It was supposed to be just a layover. I had taken my daughter, fourteen at the time, to Dubai for an internship with a performance coach, and had stayed on in Oman for another week to make sure everything was fine, because fourteen is still young. Then I saw she was fine, all good, I could leave her on her own for a month. So I wanted to fly on to Istanbul, where I have an office, and the flight went through Beirut. Stay one night, look around the city, fly on the next day.
Then the flight was cancelled. The next one too. And then it started.
I was standing on the hotel balcony and felt detonations, the pressure waves. That happened to me twice. The hotel was a five-star place on the seafront promenade, nine floors, a hundred rooms, and I was the only guest, maybe there were two others. When it started, people fled from their neighbourhoods, with children, with mattresses, and suddenly the place was full. I would never have gotten a room. But the hotel people said: You know what, you stay with us, because if a foreigner is here, there is less of a chance they attack us, they check that somehow, because of the news. So please stay. For me the room was always free.
There were no more flights, only one national airline. And so I waited, almost two weeks.
What do you do for two weeks in a hotel while there is a war outside? I worked, every day. I could take on projects I hadn’t managed to get to in the last ten years. I had always recorded everything, Taiwan with the kids, the time in Cambodia, the finca in Colombia, but I never published any of it, because I was too lazy to sit down and go through it all. Too much work. In those two weeks I got it done for the first time. I would never have managed that if I had been travelling normally. That was really the good in the bad.
I got out on one of the last seats. I went to the airline myself, and they squeezed me in somewhere on a flight to Cyprus, to Larnaca. On the drive to the airport it smelled of bombs, of smoke, of explosives, because rockets had hit there before. The airport was like dead. No restaurant open, a ghost town feeling. A few flight attendants and staff put together a plate for me from the food they had brought from home, because everything else was closed. That was kind. I made a video of it.
You always have to make the best of the situation. That’s it. What would you have done with those two weeks?