Anatolia and the Levant 2013

GOING ALL IN ON THE PARIS OF THE MIDDLE EAST

It was getting to be mid-January and we had to decide if we were all in for Beirut or not. I had been reading the The Daily Star every day (or daily). It's a great English language daily published in Beirut. Aside from a few kidnappings of businessmen in the Bekaa Valley, Lebanon had been pretty quiet since the car-bombing assassination of the head of the Lebanese intelligence agency in October 2012. And this was despite the civil war raging in next door Syria. 

I had reviewed the travel warnings on the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office website (along with the American State Department's warnings - but in my opinion, those tend to be alarmist and not worth much). According to the Brits, Beirut was ok - though Tripoli, the Bekaa Valley, and Tyre were no go. I had also read Jessica Lee's Lebanon Handbook, which had been very reassuring about traveling to Beirut. So on January 13, 2013, we took the plunge and booked tickets from Istanbul to Beirut for March 4.

Now booking those tickets was a little difficult. Pegasus Airlines was the carrier. Because the tickets were $5 cheaper directly through Pegasus's website over Expedia, I tried booking with Pegasus Airlines. However, after hitting the book button on my computer - nothing happened. No confirming webpage, and no confirming email. Just a blank screen. Odd - but perhaps that is the way Pegasus operated? I didn't want to resend, worrying that I would book tickets twice. So I called Pegasus's american phone number. And I got a strange answering machine message (who uses an answering machine in 2013?). So I called my credit card company to see if I had been charged for the tickets. When the credit card company confirmed there was no such charge, I decided to go the safe way and booked them through Expedia. So much for saving $5.

I immediately sent a copy of my confirming email to my mother - as I knew she'd be excited about our visit to the Paris of the Middle East. Shortly after, I received an email back from her with a copy of a parade of horribles from the State Department's travel warnings. I guess she wasn't excited.

Last we needed a hotel in Beirut. Now surprisingly, hotels in Beirut were not cheap at all. When we had traveled to Cairo in 2011, we had paid about $50 a night for a nice place, and even cheaper when we went to Morocco in 2012. But Beirut hotels were on par with places such as Chicago and London. I ended up booking four nights at the Mayflower for about $100 a night. All I knew is that the hotel was in Hamra, got ok reviews on Tripadvisor, and according to my wife - as she had looked at the photos on the Mayflower's website - there were swords on the walls in the hotel bar.