My trip to Lebanon for my friend Omar’s wedding ended up being a massive friends reunion full of eating, drinking, and socializing, which doesn’t make for the best writing, so this won’t be one of my normal blog posts. Instead, this is more a reminder of what we did and where we went, with a few observations thrown in here and there. I even brought my camera to Lebanon and still barely took any photos! The week was incredibly engaging in so many other ways.
Monday
A decently full day of flights starting Sunday afternoon in San Francisco ended at about 11:00 pm Monday night (September 4th) in Beirut. I was able to beat jet lag pretty easily since I was exhausted at just the right time. After getting an expensive taxi from the airport to my hotel in Hamra, I took a 20-minute hot shower and passed out.
Tuesday
I slept in, ate breakfast, went to the mobile shop across the street to buy a SIM card (an incredible investment on this trip for Uber alone!), and waited for a friend at the hotel in the afternoon. After she arrived and checked in, we grabbed food in the neighborhood and waited for the next friend to show up. Once all three of us (the only friends expected to arrive on this day) were settled, we walked the Corniche in the afternoon, had beers and coffees at our hotel’s rooftop bar, walked around the neighborhood until settling on a restaurant for dinner and double espressos, then went to Blue Note in the evening for music and drinks.
The evening at Blue Note absolutely warrants a special mention. The main reason we went was because it was conveniently located – literally around the corner from our hotel – and seemed like a pretty great local spot. Though the venue is nominally a jazz club, on this particular night they had Arabic music. We considered ourselves pretty lucky for this, especially since the club isn’t open every night and we just happened to be staying in the neighborhood on one of the nights they were open.
The three of us apprehensively went inside, not sure what to expect, especially since we couldn’t hear anything from the street. After we went through the big wooden door in the foyer, we realized why: there was a second foyer and second set of doors which were blocking most of the sound. As we entered, our senses were immediately assaulted by the sight of a full pub of merrymakers, the raucous sounds of live music and even louder people singing and talking, and the onslaught of smoke from countless cigarettes and cigars. Perfectly, there was exactly one free table in the back with exactly three chairs, which we snatched up immediately. We settled into the scene and munched on olives, pickled carrots, and roasted nuts while ordering the first of many bottles of rosé.
My memories of the rest of the night are a tangle, like those romanticized montages of crazy nightlife that you often see in movies or TV shows. The band played live music for hours and hours on end, never once stopping. The entire club was full of folks roughly my parents’ generation, living it up: eating, drinking, laughing, smoking, dancing, singing, taking selfies, and basically getting after it. On a Tuesday! I would soon learn that the daily schedule in Beirut differs greatly from America: late dinners, late nights, and time with family and friends are fair game any day of the week, not just Friday and Saturday. It was a scene that we’d all see repeated pretty much every day we were in Beirut.
Omar, his then-fiancé-now-wife Nour, and his brother and sister-in-law even joined us for a bit, leading to more drink orders and laughs and stories and – if I remember correctly – quite unnecessary shots at the end of the night. Even though I had been in Beirut for 24 hours, I was actually having trouble remembering that I was in a new, exotic place; walking around the city had actually reminded me a lot of Bangkok and nothing was really sticking out as being overtly different. The evening at Blue Note was the first moment where I thought to myself: “Okay, yes, I’m definitely in the Middle East now.”
It was a fantastic way to kick off the week.
Wednesday
Needless to say, the next morning saw the three of us dealing with some pretty healthy hangovers. After a late breakfast, we checked out of our rooms, left our luggage at the front desk, and walked to “Pigeon Rock” for some sightseeing, light trekking, and lunch. After meeting up with another friend who had just arrived, we had our first bitter taste of terrible Beirut traffic: an incredibly slow, two-hour Uber ride across town to our Airbnb apartments in Mar Mikhaël. Luckily we had a very entertaining cultural exchange with our Uber driver, a mid-20s Christian Lebanese guy who had some vocal opinions about Muslims, women, and Donald Trump. Let’s just say that type of person exists everywhere in the world.
Over the course of the rest of the evening, all the friends arrived and we all dressed up and went to Iris, a trendy downtown rooftop bar. Unlike Blue Note, this was more of the 20s-and-30s crowd I’m accustomed to seeing. After many hours of light revelry and meeting more friends and family of the couple-to-be, we set out for some late-night/early-morning manakeesh, a tasty nightcap that would repeat itself later in the week.
Thursday
A few of us had lunch at a fantastic seafood mezze place in the neighborhood, followed by an afternoon at Madame Bleu beach club with many more bottles of rosé, beautiful people, and even more beautiful views of a sunset over the Mediterranean.
We went back to the apartments for more drinks (both alcoholic and caffeinated) on our rooftop, bought some delicious and simple Mediterranean-inspired sandwiches (think of lots of fresh tomatoes and feta) from a small shop on our street, and then set off to Music Hall on the waterfront.
Music hall ended up being a pretty epic night out, though initially it seemed like it would be more of a relaxed lounge night. The format of the entertainment is really, well, entertaining: performers – dancers, singers, musicians, etc – of very different styles take the stage for anywhere between ten and twenty minutes, then the curtain closes for maybe the same amount of time (or less), then the curtain opens again and a new act comes out. The entertainment ranged from soulful Arabic singing to reggae to tap dancing to American pop to Georgian sword-dancing. The crowd was almost a combination of our two previous nights out: the age range went from 20 to 60 and it was a choose-your-own-adventure of drinking, lounging, eating, smoking, and dancing.
We thought we had perfectly measured our intake of libations with our vodka bottle service, until the waitress informed us, as we were settling up, that we were entitled to 12 free drinks (one for each person in our party). By this point, half the group had already gone home, so the rest of us had to jump on the Grey Goose-flavored grenade that had just been lobbed over the wall. Fast forward an hour or two to some interesting Uber rides home and a visit to the same sandwich window that we had gone to eight hours prior. And sure enough, the same boys were working there, no doubt having a laugh at the hot mess group of guys that was trying to order sandwiches without mixing the pesto with the chicken or the chicken with the bacon or the bacon with the pesto all the while not wasting any food and drunkenly repeating English instructions to the poor sandwich maker who didn’t speak much English. It was the closing of a beautiful loop on the evening, once we escaped with our delicious, life-saving sandwiches.
Friday
While some of us dealt with massive hangovers, others fetched food and smoothies and coffee so that collectively we could attempt to have a tourist day outside of Beirut. A few of us had recently discovered UberTOUR – a feature of the app available in some markets that lets you rent a driver for a full day for a flat rate – and after some back-of-the-envelope calculations, we realized it would be cheaper than booking drivers individually, especially since Uber was running a promotion that week: $50 for 8 hours for a car of 4 people, instead of the usual $125. Deal!
We decided to hit the two major tourist sites outside of Beirut: Jeita, an impressive and massive cave system with beautiful rock formations, and Byblos, an ancient coastal town with an old citadel, ruins, and lots of history. Jeita doesn’t allow photography inside the caves unfortunately, so you’ll just have to Google for those images, but trust me, it’s spectacular. After a lovely seaside lunch in Byblos, we had some time to wander around, snap a few photos, poke our heads in some of the vendor stalls, and a few people did some shopping.
That night was very lazy, as a compound effect of the shenanigans of the previous night and the anticipation of the wedding the next day. Dinner consisted of lots of small dishes and drinks at the very hip, open-air Junkyard, another great spot in the neighborhood just down the street from us.
Saturday
Finally, the wedding! It was large, festive, beautiful, colorful, delicious, and basically everything we all hoped it would be. The location (Kempinski Summerland Hotel & Resort) was gorgeous and right on the water and the evening was incredible from start to finish. The East-meets-West motif of Beirut was to be found everywhere, from the attendees (and their clothes) to the amazing spread of food to the music playing all night long. A delicate balance of wine, whiskey, espresso, and water kept most of us going until very late; a few of us, plus most of the wedding party, even made it out to a decidedly non-wedding, dark, industrial club for a bit, before resigning ourselves to some late-night manakeesh and finally bed.
Sunday
Brunch, nap, dinner, sleep. Seriously. Those of us who were still around celebrated Erik’s birthday a little bit early.
Monday
The few of us remaining all boarded our different flights and went our separate ways. (One of the coolest facts about this trip is that every person/couple had a different travel itinerary both in and out of Beirut.) I had a brief layover in Doha, which has the most impressive and accommodating airport I’ve ever flown through. Even at 2:00 in the morning, there was no shortage of amenities (for all travelers) or employees ready to assist with just about anything. During my brisk stroll across the airport to make my flight to the states, I managed to find the huge teddy bear that has become a symbol of the airport.
I don’t feel like I had enough time to write anything really meaningful about Lebanon, but I will say this: Omar once told me that Lebanon is like the “Switzerland of the Middle East” and now I totally get it. Besides being tiny, it’s dense with multiple cultures all mixing fluidly; not only is it more Western than I had anticipated, but it’s also more Mediterranean, especially with the food, which seems so obvious now in hindsight. I wasn’t anticipating cuisine that had obvious Italian and Greek influences, but we easily found it everywhere and everything was delicious.
Mostly, I’m incredibly grateful that I got to spend an amazing week in an exotic place with some of my closest friends. It was the perfect mashup of international travel and fun times with friends that sets the bar unfairly high for pretty much everything else.
Congratulations Omar and Nour!