Blame it on the Saudis. That’s what the Lebanese do.

The most striking first impression of Beirut is the number of cranes deployed for new luxury condos. Dubai usually gets the fame for unfettered construction, but we were in Dubai, and it’s nothing like this.

It doesn’t make sense. Lebanon is at peace, but for how long is anyone’s guess. The border with Israel is still hot. Tensions could flare at any moment when a UN tribunal issues the first accusations on the assassination of Rafik Hariri, the prime minister slain in a car bomb in 2006. Everyone expects Hezbollah to be fingered, and the militant group swore trouble as such.

A place with this much political uncertainty should not, logically, have this much economic confidence. Too many buildings pockmarked by the civil war haven’t been mended. The electricity doesn’t work half the time, for crying out loud.

Every Lebanese we spoke with say it’s all spurred by Gulf Arabs who build, sell, and get out. But probe a little further and you find that many Lebanese – those with two passports who can easily duck out if things get hairy – do have a hand in Beirut’s bewildering construction boom.

But that’s Lebanon for you. In a place where peacetime is as rare as hot sunny days in Canada, the people learned to make use of every bomb-free moment.

This naturally goes to its absurd extreme. Beirut’s main districts are lined with designer shops, sleek bars and restaurants where an appetizer costs as much as a day’s budget in Vietnam. The souk in the old city hardly merits the name; it’s a mall for Hermès and Burberry to claim some Arabian cachet.

Young people are fabulously dressed to sip coffee and smoke narguileh. And when another daily blackout darkens the humbler neighbourhoods, the lights keep burning bright in the pubs of Gemmayze and Monot Street, where the nation’s elite go to be seen.

You start to think that things are so expensive in Lebanon because every serious business has to pay two electricity bills: one for the utility and the other for the diesel generators that hum continuously in the basement.

Either this country is suffering the world’s greatest case of mass denial, or the Lebanese are implacable, refusing to let something as banal as unreliable power interfere with their lifestyle.

This staged glitz on top of a shaky foundation reminds me of that scene in Downfall when Eva Braun urges her party guests to dance while Allied mortars shake the streets just outside.

The only difference is that Braun couldn’t accept that it was all over. The Lebanese know that at any moment, this could all go away.

Good on them for enjoying while they can.