I’m in Beirut

I’ve made a surprise visit to Lebanon, arriving yeasterday from Dubai on a FlyDubai flight (more on that below). American administration officials are not the only ones who can pull off surprise visits. I’m here till the 24th with the website returning to regular programming soon after.

As for the FlyDubai flight on Monday, it was very much a no-frill trip until the plane landed at Beirut Airport. The head attendent came on the PA and announced (in Arabic):

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Queen Alia Aiport in Beirut…

That brought looks of confusion across everyone’s face. But she continued. Next, she wanted to say that now the plane has landed (habattat), we can turn on our mobiles phone. But she said (in Arabic):

..the plane has crashed (khabattat) so you can now turn on your mobile phones…

I kid you not. The entire cabin broke out in laughter.

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I’m Off to India on Friday

I’m off to India this Friday part of a well-deserved vacation so I wont be blogging for the next 10 days at least. My wife is Indian so we will be visiting her hometown of Pune via Mumbai. We’ll probably stay about 3 days in total in one of the world’s most populous city before taking the 4 hours bus ride over to Pune.

Map Showing Mumbai and Pune

If I have enough time in Mumbai, I’ll make sure to visit the “Looks-Like-Beirut” Zenzi Bar and maybe even get a chance to meet Mayank Tewari.

The schedule is very fluid at the moment but we’ll see how it goes. So to end this post properly, Lebanese style: can I get you anything from India?

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I’m Offline

Tomorrow is my wedding and the days leading to it have been slow (Internet-wise) – I just couldn’t find the time to blog or read blogs.

Well, I’ve decided to officially move offline for the next 10 days. That means no emails, no blogging – I’m going cold-turkey so don’t be surprised if my Facebook status changes during that time, it just means that I cannot stay away from the web.

I’ll have a wedding photo album set-up somewhere in cyberspace so that you can all share in the celebrations.

I’ll see you all on the other side.

Update – August 10, 2009:

Well, I’m about a few hours away from the start of the honeymoon (a staycation in the UAE) so I thought I’d share with you the amateur photos taken during my wedding celebrations on Thursday.

The photos are best viewed using Internet Explorer. Click here to view the photos.

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Blog Bloopers

If you visited this website in the last 48 hours, you might have noticed two out-of-place blog entries. What actually happened is that the wires crossed between this blog and my Twitter account. That has now been corrected.

Also, there has been number of comments that have been pushed into moderation by a comment-spam program previously installed. I am currently running a different spam plugin so I hope that this solves the problem. My apologies to everyone that had their comments "moderated".

Update: Just fixed a problem with the comment submissions; now it should work better with the new comment spam plugin.

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Elections 2009: Final Results

March 14: 71 Seats (red on the map)
March 8: 57 Seats (cream on the map)

I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m ready to move on to more pressing issues now like the economy, healthcare, taxation, security, education, etc. Bring on the forever quarrelling “unity” government.

From Lebanon's Daily Star

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