 | Beirut General Tips | Tips 31 - 40 of 138 |  |
Popular General Tips | Other General Tips Tips | All Tips (138) Beirut City Center: The area was totally destroyed during the civil war between 1975-1990. During the last ten years it was reconstructed in the same design but with the latest facilities.
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At Lebanon you can use both United states dollars and Lebanese pounds.
1 USD = 1.495 Lebanon pounds (3 June 2006)
1 Euro = 1.931 Lebanon pounds (3 June 2006)
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All around Beirut there is a lot of construction work going on and the silhouette
of cranes against the sky can be seen everywhere. Leave a Comment
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Many houses along the former green line still bear obvious signs of the destruction during
the war. Others are newly restored.
The Green Line was the border between the Christian east and the Muslim west during the war. Leave a Comment
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The area around Martyrs Square was seriously damaged during the war. New buildings are now built and the new apartment block on the photo looks very nice (and expensive), and has a peaceful courtyard. Leave a Comment
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Hamra is the main commercial district of Beirut, with rue Hamra the city's answer to London's Oxford Street. Rue Hamra and the streets immediately parallel and perpendicular to it are the center of all things retail in this city, with everything from hole-in-the-wall shops selling lottery tickets to Starbucks (who would have thought there would be a Starbucks in Beirut! There are several!) It's extremely bustling, and the place to buy absolutely anything. The pricey boutiques are all moving to the spiffy new downtown, but there doesn't seem to be much chance of rue Hamra losing its status as the place for all Lebanese people to shop. Leave a Comment
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Around the Place l'Etoile (fittingly, a star-shaped plaza where a number of streets converge) is Beirut's downtown. Everything in this area (except for the religious buildings, which have been restored) is brand-new, part of the Solidere project mentioned on my first Beirut page. The buildings in this area are generally very attractive, and most are built in a style that fits their Middle Eastern locale, but I found this section of the city to be depressingly sterile. I think I like the grime of the old Beirut better, although of course, the current look of downtown is certainly a vast improvement over the no-man's-land that it was a decade ago.
There are lots of restaurants and sidewalk cafes around the Place l'Etoile, and just north of this plaza is the highest-end retail district in the city, sporting the very fabulous Aishti department store as well as such global names as Gucci, Furla, Armani, etc. This is not the place to come if you want items that will remind you of Lebanon itself, but it is a good place for people-watching if you want to see the elite of today's Middle East.
Downtown is also now an amazing conglomeration of construction sites--at this point, only about a quarter of the territory is developed, with about half of it still under various stages of construction and another quarter still to be spoken for. Walking around can be something of a hazardous exercise if you find yourself on a street that is lined with cement mixers and bulldozers. Leave a Comment
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Beirut has been occupied for a long, long time. There are still Roman ruins scattered around the city, and the clearance of downtown that accompanied the Solidere reconstruction project unearthed quite a bit of history. Just east of the Place l'Etoile and west of the Maronite cathedral is one set of Roman columns and foundations (pictured here), which no one seems to know what to do with yet. Just west of the plaza, sandwiched between gleaming new office buildings and the Grand Serail, are the remains of a large Roman baths complex--these are nicely excavated and dressed up with attractive stone surrounding walls and balcomies. Things like this can be in some unlikely places in Beirut--I spotted one lonely Corinthian column, all by itself, right in the middle of Hamra's bustling shopping district. I spied a lot of other ruins crumbling under demolished buildings around town, but it's hard to tell if they date from 200 or 2000 years ago. Leave a Comment
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Currently, there are plenty of buildings in Beirut that will give you a good idea of just what the city must have looked like ten years ago, before the reconstruction project got underway. A few of the shell-scarred structures are still standing downtown, awaiting decisions on restoration or demolition. Others are partially rebuilt, like the apartment block pictured here which has had its eastern half renovated, but not the western half. And still others, like the Magen Abraham synagogue left stranded downtown among massive construction sites, may never be restored if the original owners cannot find funds to rebuild their architectural monuments.
The contrast between these buildings and the sparkling new structures downtown is pretty stark. In five or ten years, the older ones are likely to be just a memory. Leave a Comment
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The official currency of Lebanon is the lira. However, U.S. dollars are accepted everywhere, so there is no need to exchange and change your money. What you will find is that when you pay in dollars, you will get your change back in lira. The exchange rate is pegged at LL1,500 per dollar and this never changes. Leave a Comment
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on August 26, 2002
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on December 11, 2005
on March 5, 2006
