Tag Archives: Achrafieh

A Girl’s Walk Around Gemmayzé, Beirut

My best friend was having dinner at the newly opened Nasawiya Cafe last Saturday. They had a Ghana-music night and it was for a good cause, she thought. When the event ended, she got up to leave.

Her friend walked with her. His car was parked a little before hers. He offered to drive her to her car. She refused.

This is Gemmayzé. I have walked this street all my life. What’s the worse that can happen?

So she tucked her hands in her pockets and walked on the sidewalk. Like a ma’am. She looked around the bustling bars and the intoxicated people. She saw the fancy cars trying to find a place to park.

As she walked and walked, she felt safe. Gemmayzé and Achrafieh were home.

It was then that she spotted something in the well-lit corner of the street. She stopped right in her tracks. She was paralyzed with shock. She was petrified.

It couldn’t be. Not here. Not like this. Not on this street.

In that well-lit corner was sitting a man. This man didn’t care about passerbies who looked at him in disgust but did nothing about what he was doing. He just kept at it.

She looked at his hand. Down there. She couldn’t move. The man in front of her was mastrubating in public. In front of her.

But that wasn’t the end of it. Suddenly, the man stood up and walked briskly towards her.

He had a steady pace. He was not intoxicated. He was not drunk. He was not high. He was fully aware of what he was doing. And in that moment it took him to get to her from the corner he was sitting in, she felt the most afraid in her 22 years of existence so far.

The man stood in front of her. He looked down at her and said: “Do you want me to cum on your breasts?”

Her reflex response was to grab her phone. Speed dial her friend and start shouting for him to come to her.
It took the friend less than a minute to be there. It took her more than a minute to catch her breath.

Never did she believe she would be this threatened this close to home. Never did she think she would see this level of decadence on a street that she always considered as beyond safe.

That night she felt the least empowered of her life. She felt so weak that she felt she couldn’t have done anything. And what’s worse, she knew that if anything had happened further, she wouldn’t have a safety net to fall back on.

That disgusting man would win. And what’s worse, his win would have been fair and square by all accounts.

When she got home, she needed to vent. She had already read my article about losing hope in Lebanon. So she wrote an addendum centered around the night that seared her decision to leave the country for her PhD in 6 months.

“From a Lebanese ovaries point of view, it is impossible to spend your life in semi peace without a pair of testicles guarding your back. From your dad watching your every move to your boyfriend being over jealous, to your husband being overprotective. Testicles are handling the situations.

This is the most annoying thing to young ovaries. But sexual assault is not a far fetched situation. It lurks around your brain every second of your waking time. Whoever tells you otherwise is in oblivion or still didn’t hear the stories everyone is so busy hiding.

If you walk around a carefree neighborhood, it is only because you know the alpha male there. No matter how loud you are online about your independence, you will never be ready to punch a guy once confronted.

Bottom line is we should either grow a pair or embrace our inherited dependence.”

What’s ironic, she later told me, is the place she was having dinner in.

Spotted in Achrafieh: Lebanon’s Neo-Nazis?

Because it doesn’t make sense not to have something of everything in Lebanon, we also have our own Neo-Nazis. Have they read Mein Kampf? I doubt. Do they know what Nazism stands for? I doubt as well.

I really have a hard time understanding how someone’s mentality could actually bring them to be this convinced with Hitler and his ideology that they’d take the time to paint the swastika on a building in Beirut. I even know one person from my hometown who wears the swastika around his neck.

Old Achrafieh (Geitawi) House To Be Demolished

A few seconds’ walk away from my house is a small building that I never took much notice of. That small building, however, is counting the days until it exists no more to give way for a new high rise.

As I walked next to it this past weekend and was taken aback by the metal frames to keep people out, I looked at the facade of the two-story building and couldn’t but notice how beautiful it could be. It’s a shame really that the mentality of renovating instead of demolishing isn’t taking hold in Beirut, especially Achrafieh.

Former minister of culture Salim Warde had a law proposition involving forcing contractors to have the new building they intend to erect be of the same number of stories as the one they demolished. His proposition went into a bureaucratic drawer and will probably never get out of it.

Achrafieh desperately needs such regulations. It’s fast becoming a concrete jungle of buildings that all look alike and feel imported, without a Lebanese flavor to them apart from the people that live in them. It’s a shame really.

And what’s even worse, the parking situation in my apartment’s street is about to get worse. People were allowed to park next to the building set to be demolished. The new building will obviously not allow that.

Jesuite Garden – Achrafieh, Beirut

Over the years, this garden located in Geitawi, Achrafieh, became a shortcut for me not to go around the block in order to reach my house. When I was younger, my grandparents used to take me to play there with my brothers and friends.

As I grew up, I outgrew it I guess.

Now, with my time in Achrafieh becoming less and less abundant, I look at the Jesuite garden and can’t help but smile. The place today is full of old men and women, going about the rest of their days, succumbing to the reality that they’re not what they used to be.

The maids now bring the kids to play. When I used to be a kid who came to this garden, parents were the chaperons of their kids. Times have changed.

There’s also a new public library. The garden now has wifi as well. Times have changed. Yes they have.

But once I pass next to the Jesuite garden, when I eventually find a place to park in Achrafieh, I can’t help but smile as I remember how it used to be to hold my grandfather’s hand and walk into its doors, my heart racing in order to run to that swing.

My memories of the garden today are different. They are ones of gratitude, filled with happiness that I really had a great childhood, some of which was spent in its midst – even though it was the place where I broke my arm during the Easter vacation of 1996.

As I pass the Jesuite garden, I see familiar old faces. And then some time later, I don’t see them anymore and I know that their time must have come. Other faces replace them. Those faces become familiar and the cycle repeats itself.

This is the heart of Beirut – the one we should never forget.

This is where I broke my arm

The public library

IDM Unlimited Nights: Fail!

I had a DSL subscription with IDM for the whole year last year. I had to stop it during December because I moved out of my Achrafieh house and my grandparents didn’t need it.

I had unlimited hours from 11 pm to 7 am that I used extensively and it was great. However, I recently called IDM to install a subscription because the need for internet in the Achrafieh household arose. While discussing the details, I asked if I get unlimited nights and they said yes. So naturally, I subscribed to one of the smaller packages offered because I wouldn’t need a big quota if I can get unlimited quota at night.

5GB per month it was.

I activated the DSL this past Sunday and behold, I don’t get unlimited quota. IDM was closed on Monday so I called on Tuesday and apparently they hadn’t discussed unlimited nights with me. I was making stuff up. And if I had asked them, they would have told me they couldn’t offer it because the “central” didn’t have enough open ports anymore.

So now to get unlimited internet at night, I either have to wait two or three weeks until the governmental decree goes into effect. And if that doesn’t happen, which you know is very likely in Lebanon, I’ll have to cancel my subscription and re-apply again, hoping I’d get a port. It’s a matter of luck apparently.

The saga doesn’t end with me. Twitter user Rabih faced the same thing with IDM while installing DSL at his house in Bsalim. He filed in all the paperwork and went to make sure he got unlimited nights. They said no. So he told them he didn’t want a subscription anymore. They replied that they’d see what they can do.

A week later, IDM contacted Rabih telling him that they have secured a port for him and that he will be getting unlimited nights. However, once his DSL got installed, he didn’t get unlimited quota. The reason? They didn’t activate his port because everyone would be getting unlimited nights in a month.

No, we’re not nagging for the sake of nagging. When an area supposedly has the option to have unlimited night hours, you don’t expect some people to get such a thing and others not to, depending on how lucky they are. Either everyone gets unlimited night traffic in a certain area or no one does.

How much sense does it make that my neighbor in Achrafieh, who lives less than 20 meters away and who shares the same central has unlimited night hours and I don’t? How could they actually tell you: Oh we’ve run out of ports for you. Sorry. You pay the same amount as everyone else in your area except you don’t get to use the internet as much as they do?

Lebanese companies taking their customers lightly and treading on them needs to stop. What’s worse? They actually had the audacity to tell me that I haven’t really paid much so I shouldn’t nag. So dear IDM, if I had paid $1 to get a service you advertised, I expect to get that service. As a company that respects itself, you need to get a grip.