Sometimes you get the itch to travel to places, even when every single person you talk to thinks you’re crazy. My “itch” to visit Beirut and the Middle East came out of curiosity and just dumb luck. The company I work out happened to gift employees with a week of mandatory, Slack-free vacation. Things like that don’t come along to often, so when they do it’s important not to waste the opportunity.

So why Lebanon? I wish I had a better reason other then “Anthony Bourdain went there and it looked cool”. I wasn’t too keen on visiting anywhere by myself, so I reached out to a good friend of mine living in Nairobi, Kenya and asked if he wanted to meet somewhere halfway. Ten WhatsApp messages later, we had a flight booked for Beirut.

We had three main goals going to the Middle East:

1. Exploring a new country that neither of us had visited.

2. Eating some great food.

3. Avoid getting kidnapped by ISIS. That was more of a request from our friends and family, but it seemed reasonable judging by the proximity of Syria.

We were successful with all three.

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