“Beirut? She is like a big mother, but tired,” is how a taxi driver describes his city to me. He tells me about the hardships of everyday life, like the unreliable electricity supply or the misery caused by garbage piling up; about mismanagement and corruption. And that it makes no difference whether Lebanon has a government or not. “It’s all the same,” he says. Beirut seems like a puzzle to me – composed of a variety of pictorial fragments. The oscillation between the worlds of the east and the west shapes Lebanese identity: “I don’t feel like an Arab, but I don’t feel like a Westerner either: I’m something in between,” another taxi driver tells me.