The minibus is starting its ascent to Dahr Al Baidar on the narrow two-lane highway climbing the eastern slope of the Sannine mountains. The driver guns his engine, accelerates into the left lane while shifting up, and overtakes a truck that is doing its best to keep up, with a loudly laboring motor - while both vehicles approach a curve that fully blocks visibility of oncoming traffic.
No doubt, I am back in Lebanon where maniac driving causes few people to as much as blink an eye, and now I am getting closer to Beirut, which I had left seven weeks ago in an evacuation decision forced by the war between the armed forces of Israel and Hezbollah, the Shiite militia.
Traveling back was arduous in a minor way, and expensive, because the Israeli air blockade of Lebanon is still mostly in place in this first week of September although fighting has ended in mid-August.
Because the few Amman-Beirut flights were full, my journey from Vienna took me by air to Amman and overland to Beirut, via Damascus.
After spending weeks observing the events in Lebanon via e-mail, blogs, and online news reports, I was eager to see with my own eyes how the country where I have been living for almost 10 years looked after it had been pummeled by airstrikes, naval and artillery fire that had claimed the lives of more than 800 civilians - some counts claim over 1,200 non-combatant fatalities - wounded more than 3,000, and destroyed at least 15,000 homes, in addition to all those bridges, roads, factories, and infrastructure facilities.
The first visual impact of the new post-war situation met me in Damascus - posters incorporating the image of Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah side by side with Syrian President Bashar Al Assad in triumphal iconic settings that are so important and prominent reflections of both official propaganda and popular sentiment in countries of the region.
Where in the past only Lebanon's president and staunch ally of Syria, Emile Lahoud, had been deemed fit to adorn joint pictorials with Bashar, now joint images of Syria's leader and the bearded, smiling Nasrallah were hanging from ropes above the passages in the Old City of Damascus and shone from the back windows of taxi cabs.
However, after this visual primer of a new display of Syria's most popular and most depicted living political idols, the road from Damascus to Lebanon did not reveal new realities, save for one - the fare for the trip across the border in a shared taxi, which had been modest enough at $4, has gone up 50 percent, to $6.
Passing through the border control stations at Masnaa, where Israeli air force jets had dumped some bombs on the access roads, proved no different from travels in recent years.
The road was bumpy and disrupted - but it had felt just as bumpy and incomplete when I had come this way in the beginning of July - and the agglomeration of living humanity in the Lebanese customs and visa area was as chaotic as ever.
There were long lines of trucks on the highway coming into Syria, but this was afternoon and so presumably the lorries were on the return trip from delivering supplies to Beirut as the air and sea passage into Lebanon was still cut off by Israel under a declared goal of wanting to stop smuggling of military supplies to Hezbollah.
Before leaving Syria, the driver of our taxi did not hesitate to buy a few more cartons of cigarettes and stuff them under passenger seats in his vehicle. Thorough vehicle checks for any sort of contraband were obviously not a high concern of his.
Rolling downhill into the Bekaa Valley - an area with a large Shiite population and villages that media reports of the past weeks had labeled time and again with mind-numbing repetitiveness as "Hezbollah strongholds" - the unassuming buildings on both sides of the highway on the first five or six kilometers stand just as grey as they did before.
But then, the first broken bridge, smashed during one of the many sorties Israeli airforce jets have flown against that "terrorist infrastructure" in Lebanon. The taxi veers onto a gravel bypass of a low bridge that I had never even noticed when driving here before.
Those Israelis must surely have had good maps of Lebanese roads, although it remained a mystery to me how this particular work of destruction could have impeded Hezbollah.
After a very short distance, the next clear witness of a successful airstrike: a burnt-out, totally ravaged factory building.
The Maliban bottles and glass factory stood here. Its buildings were never a jewel in industrial design, but the penetration of precision bombs had transformed this place into a nightmarish ruin and testimony to a meaningless war machine that had been given an obvious license by its masters to obliterate whatever appeared like a target on suspicion of almost anything, such as a delivery truck pulling up.
In the town of Chtaura, roughly the halfway point on travels between Damascus and Beirut, everything again appeared so very normal. Our taxi dropped off three passengers, a young Shiite couple and their baby, at a building flying the flag of the Amal movement.
They transfer luggage to their small VW and wave goodbye before taking off in direction of Baalbek (another one of those "stronghold" places). When we had passed the Maliban factory, the husband pointed at the destruction and said one word - Israel.
The MacDonald's fast food outlet in Chtaura was teeming with young families as it had during so many times when my colleague in Damascus and I had met here over the past four years.
If there was anything that differed today when compared to a year ago, it was that the atmosphere of the place was more relaxed.
In the summer of 2005, when Lebanon was the target of a series of terrorist bombings against politicians, opinion leaders, and journalists - whose common point was their critical view of Syria - restaurants like MacDonald's had checked backpacks and handbags of customers.
Today, when people expressed uniform opinions on who Lebanon's enemy was, the eatery's doors stood wide open and no one thought to ask me about opening my two large travel bags.
After Chtaura, as I ride to Beirut with a full dozen of young men in one of the minibuses that are the most affordable form of public transport here, the mixture of normal and frightening sights continues.
The soldiers at the highway control post on top of the mountain ridge at Dahr Al Baidar wave us through without check. On the downward drive, we lose no more than 10 minutes travel time by having to use the old road along Mederej and Sofar because the high bridge - an awful sight in its disruptedness - has lost several segments under aerial bombardment.
Skirting the southern districts of Beirut on the way into town, the road offers glimpses into side streets where apartment buildings have been smashed, sliced open, punched into the ground. It is a surreal sight as surrounding buildings stand apparently undamaged and one can only wonder why one building was a target and its twin wasn't.
This area, bisected by one of the fault lines from Lebanon's civil war in the 70s and 80s, still has a few ruins that date back to the ground battles between militias in that old conflict, where grenades or rockets had scored direct hits back then. Some of the concrete floors of these broken buildings had been compressed into what looked like layered cakes sticking out from the main structure at absurd angles.
It was a striking similarity of warfare how some of the newly destroyed buildings looked where Israeli bombs or missiles had made their impact. The difference between the new damages and those from the civil war was apparent.
The old conflict zone had been a landscape painted by long fighting; buildings along the frontline streets were pockmarked with bullet holes and their appearance had been degraded throughout.
The new devastation, however, was vast deeper into the southern suburbs; the latest urban destruction in this part of Beirut resulted in isolated ruins in an intact looking neighborhood.
Around our apartment, Beirut's (predominantly Christian) Ashrafieh district basks in the late summer sun. Here, one could walk today without knowing that war had paralyzed Lebanon or that any buildings in the city had been eradicated.
There are fewer cars on the street but it is hard to regard this as a worsening of the situation. There are erratic electricity cuts but they are not worse than many cuts of the past when Lebanon's government felt compelled to ration power to its citizens because the mismanaged state utility had no funds to pay for fuel oil deliveries.
Also in central Beirut, the superficial impressions are just like in spring: construction sites, a modicum of street life and business in restaurants, shops, and malls.
Things are not as vibrant as they were in May when the country was filled with high-flying expectations for a great summer but people are about, wearing the cheery smiles and flashy outfits that Beirut is legendary for around the region.
Under their red and white flowering trees, the parks - the rarest commodity in this city - in the evening twilight look none the worse for wear from having sheltered scores of refugees a month ago.
Banks have put up patriotic messages on billboards and supermarkets advertise their specials, and only when one looks closely, the abandonment on their shelves becomes evident. Cans and jars have been spread thinly to give an impression of the usual abundance of items but stocks have clearly been depleted.
However, nobody has exactly to fear suffering deprivation from the lack of French cold cuts, German news magazines, or mayonnaise and ketchup from some well-established American brand manufacturers.
The thin selection is nowhere as limited as the array of goods in a fully stocked store in East Berlin or Bucharest 20 years ago. "The port is cut off through the blockade but we are getting many things from Syria," assures me the manager of a major supermarket, even as his claims that the store is at stock levels of 70 percent smack of the window dressing that is common in this town.
In the downtown, which had been eviscerated during the civil war, the painstakingly rebuilt roads with their granite curbstones are unblemished and one has to go to the nation's political hub at Parliament Square to see any impact of the conflict.
Here, oversized pictures of suffering children are displayed around the square that is bustling with traffic. Instead of the usual summertime lull, cars of parliamentarians pull up and one political delegation after the other - the only vehicles allowed here - roll in with their security teams and police escorts.
Lebanon has been hurt and hurt gravely in this war; there can be no mistake about this. Everybody's life has been affected.
Out of three immediate coworkers of mine, one lost her new apartment in southern Beirut from an Israeli air raid and moved to Dubai. Another had sent out invitations for his wedding for July 15 and the outbreak of war had crossed out his plans for celebrations and a honeymoon in Spain.
Thousands of families suffered grievously and the psychological trauma from this war will impact a whole new generation in a country gradually recovering from the ills of displacement, alcohol abuse, depression, and emotional fragility generated by the civil war.
Yet, at the end of this first week after my return, the joyful music from a nearby wedding party reverberates through my apartment. I have seen increasing signs of recovering social life and heard optimists say that everything will become better now.
Some of that seems wishful thinking and there is still much existential pain and economic desperation hidden in the shadows behind the smiles.
But there also is a lot of resilience in the faces and words. "We have seen worse and have come through six wars. I think that there will be no more fighting between Israel and Lebanon," tells me one neighborhood friend with strong political opinions.
As the Israeli air and sea blockade of Lebanon dissolves in the days between September 6 and 9, I happen to stand at Martyrs' Square in downtown when the pilot of Middle East Airlines' first direct flight from Europe after the blockade dips low overhead, the jet's engines unquestionably screaming the message that Lebanon is back.
Thomas Schellen is a business journalist and writer who has worked in Lebanon for more than nine years
Commentary: Lebanon returns
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