Majida El Roumi singing one of my favorite songs for Beirut “Ya Beirut” at the Francophone games opening ceremony. Great performance as usual!
Tag: Beirut
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Francophone Games – Beirut 2009
50 Francophone countries are participating in the sixth Francophone Games, which will take place in Beirut from September 27 to October 6 2009!
50 pays francophones se regroupent à Beyrouth pour les 6eme Jeux de la Francophonie du 27 Septembre au 6 Octobre 2009!
Website: www.jeux2009.org
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Ministry of Tourism: Lebanon is the place to be
Usually you have 1001 reason to leave this country! (Electricity, water, mobile network, slow internet, Ammar Houri, etc…) But for some reason I find myself attached to it, and more precisely addicted to its capital Beirut.
Below is a nice short video found on Twitter promoting Lebanon and showing how charming this country is despite all its problems!
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Freeze Sodeco! I will shoot you!
I thought of a fun idea today which is to start a new series of posts called “Freeze, I will shoot you!”. Breathe, the thing has nothing to do with the shooting we’re used to in Lebanon, the idea is to go to some area in Lebanon (where else?!) for the purpose of taking some nice photos of the place and then publish them in a blog post here. I’ll be also open to suggestions if you have some nice place in mind.
I will start today with Sodeco, one of my favorite streets in Beirut. The reason why I originally went there was to shoot the old buildings that still have marks from the civil war on the. I leave you with the photos.
Facing Sodeco square, this building is currently being renovated by the municipality of Beirut.
Showing contrast between two buildings, one has witnessed the civil war and the other eventually didn’t!
Another building currently being renovated.
Same building from the inside.
Same building from the inside.
The street leading to Monot.
P.S: For some reason, the lightbox plugin on my blog (the image overlay thing) seems to be broken, so whenever you click on an image you will be taken to a new webpage instead of displaying it on a grey background. I promise I’ll be working on it today!
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Lebanese bloggers meetup at T-Marbouta
It’s all over the Lebanese blogsphere now… Yesterday night I went to T-Marbout along with several Lebanese bloggers to meet with Philippe Couve, Pierre Haski (www.rue89.com), and Eric Scherer from Radio France Internationale.
The meeting purpose was for the French journalists and bloggers to get to know more about the Lebanese blogsphere and its status. We discussed several issues such as why blogging isn’t very popular here in Lebanese, and why do some bloggers post very frequently when things heat up in Lebanon and then dump their blogs when everything calms down. They were also interested in knowing if anyone of us had a problem with the authorities because of some content (I wasn’t surprised with that question, at the end we’re an Arab country!).
In addition, while discussing the Lebanese people in general, we all agreed that they hate to read and write, they’re just good at grasping already processed information. Which explains why they’re all active on Facebook, and very few of them thought of starting a blog. Lazy nation!
w heik..! by the end of the meetup I was glad I had the chance to finally meet Maya Zankoul & Tarek Chemaly.
Here’s a list of the bloggers who were there:
20minutes.fr
beirutntsc.blogspot.com
choueichoueibeyrouth.blogspot.com
qussa.nl
diaryofahalfandhalf.wordpress.com
mayazankoul.wordpress.com
29letters.wordpress.com
klekeesh.blogspot.com
hanane.me
onoffbeirut.com
rue89.com
atelier.rfi.fr
kibot.blog.com
bloggingbeirut.comAnd finally, here’s what others have posted about the meeting:
Maya Zankoul
Tarek Chemaly
Samer Karam
Pierre Haski
Hummus Nation (a blogger I really would like to meet someday!) -
Facebook Beauty Salon?
Ah no, it’s FaceLook beauty salon!
Photo taken at Bourj Abi Haidar – Beirut.
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Shou ya ashta?
I saw this on the front of a mini-bus 2 days ago in Tarik Al-Jadida, Beirut. I am sure the driver is “Shou ya ashta” style!
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Toastmasters Lebanon
Toastmasters International is a nonprofit educational organization that operates clubs worldwide for the purpose of helping members improve their communication, public speaking and leadership skills. Through its thousands of member clubs, Toastmasters International offers a program of communication and leadership projects designed to help men and women learn the arts of speaking, listening, and thinking.
There are actually two toastmasters clubs in Lebanon, one is in Beirut and the other in Tripoli. And I got introduced to Toastmasters Lebanon a while ago via Nour’s blog “Sunken Treasure 6”. Nour is a member of Tripoli’s club and she posts frequent updates on her blog about what goes on in the meetings and sometimes shares with the tables topics that she’s going to be speaking about.
Per my readings of her blog posts, Toastmasters evaluation system helps the individuals identify the weaknesses in their communication skills and of course work on improving them. One thing I have been wondering about though is when do members decide that they got enough practice and no longer need what Toastmasters offers and thus choose to just stop attending. I think Nour can answer this by commenting on the post!
Anyway, you can get to know more about Toastmaster Tripoli through the below reportage by Mounzer Al-Merehbi which was aired on TeleLiban few days ago.
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Ziad El-Rahbani – Mni7a Photos
Words really do not do justice to the performance of Ziad El-Rahbani and his musicians in “Mni7a”, he was awesome as usual.
Ghassan El-Rahbani was also there wearing this funny T-Shirt.
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Beirut – The best party city
Check out this report by Cal Perry from CNN about the summer season this year in Beirut. So far this is the best summer after more than 4 years of continuous political instability that has started with PM Rafic Hariri assassination and ended with the 2009 elections 2 months ago, and Beirut is literally on fire with the countless events this summer, not to forget the booming nightlife everywhere in the country.
I loved how Cal Perry ended the report “This summer, the world is partying on the shores of the mediteranean”.
