“Hezbollah is meeting with the President at noon; that’s why the trouble on the roads.”

The taxi driver scooted along as he could, keeping pace with lanes of beat up, horn-honking Mercedes all plowing eastward through Beirut traffic. The radio scratched Arabic news stories that we couldn’t understand.

Ted and I looked to our new friend, Wade, a thirty-something cool-as-a-cucumber history teacher with a baby strapped to his chest. He’d flagged down the taxi and mapped our way toward our destination. He’d lived in Beirut for a handful of years. If he was calm, we’d be calm.

He raised his eyebrows. “Never a dull moment. Who knows? The @#$% could hit the fan…”

And so it was, as Syrian violence escalated just across the border and as Hezbollah bent the ear of the Lebanese President, we four Americans carried on in a ramshackle taxi toward our field trip to the only microbrewery in the Middle East.

It was one of those days that makes a good story after the fact; in the present moment, we simply say prayers that our moms aren’t worried at home.

We pulled away from waterfront traffic and climbed a bit into suburb hills. The driver stopped at a side street next to a chicken restaurant, leaving us to find our final steps. Somewhere in the maze of warehouses and gravel drives, we spotted the tiny red, white, and black 961 sign perched on the balcony of a grey concrete building. We’d made it this far on an email exchange and an addresses, time to find the door.

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