sculpted in 5 BC to thank the Gods for delivering them from illness. As I leave, I am serenaded by the joyful singing of two young museum guards as they nonchalantly clack their worry beads.
Music and song are everywhere in Beirut. Journalist Robert Fisk talks of a Lebanese “belief in happiness”, a belief that is most evident after dark. Beirut nightlife was famed in the 1960s (“Paris of the Middle East”, if you believe the travel agents), attracting stars like David Niven and Brigitte Bardot. From what I see, it’s getting its groove back. The food is fabulous. I have three meals that beat anything I’ve tasted recently in London – a sumptuous Lebanese banquet in the walled courtyard of Al Mijana, more intimate mezze at Al Balad downtown, and, most memorably, exquisite sashimi and steak at uber-chic Asia, the sleekest rooftop restaurant in the Middle East, if not the Mediterranean.
And the drinking is Manhattan-esque. I get half-drunk in Liquid, a red-clad Solidere Mojito-hole where girls are dancing around the bar; three-quarters drunk at the funky District (it looks like a Calder sculpture, good luck finding the door) where girls are dancing around the barman; and wholly and majestically drunk at Crystal, a mad-cap club on mad-cap Rue Monot, where girls are dancing on the bar (and possibly the barman, for all I can see in the scrum). Champagne bottles topped with showering sparklers zip between tables; house, hip-hop and eurotrash pierce the ear-drums and everyone shrieks to whatever God they please. Crystal, I decide after too-many cocktails, is where a belief in happiness was invented.
The next day I leave Beirut to clear my hangover. Lebanon is so small (half of Wales) you can see much in a couple of day-trips. 45 minutes up the coast is Byblos, one of the oldest towns in the world (7000 years of continuous settlement), where I admire the crusader castle and casually dangling bright red pomegranates. I shelter in the ancient coolness of the 12th-century church, before enjoying a fish lunch at Bal al Mina on the harbour where Marlon Brando once caroused.
Down the coast, I am seduced by a dip at La Voile Bleue, a consummately glitzy beach club of sculpted torsos and bosoms their owners weren’t necessarily born with. As I bask among the Gucci shades and latest mobile-phones I recall something Hassan told me.
“We only have rich and poor. Before we had the in-betweens, but they left.”
On my last day I meander east through stone-clad hill-top villages that resemble Provence (no wonder the French felt at home in Lebanon) into El Chouf, a hilly region of cedar and pine forests, and the 19th-century palace of Beiteddine built by Italian architects for a Druze prince in the 1780s. It’s been restored into a place of almost Buddhist tranquility, with silent cloisters and trickling fountains. In stables that once housed 500 horsemen, exquisite Byzantine mosaics are displayed depicting native animals and the geometric ponderings of early Christianity. Outside, where Israeli paratroopers once battled Druze militia, couples hold hands and gaze down to the golden Mediterranean.
My road to Damascus moment comes, appropriately enough, on the road to Damascus. Heading out on one of the world’s more exotic Sunday drives, towards the spectacular Roman temples at Baalbeck near the Syrian border, through the fertile Bekaa Valley and its biblical landscapes (punctuated by the occasional Dunkin’ Donuts outlet), past Bedouin encampments, Syrian checkpoints, Hezbollah banners and markets selling monkeys, I realize that I feel safer in Lebanon than in Leamington Spa. It’s a strangely reassuring sensation. Maybe there’s hope for the world after all.