It's Wednesday, October 23rd. Mohammed, my driver, was waiting outside the hotel at

420 a.m. idling in the middle of the road because there was no other traffic.

Not a soul to be seen except a cat sleeping on the hood of a car parked on the sidewalk.

Mohammed's car was a black sedan. parked on the sidewalk.

Mohammed's car was a black sedan, cool and quiet inside with leather seats.

We rolled out of Hamra in silence, gliding along narrow streets I'd learned on a motorcycle in loud

and crazy two-way roller derby traffic. People honking to pass or be careful, out where you're going but at 4 in the morning

Mohammed drove without stopping or even slowing down at the intersections and the narrow streets

opened onto a highway and then a freeway headed south to the airport.

The airport is in southern Beirut on the edge of the Mediterranean Sea.

Southern Beirut is also the Shia side of town, and Hezbollah, the party of God, is comprised of

Shia Muslims. So Israel had been bombing the neighborhood pretty much every

day for the past two and a half weeks. As we approached the airport, Muhammad asked me,

do you smell the bombs? Up ahead, a half a mile from the airport,

there was a low hanging cloud of smoke or dust,

and we could already smell it coming through the air conditioner, a metallic

singying of my nostrils.

Yes, I said, I can't smell the bombs. They exploded hours ago, he said, during the day,

but sometimes the dust stays in the air for a long time.

So I asked Mohammed the same question I asked everybody I'd met in Beirut.

What's it like living in a city that gets bombed every day?

This part of the city, he said, has been bombed many times over many years, so for us it is normal.

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