The Streets of Beirut are no longer empty. Nightclubs, restaurants, coffee shops, and bars are no longer filled only with ghosts. This is National Unity week, and that means it's time to have fun.

Beirut is nothing if it isn't fun. The city is solidly packed from one end to the other with the classiest hotels, the hippest night clubs, the most stylish bars, the coziest cafes, and the best shopping districts this side of New York and Paris. Deserted streets mean a shattered economy. And empty establishments only compound everyone's fears.

A huge outdoor concert, complete with colorful lights and a gigantic electronic video screen behind the musicians, was staged Sunday night on Martyr's Square next to the tent-city. One set of musicians after another played emotionally powerful patriotic songs. People in the crowd cheered, applauded, jumped with excitement, and waved Lebanon's national flag instead their own sectarian flags which have been all too commonly jammed in everyone's faces the past couple of years.

Another smaller, more intimate, stage was set up just down the street from Parliament for outdoor poetry readings. This event, too, was well-attended. I could only pick out a few words here and there in the Arabic poems, but I felt a palpable sense of relief and catharsis when the audience cheered and applauded.

Civic leaders unconnected to the Syrian dictatorship asked everyone in the country to, please, go out and have dinner. Enjoy Beirut's normally-irrestisible nightlife. Restaurant owners downtown got together and printed a standard placemat to use on everyone's table. It presents the Lebanese Cedar tree flag along with a national unity slogan printed in three different languages, Arabic, English, French: "Lebanon: United for Life."

Abdel Mounim Aris, mayor of Beirut, delivered the following message to the people of his city:

"Let us all together agree to practice faith in the future, to work for an anchored national solidarity, to affirm our commitment to preventing the return to war, and finally to renew our promise to new generations that we will offer them a prosperous, free, and honorable country founded on respect for coexistence among all citizens of Lebanon."

I've been told the streets are still more quiet than usual. But there are ten, perhaps twenty, times as many people out and about now as there were when I got here. Taking back the streets is less dramatic than a million demonstrators in Martyr's Square. But it's still extremely important, and it's important for some of the very same reasons.