station. A policeman fills out a few forms and leads us to a sweaty man in an office, who directs us to another office with three other men in it. I wonder if this is what happened to Terry Waite. The three other men all sign one of the forms filled out by the policeman, and send us back to the last office, where the sweaty man stamps it and gives it back to the policeman, who then writes something in Arabic on a piece of paper and gives it to Mat. The process takes nearly twenty minutes.
The piece of paper gets us through the gate where we’d been stopped the first time, but we get pulled up again on the other side of the course at the main entrance. Mat flourishes the paper with a triumphant cackle, but there’s a problem—the note gives permission for three people to leave the track early, and there are now four of us. An expatriate American, who has seen us going, is trying to sneak out on our ticket of leave. He apologises, sheepishly, and is led back to the stand while we’re waved out of the gate.
“We’ll light a candle for you,” Mat calls after him.
We spend the afternoon tooling about on the Corniche, the wide pedestrian promenade that winds along Beirut’s waterfront, and fills up every weekend with perambulating families, preening adolescents and kamikaze rollerbladers. Despite the fact that all present should have grown out of such things, we visit Luna Park, a rusty, melancholy little funfair. Mat and I take a couple of turns on the dodgems, though having now spent a couple of days running for cover from Beirut’s traffic, we suspect that preteen Lebanese regard these less as a sideshow ride, and more like the beginnings of driver education.
Luna Park also boasts the world’s most pissweak ghost train, which could certainly be livened up with some local colour—they could replace the decrepit plastic skeletons and flaking rubber ghouls with animatronic keffiyeh-clad fanatics which throw blankets over the passengers, stick guns in their ears, handcuff them to a radiator and yell at them about Israel. Thrillseeking tourists would be round the block. As things are, the ghost train is a good deal less daunting a prospect than the ferris wheel, which looks to be on the verge of slipping its moorings and rolling out into the sea. Out the front of Luna Park, a street trader is doing a roaring trade in toy rifles.
WE HAVE A night free. We have directions, thoughtfully provided by some journalists from Beirut’s English-language paper, The Lebanon Daily Star . We are going out. We flag a taxi. This is a mistake.
“We want to go here,” says Mat, slowly and patiently, pointing at our hand-drawn map. “It’s a club called Zinc. Do you know it?”
“Very good hotel,” confirms the driver. “I know very good hotel for you.”
We have high hopes for Zinc. We have been told that it’s where all Beirut’s cool and happening people go. We have been assured that it is even more convivial than Che’s, the place we’d visited two nights previously, where the walls were covered in portraits of Senor Guevara, and people we didn’t know kept buying us drinks.
“Very good hotel,” says the driver again.
He plants his accelerator foot, and we head off in a cacophonous symphony of squealing tyres and honking horn. I suddenly realise what it is John Coltrane’s records have reminded me of all these years.
“Very good hotel,” says the driver again, and again every five minutes after that. We ignore him until we begin to get the sinking feeling that he knows Beirut as well as we do. I am sure, for example, that we have been past this tank before.
“Have you,” asks Mat, evenly, as we pass another checkpoint for the third time, “got any idea where you’re going? I mean, any idea at all?”
“I know very good hotel for you.”
Oh, God. Do you speak any other English at all?
“Very good hotel.”
There’s not much we can do but sit tight, see where we end up, and try not to dwell on
The piece of paper gets us through the gate where we’d been stopped the first time, but we get pulled up again on the other side of the course at the main entrance. Mat flourishes the paper with a triumphant cackle, but there’s a problem—the note gives permission for three people to leave the track early, and there are now four of us. An expatriate American, who has seen us going, is trying to sneak out on our ticket of leave. He apologises, sheepishly, and is led back to the stand while we’re waved out of the gate.
“We’ll light a candle for you,” Mat calls after him.
We spend the afternoon tooling about on the Corniche, the wide pedestrian promenade that winds along Beirut’s waterfront, and fills up every weekend with perambulating families, preening adolescents and kamikaze rollerbladers. Despite the fact that all present should have grown out of such things, we visit Luna Park, a rusty, melancholy little funfair. Mat and I take a couple of turns on the dodgems, though having now spent a couple of days running for cover from Beirut’s traffic, we suspect that preteen Lebanese regard these less as a sideshow ride, and more like the beginnings of driver education.
Luna Park also boasts the world’s most pissweak ghost train, which could certainly be livened up with some local colour—they could replace the decrepit plastic skeletons and flaking rubber ghouls with animatronic keffiyeh-clad fanatics which throw blankets over the passengers, stick guns in their ears, handcuff them to a radiator and yell at them about Israel. Thrillseeking tourists would be round the block. As things are, the ghost train is a good deal less daunting a prospect than the ferris wheel, which looks to be on the verge of slipping its moorings and rolling out into the sea. Out the front of Luna Park, a street trader is doing a roaring trade in toy rifles.
WE HAVE A night free. We have directions, thoughtfully provided by some journalists from Beirut’s English-language paper, The Lebanon Daily Star . We are going out. We flag a taxi. This is a mistake.
“We want to go here,” says Mat, slowly and patiently, pointing at our hand-drawn map. “It’s a club called Zinc. Do you know it?”
“Very good hotel,” confirms the driver. “I know very good hotel for you.”
We have high hopes for Zinc. We have been told that it’s where all Beirut’s cool and happening people go. We have been assured that it is even more convivial than Che’s, the place we’d visited two nights previously, where the walls were covered in portraits of Senor Guevara, and people we didn’t know kept buying us drinks.
“Very good hotel,” says the driver again.
He plants his accelerator foot, and we head off in a cacophonous symphony of squealing tyres and honking horn. I suddenly realise what it is John Coltrane’s records have reminded me of all these years.
“Very good hotel,” says the driver again, and again every five minutes after that. We ignore him until we begin to get the sinking feeling that he knows Beirut as well as we do. I am sure, for example, that we have been past this tank before.
“Have you,” asks Mat, evenly, as we pass another checkpoint for the third time, “got any idea where you’re going? I mean, any idea at all?”
“I know very good hotel for you.”
Oh, God. Do you speak any other English at all?
“Very good hotel.”
There’s not much we can do but sit tight, see where we end up, and try not to dwell on
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