All the Beirut news.

I only have myself to blame
for you, my victory, my downfall,
my need, my hunger, my flame...

I only have myself to blame,
hoping endlessly, as my mother
waits for my dad, against hope
for you to change,
for you to become
what I want, to be
somebody else...

I only have myself to blame
for this, the burn that is my life,
this lie that I insist on telling,
waiting, against the odds,
for me to become
someone I want...

I can remember as well as September does,
And what music remains inside of me
Is muted over with memory, strains sad
As the seed that spills from the withered okra plants. The best days of summer are the days of summer gone:
Something cooking, a wash of light on the water...
The music dies, and what I hold is the world.
One leaf falling would break the spell. It falls.-from"The Last Nostalgia"

Picture courtesy of Skyscraper City
I can’t believe they actually attacked him for taking pictures! WTF?
I saw a hole in the fence and tried to take a few shots. Nothing was visible but bulldozers. A man with a walkie talkie saw me and yelled that photos were prohibited. He sent me to the main door. There two men stood, one with greased hair, a white shirt and a metal cap visible in his mouth.
I asked if I could see the site and he refused. “This is private property, no pictures.”

(ink on paper حبر على ورق)

My friend told me: "When you return to Palestine, we shall go together to your village. There, we'll let our hair to the breeze to play with its locks as it desires."
And she left me with my heart racing it to a waft of our homeland's breeze.

My chest and wrists still hurt from the arms of the men who tackled me, twisted my hands behind my back, and tried to rip my phone out of my hands this afternoon.

They were enraged because I refused to delete a photo of ancient ruins I shot on their construction site.

"Lock the door," one of the foreman said earlier today, and moments later the giant doors of the site were sealed. I was surrounded by 5 to 6 men looking at me menacingly--prepared it seemed--to do anything to shut me up.

Here's how it all went down:

I couldn’t help but chuckle a bit when I saw this. I mean, come on, Barbar is the place you stop at 4:30AM after a night of clubbing when you’re super hungry and your options aren’t that many. But, then again, a good kebab isn’t just the price, presentation, pedigree of the beef, etc. It’s about the most popular one too, the one anyone and everyone can eat, one which without it, Beirut, more specifically Hamra, would not be the same.

I love it when Lebanon seems to find it’s way on the list of the best foods to find around the world. This time CNN sheds light on Kebabs and don’t we just love it… and Lebanon is number one on the list of TOP 5 places to have Kababs. According to CNN’s Gabrielle Jackson: »more...

How adorable is this series of animal shaped wood wine racks from Conte-Bleu, a design company based in Seoul, South Korea. The company currently offers animal designs of a reindeer, an elephant, a penguin and a doberman.

The Hälssen & Lyon tea calendar is the first calendar in the world to feature calendar days made from tea leaves. Finely flavored and pressed until wafer-thin, the 365 calendar days can be individually detached and brewed directly in the cup with hot water. But unfortunately we can’t enjoy them as they were distributed exclusively to »more...

Yesterday, minister Nicolas Sehnaoui
announced the newest addition to the Lebanese online community – it was Super
Geek! Some sort of a super hero who will come about and help us online fellows
be able to shake the system and make a change around us.

A reader forwarded this link to me, and I found it extremely interesting because it looks like this has been happening for quite a while and they even have hundreds of fans on their Facebook page and followers on Twitter.

Beirut Night Life posted about an American company who’s currently proposing a 150Km bridge connecting Dbayeh to Limassol to allow reaching Cyprus from Lebanon (or vice versa) within 80minutes. Using this bridge will be subject to paying a certain fee, and it will be owned by the American company for the 10 years.
Can you imagine how many things can go wrong if this projects gets approved?

Good Job Sareen!
This picture was uploaded yesterday night by Minister Sehnaoui on Instagram with the below text:

[YouTube]
This look like a fun show.

Best of both worlds? 

This Wednesday, Alfa will launch the 4G-LTE network.I have been selected along with other bloggers to test Alfa’s 4G mobile broadband for a month and will be as of this Wednesday, sharing with you my 4G experience. Can’t wait!!!

I can’t stress how happy I am of the leak earlier this year, and how lucky I was that I got on the good side of the guys behind it and apart from getting to meet Sir Richard Branson this week, I got the first scoop into what Virgin Radio Lebanon is gonna be all about, and how, as so many of us have wondered, will it compete in the already over-saturated English-speaking radio channel industry.
Here’s a summary I broke down into an easy-to-read list of what Najy Cherabieh, the General Manager, had to tell me.