I had a rough few days.  I'm now back in Amman, having found out once in Beirut that the same paperwork that will get me onto a Royal Jordanian flight from Amman to Baghdad will NOT get me onto an Iraqi Airways flight from Beirut to Baghdad.  I asked the travel agent, a very good and reliable guy my friend Chris recommended, if he could convince the Iraqi Airways bureaucrats to change their minds.

Him:  "Have you ever been to Iraq?"

Me:  "Yeah, three times."

Him:  "Have you ever convinced an Iraqi to change his mind?"

Beirut sits on a notch of land with the Mediterranean to the north and west.  The central neighborhood on the west side of the city is Hamra, home to the American University in Beirut, several decent hotels, and ungodly (even for Beirut) traffic.  Chris’ place is a bit east of Hamra, just south of the sea and close to the center of town.  The Mediterranean is visible over the tops of neighboring buildings, and also through the gutted, shell-scarred old Holiday Inn across the street.  Hariri was killed nearby, as his convoy drove along the Corniche.  He was a construction magnate as well as a politician.  A massive mosque he helped build sits in the center of town, a few blocks south of the Virgin Megastore.  In between Virgin and the mosque is a white tent with Astroturf carpeting has been erected, and inside Beirutis pay tribute to Hariri.  There are pictures of him everywhere, and a flower-strewn coffin behind a rope divider.  In the next room are the graves of the men who died with Hariri.  Each is covered in flowers, and each is marked with a picture of the dead man.  The men's faces are in the foreground, with Hariri—wearing a business suit and looking hale and confident and relaxed—standing in the background.

Chris and I had rented the apartment together, and when the bomb went off I was in Baghdad trying to unload my share of our lease.  Chris says that every apartment except ours had its windows blown out in the explosion.  But while Beirut is occasionally rocked by a kind of political violence not seen in the States, it’s not a city where you feel unsafe (at least not if you stick to the neighborhoods that cater to hip and well-funded western and Arab tourists).  The Holiday Inn seems to be a permanent reminder of the civil war, but other vacant or dilapidated parcels of land are being turned into office buildings or an apartment complexes or new shops.  On a walk across town Chris pointed out that we’d hardly passed a lot that wasn’t under construction; cranes seem to outnumber minarets.  The entire downtown, obliterated in the civil war, has been rebuilt; it’s now dominated by a big pedestrian shopping district.

Despite Hariri’s assassination, political instability and the Syrian pull-out, a few days wasn’t enough time for me to pick up on any serious changes here.  I’m sure the Syrian intelligence headquarters in Hamra, with its soldiers lounging on the sidewalk and its pictures of the older and younger Assads, has been shuttered.  But the most noticeable change has been commercial.  On the east (and more heavily Christian) side of town the Gemmayzeh neighborhood is becoming Beirut’s new playground.  Unlike the flattened and restored downtown, Gemmayzeh has the feel of an old city.

It's a ramshackle place.  Beautiful old homes dominate some blocks, white paint peeling off their columns and balconies.  Some have leafy courtyards behind stone or iron gates.  The streets are narrow and wires criss-cross overhead.  There aren't as many soldiers and heavily-armed cops as there are downtown, but policemen in para-military-style uniforms do hang around in front of their stations.  At night the streets are dark and cars park on the sidewalk.  The buildings are old and solid, made of rough-hewn stone.  But this is Beirut's hipster enclave, and warm light glows through the plate-glass windows.  The interiors are warmly-lit and slick:  modern bars and restaurants.