The Monot Bomb

Clubbing in Monot has always been a blast. But someone just gave that sentence a very literal meaning.

Forget the beaches; forget the food, the mountains or the shops. The real reason why Saudi, Bahraini, Kuwaiti, Omani youngsters come to Lebanon is to party hard in Mono Street, the very place that was hit by a bomb on a Friday night in the beginning of summer.

Monot Street has the appealing combination of a Paris Left bank walkway and a big city clubbing neighborhood. You are more likely to hear people speak in French than in Arabic in this French-named place, and there are no signboards whatsoever written in Arabic. The most common sentence I’ve heard from non-Lebanese Arab friends who go to Monot is this: “I’ve never seen so many pretty girls at the same place like that”. Perhaps this is why Arab tourists dig it, or perhaps it’s because they like to pay $500 for a bottle of Champaign.

Western tourists on the other hand don’t like Monot; one of them once told me that the “Lebanese Try too hard to be European”. She said that she prefers Damascus because it’s more “authentic”.

Speaking of Damascus, who was behind that bomb?

Nobody knows, but it seems conveniently consistent with a certain country’s attempt to stifle our economy by first targeting our trucks and now our tourists. But hey, the Lebanese can always teach their Arab brethrens to Dance their problems away.