"It's starting"

Smoke from the Airport
Originally uploaded by Jane Rubio.

I was just at a birthday party in Aley. As we were setting up the table and about to light the candles, I noticed that night had fallen fast. The magreb/sunset call to prayer must have finished a couple minutes before.

And then someone yelled, "Blesh". (It's starting.) So we ran out to the balcony, with the stunning view of Beirut, as you can see from the picture I had taken about two hours earlier.

We saw red star-like flashes in the sky.

We saw some orange flames coming up from the port.

We saw red and orange flares coming up from all around the Dahiye (the southern suburbs of Lebanon that Israel was bombing today--Hizbullah land). Some people were saying that they were just fireworks.

And everyone was out on their balconies yelling back and forth about what they were seeing. The guy next to me lent me his binoculars. But that was kind of useless, because I sort of have problems with depth-perception and discerning things from funny angles (like I can't follow movies like Star Wars when they switch between those models of the airplanes and the dudes talking in the little airplanes.)

But then it stopped. I have my balcony door open as I type, and I don't hear anything.