Is anyone using a Netgear DSL modem with their IDM account? I bought a new Netgear model to replace the Thomson one I got from IDM but I can’t seem to get the Netgear modem to connect. I called up support but they don’t have details on all the settings. I know it’s PPPoE and the VPI/VCI is 0/35 but that’s the only information I’ve gotten from them and it doesn’t seem to be enough since my modem isn’t connecting. Any help would be appreciated!

I tried Lebanese Brew awhile ago and I didn’t like it. If you’re a fan of Laziza you’ll probably like this. Personally, I’m sticking to my Almaza.

Seriously what’s with the hold up? Is it money? In Kuwait where I am currently living for example we had a power shortage last year. Kuwait was producing around 10,000 megawatts of electricity but we were using around 9,800. So this year they increased the production by by 2,000 so that we have 12,000 megawatts and they will keep increasing it until by 2015 we would be producing 20,000 megawatts.

From what I previously read Lebanon produces 1,500 megawatts of power. Why haven’t we doubled that or tripled that? Can’t we all pitch in like $10 and solve our electricity problem? The war has been over for over 20 years!

It is reasonable for artists in pubs or night clubs to start singing at 11 or 12 pm as the party would not have kicked in yet, but why is it becoming a trend in most restaurants nowadays?

I went to “Mon General” in Zouk Mikail yesterday for a birthday dinner and Aline Lahoud was performing there. I arrived there around 9:30 pm and left at midnight (had to leave early) and Aline had not shown up yet. This is the third restaurant I go to this year with very late performances.

Not that I mind late performances, but it doesn’t make sense to have dinner at 9 and drink and eat until midnight, or wait until 11pm to go out and dine.

What’s she doing until midnight anyways? rehearsing?

Also, food was not that bad even though they didn’t have much on the menu, but what made my night was the 1 Liter Almaza Draught Beer I had.

Maybe I should send the municipality the bill for the new tyre I bought. That’s what people do everywhere else in the civilized world. [Link]

After getting sick of NRJ’s same old songs playing again & again, I gave Light FM another chance after the numerous positive feedbacks I read on the station.

Truth is I haven’t had time to fix my cd box again or install some new audio device for my car, so I am still obliged to listen to radio stations.

Anyway, after two weeks of listening to Light FM, I must say that it is relatively decent and does put a lot of ads but considerably less than Radio ones & Mix FM. “La Bonne humeur” show with Tangui is fun to listen to from time to time but can also be annoying specially when they are advertising for some product and keep repeating the same thing over and over.

Added to that, the show gives away some cool prizes, but obviously not the one I won today when I called and figured out the name of the song playing (It was Neh Nah nah nah by Vaya Con Dios). I never thought they’ll pick up but they did and I won some Cafe Maatouk goodies.

I don’t drink coffee at all, so the gift is useless to me but it still feels good to win. I am either gonna give it to the folks or make everyone at work coffee tomorrow.

PS: Funnily enough, you can only pick up your prize from Light FM at Sin el Fil from Monday to Friday between 9 am and 5 pm. Maybe Light FM missed out on the fact that not all of us work “3ala dawemet el dawoule?”

I finally found out a decent garage to take my car to but that’s after watched how they were working on my car and other ones for 3 to 4 hours. The dealers’ garages are not an option for me as they are ridiculously overpriced. Nevertheless, after checking out many garages, I’ve noticed some common trends among them:

1- All garage owners are very religious. Huge posters of Jesus, Virgin Mary or Saints’ pictures are found all over the walls.

2- There’s always a second floor inside the garage usually with tinted glass where the boss does business. You feel like you are going up to meet with a mafia’s boss.

3- Most of those running garages are brothers or father and son.

4- Whenever you tell the garage owner you’ve been to that other garage, it turns out the guy used to work for them before “wou ne7na m3almeeno”.

5- There’s always a bird in the garage. Cool garages like the one I go to even have parrots. It’s quite barbaric though to trap the bird in such an environment.

I’ve eaten a ton of crepes in and outside Lebanon but yet I’ve always preferred my mum’s crepes over everything else. I don’t know how she does them but they are just awesome and I could easily eat up to five crepes and still want more.

Too bad I have to wait a few more weeks before I can have some since I’ve been watching what I eat and I can barely cheat except on special occasions.

PS: Just remembered I promised Mark to give him the recipe few months back. Sorry man!

I travel a lot for work, mainly between Lebanon and Saudi Arabia but for some reason, I can’t seem to get used to the turbulence, it keeps scaring the hell out of me.

Last night, I had a flight from Dammam to Beirut @ 8:20 PM.

I got on the plane at about 8:00 PM. A couple of minutes later the electricity went out… I’m not very superstitious, but I don’t think the lights going out is a very good sign! It was funny coz some of the passengers started joking “n2ata3et el kahraba? Wselna 3a lebnen bi hal ser3a??” (Electricty cut? We’re already in Lebanon?)

The lights came back on about 10 seconds later. The boarding was completed and the captain asked the flight attendants to “arm doors and cross check”. As we started pulling away from the gate, the lights in the cabin were still flickering… It didn’t look very good

We had just started to taxi when all of a sudden the engines shut down! The captain then said “Cabin crew, disarm doors and cross check”. He then said that we were facing a small technical problem and that it will be resolved ASAP.

All of a sudden an ambulance and a firetruck parked right outside the aircraft.

Without electricity, the AC wasn’t working. Seeing as it was a cool 35 degrees with humidity, everyone was complaining about the heat. A weird looking truck parked right under the plane and started to pump in cool air. I had no idea such a truck existed to be honest.

And as we all know, all Lebanese people think they are knowledgeable in just about any topic. So a bunch of passengers walked to the front of the plane to share their experience and advice with the flight attendants… These are some of the comments I overheard:
- “Eh, ana sayra ma3e kaza marra, mesh awwal marra… walaw!” (This has happened to me so many times before.. come on…)
- “Hal meshkle akid khassa bel landing gear, ana 7assayt awwal ma tle3et 3al tiyyara enno fi shi ghalat..” (I’m sure this has to do something with the landing gear, I felt it the second I stepped on board)

About an hour and a half later, the “minor problem” was fixed (BTW, they didn’t tell us what the issue was). During that time, a couple of passengers stood up, gathered their stuff and asked to disembark. They were let out, but they had luggage checked in. So we waited for another hour for their bags to be located and removed from the plane

So we finally took off at about 10:45 PM. The flight was horrible to be honest, very turbulent, but after 4 glasses of Black Label, I felt like I was on a roller coaster and almost passed out

As I’ve posted two weeks ago [Link], I headed during Easter to Kobayat, one of the biggest villages in Akkar District North of Lebanon. The village has over 15,000 inhabitants, most of them being Christian Maronites.

I was told that the road to Kobayat is long, tricky and dangerous but the reality is the road from Tripoli to Halba is the only one worthy worrying about. The road is awful at night, there’s no lighting and apparently a lot of thefts and crimes occur over there. Also, that’s basically where the Lebanese army clashed with the Islamists of Fath el Islam few years back. Nevertheless, you just need to go there during day light and all will be fine. Moreover, once you reach Halba, the road from there is in great shape and well lit.

The only stop we made was at Kasr el Helo [Hallab] in Tripoli where we had the famous Sfee7a Baalbakiyye and Halawit el Jeben. It’s pretty amazing how every time I’ve been to
Al Hallab, the place despite being huge is crowded.

Once we’ve reached Kobayat around 8:30 pm, we headed to the chalets we had rented, rested for a bit and headed to a restaurant at the extremities of the town. On our way there, I thought I was passing by Gemmayze street on a Saturday night. Pubs, restaurants and cafes were full and there was traffic everywhere. The only difference was that not only young people were filling the places, but also grown men and old people sitting outside, drinking Arak or beer and playing backgammon or cards.

The restaurant we were going to was practically in the middle of nowhere, yet was crowded and fully booked. Added to that, the food (Arabic food) was surprisingly great, the atmosphere was fun, and people kept dancing until 3 am. Don’t ask me how to get to that restaurant because I have no clue how we got there. All I know its name was Tilal el Sahar or something like that. On our way back, people were still partying and having fun and there was an ongoing party in the resort we were staying in.

I am not sure if it was because everyone was on vacation, but Kobayat was alive and kicking just like Beirut on a Saturday night. That pretty much covers Day1 of my trip to Kobayat.

For those wishing to learn more about Kobayat, their website, despite its lousy design, has tons of information about the town. They even have pictures of every house in the town with the name of its owner [Houses from Kobayat], with the most impressive one being Dr.Ernest el Haj’s house. [Picture]

The Tissot Couturier I got for my birthday [Link] is being displayed on a billboard on the Dbayye highway. It looks though as if it’s the newer version as there’s a fourth circle inside of it, but that’s pretty cool still.

[Tissot Couturier]

I am heading in 2 hours or so to Kobayyat, a town in the district of Akkar in the North. It’s a town almost at the borders with Syria and takes a 2 hours or 2 hours and a half drive from Jounieh. I haven’t done such road trips since a long time, so I kinda am looking forward to it, even though many warned me that the road is not that good, long and tiring.

Kobayat is a very big town for those unaware of it and even has its own website which is pretty cool. [Website]

I am not planning on taking my computer with me since I will be back by tomorrow and don’t expect to find any internet up there. You never realize how much you are hooked on the internet until you do such trips. It’s been since ever that I was unable to go online for more than 24 hours.

Anyway, hope you are enjoying your holidays and Happy Easter again!

Anyone who washes his/her car in Lebanon must have noticed how people like to do “sob7iyyet” while waiting for the car wash and seem to enjoy their time. Added to that, the washing business brings a remarkable income to the gas stations here.

As far as I am concerned, I don’t enjoy it one single bit but I was thinking on how profitable it would be if someone were to come up with a car wash and recruit sexy women or men only during the weekends. I am not talking about women in Bikinis here (Not that there’s something wrong with it) but just top models instead of the regular gas station workers you usually get. I am not quite sure car wash with only men will work because women rarely go to wash their cars here and Lebanese will probably label them as gay, but a car wash with female top models will definitly bring loads of customers.

You’d price the wash at 20$ the least and set up a nice lounge room or coffee shop and I am almost confident people will wait in lines for hours, plus you’d be employing more Lebanese that way.

This trend is quite popular in the USA so why not here? And there’s nothing demeaning to women or men top models about such work.

PS: A fashion house could promote such business by launching its new swim suit wear :P

Check out this list of 10 things ThisisBeirut has learned about dating in Lebanon. [Link]

I must say I disagree with some of the points mentioned and agree on others.

- Point1 differs from one person to another and needs love to begin with before few of the things mentioned are checked, such as education or social status.

- Point2 is valid even outside Lebanon yet Marina Dbayyeh is a bad example as the action taking place there is most of the time paid for.

- Point3 is mainly due to the girls’ behavior rather than guys. Playing incredibly hard to get and dancing in groups and getting their muscled brother or cousin or friend along with them are not very positive indicators when a guy wants to hit on a girl. Nevertheless, here also girls vary and guys as well.

- Point4 is totally wrong. Not sure if there’s a difference between dating Lebanese or non-Lebanese here.

- Point5 is also valid outside. Only difference is that couples usely move in together.

- Point6 is not really related to dating?

- The sex issue in Lebanon is still a taboo and while all girls pretend to be virgin, all guys have had sex at least 100 times.

- (Point8) That’s because the greatest majority of Eastern European workers in Lebanon work in Maameltein.

- Point9 is also valid almost anywhere not just in Lebanon.

- Point10 is another proof of how messed up and fake many Lebanese women are.

Dating in Lebanon is quite a complicated process and is related to many many factors that don’t come in any specific order. It’s a total chaos and few lucky ones come out with the perfect match.

Watch out everyone for pranks and lies as it is April’s fool day. I woke my little brother up this morning telling him I broke his Wii and he fell for it.

Here’s another funny comic about April’s Fool day which I hope will never happen to any of us. [Link]