A hopeless cause, rationalizing the Beirut street map. The GNC went with the flow and publicized their new address in a way the Lebanese can understand…..everyone knows where Antoine’s is.
Not all those who wander are lost is a marvelous phrase from Lord of the Rings but it doesn’t apply to me here in Beirut. I get lost here quite a bit and not just because the city isn’t laid out in a modern grid system.
First, there is the problem of addresses. They don’t exist, except in theory. A restaurant or shop may have an actual street address like the shop 499 Orient does on Omar Daouk Street but if you ask anyone where Daouk Street is they will probably look at you blankly and there is certainly no point in asking where #499 is.
But if they happened to know where Daouk Street is, then you can only pray that they know that there are two Daouk Streets, one which runs parallel to Clemançeau and the other, across a large street, becomes the extension of Clemançeau until a third name jumps in and the street becomes Bab Idriss. Even straight streets change names with some frequency. The French had tried to rationalize the street system at one point, giving each street and district their own numbers, but that was an effort doomed to failure.
Instead, one navigates by landmarks. Hotels, hospitals, and universities are important landmarks. If I need a camera recharger I go to a shop near the Commodore Hotel. It happens to be on Baalbek Street but the man at Radio Shack couldn’t tell me that when he directed me there – and we were a block away. I live near the American University in Beirut. There is no point in telling a taxi driver I live on MakHoul (well, actually, just off it on a street with no name) as he has never heard of it. What he might know is that there are two churches on the street side by side – I say that I live on the “Street with Two Churches”.
How do people get their mail, you ask? Well, they don’t. The mail, privatized out to a Canadian company, is just about useless. People tend to have post boxes or use the postal addresses of family businesses. Today a woman from my Arab church brought a Christmas card to show us that had only just arrived from America. Email has been a salvation.
It’s too bad the street addresses aren’t used with more currency as they inscribe the history of the city and its rulers. I live between Joan of Arc Street and Omar Ibn Adbelaziz Street, the one a French saint, the other a revered early caliph. LAU is on Marie Curie Street, AUB is on the street that celebrates its founder, the American missionary Daniel Bliss. Clemançeau Street, named for the French statesman, becomes John Fitzgerald Kennedy Street at one point. And there is Mahatma Ghandi Street and a street in honor of a 19th century emir, Emir Bachir, who converted from Sunni Islam to the Maronite faith, not to mention a host of streets memorializing local families.
When it comes to the dangers of the street it is cars, not car bombs, that one worries about here. Crossing a street is a sauve qui peut moment as the few traffic lights are routinely ignored and if you fail to look both ways on a one-way street you are either a) dead; b) badly hurt. I’ve seen entire convoys of cars head down a street in the wrong direction, never mind the motorcycles. Sometimes I am just plain petrified of crossing the street and have to wait for a bold Beiruti to cross with.
As you know, there were some suicide bombings here this week. Thank you for not emailing me in a panic after the latest incidents made the news. For all that the Western press talks about a “jittery” city, I can only tell you that the Lebanese seem to take these horrors in stride. They’ve been through worse. I’ve started to ask people how they feel about these bombings and mostly the answer is “depressed”. The outlook seems less an immediate sense of doom than a slow motion unraveling with no clear end in sight.
Still, I am happy to report that the monthly tango gathering at the St. George Beach and Yacht Club was well attended. I went with some members of my English-speaking congregation, one of whom is an avid tango dancer. Tango has become quite popular here in Lebanon and is even taught on campuses. I was surprised to see that there were more men than women in attendance at last night’s event and that most people came without partners. The atmosphere was friendly and low-key. As the evening began the news had just reported the latest suicide bombing. People were talking about it in hushed tones. But when the music started, they put down their drinks and answered its call.
goingfortheguttural 