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BEIRUT'S TRIUMPHANT MESS

After travelling from the steamy chaos of Beirut to the streamlined gleam of Dubai, Salma Abdelnour finds herself wistfully looking back ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

Beirut airport, 8am on a Monday morning in August. The airline check-in queues hobble along and the PA system is barely audible above the din. The air is a distinctly Beirut blend: expensive perfume, cigarette smoke, the sweat of a long-distance runner in summer. In some queues it’s an hour and a half for a boarding pass. European and American tourists, the ones who’ve braved a rare conflict-free Beirut summer, chatter spiritedly or listen to iPods or page through magazines. Lebanese locals and Persian Gulf regulars pace impatiently, puff Marlboros and holler at no one in particular.

Dubai airport, 10pm that same day. Fast, efficient check-in lines, immaculate floors, a powerhouse air-conditioning system that obliterates any sense of the 106-degree Fahrenheit heat outside. A boarding pass in under 12 minutes. But where is everyone? The ground-floor departure terminal is a desert—though cooler and less dusty than the one that wraps around this shiny city. Upstairs some people mill around the gates and duty-free shops, but there is something missing: the vital throb of an international airport. This lack of density and tension matches the orderly quiet in the streets outside.

Beirut and Dubai both boast East-West sophistication, international tourism and a glittery nightlife. Yet Beirut is the more popular city by far, despite the ways it is maddening, dysfunctional and chaotic. Why? Its traffic conditions are perhaps the worst in the world: drivers bull-headedly ride the wrong way down side streets when it suits them, create their own lanes on the autostrade, ignore the (recently introduced) traffic lights, and park on sidewalks. The electricity still goes out for several hours a day, though it's been 17 years since the end of the civil war. Weekend traffic jams shove whole neighbourhoods into gridlock. And it’s hot as hell in summer, making a ride in a cab without air-conditioning enough to ruin an afternoon. Yet visitors keep coming back—both exiled Lebanese and, this summer, a record number of tourists.

Maybe it is that Beirut succeeds precisely where it fails. It is alive with the din, dirt and mystique of a crowded old city. The collapsing infrastructure, impenetrable bureaucracy, awful road conditions and non-existent zoning laws somehow all add up to a place that never dies, never falters, no matter how many attempts are made on its life. Even the rebuilt downtown district, Solidere, which critics accused of an Epcot-like feel when it was unveiled in the late 1990s, is slowly getting re-absorbed into the noisy, dusty street-life of the rest of the city.

All over town the restaurants are as hopping as ever, the beaches bustle day and night, and every summer brings a fresh crop of outrageously glamorous, impossibly exclusive hangouts. This year it’s Sky Bar, a rooftop lounge with 360-degree views of the city, the Mediterranean and the mountains, and patrons who seem to be lifted from David Yurman ads. Apart from all that ostentatious pomp, there are always many unheralded secrets to discover around the city—always another alluring alleyway to walk down, another under-the-radar bar to disappear into until the night winds down at 6am, another hidden street-food vendor serving hot, tangy thyme-and-olive-oil slathered manakeesh pies. And there’s never a shortage of new material for jokes about the government, to keep guests laughing over late-night feasts of mezze and arak.

Two thousand kilometres to the west, Dubai’s streamlined traffic patterns, polite drivers, widely obeyed zoning laws, gorgeously functional air-conditioning and architecturally stunning retail and hospitality venues might just be too competent to succeed. A dash of chaos and malfunction here and there, a little more dirt and danger, and Dubai could be a little more interesting, a little more sexy—a little more like Beirut. A dubious honour, to be sure. But when it comes to the nebulous magnetism of any good city, maybe the lesson is: Whatever doesn’t work, works.

Picture credit: bwittorf , maryatexitzero (both via Flickr)

(Salma Abdelnour is a writer based in New York.)