Tag Archives | Beirut

15 Ideas for New Year’s Eve in Beirut

By Rami on December 29, 2014 in Lebanon

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It’s true it’s almost new year but most of my friends and myself have absolutely no idea yet what are we doing on Wednesday night. But this is of course a déjà vu since we always end up coming up with a last minute plan to gather at somebody’s home. So for people like us who’ve got no plans yet for new year’s eve but don’t like to spend it home or at their friends, this post is for you with 15 ideas from Lebtivity.com.

You can of course find much more parties at Lebtivity’s dedicated page for NYE, but the above 15 were my favorites.

This is also an opportunity to tell you that starting next week I’ll be teaming up with the good people at Lebtivity to let you know about the most interesting events happening in Lebanon on a weekly basis. So stay tuned!

Merry Christmas!

By Rami on December 25, 2014 in Lebanon

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Merry Christmas! May it bring you joy and happiness.

Photo via Lebanon POW

Beirut airport has food products that expired 20 years ago!

By Rami on December 23, 2014 in Lebanon

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Can you imagine how does a food item that has expired in 1995 look like now?! I’m seriously interested to know!

“The minute you walk into the warehouses, you feel like you entered a dump,” Abu Faour said after inspecting the airport along with Transport Minister Ghazi Zeaiter.

The health minister revealed that some of food products still in storage had expired nearly 20 years ago.

“Dates on some foods showed they had expired in 1995,” he said.

You can read the full story here.

My best sushi experience

By on December 22, 2014 in Reviews

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Three years ago I hated sushi. Today, it is one of my favorite type of food. I won’t bug you with the story of how I became a fan, what I will do however, is share with you the best sushi experience I had lately which can be summarized in two words: WOK W.O.K!

I visited WOK W.O.K at Phoenicia hotel on a Thursday evening, which is one of two weekdays when they offer open sushi/salad/dessert (2nd open sushi night is Monday). This not your average cheap sushi you find on open sushi day at some other places. What was available was actually a large variety of fresh salads, mouth watering sushi, and satisfying desserts. The bar offered a wide range of salads including beef, chicken, crab, salmon, etc, the tastiest sushi and sashimi that I’ve had so far (their salmon is just wow, uber wow) and the desserts themselves were not bad at all considering it is not WOK W.O.K‘s specialty.

In addition to the great food experience, the service of the super professional staff made my evening very enjoyable.

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You can devour as much salad, sushi and dessert as physically and humanely possible for 45$. I highly recommend you give WOK W.O.K a try.

First photo is via phoeniciabeirut.com

Allo Taxi App gets the job very well done!

By Rami on December 16, 2014 in Lebanon

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I’ve been using the Allo Taxi app for a while now and am really loving it. I actually used their rides several times before and was satisfied with their service, and the new app now makes the whole booking process much easier.

Now you may ask why am I writing about Allo Taxi instead of “being cool” and writing about Uber. Well, I’ve tried Uber twice and my main concern was their arrival time. Uber operates less cars and can therefore take a bit of time to reach your place, whereas Allo Taxi on the other hand are literally everywhere and seriously never took more than 10 minutes to reach my location. Moreover, unlike with other apps, Allo Taxi accepts cash instead on insisting to bill your credit card, so it’s more convenient for people who don’t have credit cards and those who prefer not to use it online.

Placing an order on Allo Taxi app is quite easy, you either enter your pick up place manually or let the GPS do it for you, then set the drop off location and get the tariff immediately calculated for you. You usually get a phone call from your driver asking for directions a couple of minutes after placing your order, and will eventually be billed once the trip is over.

In addition, in my opinion a major advantage that Allo Taxi has with the app is the ability to pre-order a ride. For instance, if you have an outing planned for the next day, you can book your ride ahead of time and never worry about it, which is not possible with Uber.

So there you go, next time you hear some bad news about Uber whether here in Lebanon or worldwide, you know you got yourself another much more reliable option!

The Allo Taxi app is available for both Android [Here] and iOS [Here].

Brazilian Olympic Football Team migth call off their trip to Lebanon

By Rami on August 12, 2014 in Lebanon

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Too bad for us, the much anticipated football game between the Brazilian Olympic team and the Lebanese national team might get called off due to the crisis in Arsal earlier this month!

According to this article in Al-Akhbar today, the Brazilian Football Confederation is now considering moving their training camp to Qatar to guarantee the safety of their players away from the security incidents here in Lebanon.

The friendly game will still take place though even if the Brazilians insisted on going to Doha but will be postponed till September 6th instead of September 4th.

Saint Hoax’s take on the war on Gaza

By Rami on July 24, 2014 in Lebanon

Saint Hoax is a Beirut based activist who was best known for the series of posters that went viral a while ago, showing Disney princesses being forcefully kissed by their fathers to raise awareness at statistics around rape and incest.

Below are his latest posters showing his take on the ongoing war on Gaza nowadays. You can’t but respect his spot on work!

You can stay up to date with Saint Hoax’s work by following him on Facebook and Twitter.

Beirut Beer – A new beer from Kassatly Chtaura

By Rami on July 22, 2014 in Lebanon

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Looks like the spirits industry is one of the hot investments in the country right now as we keep hearing about both entrepreneurs and big companies releasing new alcoholic beverages. Over the past few years 961 beer was launched and several wineries were established in Bekaa and the north, and earlier this year we got J2 Vodka (Polish made with Lebanese water) while Almaza kept on updating their offering with both Almaza light and Almaza lemon.

And just today, I was browsing Massabki’s page on Facebook when I was surprised to learn that Kassatly Chtaura are also launching a new beer in Lebanon called “Beirut Beer”, which is going to be produced in the Bekaa valey and will be available in supermarkets over the coming few days.

I also managed to find the below two ads for it on YouTube and they seemed a bit similar to Buzz’s ads (another product of Kassatly).

Ellie Goulding live at Biel next week

By Rami on July 19, 2014 in Lebanon

Compared to all the artists coming to Lebanon this summer, Ellie Goulding’s concert on July 23rd at Biel is definitely going to be the biggest act this season!

I already got my tickets from Mix FM and you can reserve yours online at Ticketing Box Office or at any Virgin store in Lebanon.

Why is our internet getting worse?

By Rami on July 18, 2014 in Lebanon

Following the ministry of telecommunications’ announcement two month ago about the broadband internet packages upgrade and price reductions, you would expect the average speed across the country to be significantly better and our global ranking to improve a bit. But unfortunately, this doesn’t seem like the case since a lot of ADSL subscribers are complaining about their connection!

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The chart above from netindex.com proves people are right. While July was supposed to witness the new plans taking effect, it is instead turning into the worst month for our internet with the lowest speed in over a year!

If Boutros Harb knew the upgrades were not feasible then he should have simply just reduced the prices instead of messing the speeds for the sake of coming out better than his predecessor Nicolas Sehnaoui.

It’s very clear that the top priorities for the minister right now is to work on upgrading the infrastructure to provide households with better speeds as well as supplying internet providers with more E1s to cater for their subscribers.

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