Navigating the Streets of Beirut
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Anyone in the Lebanese capital who has ever taken a taxi, ordered food for delivery, or asked for directions knows that when navigating the city of Beirut no piece of information is more useless than a street name. Trekking from one Beiruti neighborhood to the next is never a precise science of turning one way or another on specific streets but rather a loose art in, say, hooking left around a flower shop, passing a movie theater and a gas station, turning right at a bank, and stopping in front of a school opposite a vegetable stand. Ask a shopkeeper in Hamra for the way to Mahatma Gandhi Street, for example, and even if he has been operating a business on that exact street for 30 years, he will likely tsk and tell you it doesn't exist. While there is a certain charm to the informality with which the citizens of Beirut circulate their city - and a certain intimacy inherent in the act of always asking for directions, exchanging niceties, and getting to know area residents through casual conversation - it can get annoying when one wants to get from point A to point B with relative ease and self-sufficiency. Bahi Ghubril knows this all too well. Born in Beirut, Ghubril, now 34, has been living in London for the past two decades. He returns to Lebanon five or six times a year, he says, "And I drive. I drive everywhere." Ghubril likes to visit friends and see family members. He likes to entertain people at his parents' house in Rabieh. But he does not like to stop at six different gas stations to ask for six different sets of directions, many of which inevitably end up to be of dubious accuracy. He does not like to get stuck in traffic bottlenecked behind a lost driver hanging out his car window and begging for guidance from passing pedestrians. And he does not like the fact that while Rabieh may have a brilliant internal grid system no one can ever find it without making numerous frantic phone calls. (The Daily Star) |
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