Istanbul and Beirut: of course, you can't compare Istanbul and Beirut. This is like comparing tiramisu to a boiled shoe (Beirut being the boiled shoe of course). But the people of Turkey deserve credit for preserving the lovely character of this city. Beirut: when I was a child, had a beautiful and charming character. Now it has become one of the ugliest cities in the world. Three factors led to the deterioration of Beirut: 1) the unregulated capitalist developments before the civil war; 2) the war itself during the war; 3) Rafiq Hariri after the war. Only the Jummayzah neighborhood in Ashrafiyyah preserved its character. And had Rafiq Hariri lived longer, he would have ruined that neighborhood too. When in Lebanon: I go to the cafes and restaurants (I tried them all) of the solidaire area. But there is something wrong, fundamentally wrong about it: not only in terms of the way Hariri stole the property from its rightful owners (the old Beiruti families like my mother's who owned much of downtown Beirut) but also in the fact that it has no life or spirit. Compare that to Taqsim, say. And Taqsim is so much less pretentious and less fancy than Solidaire and--like pre-civil war downtown Beiurt--it welcomes people from different social classes.