Lagon, Jounieh

Demonstrating

Demonstrations or protests are part of everyday life here in Beirut -  there's often dancing and singing involved - and it is understandable when you hear some of the middle-aged laws that are still around for no apparent reason. Like the fact that women can't give their nationality to their children (q u e ?!). During my first week in Beirut I had the chance to take part in two demonstrations; the first one for the, very clever, "No Rights, No Women"-campaign and the second one to disarm the Hizbollah (one million people were estimated to have participated in the latter).

 

No rights? No women!

Alt

Picture from Fashion Gone Rogue 

Putting Gisele on the cover of her first issue was very uninteresting, but this editorial with Malgosia Bela makes me more interested in Vogue Paris by Emanuelle Alt. - I still think that her promise of "putting more clothes in the magazine" is just another way of saying that she wants to steer the magazine into a more commercial direction.. mais I'll just have to read and see.

The gym

For the first time in my life, I am now a gym-member! And unlike some of the membership-holding but non-going people I've known, I am actually keeping up the every other day-routine quite well. Granted, I can only run on the treadmill for ten minutes (I can powerwalk for 90). The turquoise miniature handles weighing about a kilo each do make my arms tremble as if I was having a seizure - but I love it! Especially the people-watching. Right now my favorite to observe is the older obviously-surgically-enhanced woman who wears white (I repeat w h i t e) lace-trimmed leggings as sports pants and uses the machines only as chairs. Not that I blame her for the latter; I wouldn't want to sweat if I had spent an hour putting on make-up, and hitting on the iron-pumping men is surely more comfortable when seated.

There is apparently a lot of people who don't come to the gym for working out, they come to socialize. Like the striped-polo-guy who, without a care in the world, leans on the treadmill of a fast leaping man until he is bothered enough to press the stop button, take off his clearly visible headphones and make out a "YES?".

"Skinny girls don't eat cake. Skinny girls just eat snakes"

Pool

I am not oh-so-very-excited about the idea of falling back into the blogging pool, I really am not, but as my dear mother pointed out, having just arrived in a new city further away from home than Paris, it seems like the appropriate thing to do.