Hotel Riviera - My First 'Beach'

As I wrote yesterday, I went to my first beach in Beirut (I'm going to leave off the quotations for this entry, but don't forget that beach does not mean sand and salt water here in Beirut.  In fact, there is nothing natural whatsoever about beaches here).  It was at the Hotel Riviera, a seafront hotel that lets non-guests pay to use their beach.

It was hard to get pictures of the pool area, it was sprawled on three levels.  A big saltwater pool farther away from the sea, with a small freshwater pool down by the sea where my group situated ourselves.  There were tons of beach chairs and more tanned and sculpted bodies than I've ever seen in one place before.  A glimpse of what life next to the pool at the Hotel Riviera is like:

And yes, that's the Med in the background.  It was great to sit in the cool water, look at the sea, and learn all about the people I came with.  Such an interesting and diverse group, I have very little to say besides 'wow' when people say 'I work for TIME'.

We found these great mattresses in our area and eagerly piled onto them.  Such great pillows on those things, but we only got to enjoy them for about 15 minutes before we were informed that it was actually an extra $100 (!) to use them and we went back to our old chairs.

There's not much to say, but that bar is definitely worth a look too: