Living in Lubnaan

After spending two weeks in Lebanon (Lubnaan in Arabic) I start to feel more and more at home here. Which is strange in many ways, and natural in many others. It's strange, because I was just started to feel at home in the US. So after arriving in Beirut I felt far away from home (the US) while I was actually closer to my hometown (Beerze, the Netherlands). It was also strange to know that I would be so far away from my girlfriend for two and a half months, and still I am looking forward to leaving Lebanon to see her again. The language is also hard to deal with. Of course, Arabic is already difficult enough as it is, but I have even more difficulties with spoken Arabic (because I didn't study that the past year - as any university student I studied modern standard arabic, what nobody speeks). And anytime I try to speak Arabic, I get stuck, frustrated and switch to English or French, what most people speak fluently anyway.
Nevertheless, I feel comfortable here now. Many people and many factors contribute to this. I share a nice appartment with steady electricity (a rarity in Lebanon) and wireless internet that works most of the time with a French girl and an Italian guy who are both great people. We speak French most of the time, that beautifull language that I was already starting to forget, and we have a great balcony where we have drinks and narguile (I'm smoking one there right now actually). The neighborhood is nice and relatively quiet, and there's always something to do in Beirut. I'm meeting tons of new, interesting people who all seem equally hospitable and friendly, who take me to salsa-clubs, nice, local restaurants, the beach, other towns and cities and bars and parties. And Lebanon outside of Beirut is just incredible. There are beautifull mountains everywhere, a long shoreline with the Medditeranean see, nice small villages.
I had the opportunity to get to know some of that beautiful countryside when I went hiking in Mount Sannine, north-east of Beirut, where I finally saw that natural beauty that I heard of so much before I came here and that I have missed most of my life in the Netherlands, where we lack anything that resembles a mountain. In the winter, Sannine turns into a ski-resort flooded by tourists from the whole Middle East, and even under the burning summer-sun some snow remains on the tops of the mountain-ridge. I've also visited Tyre, a harbor-town in the south of Lebanon with an ancient roman hippodrome, and I went to a beach north of Beirut. Actually, there aren't that many sand-beaches in Lebanon, so when people 'go to the beach', they actually go to a place at the sea owned by a hotel where you can just sit next to the sea, order food, swim and get a sunburn. Yesterday I went to a small town 'in the mountains' - when people go out of Beirut, they always 'go to the mountains' - where the brother of a friend of mine owns a pattiserie. On Saturday I will go to an even smaller village next to it which is actually his hometown to meet his parents. Seeing this rural side of Lebanon made me really appreciate the country, because Beirut is in fact not really a beautifull city. From the mountains, behind a thick layer of smog, you can see both the Medditeranean and a sea of boring, concrete buildings that have to be restored or completely rebuilt every time a war has been going on here. So it's understandable they can't afford exquisite architectural tours de forces, but it doesn't make the city the nicest place to live. Luckily, the mountains are never much further than an hour by car away. So I can imagine myself staying here for eight more weeks, trying to enjoy as many of the great things this country has to offer as possible.