Beirut -- I took a bit of a down day today (don’t tell my editors), feeling that I needed a few hours of normalcy after what had been an exhausting stretch of travelling around first south Lebanon and then the Bekaa Valley in the east.

In the centre of Beirut, cafés and restaurants that were closed when I arrived here 23 days ago have re-opened, reflecting a growing confidence that neighbourhoods like this one are not targets of the Israeli war planes.

It was a bright, sunny afternoon, and I sat for a short while in my favourite sandwich joint and read newspapers, just like I used to when I was living and studying here. If not for the newspapers’ horrifying content – both the English-language The Daily Star and the French L’Orient Le Jour had front-page photos of dead children being pulled from the rubble of destroyed buildings – it could have been the Beirut that I used to know and love.

But even without the media, there’s no escaping the war anywhere here. After doing a few interviews and some errand-running, I returned to my hotel room to check my e-mail. Soon after I settled in, a tall, thin man with a neat goatee knocked at my door.

“Are you a journalist?” he asked, clearly shaken by something. It was a member of the cleaning staff whom I’d nodded at and said good morning to several times. I didn’t know him any better than that.

I told him yes and, unbidden, he started telling me his story.

“They destroyed my building two days ago,” he said, referring to Israeli war planes. The apartment block was in Harat Hreik, a once-populous Shiite Muslim suburb on the southern edge of Beirut that has been completely flattened by air strikes. When I visited there two weeks ago, the roads were covered in rubble. Even then, there were few buildings still standing.

“There were just 10 buildings left, and then they came back and bombed them too,” he said. His voice was flat, but his face wobbled to keep the pleasant hotel-staff smile in place. “The whole building just fell down.”

No one was hurt because everyone had long since evacuated, he said, which made Israel’s decision to attack it even more puzzling for him.

“We were all civilians in this building, nobody that had anything to do with this war. I lived on the fifth floor with my family. On the fourth floor there was a lawyer. On the third floor was a doctor, a surgical doctor. On the second floor was my cousins, even younger than me, and their families. They were living with their mother, an accountant. On the first floor was just an old man with his family.”

These days the 24-year-old university student lives where he works, staying in one of the empty rooms here at the Commodore Hotel, which just as it did during Lebanon’s long civil war has done an admirable job of staying open and serving its picky foreign guests despite the bombs, the power cuts and the mounting shortages.

The money he earns cleaning rooms helps pay for food for his father, who is living with other relatives, and for his mother and sister, who have fled to the safety of Jordan. When the war is over, he said, “we’ll have to start all over again.”

He had a favour to ask of me. “Will you write down what happened? Will you tell people in Canada?” he asked me. I promised him that I would.

He told me his name, but asked me not to print it because he didn’t want his cousins who live in Toronto to worry about him or feel sorry for him.

I won’t use his name, but I think his cousins should worry about him and his father anyway. And this country that is being dismantled by a war so few of its people want.