Ahhhhh Lebanon! I'm not sure whether my love for Beirut has been amplified, due to the fact that I have been living in a "city" with no streets and devoid of atmosphere for 9 months or whether is just plain fabulous! For a holiday destination I cannot think of a thing Lebanon is missing, it has beaches, mountains, scenery, museums, architecture, nightlife and cuisine! The moment I arrived in the city I fell in LOVE!
We were picked up from the airport by a taxi driver that the company I work for uses- tony! Now if you have never been to the middle east and you are a nervous passenger you may want to pop a few diazepam before embarking on the drive to your hotel! To say the traffic is crazy is an understatement! After living in Kuwait it didn't seem all that bad to me but a few things did strike me.....instead of the lines of HUGE shiny new expensive cars I have become accustomed to, the traffic jams were made up of cars full of rust and chipped paint work....hooray for old cars! My experience of Beirut literally did start with the journey to our hotel. During the cab ride we were accosted by begging children, who had been trained to stare into you eyes like sad puppies, our driver made incest jokes and drove in to parked cars and responded to our chorus of gasps with a simple "whoops"-amazing! Lol!
As we entered the city centre I stared in marvel and the character filled buildings crumbling with bullet holes and spectacular graphiti in tow, a piece of history themselves; the old city is a complete contrast to the clean wide streets of the modern side of the city which houses the likes of le gray hotel (class and cocktails......and a glass rooftop pool) and skybar(hand raisers, beautiful people and grey goose vodka)two places I visited that evening!
Lebanon is not short of nightlife, if you are visiting in peak times do be sure to make reservations as most venues require guest lists, if you are five girls in short dresses you may very well get walked to the front of the queue but better to be safe than sorry!
The sights....... Besides wondering around the different quarters of the city we decided to get away from the hustle for a day and visited some badass limestone caves (jeita Grotto), the small village of Byblos and took the cable car up to "our lady of Lebanon" a huge white statue of the Virgin Mary which overlooks the Beirut; I'd highly recommend all of the above!
The caves are situated in a beautiful valley, they are a cluster of interconnected caves, the upper galleries of which have had a walkway calved for the tourists. The caves are full of different stalactites and at the end of the tour you are taken on a little boat ride through one of the lower galleries- a little spooky, I felt like I was being taken by the ferryman of the dead. As well as being a popular tourist destination the caves also provide over a million people in Beirut with fresh water!
Byblos is just great! It is a UNESCO world herritage site and is said to be one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. We visited the ruins of the castle and a small market full of lots of weird and wonderful items( I purchase a tambourine and some coasters)!
The cable car is well worth the ride, not recommended if you are scared of heights, even I was gripping the sides if the car at points! The view from lady Lebanon is pleasing and if you arrive in hot pants and a belly top they will provide you with a number of blue blankets/cloths to cover your modesty!
Cuisine, Wowzers! Everything I ate I loved, we visited a few recommended restaurants and just asked the waiters to select dishes for us, I was not disappointed. You can also find a number of cuisines beside the typical Lebanese deliciousness, we tried a part Armenian restaurant where I sampled sparrow- not bad but a little crunchy!
