Landing at Beirut

Arrived back late on Monday evening at Beirut’s Rafiq Hariri International Airport.

The Nokia tune and about 200 other assorted cell ’phone start up sounds all seem to play at once within a few milliseconds of the aircraft hitting the runway. Fortunately the pilot knew where the terminal building was and headed straight for it, rather than worrying about what the navigation systems must have been saying after this supernova scale radiation burst from so many ’phones being switched on together.

“… the outside temperature is twenty-five degrees …” announces the captain, to which the man in the seats in front reacts by dressing up in parker, scarf, woolly hat and ski gloves. “Wrap up well,” he says to his son, “you’ll feel this different from the sixty we’re used to in LA”. Busybody here has to tell them that Centigrade rather than Fahrenheit is the scale used outside the US of A. They look confused until I tell them that in old-money that means seventy-seven, so off come the parker and accessories.

Clutching my various travel documents – passport, residency permit and landing card – I manage to join the queue with the trainee immigration officer, as always seems to happen. “Progress” is occasional and only just in a forward motion. The landing card asks for all the usual stuff, plus father’s name and sex (mine, not my father’s – steady now); I have somehow restrained the desire to write “ask my mother” and “yes, please”. Clearly someone further up the queue has allowed imagination to get the better of him with said card, as, after a noisy exchange, he is led away by a couple of serious looking chaps with side arms.

I’m wondering why there are so many people wearing white, and then memory kicks in, it’s the end of Hajj – the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. Beirut airport isn’t on the scale of London’s Heathrow or Chicago’s O’Hare except in one area, the number of people waiting to greet those off the plane. Normally there’s a ratio of about five to one (for those who can’t find a calculator, that means an average of, oh!, a thousand people waiting to meet someone off each flight). There have been two landings and families of those returning from Hajj have swelled the ranks, so the noise is less that of staid airport arrival and more akin to that at a middle ranking sporting event, with tears, hugs, kisses and even the odd scream added. Although never much good at rugby football as a boy, I’m grateful for the “hand-off” and “scrum-down” training to get through the waiting crowds.

As I walk out of the airport into the warm at nearly mid-night, I look forward to home, a really good night’s sleep and then … full-blown re-entry tomorrow.