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renatoobeidsworld   Friday, March 16, 2007   Finally found a voltage regulator for my new laptop at a Beirut department store this morning. Nothing extraordinary in that but the last time I was at that same store, a staff member told me that they didn’t have any voltage regulators despite my friend having actually seen voltage regulators there (he even told me the exact brand). They must like them a lot and not want to sell them. So this time I just walked around looking until I found one which is what I usually do when shopping in Lebanon because I find that shop staff in Lebanon are either over helpful (rarely) and stick to you like glue or totally uninterested and don’t know where anything is yet still send you on a wild goose chase or try to sell you the wrong thing. I wasn’t so lucky finding an umbrella (I think I ‘’donated’’ my last umbrella to a taxi driver) – they told me that they didn’t have any (surprise, surprise) and I was too tired to look. So if anybody knows where they umbrellas are at Spinneys Dbayeh, can you please email me? Now that I’ve actually mentioned the name of the store, I must point out that Spinneys is my favourite department store in Lebanon and that the staff there are very friendly and relatively efficient but there are some still some all-pervading cultural traits that you’ll find across the board in Lebanon that won’t change so easily. It’s still a dream compared to others – there’s one supermarket in Jounieh that I won’t even enter because it’s the citadel of Maronite arrogance. So I end up going to a no-frills supermarket on the outskirts of Jounieh. It’s pretty downmarket and the checkout chicks there are ugly (as they usually are at no-frills supermarkets) but the staff are less intrusive (because they're ugly) and it’s close to my walk route. 6:00 pm

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