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    "Top blog/Renato Obeid's World/Today's pick: This rambling weblog is worth reading not so much for its satirical posts but more for its insight into the minutiae of life in Lebanon, including the etiquette of road accidents and how to hire a taxi.” -Jane Perrone, The Guardian

    renatoobeidsworld
     
    Sunday, March 25, 2007  
    THERE’S A DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN
    Just got back from my walk to Jounieh.
    I got to Jounieh Square at around 5.00am just as the minibus that takes the Eastern European sex workers home from the ‘’super nightclub’’ there arrived.
    Not the first time that ladies of the night get home and to sleep and before I do and probably not the last time.
    There was nobody at the taxi rank in Jounieh so I had to walk about a kilometre north to the intersection where Jounieh meets Maameltein and where the real sleaze begins.
    Right on the edge of sleepy provincial Jounieh is the only remaining red-light district in Lebanon.
    With its old traditional stone architecture, famous restaurants and Mediterranean frontage, Maameltein is lovely during the day when the lowlifes are asleep or away but undergoes an ugly transformation at night.
    And in sleazy areas you get sleazy taxi drivers.
    I stopped at least five taxis whose drivers did not even know where Harissa was - three hundred meters as the crow flies up the mountain above, five kilometres away along the winding mountain road.
    The old-timers say that in the old days, before the ambient noise of modernity that is all around us but we aren’t even conscious of anymore, you could yell out to someone in Jounieh from Harisa and actually be heard and understood and that people used to often communicate this way.
    One driver said that Harisa was in the Bekaa (another province altogether).
    I felt like Diogenes the wise old man of legend who wandered the streets with a lantern looking for an honest man except I was looking to shine my lantern in the face of a man who knew where Harisa was.
    Suffice to say, they weren’t locals, probably not even Lebanese.
    God knows where they were from.
    I finally found a driver from the north who jettisoned the two little flower-selling* boys he was ferrying (they’ll live) to take me home.

    *Reading Charles Dickens in Dickensian Lebanon is redundant – just go for a walk.
    5:45 am

     
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