Moving to Sector 37

Before coming to Lebanon, I had a hard time imagining what a new life in Beirut would be like, but I hoped that it would somehow involve a small apartment overlooking the sea, or something suggesting similar levels of exciting possibilities.

Instead, I was convinced by my mother to apply for university housing to allay her worries about me struggling to find housing upon arrival and having to sleep under a bridge with my 314 suitcases. This sounded like a reasonable suggestion. Perhaps my dorm room would have a balcony with a view on the sea.

I did end up with a balcony, with a splendid view on a construction site, and well within earshot of an Islamic cultural center broadcasting the five daily prayer calls and the hour-long Friday noon service.

Living in a dorm was a harsh reminder of my closeted misanthropy and my strong distaste for sharing sleeping quarters. I was assigned a two-person room, but was lucky to have it for myself for most of the semester. Eventually, I had to share my living space with another person for two months. While my roommate was very sweet, I still felt that I was accommodating an intruder on my territory, a presence coercing me to do things such as shower on a regular basis and not wallow in my pajamas all day eating cereal during finals. Cohabitation in such close quarters also led to some awkward cultural interactions, such as the couple of times I came home mere minutes before my roommate's morning prayer.

With my first semester nearing to an end, the perspective of going five more months without a kitchen and the assured presence of a permanent roommate this time around was too much. I had to move out and live the dream. So by early February, I threw all my belongings into neatly packed my suitcases, and left the AUB campus for a small apartment, three roommates and two cats in the nearby neighborhood of Qoreitem.

While I now bathed in the glow of having a room of my own, living off campus was my long-awaited introduction to some previously unseen aspects of day-to-day Beiruti life.

Electricity
Away from the comfort of university generators, I was finally exposed to the relentless routine of electricity cuts. All of Lebanon is subjected to electricity shortages due to the gap between demand and production capacity. Most neighborhoods in Beirut go three to nine hours a day without power, in the predominantly Shi'a southern suburb known as the Dahiyeh it can go up to 12 hours a day, and some parts of the South go without power for 20 hours.

Being in one of the lucky few areas with a regular rotating schedule of three-hour cuts, getting an expensive generator is a luxury we can afford to live without, although this has led to an adjustment of my life schedule. Night showers are mandatory on days before the 6 a.m.-9 a.m. cut; 9-12 gives a perfect excuse for sleeping in on weekends; my roommate's obsession with candles has come in handy to avoid peeing in the dark; and it has become regular routine to put on my makeup in the morning in the only available room with both a light and a mirror: the building elevator.

Water
As previously mentioned, tap water is not drinkable in Lebanon, but our apartment also has the curious particularity of have salty-tasting tap water. This was a rather bizarre and slightly unpleasant discovery to make the first time I took a shower, but one we have gotten accustomed to.

Another interesting aqueous characteristic of my new habitat is the propensity of our windowless, centrally located bathroom to flood during days of heavy downpours. The first couple of weeks, we were puzzled by this strange phenomenon. We couldn't locate a leak anywhere in the bathroom fixtures; the ceiling was dry, which eliminated the hypothesis of our upstairs neighbors forgetting to turn off their bathwater; yet, we were regularly wading in about a centimeter of water. One of my roommates finally made the connection between the weather and the paranormal moisture, but the mystery remains whole as to the practical logistics of this odd phenomenon.

Internet
A must for our new apartment, getting it installed was quite an adventure. We first attempted to get proper, legal Internet through a legitimate company, but the $120 installation fee plus $50 monthly payment quickly turned us off. We finally asked our concierge, who got us in contact with the more-or-less shady, more-or-less legit neighborhood Internet man.

However, in  order to get our Internet installed, we had to jump through some hoops. Our apartment building being situated not too far from the house of the prominent Hariri family, we had to warn them before proceeding with the Internet installation, lest they think snipers were on our roof setting up our antenna (or whatever it is that Internet requires on a roof). Members of the Hariri security apparatus actually showed up at our house, asking for our IDs and residency permits, of which they made photocopies. This felt quite Big Brother-y, but I was told this is standard procedure anywhere around political buildings, so I decided to just chalk it off to Lebanon being Lebanon.

Heating
Nonexistent. Which, one would think shouldn't be too much of a problem in our lovely Mediterranean climate, but trust me, Lebanese winters are their own kind of brutal. And while the weather might have been a mild 11°C compared to freezing Parisian or Chicago winters, things aren't necessarily easy when your room is only 2 degrees warmer than outdoors. Me and my roommates took turns sharing our one small electric radiator, and we all slept in supremely fashionable bedroom attire with long socks and big wool cardigans.

But, surely enough, the weather has gotten better, and the everpresent rain clouds have given way to April sunshine. And as I sit on the balcony eating dinner by candlelight with my three lovely flatmates, smoking arguileh and listening to the distant hum of cars, I don't mind so much that my apartment overlooks a parking lot and not the sea.