What is Beirut?

No idea. This place is insane. I've been here 24 hours. The quality of life, the development, seems insane given the place's history. Given the war. Which, in like 5 - 10 year cycles over the past half century, lovely Beirut has found itself fallen prey to in a serious, push-the-country-back-years kind of way.

Some French weenie, well into international politics, the other day told me how a recently-released White House dossier predicted armed conflict between Lebanon and Israel within the next year and a half. What my own research tells me: the reason it's been so quiet since the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah clusterfuck is because of a kind of apocalyptic fear: Hezbollah's arms build-up is now so menacing, thanks to Iran and Syria's abettal, that any kind of declared war is bound to devastate the region in a whole new way, in a whole new league of battle. Iran would be drawn into it. And Syria. A thing of such scale that it would spill into the civilian realm in a way not seen for some time, devastating magnitudes.

In Beirut you deboard your bus and look around and hail a taxi and suddenly you're looking out the window at this: Miami-style condos of every imaginable colour pushed hard up against one another, hot-shot cars gliding around between them -- burnt orange Ferrari, Hummer, sexy upper-end BMW -- driven by men and women of a genepool more spectacular than anywhere else I've been or will g0 to, usually with a mobile phone pressed to their ear. There's that. And then in-between in like a 10:1 ratio is this: bulletholes in destitute buildings, bombed-out tenements, bulletholes in still-operative roller-doors and balconies and whatever, you name it. Walking down the street is a challenge, you get drawn into phantasms of how it must have been: soldiers running around in residential areas, firing shots at snipers hidden up high in some real Lebanese civilian's (with a name and a story of their own) abandoned home. The street quiet and deserted but for the odd volley of gunfire, sight-snatch of a gunman moving to find a better vantage point. I write it here in words, but walking down the street in 2010 with Lebanese life buzzing healthily around you, it's impossible to comprehend. Yet it's all you can try to do. I've been drawn to Google-image things like 'lebanon civil war rue gourad' (the name of a main street, where now all the hip, expensive bars lay), just to see what it was like. To print out the image and others like it, so as to be able to walk along those very streets and pinpoint where those exact photos were taken, to get that exact view and experience the ghost of it all over. Do it. Google 'lebanon civil war.' Look at the pictures.

I haven't found the cinema yet, which I make a concentrated effort to do at least one time in each country I visit. But I have found a bombed-out version thereof. Have you ever wondered about superstructure of a cinema, what it looks like in truss-and-beams form? This cinema sits more or less in the centre of town, a giant egglike shell with pieces missing and bulletholes decorating, a giant egglike shell stripped back to its skeleton of sick grey concrete and sick brown undergirding, a giant egglike shell literally ripped into half of what it once grandly was: a massive airy room where people watched movies in the dark. War movies.

It must be what Sarajevo's like. Or: 15 years ago here must have been what Sarajevo's like now. The perfect time to be a tourist here would've been then, 15 years ago. The rebuilding process still in its early stages, the bombed-out buildings holding sway over the redeveloped multitudes. Why would that be perfect, for me? Something to do with living history. Modern history, where the ash is still smouldering. I've come to realise this has become my travel-bent. Seeing and researching and understanding the now-history of these places, the history-in-action, history-up-for-grabs. Screw the Romans and their still-standing ruins. Piss on your ruins, Marcus Aurelius. Your stony relics have no bearings on me and my travails (unlike your books, which are great. Keep it up!).

In any case, the move from Syria to Lebanon has been even more dramatic than I had anticipated. There are mountains everywhere. The heat is wet heat, not dry. People speak English better than me. And every time I hear a firework, I duck. Every time I hear a police siren, I think 'air raid.' Where Damascus fights war by proxy, Beirut does not. I am here in the jewel of the Middle East, fake-boobed woman running around at 5-star Mediterranean beach clubs, McDonald's serving chicken Big Macs to girls in hijabs, all this wonder and tawdriness and modernity -- smack-bang in the line of fire. This is Beirut.