I woke up today to find two pictures circulating across my friends of the recent snowstorm in Lebanon. The first one is the following, “originally” shared by Beiruting.com, complete with a watermark for copyright:

The second one is the following, presumably of the Cedars:

Beiruting.com did not share the second one. I have no idea where it originated from.

Now the original version of the first picture, without the watermark, is the following:

How come there’s a non-watermark version of it?  Simply because this picture was not taken by Beiruting.com. This picture was taken by someone not in Lebanon but in Oswego, New York. That’s about 9000 kilometers away from where this picture was supposedly taken.

The second picture is actually in Japan and dates back from 2010, a relatively dry year in Lebanon. You may have not noticed the cars driving on the “wrong” side of the road. But I hardly believe we have the snow removal trucks in Lebanon that can do such a precise job. And suppose this is in the Cedars, would our beloved trees that are outside the main forest peak above the snow cover? I hardly think so. In fact, the second picture is part of a wider batch of pictures of Japan’s Snow Roadway. Check out this link for more images and this YouTube video as well:

It’s lovely to think highly of our country but I expect from renowned websites such as Beiruting.com to at least go through some fact checking before going after those coveted Facebook likes and shares (for the record, the picture has about 300 shares and 600 likes). As for the rest of the Lebanese, not everything landscape-wise that you find impressive is actually Lebanese.

If you want a sequence of real pictures of the recent blizzard, check out this link. These are pictures taken by Lebanese in their hometowns through their phones, cameras, DSLRs, not taken from Google images and stamped with a Lebanese stamp of approval.