I was in the South today, Sarafand to be exactly – the ancient Sarepta of Phoenician times - to see a glassblower, and while I drove back to Beirut, I decided to shoot some pictures of our national crash barrier system on the side of the road. The Lebanese have understood it well; it is a crash barrier, and therefore you should crash into it, which they do frequently and vigorously. It’s all in a name. Just like a traffic police causes traffic. So this is a stretch of road right between Sidon and Beirut, about 37 kilometers long. I only took picture of the really serious crashes, because if I would have taken shots off all the ‘hit and runs’, I would have filled my 512 MB card in no time. I gave up after ten minutes, there were just too many of them. Lebanese are very assertive drivers. There are very few accidents (no, you don’t say!), because everybody expects everybody else to screw up, so you look out for yourself and the other guys. But when they crash, it is always lethal. The crashes I have seen, transformed Mercedes sedans into little sardine cans, broke entire vehicles in two, sheered the entire top of and made the steering column end up in the trunk. People like car pulling here, not for any ecological reason but for reasons of finance, so when a car crashes, you read in the paper; The occupants of vehicle B (Mohammad S, Fatimah R., Saleh B,. Marwan B., Elham S., Mustafa L., Khaled R. and Salwah R.) died instantly.
Sunday I have to drive to Damascus for a coupe of interviews. On the way from Beirut to Damascus there are no carsh barriers like these; too expensive. There they use concrete barriers. Not as bouncy, cheaper, and easier to maintain.
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