For quite a long time there was a stereotype about stewardesses. They were young, attractive girls with a perky demeanor. They would spring forth from the galley in form-fitting, curve-accentuating uniforms the airlines would make them wear. Advertisers had leggy stewardesses gracing airline ads using the seduction techniques normally reserved for men’s magazines. It was good business at a time when a gigantic majority of airline passengers were businessmen. Unfortunately, it was also before my time.
But probably in the last thirty years or so, the stereotype has been dashed. They eventually came to be called the gender-neutral term ‘flight attendant’ as they can now be either male or female. It’s easily possible they can be very unattractive. They spend their time telling you what to do with a seatbelt while slinging free over-salted snacks at you, that is, until the airlines begin charging for them.
My brother, Welled, and I flew Middle East Airlines, Lebanon’s flagship carrier, from Larnaca in Cyprus to Beirut. Our flight was comfortable and hassle-free. The plane was relatively new with all the accoutrements, modern in every sense. As I buckled myself in for a ride that would take no longer than a session on the stationary bike, Welled and I couldn’t help but notice two young, attractive girls coming down the aisle.
Their uniforms were form-fitting and curve-accentuating, held up by legs that couldn’t possibly be any longer. The curvy blonde attendant approached me with a wide smile finding shade under a pair of seductive eyebrows. She said ‘hello’ and then handed me a juice box. I just smiled uncomfortably and mumbled ‘thank you’, momentarily forgetting how to say it in Arabic. I was so taken aback, I wouldn’t have noticed if she handed me a grenade.
The other attendant, a brunette halfway across the plane with twice the curves, was keeping Welled’s eyes busy and I couldn’t help but think: why haven’t I flown here sooner?
Sass, our friend whom we had come to Lebanon to visit, picked us up at Rafic Hariri International Airport at around 11:00pm. In wonderfully typical Sass fashion, she was working a shock of deep red hair with blonde highlights which fell on her jean jacket shoulders. Her baby blues outshone the fluorescent lighting and she wore her biggest smile while practically tackling Welled and I in the terminal.
Sass had been stationed in the Chouf mountains forty-five minutes southwest of Beirut for about a year-and-half. She was tasked with teaching the local children critical and creative thinking; two much-needed skills the future of Lebanon will depend on. Before our dark, winding retreat to those mountains for the evening, Sass asked Welled and I the dumbest question possible.
“So, are you guys hungry?”
In the Hamra section of town, the three of us gorged on extraordinarily fresh tabouli, hummus, and a heaping of succulent slow-roasted lamb while we caught up with each other. The freshness of the food was so pronounced, the flavors so, well, flavorful that I could not stop my right hand from involuntarily feeding myself. Afterwards, Sass and the car she rented, scooted us around the downtown area for the two-dollar tour. The dazzling blue domes of the majestic Mohammad al Amin Mosque, an obvious symbol of the city’s resurgence, lit our way like an enormous flashlight.
Over the next couple of days, we were seduced by Beirut. Lebanon is a teeny-tiny country, about the size of Connecticut, and Beirut isn’t just the political capital but the capital of pretty much everything Lebanese. Throughout the city, ancient and storied mixed freely with ultramodern and cosmopolitan whether we’re talking architecture or people or anything else.
Solidere, or Beirut’s Central District, the site of some of the most intense fighting during the country’s 15-year civil war was now the site of some of the most intense shopping. High-end international brands all have outposts in the beautifully restored parchment buildings. A pedestrian-only promenade encircled the area that also housed the impressive Parliament building and ancient Roman bath ruins.
Hamra street was lined with stores selling high and low fashion. Bookstores specialized in international newspapers and publications in several languages. There were big hotels and a few big international chains. Jutting off the drag were narrow side streets not quite so polished but still bustling with activity. Hamra is one of Beirut’s most vibrant neighborhoods and would easily become my favorite area to hang out in.
Not far behind the modern facemask, signs of one of the bloodiest regional conflicts in a region specializing in them abound. It was too, too easy to find blocks and blocks of burnt-out buildings. The concrete walls were covered with so many bullet holes they looked as if they were a design element. Whole streets lay in ruins, just off modern commercial streets. I can imagine the reconstruction priorities must be daunting in a city that was the epicenter of the Lebanese Civil War but the gentrification struck me as wholly so random.
Sass had worked out a subletting arrangement with a friend enabling the three of us to have a flat in the Achrafieh neighborhood in East Beirut. Achrafieh is an old bastion of the wealthy Greek Orthodox elite. The area is dense with apartment blocks and the streets are basically just glorified alleyways. Hundreds of clotheslines connected the concrete jungle that sat atop dramatic hills.
Visually, Achrafieh most closely resembled the disheveled and chaotic Middle East that I knew. My only previous exposure to that part of the world had been Egypt, and the always insightful cable news. Also, with two Egyptian parents, Welled and I were given a filtered and abstract view of what the Middle East was and, more importantly, the absurd Middle East our parents got away from. However, Welled has actually been to many more of the surrounding countries in the region and confirmed my visual observations. The thing with Lebanon, though, is that it didn’t take us long at all to realize that unlike its neighbors, Lebanon wasn’t exactly our mother’s Middle East.
Our neighborhood was like many other parts of the city, full of polyglots. Arabic, French and now increasingly English, are spoken or at least understood by many of the Lebanese I ran into which certainly surprised Welled and I. In Egypt, the only English spoken by most of the cab drivers I conversed with seemed to be the names of action movies stars. I would have entire conversations with them by simply stringing along the names of actors from any movie with an explosion in it.
“Uh, Chuck Norris?”
“Ah, Jean Claude Van Damme! Bruce Willis. Sylvester Stallone.”
“Arnold Schwarzenegger?”
“Yes, Charles Bronson!”
In a bizarre way, we were able to breach the language barrier and somehow communicate even though two of those names aren’t even English.
The vibrant beating heart of Achrafieh is Gemmayze, a sub-neighborhood a few blocks from the sea. The main drag, Gemmayze Street, is Beirut nightlife at some of its best. Our first real night in the city Sass, in her dazzling high heels, led a couple of underdressed schlubs down to the city’s biggest party street. It seemed like no accident that we had to descend the steep hills from our apartment block into the depths of the city to get there. Coming down from on high, hulking churches looked on us as if disapproving of our intentions.
Cramped clubs and bars tightly lined the street and everyone, regardless of religion, was out and about amidst the neon and the music. Everyone, present company excluded, was dressed to kill. There were art galleries and restaurants with slick logos and slicker interiors. I couldn’t count the number of times while walking down that street when I would start babbling to Welled about something and my train of thought would quickly derail as a group of scantily-dressed Lebanese women came into view. Besides their natural beauty — maybe a byproduct of centuries of foreign invasion — the lack of veils and the abundance of skin, all while speaking Arabic, was for me, a mental disconnect. These Arabs were behaving socially like Europeans or New Yorkers. It was incredibly refreshing and nothing like what I had witnessed in Cairo.
Sass took us to Dragon Fly, a narrow bar filled with young fun seekers like ourselves. They made a mean dirty martini and the bartenders were dressed in classic white smocks with black ties. The music was a benign mix of American pop classics that the ex-pat American DJ was having just too good a time spinning.
I was in a great mood. There was something infectious about the energy of that place and I just couldn’t wait to have a drink in my hand. I still could not get over the fact that I was in an Arab country. I had read plenty and talked to numerous Lebanese people and independent travelers before I arrived so I was somewhat prepared to witness all of the social freedoms. Still, to watch a Lebanese woman with enough cleavage to stun a camel cozy up to the bar, without a male companion, and down a shot surprised me every time.
We left Dragon Fly and headed up a Gemmayze Street packed too tightly with cars and people. Every few meters we saw smiling Lebanese police behind makeshift checkpoints. The checkpoints were made of wood with poorly drawn cedar trees on them and looked as if they had been made by the prom committee. At the corner of Gemmayze and the main thoroughfare there were what I took to be soldiers as they were wearing a different style of camouflage from the cops. Hoisting large guns they just simply stood around smiling, some of them playing traffic cop with more than a bored look on their faces. The soldiers stood next to jeeps and some nights, next to small tanks.
Bored, armed men in berets near large groups of civilians was the Middle East I knew. But the scene they were juxtaposed into included a high-end French patisserie to their rear and Beyonce blaring out of a nearby club. On top of that, many passersby freely conversed with them as if they were mailmen.
Dany’s Bar, a sliver of a place buried in Hamra, was Sass’s preferred dive at the time. And it truly was a dive. There was sanctioned graffiti on the walls and a bare bones presentation of no more than a bar and stools. The patrons — Lebanese along with some ex-pats —were individually stylish without being over-dressed. Dany’s seemed like a place where all the misfits who didn’t fit into Beirut’s pretentious club scene gathered. Sass held court in a way that made Welled and I glad we were in her company. She double-kissed many of the patrons and some of the bartenders and waved hello to many more. If someone new entered the bar that she knew, they would all exclaim, “Danielle!”
While sipping on a crisp Almazaa, the national brew, I remember being suddenly startled to hear Bob Dylan’s voice coming out of the speakers. I would have sooner expected to hear the Hava Nagila before I heard Blonde on Blonde. The music that followed included Ryan Adams, Van Morrison, Nina Simone and the band Beirut. Where exactly was I?
It was hard to take everything I saw that evening with a grain of salt, the entire shaker, in fact. I knew I should have but I was relaxed and quite at one with this new Arab social reality I was experiencing. Welled even began talking about coming to Beirut to study Arabic. In hindsight, though, while the city’s charms were incredibly hard to resist I was going to be there for a month. No charms, no matter how powerful, usually last that long.
