Crazy Beirut

Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde come to my mind when I think of Beirut these days.
Sometimes you enjoy and love Beirut, and sometimes you just want to grind your teeth!
Within a period of 10 days I experienced it all.

I had dinner with family in a very nice restaurant. The restaurant is situated in the interior garden of an old Lebanese house, the weather was perfect, the food quite good, and the service excellent.
Two days later had dinner in a new restaurant based on the idea of mixing fish and meat. Minimalist design and innovative cuisine. Enjoyed the company and the seafood salad of fruits and vegetables with goat cheese. Quite interesting combination.

A day later woke up to an unscheduled electricity cut. Why do I say unscheduled? Because Beirut is a city where due to power shortage there is a scheduled cut of three hours a day in electric supply. It is done according to a timetable and is now considered by all part of regular life.
This cut stayed for more than three hours. I decided to call the phone for customer service at the electricity company. The young man who answered was nice and courteous when he informed me that the reason was a damage to one of the cable and that repairs will be done Monday as maintenance does not work on weekends! Accordingly, almost 72 hours of cut!
Will not comment on what this entails as to no hot water, food spoiling, no refrigeration, no hair dryer, no internet connection, and, and...
Then on Monday around 2:15 pm the current is restored, Yeah! At 3 pm another cut. Again, on the phone, and the nice young man informs me that he does not know why the electricity is cut and advise me to be patient as it is maybe a extra 3 hours cut in the schedule!
Oh yeah, you need to be patient not to blow off!

Then the router for EDSL connection start playing out. So back to the phone trying to talk to Ogero, the company responsible for the service. Nobody answers the phone, then a few hours later, I get through to a gentleman who tells me that I need to change the router and that I need to come personally with the old router and 'maybe' they can give me a new one, not for free and he states the amount.
When asked if I could delegate someone, he answers no, you need to come in person!
So for each services you pay for you need to lose a day without being sure that at the end you will get served!

This all happened in 10 days. But it seems this is regular life in Beirut.

I wonder if I should title the blog crazy Beirut or crazy Lebanese for accepting such a quality of life.