Beirut eclipse

Loving Beirut for what it is – the dirt spread everywhere, the unexplainable and sudden lack of water in your apartment, the incredibly loud honking that follows you day and night from one corner of the city to the other, the bickering over taxi fares, the unavoidable leering eyes of men on the street, the heavily over-priced cell phones that makes you master of 30 second phone conversations, the army men at every corner of the street, the creamy ice cream covered in pistachios, the sojouk sandwiches that are surprisingly the most satisfying piece of food you've had all week, the mint tea that should really be drank in the company of friends (near the water preferably), the view of the sea while you lounge in the sun reading a book and thinking how the perfect blue pleasantly surprises you every time, the overpowering scent of jasmine trees that greets you when you enter a friend's house party on a Saturday evening, and the surprise lunar eclipse that looks down upon the line of people who stand willfully against the wall, entranced by the bright and half-hidden moon.

Beirut has taken me places, and this week it has been in pockets of pleasant surprises. One night, I enjoyed two amazing dinners – one at my other favorite restaurant (Barometer), consisting of fettoush, muttabbal, spiced potatoes, and chicken; and the second, only an hour after, at a friend's friend's house. Hommemade Lebanese food, good conversation, fantastic music and delicious desserts … well, how could there be anything wrong with that night?

Another night, the city took me to a fantastic Italian resteraunt in Gemmaizeh, where I gorged on pasta and friendly debates about the Olympics and Obama. I was at a table with an Australian, a Swede, a Norwegian, and two Americans, where my American pride came out more frequently than I thought it would.

And yet another night, I was saying good-bye to another intern who was leaving, and saying hello to a friend I had hardly seen all summer. At the party at his house, he showed me the garden he had worked on all summer, cleared away the rubble and uncovered a beautiful piece of land that looked like it could have been a small oasis in Gemmaizeh if it still retained its greenery and water. But they have big plans for it, he told me. The fountain would be repainted. Plants would be replanted. And that was the best note of the night: that a person who was just visiting Lebanon could love it so much to make even a small part of it beautiful again.

Yesterday I tried my hand at investigative journalism, traveling to a region 40 minutes outside of Beirut to uncover the causes of the forest fires spreading across the country. Even if we had not gotten a story, I would not have been disappointed. The wonderful company of three other interns and the discovery of a collection of life-size sculptures on the edge of a hill overlooking the valley, well that was more than enough.

Beirut does funny things to you. And last night, in the city's spirit of, "why not?", I resigned myself to become a poet for about five minutes when I read some of my poetry at a reading for the first time ever. And that was as good an end to the week as any...or the beginning of the week, depending on which way you look at it.