A Litte Sick Day Blogging (Bumped)

Thanks, everyone, for posting in my absence. And please keep it going until the end of the week; I have little internet time.

Yes I'm alive. This junket has events and meetings and dinners and so on scheduled for about 13 hours out of every 16 hour day, and the last three hours tend to get used for napping or, in my case, unwinding with beer. I'd rather nap, but I can't nap, so beer it has been.

The last time I even logged into the internet was Saturday, and all I had time for was to email mom and a few people that I had made the trip okay and all that.

Then I had to go to the next thing.

Yesterday was the high point of the trip. We took a harrowing action-movie race up the mountains of Sharouf (Sp?) that left several green and sickened and Christopher Hitchens berating the driver. "Now stop this nonsense," he said after we barely missed a head on collision with a Mercedes. "Start driving like a sane person." (Yeah, he's here.) Lebanese drivers are among the most aggressive and dangerous on the face of the earth, and our trip was even more ludicrously dangerous because 1) we were late and didn't want to keep Jumblatt waiting too long and 2) despite reassurances from our sponsors, I think there are some security concerns about the junket so they drive like maniacs to avoid being pinned in by hostile vehicles.

There we met Walid Jumblatt, leader of the Druze faction and the most stridently anti-Syrian critic, in his villa slash fortress slash Bond Villain Lair. It was a pretty amazing spread. I'll post all that (I took a lot of notes) but not now, I'm demolished from jet lag and general exhaustion.

Today I was supposed to go into the mountains again to meet a Christian leader. Wanted to go, just can't make it.

Instead of posting about this stuff now, I'll just do normal blogging for a bit, then try to nap. I've been out of touch with the world for three or four days now -- nothing but Lebanese politics 24/7 -- so I have to catch up some.

(DrewM.) I bumped this, unbidden by Ace, just in case anyone missed it earlier. I know it's mostly Ace and the co-morons who don't actually read the blog but I thought better safe than sorry.

posted by Ace at 11:36 AM

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