Raouché is a residential and commercial neighborhood in Beirut, Lebanon. It is known for its upscale apartment buildings, cliff-side cafés and its wide seaside sidewalk, the Corniche, where strollers and joggers crowd the pavements in the evenings and weekends.
Everyone says, dreamily, "it's the Paris of the Middle East." It's not. Beirut is its own funky animal: tense, beautiful, cracking with growth, assaulted by civil strife, graffitied with advertising for Starbucks and Applebees and perfumes from Paris, but without jobs for women, without futures for the young people bristling with university degrees. I love the city, love the friendliness of the people; I would live there permanently, but cannot stand to see so many talents withering on the vine, so many dreams dried into dust rather than wines.
Beirut, Mohafazat Beyrouth, LB
Discovered by seanie blue
on 23 November 2007.
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