Thank you Switzerland for your vacation time policies.
It's been a little while since I updated the website. The plan, as assuredly mentioned somewhere was to provide some regular updates on life in Switzerland interspersed with vintage Sierra Leone posts. I have unfortunately not gotten to far on that front.
The good news is that I'm in an interesting place again. Not that Switzerland's not interesting but perhaps a little less novel than two years ago.
Several weeks ago, I thought I'd be somewhere near Dubai at this time on a stopover en route to Bangladesh for a reportage on climate change and development. I had the week booked off and plans to spend a week and a bit after that in Canada.
Then we found out it takes three weeks to get a journalist visa for Bangladesh, so Dhaka and some of the outlaying areas got the kibosh, at least a couple of weeks. That left me with a week off and some ideas for adventure.
In Switzerland, they actually pay overtime or compensate for it, so at the beginning of October I found myself in the rather fortunate situation of having roughly seven weeks of holidays.
I booked my flight to Beirut on Friday evening and was on a train for Geneva airport 12 hours later.
I overpaid for my cab from the airport, meaning I've overpaid for cab rides in Geneva, New York, Freetown, Monrovia, Kisumu Bern, Bucharest and now Beirut.
The plan is to spend a few days in the city and perhaps get on to Damascus if possible. Maybe some hiking but nothing is certain. It's scheduled to rain for the next couple of days, at least in the evenings.
I realise I remember little from university Arabic. I can say "American coffee" but of course I don't want that. Lebanese coffee's better.