remembering my weirdest Christmas

For some reason I was just remembering my weirdest Christmas. It was 2010. I wanted to spend the last week of the year in Cyprus, which is close to Egypt but so far I had not yet been.

After surveying the available flight itineraries, I purposely chose the flight out of Cairo on Christmas morning, something I often did due to good deals and empty flights in that slot. I also purposely chose to fly from Cairo to Cyprus via Beirut with an 11-hour layover, just so that I could enjoy Christmas Day in Lebanon.

Unfortunately, this was not too long after the Israeli assassination of the Hamas official in Dubai, with the assassination team sweeping in and out of Dubai Airport rather quickly. The point being, Lebanon was surely on guard against the same sort of thing happening there. And… they wouldn’t let me out of Beirut Airport. That’s right. Though I had quite a number of Lebanon stamps in my passport already, they said if I didn’t have an overnight hotel booking, I would have to stay in the airport until my next flight.

Now, Beirut Airport is not the world’s most boring, but it’s far from the world’s most interesting, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend that anyone hang out there for 11 hours. And you can only look at the gift shops so many times.

Worse yet, the Beirut Airport stereo got stuck on something I never would have predicted– the soundtrack to that Disney animated Robin Hood cartoon where the characters are all animals. Robin Hood himself is a fox, if memory serves. And in particular, the airport stereo got stuck on many consecutive replays of “Robin Hood and Little John walkin’ through the forest, oo-de-lally, oo-de-lally, golly, what a day…”

Song HERE.

After hearing it around 20-25 times in a row that Christmas Day, it took a week or so to get it out of my head.