On the Street

Small businesses thrive--there are so many little stores. You find some rather odd pairings of goods. Recent sightings in shop display windows were: cheese and cooking gas, yarn and pets (cats), flower seeds and hair coloring, plants and espresso, cigarettes and baked goods. On the next block from us are four, count ‘em four, florists in a row. All four are reportedly brothers, who were left plots of land by their father. Apparently they don’t get along well enough to join forces. One specializes in cut flowers and another potted plants. Our first dinner guest brought us our first Beirut plant (yay!) from one of the stores. It’s a star jasmine, and we have it on the balcony.

One of the larger stores, a gaudy department store call El Dorado with multiple floors and half floors that appear surprise! at the end of a row of clothes, has the most marvelous window display: a bevy of naked mannequins dressed only in large-sized El Dorado bags, females with the bags tied under the armpits and males around the waist…

Security is evident all over town. Various buildings where members of parliament live have permanent army patrols stationed out front—usually several soldiers in grey camouflage toting automatic weapons. They will smile and say hello if you meet their eyes as you pass by. Concrete barriers with metal chains or sometimes rope laced between them prevent parking and also make it interesting for pedestrians and vehicles to navigate. We haven’t seen a single accident and only a few dented fenders despite the lack of traffic lights or stop signs, creative double parking, and the very narrow space commonly employed between drivers. The underside of cars entering Tom’s school and other places are inspected before they are allowed to enter. What they use is a large—2 foot square--mirror on a rolling base with a long handle—think huge dentist mirror. They slide it under the car and check for bombs… And periodically there are roadblocks at various points of town, and traffic is frequently diverted for both security and construction. Everyone is used to it and life goes on.

There is a lot of construction; concrete, sign of hope. Not so much along the Corniche (seaside), which one would expect to house more upscale hotels and restaurants if tourism was booming. But in the neighborhoods and commercial areas. You can always hear a jackhammer, a dumptruck, a hammer.

Men from Sudan and maybe Ethiopia, dressed in green jumpsuits, sweep the streets daily and pick up trash. Westerners find the lack of recycling painful. One small shopping trip—small because you have to carry everything you buy and because stores are everywhere—yields 4 – 6 plastic bags. Water is purchased in plastic bottles, large and small, that are not recycled. Paper, newspapers and cardboard are thrown out. I’ve seen two recycling bins, for glass bottles, but they are about 8 and 10 blocks away. The only two in town and so close together! With last summer’s Israeli invasion/bombing, the regular assassinations of elected officials, and recent political impasse, not to mention the daily power outages, I suppose it’s easy to see how the environment slips down the priority list.

So this morning, a Saturday, we decided an omelette with feta cheese sounded nice. We had a couple of tiny eggplants in the fridge. Ah, a tomato would be nice. So Tom slipped on his sandals and hit the elevator button. Seven minutes later he returned with two ripe tomatoes, a cantaloupe and a bunch of baby bananas, for less than 3$. City life!



--photo is from our balcony. Can you see the lady in the middle on the right on her baclony? She is taking in her laundry. On the left a man keeps pigeons on the roof--fun to watch at feeding time