Matt McInvale | Matt's Website

Caline and I traveled to Lebanon for her cousin (on her Mom’s side) Agop’s wedding. We spent our time exploring the country, worrying about crazy drivers, learning about Lebanon and trying all sorts of delicious food. If you have an opportunity (and a tour guide/translator), you should definitely go to Lebanon, you will not be disappointed.

All of these photos were shot using a GoPro in timelapse mode. We took over 2,500 images and narrowed it down to the best for this writeup. A lot of the night pictures are blurry, sorry, GoPros don’t include a flash.

Thursday & Friday: Travel to Lebanon

We left Pittsburgh at 3pm on the 17th and arrived at the Abadjian’s home (labeled as Unknown Road on my phone) around 8pm on the 18th. Travel was mostly uneventful, except for my suitcase not arriving with me in Lebanon. We didn’t take any photos while traveling, the only time I regretted that was in the Paris airport with a large group on their pilgrimage to Mecca dressed in all white. Marc (Caline’s cousin) and Oy (Marc’s wife) met up with us in the Paris airport for our flight into Beirut.

Once we were in Lebanon, we went out for a late dinner at a restaurant called Downtown and quickly learned that Lebanon has crazy driving, Zareh (Caline’s father) knows someone everywhere and Lebanon has pizza & sushi at almost all restaurants. Not going to complain about those last two!

Driving in Lebanon; lanes don’t matter, streets aren’t labeled, passing on blind corners is the norm and people are constantly cutting each other off; it’s almost a free for all. Luckily, we had Agop & Zareh to handle the driving for us. Without them we would have definitely gotten lost and potentially in multiple accidents. Lebanese license plates use different background colors to tell them apart; white is a normal car, light green is a rental car, yellow is for diplomats and red is for cars that are for hire like taxis & buses. I thought that was a really neat system to segment transportation usage.

Saturday: Kitten, Sightseeing & Music Hall

On the way out to grab breakfast, we met the kitten that lives in the parking lot. He’s a very dirty grey & white cat that loves people. Caline and I both took to him quickly. Caline named him Tux based on his colors & the upcoming wedding. We brought him treats almost everyday of our visit, cheese & fish mostly, which he loved just as much as getting petted.