We are now living in Lebanon. I say living because I believe that once you buy Cheerios and eat them with milk and bananas in a ceramic bowl with a real spoon, you can no longer claim to be a tourist.

In the news, I see that Clinton has won N.H. and Nevada, Obama stole the hearts of South Carolina, McCain’s gaining ground, and Kenya is in chaos. I learn that Heath Ledger is dead, China has outlawed plastic bags and that Bush was recently just a couple borders away having coffee with Abdullah.

But here’s what’s freaking me out. Through the same source, a day after the fact, I discover that while I was complaining about no hot water the night before, an American-vehicle targeted roadside bomb killed four Lebanese in “war-torn” Beirut.But wait. I’m LIVING in Beirut. And if I wasn’t online, I’d never know.

Yes, this is bizarre. Just as bizarre as getting a text message from our NGO director on January 21st that said: “Due to the situation in Gaza, we will not be having activities in the camp.” Just as bizarre as being advised to go home on January 25th because an undercover agent had been assassinated, and the tire-burning had begun.

Today, we met with the NGO director and were briefed on the situation. Road-blocks and protester-police clashes around the camp means we should stay in our area, a ten minute taxi ride away. You see, the Shiites are pissed about the electricity rationing. . .there’s some aftermath from the assassination. . .but we know this is also a way for the “opposition” to try and weaken the government. Over coffee, the three of us discussed what’s happened since we arrived and who might be responsible. I have to admit, being here is a rush.Between the bombs, the traffic, the strikes, the sectarian squabbles and the electricity outages, we are living in the news. Yes, Beirut is where Drama has purchased a permanent pad for herself and put down some roots. You know, joining the gym, picking out paint swatches, finding her favorite Whole Foods location. And the Beiruti’s, even the expats, have really taken to her. I’m starting to believe they might even feed off her. If we’re not careful, so will we.

But I know Drama. All too well. She’s super clingy. Like Friday morning, around 5:30, as thought-rattling thunder rolled through the sky and the naked women on our wall lit up like Moulin Rouge and the Call to Prayer began and I thought about the cold, long, dark hallway to the bathroom? Yeah. She wouldn’t let go of my hand.And last week, when I locked the door to take a shower and the water strangely stopped working just as I was finishing and then I swore I heard the front door shut, but then Michael didn’t answer when I called and so I brushed my teeth and lotioned my legs and by then he totally should have been home but he totally wasn’t and I had to dry my hair, but I was afraid to get, you know lost in the zone of the hair-dryer sound when clearly, the guys I saw earlier on a nearby roof were members of Al Qaeda and they were now in the house waiting to break down the bathroom door. Yeah, Drama was in on that one, too.As much as I get a rush from our stories of time spent in a city whose very name evokes visions of hostages, terrorists and masked militants. . .as much as I love the fantasy of starring in my own humanitarian action flick. . .and as much as I understand the excitement of leaving the house and never knowing WHAT the day might bring, the big D is not good for my well-being.So the idea of residing long-term in a city who seems to thrive on her very presence. . .well. . .no. Thanks, but no thanks.But I will leave here with a different view of the world and of my government. I am realizing that where your loyalties fall has less to do with open-mindedness or how broad your horizon is, and more to do with who you are deep, deep within. What comes out when your faced with conflicting opinions. The instinctive stuff that lives somewhere in the neighborhood of your genes. A place you don’t typically visit every day.

Michael took this stellar photo of a bullet-holed, disco-no-longer in Hamra, Beirut.

We were rolling on a smooth highway. Mercedes’—some asphalt scraping and others probably purchased outright—wove past. Rob, the Dutch director of Inma Foundation, a group which helps disadvantaged communities of Lebanon, including Palestinian refugees, was at the wheel of this Land Rover, positive energy sprouting from his expression. Eagles sang We Are the Sultans. . .The Monday before, we’d had dinner with Suzanne, a friend of my friend Kelly Korak, a talented graphic designer in Denver. Suzanne volunteers for Inma. In a whirlwind discovery of matched skills and needs, cooperation naturally came about. In exchange for a free flat, a loaned laptop and a small stipend, Michael would design a website and create mini documentaries on their projects. I would organize and compose their content and stories.

Today, we were on the way home from South Lebanon, where Michael had filmed and photographed Inma’s renovation project of a village impacted by the Lebanon-Israel Summer War of 06.

Now, from the west, cypress, stone and sea glared at me, powerful with sunshine. You see, it all screamed, you’ll never figure out this country. Not even if you stayed a lifetime.

Seasonal canvas signs reached out from the medians. First a row of red McDonald’s ads in Arabic. Then a soft beige variety, announcing the Shiite Muslim holiday of Ashouraa, a ten-day period of memorial and prayer for Hussein, grandson of Mohammed, a martyr slain by the Sunni Muslim sect aver 1400 years ago.

As we entered greater Beirut, the cars slowed, forced to make their own decisions (which included parking and ramming) at four-way intersections void of stoplights or traffic cops. Meanwhile, tanks guarded embassy walls. Trendy, black-and-white, Von Dutch fatigue’d troops, youthful and shouldering assault rifles, patrolled the empty, sepia-toned house of parliament, where elections had been delayed for the 12th time since November. The government was choosing their battles. Literally. And when they couldn’t elect a president, vehicular misdemeanors hadn’t even made the spreadsheet. Of course, neither had electricity–outages were daily, frequent and for hours at a time. Mass transit was non-existent. Saltwater ran from our tap. DSL was a joke. While yellow cranes and bulldozers swung to life by 7 AM, clicking together a lego-land of investment from Lebanese who’d fled abroad in the last quarter century, state-owned skyscrapers stared out to sea with dark empty sockets, skeletons with no closet.

In Hamra, Lebanon could be described as chaos driving a Lexus, confusion carrying a Prada pocketbook, conflict ordering a grand latte. It was the inverse paradigm of the traditional developing country. Rather than shirt-off-their-back hospitality wrapped in a corrugated-tin-topped shack, we found this neighborhood in shades and shopping at Mango, attempting to hide the heartache of war, ignore the instability and ride the melo-dramatic rollercoaster of a power struggle which goes up and down and around again.

In our middle class Muslim neighborhood, coiffed men sold magazines, pasta, shampoo and tahini from tidy grocery stores on narrow streets lined with barricades, each striped in red and stenciled with a green tree, the Lebanese flag. Nearby, lavish home interior boutiques sold velour throw pillows and hallmark cards. Sweet shops boasted 47 different kinds of nuts. Riots about bread prices recently occurred–so we heard. If you wanted food fast, Pizza Hut delivered.

Not far away, ten-year olds used plywood for guns as they played in a field of trash. Unscrubbed potatoes rolled around a corner wagon. Under Saeb Salem Boulevardskirted women sold spinach. Out near the airport, what started as a Palestinian Refugee Camp in 1947 had become more like a Palestinian Quarter of poverty.And a few miles from there was Spinneys, an extra-strength shopping plaza full of high-priced, imported cottage cheese, Campbells Tomato Soup, and all that crap you buy at Target, too. Attached was a McDonalds, a Starbucks and a Claires in case you needed some cubic zirconia with your Coke.

But our flat, where we eat, sleep and watch Carnivale, (because, you know, we need something dark and brooding in our life) , is the biggest oxymoron of them all. Here, the drapes are more like DRRRRAPES, ideal for a drawing room in Versailles, or maybe playclothes if, say, I happened to be a governess for English-speaking children in 1940’s Austria. Our bed is so big that if Michael farts, I can lie on the opposite side, unaffected. Nearby is a love seat–obviously the one Kate Winslet posed upon before the ship went down. Chandeliers with cherubs–some winged, some wincing–bounce from the ceiling of all seven areas. Around every corner are white-washed women in stone, each trying out for the part of the “bare-breasted nymph #2″. There are four televisions, multiple luxury appliances, two stereo systems, one piano, three scary giraffe CD holders, around twenty-five lamps and a lot of shit that has been marinated in liquid gold.Yet the walls sprout far too few outlets to support such extravagance. We found just a handful of lightbulbs in the entire place. The televisions display four fuzzy channels. Our stainless steel oven simply doesn’t function. The microwave sprouts sparks. The water cooler leaks. There is no shower curtain. The heat is confined to areas that have a door.I am certainly not complaining. But this was, this is, Beirut–schizophrenic and sure of themselves all in the same Altoid-flavored breath.

On our second day in Beirut, a bright Sunday morning, long before we knew how long we’d stay, Michael and I wandered on foot into the downtown area. After twenty minutes, we’d been stopped three times by security officers–told to stop taking pictures and asked about where we were headed. All of this happened along landscaped medians, yellow-lined roads, glass-walled banks and track-suited joggers. As Michael had remarked, apart from the tanks, it looked a lot like San Diego.

Taking an unintentional detour past block after block of gnarled barbed wire and barricades, we slowly realized that this must be Hezbollah.

Aha! The occupied warzone amidst a cosmopolitan city that all those travelers had been talking about. Soldiers were everywhere. Below we spied a tiny tent city, but left our cameras safely inside our bags. Cars zoomed by, picking up speed toward a kind of highway. But the sidewalk remained. So carefully, cautiously, we pressed on. Clearly, we were on the fringe of what made Lebanon such a clusterfuck of politics, pride and prejudice.

Finally, as we veered slightly left, a black beret stopped us. We told him we were heading for downtown. After a brief conversation with his officer and a lively discussion with us about Hollywood and George Michael, he sent us directly through what appeared to be an army camp of plywood planks, construction, armed militia and tents. So surreal, it looked a little like a movie set. Condoleeza Rice smiled down from a poster. Officers barely glanced at us. At a final checkpoint, our bags were skim-searched and abruptly, we entered a promenade of dusty shop windows and naked mannequins, boutiques which, since the Summer War of ‘06 no longer attracted enough customers to survive.

Soon a plaza of chrome and wicker chairs emerged. Hagen Daaz smiled with creamy scoops and I could see Virgin Records across a star-shaped burst of urban renewal. But several storefronts were merely glossy ghosts. Only a few strollers and toddlers wobbled across the cobblestone-ringed center while Sri Lankan nannies followed.

A lone roller-blader criss-crossed the clock-tower-centerpiece. But like a Rolex sold on a corner in Soho, the face was a fake facade, the inside dead with dysfunction. Mimicking Beirut, its hands refused to work together. Four coffee drinkers whispered. Armed soldiers—I saw four from where I then stood– paced within their spaces.We realize now that what we crossed through the remains of the opposition’s sit-in. Tents from last spring. Still there.

That’s why the camp had looked abandoned. It was. The guards, with the American Secretary of State watching over, worked for the Lebanese government and were in protection mode. But who did they think would attack? Syria? America? Hezbollah? Al Qaeda? Israel? We learned that depends on who you talk to.It was the strangest Sunday morning we’d had in a long time.We’re now struggling to collect just a coin-purse full of unbiased facts. To figure what the hell is going on, what side we’re supposed to be on and how we should feel as Americans.

Stay tuned.

(Photo by Michael)

Garret and his sister Esther, the Irish backpackers staying across the hall, were planning a trip to Golan Heights. I’d never heard of it—and I apologize. But as Garret ranted on like an action movie trailer about the special permission, bombshelled buildings and sledge-hammered sight of this strange buffer territory, I wasn’t enthused. Hadn’t we seen enough ruins?

Well. .It all started back in the 1967 when Syria lost a bunch of land called Golan Heights to Israel in the Six Day War. This pissed them off. So during the Yom Kippur War of 1973, Syria won back 450 sq km of Golan Heights, and a demilitarized, UN-supervised buffer zone began to keep the peace. But now Israel was pissed. Just before giving up Quinetra, a part of Golan Heights just lost back to Syria, they went through and systematically destroyed everything in sight, removing, as Lonely Planet put it “anything that could be unscrewed, unbolted or wrenched from its position.”

(Photo by Michael)

Then they bulldozed what was left. While some say it was revenge, and others claim it served to strengthen the security buffer, it wasn’t pretty. Syria, as you can imagine, now welcomes tourists to witness this act of destruction, just in case there was any doubt about which country was or is in the wrong.Most of Golan Heights–1,200 square kilometres of territory, manned by thousands of troops–is still under dispute. Neither countries seem interested in compromise.

That morning at the bus station, I realized I’d forgotten my passport, which could have been disastrous. But I was optimistic. We made it through two checkpoints where no one seemed to correctly compare the number of heads with the number of documents. And at our final threshhold, after a promise to take photos and patient smiles, we were in.Rain fell freely into the roofless shops of Quinetra’s main street as the five of us shuffled in an unintentionally staggered formation up and down the empty roads, each on our own private walk through the modern ruins of real conflict. Dirt-stained goats grazed in the weeds between garlic-colored stone and gravel. The walls and arches of a stone church appeared like so many we’d paid to see in the past. Climbing the dark, narrow, princess-style spiral of a crumbling minaret, there was a disturbing view of Quinetra’s mine-filled fields and the Israeli territory in the distance. But kilometers of gnarled barbed wire and our Syrian guide kept us on the right path.

Coming upon a kind of checkpoint, our tour was abruptly over. We stood for over an hour in the slanted rain waiting for a ride back to civilization. Soldiers came and went. Gold badged and bereted, some huddled in a small office. Others shot the shit inside a checkpoint station. Another was in charge of lifting the gate for incoming SUVs with “UN” in big, bold and black letters along the side. When encountered, they were timidly friendly, always interested. One little boy, age 10, accompanying his father, practiced his English by shouting to us with a high-toothed, rabbit smile.

Finally, piling into an army jeep with other fatigue-covered men, we rode back to our first interrogator and stood awkwardly in a two by two shelter. Plastic white deck chairs slid on a muddy, public-school tile floor while a red, cable-wrapped, deckless boom box chanted Arabic radio and a small stove dripped propane. An extra-strength candle, which looked a lot like a stick of dynamite had been lit and placed outside the window. Kalushnakavs hung on a row of nails. The guards were nothing but nice.Golan Heights was plenty disturbing, just as anticipated. I kept thinking–all this fighting and destruction over a little piece of land? But Michael reminded me that everything is relative. When your country is this small, a couple hundred kilometers matter more. Who am I to talk, anyway? Had the United States ever permanently lost any sizable land? No, it seemed like we’d had much more experience in taking it away from others.

I am still digesting.