I am lucky to have a brother and few cousins and friends in the U.S as I can easily order my electronics from there, because to be honest, you have to be either crazy or desperate to buy them from Lebanon.
There are few decent shops in Lebanon or sales people who can get you good deals on laptops and other electronics, but most of the time, you have a high chance of getting ripped off.
I was looking for a new laptop to replace my dying Toshiba, and the price range I was looking at was between 600-800$. After some thorough research, I had to choose between a 17-inch HP laptop and a 15-inch Lenovo Thinkpad E520.
I opted for the Lenovo as it was 200$ cheaper, is more reliable and had everything I needed in a laptop. It’s a core i5 2.4 GHZ 4GB DDR3 500GB HDD for only 617$.
When comparing the prices of laptops in Lebanon, there was at least a 200 to 300$ difference between most laptops I found online and the ones I found in shops. I understand there’s shipment fees and customs and taxes but that’s a bit too much.
I have to ask here why doesn’t the government lower its taxes on electronics in general and let Lebanese retail shops be more competitive and sell more? Most people I know want to buy their electronics from the U.S because they think products are either over-priced or not good in Lebanon.
I’ve always wanted to make comics, but my drawing is not that good. However, I was talking to Chahe about rage comics the other day and I thought I’d use them instead.
This is inspired from my past experiences at the Mecanique before I started paying someone to do it for me.
Update: Speaking of mecanique, read what happened today [Here].
The artist they are interviewing is not really saying anything wrong. She’s for equal rights between men and women, defending gay rights, and promoting safe sex. She is not promoting sex, she wants Lebanese to get over the sex taboo. I am not saying I fully agree with her, but she is making few good points. In fact, for once I thought “A7mar bil Khat el 3areed” was actually sending out a useful message until they let this stupid woman come up and address the artist.
What does nudity have to do with pornography? How does wearing a condom necklace make you a prostitute or a sex promoter? I mean seriously where do they come up with those people?
One last thing, can we please stop comparing every artist or singer dressed in a funny way to Lady Gaga? Chou We2fit 3laya?
I don’t know if less people are shopping this year, or the concerned ministry did some changes, but traffic this year during Christmas is not that bad. I expected much worse but it’s not that frustrating when compared to everyday traffic or even past years. I visited ABC Achrafieh and Dbayyeh like 10 times already, went to Kaslik 3-4 times, Beirut Souks once, so it can’t be just luck. Yesterday, I left Achrafieh around 5pm and reached Khoury Home Dora in 30 minutes, then it took me 25 minutes to reach ABC Dbayyeh and another 30 minutes to Jounieh.
Surprisingly enough, the only time I got stuck in an unexpected traffic was a week ago when going from Jounieh to ABC Dbayyeh, but since then it’s been relatively ok. It could be that I’ve become immune to traffic, or it’s the Christmas spirit kicking in, but all in all Christmas traffic was not so horrible after all!
I couldn’t stop laughing when I saw a friend talking on her new Samsung Galaxy Note the other day. It looks nice and all but it’s too freakin’ big to be a phone! It reminded me of the old Nokia Communicator or one of the first Nokia cellphones except it’s bigger!
Samsung’s trying to portray it as neither being a phone nor a tablet but that’s just silly. It’s the biggest goddamn phone ever!
There’s one day left before Christmas eve and the bottle is almost filled. If the Giant Heineken was truly automatically synchronized with the website, and no manual intervention occurred, then the timing of the campaign was perfect.
Now what they should do is come up with a real giant Heineken bottle and invite beer lovers to drink it.
The Christmas tree in Beirut was featured in the Huffington post as being among the prettiest Christmas trees in the world. Check out the other trees that made the cut from around the world [Here].
The Christmas tree from the Huffington is from 2010. I updated the picture above and you can see the video portraying the Beirut Christmas tree [Here].
