A change is as good as and all that.

I've been in Beirut a little under two weeks now, working at the Daily Star having bunked off the last week at university in Damascus in favour of some work experience in Lebanon.

This is to be my final staging post in rehabilitation into the Western World, and just as Damascus proved hard to leave so Beirut is already infecting me with the same excitement. I have been living in an apartment overlooking the Port in Jeiteweh, spitting distance from the fashionable nightspots of Gemayzeh and upmarket shopping malls of Achrafieh. The apartment that I've been in (the view from which is pictured above) belongs the friend of a friend of a cousin who is away and it has a stunning roof terrace with said view out across the Port of Beirut and off into the Mediterranean horizon. Its pretty idyllic. There is a even a cat who goes by the name of Noual and an impressive selection of plants that I have done my best to kill in the ten days I have lived in the house.

Work-wise I have been surprisingly busy. The one or two stories, that I was told I was likely to write in two weeks have just mushroomed into the sixth and my knowledge of garden shows and beach combing is reaching new scholarly heights. One thing that this journalism gig does have going for it is the opportunity to meet fascinating people. Thus far I have covered a charity called Al-Kafaat in its fiftieth year of helping disabled people find a valued place in a rather rejective Lebanese society, a beach combing operation to remove the vast swathes of solid waste from Lebanese shores, an annual youth parliament session on the environment and a the publication of a report into the state of Lebanon's drinking water supplies (which aren't all that clean as it happens). I've even been invited to go and spot some dolphins on Friday or Saturday morning with the Cedar Protection Group. Its all a bit of blur.

Beirut is also very different again from Damascus. On the surface its clean and slick and full of great bars and indulgent restaurants populated by Porsche-driving tycoons and slick young execs, and underneath its still thrashing about in its ill-fitting skin, short in some places and baggy in others. As a western student, with a bit of his student loan left in his pocket and few of the everyday concerns of so many Lebanese, particularly in the current political stalemate, its great fun. There are so many facets to it, and its politics are very potent, and its people are very friendly and its a great place for a young would-be journalist to learn a few tricks in the newsroom, turn a phrase or two in the day and stumble a few hundred yards from the office into the waiting arms of a well-trained barman.

The first two weeks in a new place it seems are always the same. The same wide-eyed adjustment to the light of a new culture, the thrill of new sights and smells and then the drop off as they scribble down a new chapter in the familiar. I would imagine there is still plenty of scribbling to be had in the next four or five weeks before I leave the Middle East for good (at least for this bit of 'good') but before then there is plenty of time to wash down the steady, Mediteranean sun with a few glasses of the local tipple, a cat called Noual and a half-dead phaecus who I'm going to call Jaune, on account of his leaves.