How do you tell the delivery person where you live in order for them to bring you precious food? Well, most conversations go a little like this:

– “Do you know [insert landmark]?”
– “Yes.”
– “Okay, don’t take the street next to it. Keep going deghre. Skip the street after that one and take the one after. Still with me?”
– “Barely.”
– “Okay go into that street. Find a shop called [insert name]. Once you find it, do a 95 degree pirouette to locate my building’s entrance. I’m the [insert floor number].”

Delivery people, the maze of Lebanon’s “addresses” is soon to be over.

Minister Nicolas Sehnaoui announced on twitter that all of Lebanon will have addresses soon.

Long gone will be the days where local landmarks point you to where you are and long gone will be the days where you fill your official papers with generic addresses just because you can’t skip that step. And perhaps setting up Lebanese iTunes Store accounts will be less complicated?

Of course, theoretically. I’m not sure how feasible the entire process might be or how tedious. Aren’t we far gone as a country for that? But still, I’ll take it as some potential for good news.

Suck it, telecarte booth. I will no longer be using you.

Update: according to BlogBaladi, a Canadian company was hired to do a similar job in 2002 and they managed to name streets and buildings (link). However, I’m not entirely sure if this actually went beyond Beirut because I’ve never seen those blue street and building tags outside the city. Moreover, the entire project was definitely not advertised and marketed enough for people to be aware of it. It’s akin to having an address but not knowing what it is – not because of laziness but because of inefficiency.