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Watching Beirut Die

Snip from a Salon essay by Anthony Bourdain:

We went to Beirut to film a TV show about the city’s newly vibrant culinary and cultural scene. Then the bombs started falling, and we could only stand on the barricades of our hotel balcony and watch it all disappear — again.

From where I’m sitting, poolside, I can see the airport burning — the last of the jet fuel cooking off like a dying can of sterno. There’s a large, black plume of smoke coming from the South of the city — just over the rise, where the most recent airstrikes have been targeting the Shiite neighborhoods and what are, presumably, Hezbollah-associated structures. My camera crew and I missed it the first time they hit the airport. Slept right through it. Woke up in our snug hotel sheets to the news that we wouldn’t be making television in Beirut (not the show we came to do anyway), and that we wouldn’t be getting out of here anytime soon.

Any hopes of runway repair followed by a flight out disappeared two nights ago, when we watched from the balcony of my hotel room as missiles, fired from off shore, twinkled brightly for a few long seconds in the air, then dropped in lazy parabolic arcs onto the fuel tanks.

Link. Photo: Stephanie Sinclair/Corbis — “Prewar partygoers enjoy the music and atmosphere at 1975, a bar whose theme is the country’s civil war.” (Thanks, Cyrus)

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