Through heat and sweat and humid smoggy air, I marched my way out the back door and eastward toward an ice cream shop on the other side of town.
Mission: to meet with a friend-of-a-friend and again bring Twitter to life.
This is how I found myself crossing Beirut solo, leaving Ted to rest at home in the shade and breeze of a balcony-boasting apartment.
This week was splendid. As you may remember, we’re staying with our friend Jodi here in Lebanon. After fairly brisk pace the last couple of months, we are sitting still (mostly) and getting some R&R.
Turns out, we picked the right city, but not for the reasons you might think. Beirut is a distressed city, a city very recently war torn, a place where many people-groups live at odds and in close quarters, a place where it’s easy to spot buildings still wearing machine-gun bullet holes on their walls.
But in part because of Beirut’s history of unrest, it has developed a culture of “oasis,” where there are countless places of rest, food, drink, and relaxation behind the rather disorderly store front streets. Thanks to Jodi and several other new-found friends, we have been introduced to delicious mezze, carrot cake perfection, and beer from the only micro-brewery in the Middle East. Continue Reading…
Hello from sunny Beirut, Lebanon!
It’s been a quiet week on the blog and anything-but in real life.
Due both to lack of consistent wifi and an intentional choice to put priority on in-the-moment living, I skipped posting entries this past week (aside from Monday’s Portland/Bologna piece).
If you follow our updates in the Daily Travel Journal or read our flying tweets, you probably have a pretty accurate up to the moment sense of our location. Since the end of May, we ferried east from Italy, spent time in a quiet corner of Croatia, over-landed through a slice of Bosnia on our way to Montenegro, peeked at Kosovo out the window on our night ride to Macedonia, and hopped by plane from northeastern Greece to Cyprus en route to our June destination, Lebanon. Continue Reading…
