Janine and I last summer during Salah's wedding

Leila fixed the luminosity on the picture as it was slightly overexposed. Otherwise, it's Janine and I in our undimmed glory

Busy month(s) ahead

March is about to begin and it's going to be a crazy month. Break is over, got time to relax a little and to make sure that going back to school would be insanely busy (by taking the time to relax, how ironic). This week is extremely bad, with one exam, one ten-page paper, much reading and the second of three week-ends doing the live case analysis. I can't divulge anything about the case, but I can say that I'm heading to Burlington, Vermont on Friday for two days and when I come back, probably totally fried, I'll still have a shit load of work. At least, I work extremely well under pressure, I just need to have enough sleep :)

Anyways, just thought I'd give a heads up in case I end up not posting in the near (or not so near) future, it's just the second half of the semester, and with 5 graduate level classes, it's not a walk in the park.

Take care y'all!
Ciao,
Karim

P.S: I set up my domain, saliba.ca, on google apps. What an awesome set of tools that is, not because of how powerful and simple the package is, but because it's all these things and it's free!!! Some people think of google as a big brother in the making, but they innovate and do all kinds of cool things to make people more productive, I really don't mind that they're making a huge profit, quite the contrary.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!

It's snowing like crazy tonight, like it has all day, and I for one am loving it. I didn't use to be this way, but the whiteness, the silence, the slowness of city activity, it's just amazing. The snow today was unlike any I have ever seen before, like a hundred thousand diamonds had fallen from the sky and blanketed Montreal in a lovely white veil.
Happy Valentines to everyone, especially those of you who aren't spending it with loved ones. Janine and I celebrate Thursday night so we can have more time, as tonight was busy for me, and tomorrow all day as well.

Love you all,
Karim

The full story of our escape out of Lebanon last summer

I realize I never posted the story of when we escape out of Lebanon last July. I don't remember all the details anymore but it'll be fun to try to give you guys the info.

OK, so let's start at the beginning:

Janine and I decide to take a couple of weeks (I was still working at alogient then) to go down to Lebanon to visit our families in Lebanon and attend our (shared) cousin Salah's wedding (yes, Janine is related to me. No not by blood. Maybe I'll explain that someday). We also decided to stop in Prague for a couple of days, as none of us had visited the city and it looked exciting. It helped that the cheapest tickets to get to Lebanon were actually through Prague :)

We left from Montreal on July 1st 2006 and arrived at Prague at 6AM local time, or midnight on the night between Saturday and Sunday for us (Montreal time). We took a cab (already planned ahead of time w/ the hotel) that drove us straight to our beds. We were really tired and the hotel staff was nice enough to give us our rooms very early :) After a couple of hours (a bit less maybe) of sleep, we headed out into the the town.

If you've never been to Prague, well, you should go. It was awesome, and the prices outside the tourist areas are actually unbelievably low. I'll elaborate more on the Prague visit another time, inshallah (the Arabic word that means you shouldn't expect it realistically in your lifetime, but if God wills it, then maybe).

To make a long story short, we arrived in Prague Sunday morning at 6AM local time and left Monday evening at around 6PM, for about 36 hours of fun in the amazing city.

We then arrived in Beirut on Tuesday the 4th in the morning and spent a couple of days resting, visiting family, eating (a lot of that happening :P ). The wedding was Friday night, on the 7th of July (7th month) in 2007. 7/7/07 in short :)
It was a good time and Janine "caught" the bouquet (another story for the wedding night which was a blast), so we're doomed to get married soon (more news here too)(tell me when I get annoying with the parenthesis, cause I'm having way too much fun foreshadowing stuff and messing with your minds right now).

After the wedding, we visited more family and ate a lot more too (ah, Lebanese gatherings are just amazing), until the 12th hit. That's when the awesome (since this is a public blog, I'd like to (Cough cover my ass cough) make sure that idiots who don't see irony when it bites them in the ass should know that nothing that happened last summer between Hezbollah, Lebanon and Israel was in any way amazing) events in Lebanon started unfolding with the news that Hezbollah had kidnapped Israeli soldiers and killed others.

We sat all Wednesday waiting for something to happen. And for a while, nothing did. I couldn't believe it when I woke up Thursday the 13th and nothing had happened in the night, except for minor events in the South. We had plans to do touristic visits in Lebanon, including going to a vineyard in south-western Lebanon and were still debating whether we should go or not. My parents weren't sure, but my uncle and father ended up advising us to not go far from the area where we lived, so we decided, with Peter, Leila's girlfriend, and a few other friends of ours, to head to Jeita grotto, one of the most amazing grottoes in the world by the diversity of its rock formations.

After the amazing visit, we headed to the chalet in the mountain, at Satellity. There, we saw the news about how the airport had been bombarded. Since we were supposed to be leaving the following Sunday (not quite sure about that anymore, but it sounds right) by plane, it looked like our travel plans were bleak. After that, it just got worse every day. First, the main road to Syria (towards the East from Jounieh where we live and Beirut) was bombarded soon afterwards. Second, the scale of the bombardment also got a lot worse. The image at the top should show you what I mean by "a lot worse".

Anyways, Janine and I had full travel insurance coverage for the first time ever (how lucky!), with the Desjardins company (who were unbelievable by the way, they didn't make a fuss and paid every thing that I had expensed. I recommend them highly just for that, although everything else about them was good too). The travel insurance was about to expire one day after we were supposed to return (it would expire Monday the 17th), so we talked with my parents on Friday and they said that taking an alternate road to Damascus, Syria (from the North, a 4 hour detour or more) and flying from there would be good. I had work to return to, and didn't want to miss too much of it and get stuck in Lebanon indefinitely. We also didn't know how bad the conflict was going to get. Finally, Janine was having a hard time sleeping, as she heard the Israeli planes and the distant (or not so distant sometimes) bombings.

A few calls later on Friday evening, we were mostly booked through the Desjardins contact, and scheduled to leave Saturday. My father would drive us in the Toyota Previa (family car, like a Renault Espace). The passengers would be Janine and myself, as well as my aunt Dima and her two kids. Dima's husband's family live in Damascus, and Dima was also very unhappy about being in Lebanon with her children with a war going on.

Unfortunately, when we woke up early Saturday morning, we heard that all the roads going north into Syria were being bombarded by the Israelis. My father, my uncle and my cousin Salah all took long looks at large maps and decided that we could use other roads through the East to get to Syria (basically taking roads parallel to the ones already bombarded by the Israelis in the first few days of the war).

To make a long story a bit shorter, my father was able to drive us to the border and to go back home safely. It's important to note that the roads we took were being bombarded as well, and that we had to change itinerary three times due to the road being destroyed and people dying on it between 1hour to 15 minutes before we went. The final segment to the border was particularly stressful to all, as the final road had just been bombarded with casualties (2 taxis and another vehicle destroyed, with passengers on board) just 15 minutes before our arrival. We had to take a very small road, with no traffic on it, with a huge white family car screaming "SHOOT ME", while the aviation was flying above us.

The we got cabs from the border into Syria, and again left just before that border post was bombarded. We prayed hard for my dad who was now driving alone.

After a lot of stress and a lot of running around, including some craziness in Damascus to pay for our tickets and the such, we were able to get to Canada safely. Maybe some day I'll elaborate some more on this, but I think it is sufficient to say that had I really known the risk involved, we would have never embarked on this crazy drive. The insurance people actually issued a "no travel" advisory on Saturday morning, but we didn't call them again until we got to Syria so we could confirm our reservations (which were cancelled because no one was getting there anymore, but I really want to get to bed now and won't go into all the painful details) :)

I hope you enjoyed this account, it was long in coming.
Now that I wrote so many lines, I expect I won't post for a while :p Unless I do. Hmmm. Let's keep the suspense now, shall we?

Love, Karim

The road to hell is paved with good intentions

At least I'm only one month away from last time, but I admit it's not what I had in mind when I was talking about updating more often :)
Anyways, today's the super bowl and I probably won't be watching it... Bourgui called me Friday night and told me that Marcel, Nataly and himself were going to be at his place watching the game and said I should come. Unfortunately, I was in the middle of a international live case competition, which lasted from Friday morning till Saturday evening.
I guess I could drive today, but I have work due for tomorrow evening (10 page case analysis) and I will need to be working on it tomorrow all day, and need my rest today. I'm still trying to find some wiggle in my agenda to do the 2time 2hour drive back and forth from Ottawa. I'm just not as enthousiastic about driving as Bourgui is... I don't like having to go and come back the same day.

Anyways, in other news, classes are going good so far, I was still finding a few hours per week to play World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade, but I have had to stop brutally and concentrate on the MBA, which is a good thing.

Anyways, I'm off to read the blogs of the potes and see what's up with them. Hopefully I'll update before March :)

Love,
Karim