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    Lebanon: Where East Meets West
    Lebanon: Where East Meets West
    Lebanon: Where East Meets West
    Ebook130 pages2 hours

    Lebanon: Where East Meets West

    By Phillip Donnelly

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    About this ebook

    On turning forty the author leaves Paris and the West for Asia. En route he spends a Summer teaching English in Beirut, a city that was once a byword for civil war, terrorism and the clash between East and West. Twenty years after the war ended, there are still scarred buildings and psyches, and religious and ethnic fault lines, but the country has been reborn. Few countries have had so long and complex a history, and few so tortured a recent past, but Lebanon has emerged from it all with a beauty that belies its history and a face that beguiles all comers. It is exciting, fresh and vibrant, and tired of being branded as a Civil War nightmare.
    Join the author as he tries to understand the fascinating complexities of post-war Lebanon, and how Christians and Muslims manage to live together, and to live with the factions within their own community, and to live with the Palestinians, and to live with their interfering neighbours, Israel and Syria, and to do all of this and keep a smile of their face.
    At a more practical level, learn about Lebanese families and their pan-dimensional networks of cousins, the unwritten laws of the shared taxi and why a working knowledge of numerology is useful if you want to buy a SIM Card. You also learn how to get from A to B, using only hand signals, terrible French and a sunny disposition. Travel with the author out of Beirut to visit the Phoenician city state of Byblos, the Roman ruins of Baalbek, the Crusader castles of Tripoli and the mosques and souqs of the Arabs. You can even take the road to Damascus.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPhillip Donnelly
    Release dateJan 2, 2013
    ISBN9781301600694
    Lebanon: Where East Meets West
    Author

    Phillip Donnelly

    After completing a psychology degree, the author realised that he was profoundly misanthropic and set about travelling the world looking for aliens to take him to another planet. Unable to speak any foreign languages and almost incapable of holding a conversation in his own, he decided to teach English as a foreign language because this was the only job that would allow him to travel widely without any marketable skills or noticeable intelligence. He has unsuccessfully searched for life from outer space in classrooms in the following countries: Spain, China, Russia, Thailand, Hong Kong, Beirut, Dubai, Sri Lanka, Lebanon France, Vietnam and Korea. In the future, he hopes to continue his search for alien life forms in different countries, and he would be most obliged if any aliens reading this work could spirit him off to an altogether more exotic planet in a more harmonious dimension. About two dozen of his pieces have appeared online -- mainly travel writing and short stories, and one of them, The Interactive Classroom, won a Bewildering Stories' Mariner Award in 2010. His latest novel, Kev the Vampire, was published by Rebel ePublishers. He can be contacted at [email protected]

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    • 5/5
      I love your story and your honesty about boring vain people partying hard and the incredible stupidity of people fighting over non-existing gods!

    Book preview

    Lebanon - Phillip Donnelly

    Lebanon -- Where East Meets West

    by Phillip Donnelly

    Copyright 2012 Phillip Donnelly

    License Notes

    This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. All rights remain with the author.

    All Photos by S. Leahy or Phillip Donnelly unless otherwise stated.

    To

    Sandra

    Jitters at 20,000 Feet

    Beirut — the very word conjures up unpleasant images for anyone old enough to remember the eighties. And if you lived through the eighties you will not be short of unpleasant images to remember, but in a desperate decade, Beirut was what made you think that things could always be worse.

    Beirut meant bombs, militias and civil war. Beirut was what happened when civilisation collapsed. Beirut was a foretaste of the apocalypse to come, or so it seemed to me, a pale and languorous teen, hunkered down, low and weary, in a dreary and depressed Dublin, waiting for Regan and Co. to press the button and bring on the Rapture.

    While I waited for Armageddon to come, primary school turned to secondary school and then to university, and the war in Lebanon dragged on and on, from 1975 to 1990; and in those fifteen years, despite the intervention of regional and global powers, neither side proved capable of destroying the other. It was a war that clearly could not be won but both sides continued to fight it nonetheless.

    Eventually they agreed to a draw and tried to turn the clock back to the ‘golden age’, but it was images of a war-torn Beirut that flitted in and out of my mind as the plane flew over the tip of Cyprus and we began our descent.

    I put my book away, finding little comfort in its description of Israel’s 1968 attack on Beirut airport, when IDF commandos landed and methodically blew up thirteen Middle East Airlines planes, wanting to prove a point to the Palestinians, who had been mortar bombing northern Israel from Southern Lebanon. This was not the first or the last time that Israel has attacked Lebanon because it was unable to attack the PLO. Psychologists call this ‘displacement’, but how would this knowledge stop me from becoming the next innocent victim? A working knowledge of Freudian terminology does not deter a heat-seeking missile.

    I asked myself, perhaps for the first time, why I had quit Paris and bought a one-way ticket to Beirut in the first place. Why had I signed myself up for a two-month Summer School in the ‘Paris of the East’, as the tourist brochures used to call it, before the war and before the kidnappings? Why had I left the City of Light in favour of Beirut — a dark place where Middle Eastern conflicts came to fester and die, a testing ground for the clash of civilisations to come?

    I was about to ask my wife these very questions but then I remembered that Beirut had been my idea in the first place. It was a plan I had pushed remorselessly, waving aside her objections and reassuring her that the war was a thing of the past. She had had her doubts before take-off and now it was my turn. The images of Beirut at war are imprinted on my unconscious mind and at some point they were bound to resurface.

    Stop the plane — I want to get off! I imagined myself telling the flight attendant, a burly and daunting female of indeterminate age and origin, whom I suspected had been head hunted by Middle Eastern Airlines for her ability to deter prospective terrorists.

    Take this plane away from Beirut! I shouted at the pilot, in my mind’s eye, brandishing a plastic fork and a demonic air. But the die was cast and the Rubicon was passed and there was no turning back.

    We were going to Beirut.

    Landing

    However, as soon as the plane came within sight of the city, I saw that the past was not the present, and that Beirut was not the battle-scarred wreck I was imagining but actually a rather beautiful place.

    The blue Mediterranean looked ever-so blue, like it does in brochures, and even from the plane I could see tiny creatures frolicking in it. If this was Hell, I thought, then why were people swimming in it?

    With my nose pressed against the porthole of the plane’s window, I studied the landscape as it rose to greet me. Swimming pools were visible along the coast, with hotels growing at their feet, and beyond them the city proper.

    From the air, East and West Beirut were indistinguishable, and since it was so near midday, and the sun so resolved neither to rise nor to set, I was unable to tell which was which. Given more time I might have been able to tell East from West but my wife pulled me away from the porthole so that she too might be able to view the city.

    It’s full of buildings! I told her, as informative as ever, and people are swimming in the sea!

    I smiled at these buildings and all the other signs of civilisation, and as my spirits soared the plane sank lower and lower.

    The runway must have been built on reclaimed land, lying as it does out of the city and on the sea, and to a worried passenger, who could only see to his left and not straight ahead, it did feel as if the plane was going to land on the water and trust to Neptune to sweep us onto land later.

    There is a runway! I told my wife, when I finally spotted it.

    That’s good, she replied, in an apparently disinterested manner.

    Needless to say, the plane touched down on dry land and the second most dangerous part of the journey was over. The most dangerous, of course, is travelling by road from the airport to the city centre, but more on land transportation later.

    Our captain, whose name I never managed to establish because of a faulty PA system, was awarded a warm round of applause for having brought us down safely.

    I wondered if he had, unbeknownst to me, managed to dodge some heat-seeking Israeli missiles, or a family of time-travelling pterodactyls, but then I remembered that this used to be common, this clapping when a plane lands, but I couldn’t remember the last time I had heard it.

    When did the clapping stop? I wondered. I traced it back to the mid-nineties, when flying moved from the exotic to the humdrum. In the poisoned air of the Ryan Air Age, in which cut-price cut-throat budget airlines charge extra for everything from coffee to civility, one now feels more inclined to snarl at a flight crew than to clap them.

    But the effusive Lebanese clapped and smiled, and thanked God and Allah for their good fortune. They then completely ignored the captain’s entreaties to remain seated and to leave mobile phones switched off until well inside the terminal. Instead, they sprang out of their seats, clogged up the aisles and called all-known living relatives to inform them they had landed safely.

    Normally this kind of thing puts me into a sulky bubbling squirming rage, like a ghetto worm with a migraine, but on this occasion it did not. I was instead quite enamoured with my fellow passengers: their clothes, their perfumes, their joie de vivre; and most of all, their individuality.

    This is something we have lost, I fear, in the antiseptic septic sceptic lands west of the Levant. If you seek evidence for this assertion, the next time you get on or off a plane, note the shuffling gait and the dead fish eyes of the average plane of westerners as they embark and disembark.

    There is much of the zombie in their movements ... but fortunately none of the moaning or the insatiable desire to devour human flesh. However, if Michael O’Leary and the other budget airline impresarios start to hire zombies as cabin crew, seeking to take advantage of their willingness to work without a wage and their disinclination to unionise, then I for one will boycott Zombie Airways and would advise you to do likewise.

    The Lebanese, however, are most definitely still 100% human and they left the

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