beirut is a city that often gets lost in its own artifice. a place where champagne and sparklers or cheap whiskey mask the unfortunate realities of the present and the past, and the uncertainty of the future. amid the amnesia, towers are being erected to symbolize lebanon's newfound ham-fisted modernism. shiny four by fours with tinted windows pound the tarmac. but its true soul lies in its buildings, its old buildings that have seen armies and empires come and go. in its tattered cars. in its nostalgic residents. in its beautifully shabby back alleys. where real people live. it is a beirut devoid of time and space. the beirut of memory. in these streets it is not 2010, or 1968. it just is.