Loading ...War is a million miles away when the Lebanese begin to party
It was mid-afternoon and already the crowd had given itself over to wild abandon. Standing on picnic tables, skinny girls in hot pants and crop-tops gyrated to thumping beats, upending bottles of vodka into the mouths of the bare-chested men dancing beside them.
Having worked out obsessively – though even in the gym they keep their make-up immaculate, their nails painted, and their hair perfectly straightened – the ladies revelled in showing off their figures, in the unlikely setting of a hen party in the Lebanese mountains.
And what they hadn’t perfected with exercise, they had fixed with plastic surgery. In the upper echelons of Lebanese society, the most important thing is to see and be seen. Consumption is the ultimate good. An open-top car, Christian Louboutin shoes and a full-time, live-in maid to look after one’s children are all must-have accessories.
Beauty is paramount: parents are known to book nose jobs as a birthday presents for their teenage children, and the youngsters wear their stitches proudly, as badges of honour. The average cost of a birthday party among this elite, one event organiser tells me, is $200,000. A wedding is $300,000.
It is a lifestyle that few can realistically afford. So they rely on credit. It is said that most of the country’s big spenders sustain their lifestyles using bank loans they cannot obviously repay. The phenomenon is often explained as a consequence of the civil war: after decades spent trying just to survive, there comes overcompensation – an attempt to prove to themselves, and to those around them, that they have conclusively moved on from its horrors.
Source: www.telegraph.co.uk