An adventorous day in Beirut

Published Monday, November 12, 2007

I can’t believe it has already passed two months in this charming country. Now things are normalizing in to every day life, things has become more a routine, nothing feels that new anymore. If I was to explain to you how a normal day in my life is, this would be it. After a night where I have fought against giant mosquitoes I open my eyes, very tired, after I’ve been snoozing for ten minutes. I fight myself going up from my bed, and I realize I don’t have that much time as I thought anyway. I stumble into the bathroom where I do my daily routines. Ten to nine I run out of the front door, this day I’ve decided I am going to be on the right time to my Arabic class. I have gotten too used to the Lebanese time measurement, and I am almost always five minutes too late. Straight at once when I reach the street I hear the hopeful voice of “taxi taxi” and I try patiently to show them the sign that I don’t need it. Three hours of Arabic lies ahead of me, and I try as best as I can to come up with some good phrases. “Sabakh al kher” (good morning in Arabic) and try to remember all the glossary that I memorized yesterday. After three intense hours (where Camilla and I are the only students) where we have been conjugating many verbs it is time to go to the office. The first person we meet is Achmed which is the telephone operator in the headquarter he sits in the first floor. He always smiles and is happy every time we greet him in Arabic, marhaba kifak, how are you? (good day, how are you? ) I walk the two stairs up to the youth department and I meet several colleagues on my way, the same sentences are repeated. I reach the office and there’s Therese, our contact person, and greets us. Kifik, how are you today? I greet back and sit down trying to work on my laptop. The internet connection is relatively bad, and I try to be patient when I am working on the net. At two o clock everyone leaves the office, I am trying to stay a little bit longer. After a whilw the clock shows too much and it is time for me to go home, I usually walk home, it takes me around twenty minutes. In the afternoon I go to a café called Graffiti, that by walk is only two minutes away from my apartment. There I have spent a lot of time, money and gotten to know a lot of people. There I sit for a few hours, sometimes I sit there until they close. Often we have late meetings with the volunteers in the Red Cross, which make me spend the late hours in graffiti. I walk home and try to remember some of the Arabic glossary I learned earlier today. It is time to go to bed, and to fight those giant mosquitoes once again.