nursing my guilt of choosing my india adventure over reunion in the middle east, i come across the this quote by a former reuters’ man in beirut, bernd debusmann.
“Where else could you see people happily sip poolside cocktails served by smartly uniformed waiters in one part of their city, while mortar duels were being fought in another? Where else could you find a pet parrot that imitated the sound of an incoming shell so accurately that newcomers to the bar of the Commodore Hotel would dive for cover? Where else wold you complain that your car had been stolen, not to the police, but to the leader of the teenage militia at the roadblock near your office? Where else would it be returned in a convoy led by a tank that once belonged to the Army? Where else could you have dinner-table conversations in three languages with wordly educated people who insisted on calling their fratricidal war ‘les evenements,’ as if these events had been wrought by force majeure rather than by people? Life in Lebanon had a tinge of surrealism that I found seductive.”
