The Travelog - Take Off

The migrating bird has landed.
The note I added to my previous post still stands. This isn't my final departure from my grove, but a profound thrust in that direction.

Traveling alone over great distances and long hours gives your brain a big shove towards psychosis. Not only are you uncomfortable, tired, sleepy and in a sterile environment, you are also coming across more people than you would in a month of everyday living. Add to that the fact that you have nobody to speak and interact with, and you have all the catalysts for wild mental activity that takes your imagination and twists it into sometimes valuable but mostly surreal insight.

Of course, the only difference on this trip is that this time I have a blog to vent out all of those ideas and lighten the pressure in my exhausted cranium. So this is the first post in a series I'll call "Travelog".

Leaving Beirut

All trips from Beirut start at the airport, as we have no true civilian seaport to speak of and the land crossings only get you to places you don't really care to go to. So the Lebanese have always had a strong connection to that airport south of Beirut, the one they now call Rafik Hariri International airport officially, but to us it's just "the airport". I remember Beirut airport in it's war time state. The dark sandstone halls with high-ceilings, the chaotic buzzing activity (mostly pushing, shoving and stamping) and the second floor viewing platform that used to let you peer out onto the apron and runways and up along the hills to the south. There was always something heart-warming about seeing those old 707 jets with the big red tailfin and the sharply angular cedar. Something unmistakably "Lebanese". Of course there was something unmistakably Syrian as well, the non-uniformed 'security' Syrian staff who would take pleasure in humiliating us on arrival and departure, tossing our passports to us across the room like they were useless scraps. Maybe to them, that was what they were.

In comparison, today's airport is modern, clean and better designed. I remember when the new airport first opened, it was being completed in stages. It wasn't very efficient and not all details had been covered, but for the most part it certainly looked like it had the makings of something truly first class. Now, I haven't been out of the country for the past 3 years, so I don't know when exactly that process got derailed, but something sad has happened.
While waiting at the check-in counter the power went out. Twice. Amid the beeping of the computer terminals and the resetting of the weighing belts, I tried my best to get the image of a darkened control tower warm in the glow of candlelight out of my head. And other little annoyances which I will not get into now because a) they'll make me seem picky and b) little did I know that by the end of the trip, I would be wishing every place were Beirut.

To be continued...