Mehlis

Early morning on the Corniche: the only place where you can walk without interference of cars parked on the pavement, scooters driving over the pavement, shopkeepers taking over the pavement to exhibit their goods, holes in the pavement, or no pavement at all. A palm tree on the beach boulevard. This one obviously survived the war.

The official Mehlis report is out. It’s not a bad read, especially if you are familiar with all the names mentioned in it. I wrote a story, should appear in Trouw newspaper tomorrow. I went downtown, but although there is a crowd and some jubilation, most Lebanese are ‘ni chaud ni froid’. They are – a little anxiously - waiting for things to come. Syria’s Basjaar el-Assad is going down, and although no one will shed teards over this guy (Murder Inc. I read somewhere), people are definitely very worried as to what might come if the regime falls. If you want to know what happens if a secular Moslem society unravels (Stole this from Joshua Landis’s site, who borrowed it from someone else), just look at Iraq, and this is not what we need right now next door.
And on a lighter note, some pictures I shot yesterday on and from my way to work.

Hana checking out the waves

There's this spot on the boulevard, where a couple of local fishermen moor their boats. They're not professional fishermen, from the looks of it. Every morning, an army of about 20 cats hang around, waiting for a lady wearing a wig, who comes and feeds them bits of left-over chickens. It seems they don;t see very well, so when I stop to make a picture, they all come running to me, hoping to get their chicken. All this is much to Hana's delight who -although with two cats at home - is very interested in cats.

This one is taken in the afternoon, around 5 o'clock. Not the guy in the middle of the picture; it looks like he is sitting down and on wheels. Well, he is sitting down and is on wheels. He moves all over this boulevard, and has no legs. Or he's got legs, but they are so severely deformed that is can't use them. In the distance you see the Riviera Yacht Club beach.