Imminent implosion keeps low profile – I get back to buying mana’iche

So here we are back for another year. For a moment there I thought we might not come back. You know how Lebanon looks from the outside. If you watch international news you become convinced that Lebanon is a perpetual fireball of self-destruction. And let’s face it, a dozen kidnappings here, a dozen deaths in street battles there. I mean Air France even diverted a flight to Syria rather than land in Beirut. Things must have been bad. I was glad I lugged my PC to Europe after all. Maybe we’d stay. Maybe we’d not return to Beirut for years to come like so many families during the civil war. The food would rot in the fridge with no-one to keep flicking the tripswitch on. My clothes would disintegrate in the wardrobe, or at the very least go out of fashion. The man’ouché seller would miss us terribly.

But here we are. And to be honest, it looks a lot like when we left. Under the surface it may be quite different. But tuning into the tension won’t actually tell us when the explosion will come. So in the meantime, perhaps it’s not a bad thing not to know exactly what’s simmering away under the rug.

men in truck

the nap before the storm?

2 Responses to “Imminent implosion keeps low profile – I get back to buying mana’iche”

  1. nad says:

    A friend once said that he thought of Lebanese politics like a soap opera: you can leave whenever you’re fed up and when you return, you can pick up the story line where you left it, same feuds, same enmities, every once in a while somebody will change alliances or clans, same people for years, and with time one generation replaces the other and the story keeps bouncing again and again and again…

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