Catering

Each morning, the caterers fill their trucks and deliver tasty bites of delicious stuff all over town.

Socrate is best known for catering. In Hamra they have this distribution location on Bliss street and a restaurant on the street one block to the south.

Break Time

I walked past this truck a little while ago and was delighted by it. It was on-site where a crew was filming a movie, something you see more and more of these days on the streets of Beirut. Inside the truck I could see a little kitchen and there were also bathrooms (see the door marked for men, just to the right of the logo?).

A brilliant idea. If I were filming a movie, I'd definitely want this truck there. Creature comforts matter.

Pallet

Lately, I've been combing through my archives which include this previously unpublished image. I took it from the apartment where I was living last year. I love the yellow hardhats.

Trucks are a little bit amazing. Consider that one cinder block is a fairly heavy thing and that 12 of them in a regular car would make a noticeable impact on the vehicle's handling. But this truck has just delivered pallets and pallets of cinder blocks to their new home in a luxury high-rise. This truck probably does that every day of the week. It's amazing.

Dodge Bus

This is one of the coolest buses I've ever seen. When I happened to walk past it, the bold colors, stars, hood ornament, even the horn on the hood convinced me to pull out my camera.

This bus was parked in a line of at least a half dozen others. Some of them were just as ornate, decorated just as well. Their drivers must love them a lot.

Inside one bus, I noticed this collection of stuff dangling from the roof.  I love the fringed, tassled bunting.

You can't see it very well, but there's a card collection in the middle of the mirror above the windshield--the cards all depict Christian saints and martyrs.  The driver put them there to protect the bus no doubt. Maybe the whole collection, plushies and all, is there to woo fortune's favor.

UN Trucks

It's another commonality here: UN Trucks.

These trucks belong to UN Peacekeepers (UNIFIL) in the south. The trucks in my photo are here in Beirut because those folks need some R&R now and then, so they come to town. I walked past these trucks parked outside a West-Beirut hotel.

A few times in early evening, I've seen massive convoys of a different sort of UNIFIL trucks. These convoys include tanks, APCs, and heavy machinery. It's impressive, their parades of dozens of enormous trucks etc., and I've often wondered if that's part of some sort of planned rotation.

Lights, Camera, Action!

People are always making movies in Beirut.

See? Just the other day, I walked past this film crew setting up a ton of lights all around Salon Safar on Bliss street. It's a humble little place. Like most other little barber shops in Beirut it seems it hasn't changed a bit in the past four or five decades. Don't know how it's possible, but these little nooks seem to have resisted the tide of change better than anywhere else.

I can't help taking pictures of trucks lately, so I also caught a shot of the truck they use to drag all the camera equipment and lights around.

Final Cut Equipped. Call them if you ever need to make a movie on the streets of Beirut.

A Mystery, A Riddle

We have a new Prime Minister here in Lebanon, a Sunni billionaire hand picked by Hezbollah. Since my crystal ball is in the shop this week, I have no idea what this means for anyone in Lebanon. And nobody else does either. If there's one thing I've learned since arriving here in 2004, it's this: people will talk as though they've got it all figured out, as if they know when the sky will fall and who will be responsible, but these kinds of claims are always wrong.

It's well intended, I know it is. They're just trying to make sense of what happens around them, to sort out the mixed up stuff and eek out a modicum of predictability. I don't blame them for doing it. But the future, as they say, is a mystery. The end.

And so in the spirit of mystery, of the riddle that life can be, I give you this, a photo of automobile decals that I found not long ago.

Here's a context shot:

So, going back to the decals on the side-view mirror . . . despite my cynicism about those who project sense onto the senseless, I can't help attempting to decode this odd sort of cartouche, this unexpected and unintended rebus.

Here in Lebanon, these are completely normal things to see as truck decorations. Culturally, the eye is protective, right? But in an English rebus it would mean "I", the self, or could represent seeing, looking, beholding, watching. And the Lebanese flag has all kinds of symbols within it, beyond merely representing the country.  The horse has Arab connotations that are new to me and plenty of western ones that aren't.

So, what do you think?  Go ahead, create a little order from the chaos.  Give some meaning to the meaningless.  Solve the unintentional riddle of the auto decals, and let us all know what you came up with.

Only Just

I've often posted photos of various construction sites, workers, and debris. They pull at me in ways I can't explain. And of course, a great many trucks are needed to haul things too and from sites all over town--well, all over Lebanon, actually.

Here's one such truck, barely able to make its way between parked cars.

Pound

I really loved the look of this construction site, especially the guy with the shovel.

The truck was steadily pounding away, forcing a vertical beam deeper and deeper in to the ground. It's my (uninformed, perhaps incorrect) understanding that these vertical beams are necessary to stabilize the foundation of high-rise structures.