christmas in the city

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aley

wadi nahr ibrahim

Rain, or: Immer wenn es regnet...

When it's raining I always feel like writing,
and as this is the first evening with rain since ... - I don't even remember when, but it's a while ago - I haven't been writing a lot.
After a day in the mountains, nearly on 2000m (!) in the hinterland of Jbeil/Byblos, sitting on a motorbike, I passed the evening with bloggers and a teaching about technical issues. It felt like two days, and I am happy about the rain. Still, it's warm enough (at least for me, not my flat-mate) to sit on the balcony at midnight. The sky is grey with a slight rose glimmer.
Time to go to bed.

Saida

PS: Saida is the town where Rafiq Hariri is from.

Eid al-Adha / “Feast of sacrifice”

The boys are playing with plastic guns outside. I observed little street wars during the last two days in Beirut and today also in the old city in Saida (city in Southern Lebanon). “Traditionally” the boys are having those guns as a present for the feast, girls are getting dolls, we were told by a man working in a toy-shop in Saida. Sometimes little plastic bullets come out of the guns, sometimes they have the special effect of leaving red points at the wall. Somehow it effected me seeing this young and sometimes not that young boys running “armed” through the streets...
Nevertheless, during the feast days children are more visible in the public life here in Lebanon. During the last weeks I was asking myself sometimes, where are all the children? They aren’t very present in the streets. Only if there’s end of the school you see them coming out, often picked up by their parents. Otherwise there seems not much space to play in Beirut, except a very few gardens and the Corniche perhaps.
This evening in Saida, it was quite clear: feast days are children days.

view from my balcony

Closed curtains, veiled balconies

When I am looking outside the window, I see a lot of balconies hiding behind curtains.
It looks a bit as if the house has been covered, veiled, like in a safe cover, that nothing of its private life can reach outside. But it also seems like the house and its inhabitants can’t breathe, as no sunshine and no fresh air can’t get into the rooms behind the curtains.
The balconies here are (no longer ?) a semi-public space, where you are on you own and at the same time reachable for the gaze of the others, the neighbours and those woh are passing by. It is transformed to a closed private space. This allows privacy on the balcony, especiall in Beirut where the buildings are very close to each other.
When I am sitting on my balcony I feel a bit alone, as they are nearly no other balconies with open curtains like mine – I need the light to come in! – or when they are open, nobody is using them.

ps: picture follows, uploading doesn't work today...

Corniche

Off-electricity

Sitting in my new flat around 5 o’clock, with tea and a candle, in the middle of the daily 3-hours electricity outage, offline anyway, because the internet hasn’t been installed yet. The times of the outage are changing and have a predicted rhythm: 6-9, 9-12, 12-15 or 15-18 h backwards, not in the night. Every quarter in Beirut has up to 3 hours every day, outside Beirut even up to 6 hours. And if you aren’t lucky and yourself, your house or institution has not an own generator, you find yourself without the noise of the fridge, without light and elevator. And you start watching how much energy your computer has still left, realize that you should have loaded your mobile before…
Coming from outside I wonder, why this little country isn’t able to supply electricity all day long. Especially if there seams to be a lot of money around, if you’re watching the big fancy cars driving through the streets and all the new hyper modern buildings being constructed… I’ve been told that the electricity problem exists since the July war 2006, before it was only a casual problem. But I also heard that this isn’t the only reason – it has been more than 3 years now… – and some people make money out of it. Something still to be explained. I’ll keep on the track.
For the moment I need to remember the times to organize my daily life a bit according to them. Now it’s only ten minutes left. I’ll plug in my mobile first and also the connector for the water pump. What else?
I’ll smoke a cigarette meanwhile on the dark balcony. Since I am in Beirut I suddenly became a real smoker again, Gitanes blondes my new friends…
And then it’s suddenly back, 2 minutes to 6 o’clock, the freezer is noisy again and I open my eyes a bit more.

view

thunderstorm

Starting a blog in Beirut, on a Sunday evening, in the beginning of November, while sitting on the kitchen sofa and not being connected to the internet.
Outside there is rain and thunderstorm. The neighbours close their curtains, rain is running down on them and on the walls and getting down to the balconies - and a bit is finding its way into the kitchen here. I drank too much tea and ‘Bebsi’ to have an early night I feel. And thunder again. I just left my place at the balcony door from where I was watching the rain falling and the flash of lightning on the sky.
It has been only two weeks that I am in Beirut. Arriving in the last summer heat, at least it felt like when coming from Berlin, and now catching the beginning of autumn with a lot of rain and thunderstorms. It is not that I am only planning to write about the weather, but about all kinds of things I see and hear, what this city and the other places I go to will make me perceive and reflect upon. Nevertheless the effects of sun, rain and temperature can’t be excluded from this.
Starting a blog in English, writing in English and then perhaps really posting it feels strange as it is not my mother tongue and I am not a proficient writer in this language either. But still, how to write to you in Berlin, Oslo, Paris, Kairo, Oman and elsewhere?
Starting a blog and only posting it later, seams not to be real blogging, not ‘just in time writing’ yet.
Starting a blog and not telling anybody about it…Starting a blog just in my imagination and not posting this text anywhere… - this wouldn’t be starting a blog.
I’ll see. Still, the name is not decided yet.
It is getting stormy now.