Traffic hijinks

Remember I said a few weeks ago that people have a nasty habit of going the wrong way down the one-way slip road so they get to westbound Janzour Rd five seconds faster than going to the lights and doing a u-turn? Here’s what happens when five or six cars do it at the same time (I’m waiting to make a left-hand turn into the slip road – you know, to actually use it the way it was intended to be used…)

Digression: In the background, you can see a pile of bricks; we used to wonder why there was always so much building material at our dirt-track intersection. We thought it was some kind of central depot for delivery and pick-up – no, it’s where they sit all day and make the bricks. Check out the electrical wiring job in that second photo, too.

Driving is, to say the least, exhilarating here. There’s nothing that livens up your day like having to simultaneously slam your brakes on because you’re coming up at 100km an hour towards a guy who has just stopped his car on the motorway to chat to his mate on the side of the road, and also not slam your brakes on too hard because the guy behind you is driving at 110km an hour an inch from your bumper.

Especially at roundabouts (there’s two roundabouts here christened Roundabouts of Death by expats – which doesn’t make giving directions any easier…), driving is a matter of being aggressively assertive. In fact, if you don’t make left hand turns in tiny gaps, pull out in front of people, push your way in, cut across lanes etc, you can cause extra havoc because you’re behaving in an unexpected way.

The biggest trouble I’ve had (aside from the frigging manhole covers – we’re supposed to get in the habit of not driving over them in case one day the cover flips up and takes out the bottom of the car or is missing completely, except I manage to hit the damn things Every. Single. Time. And aside from the speeds on the motorway, and getting lost, and sitting too far right…one of the biggest troubles, then) is in indicating to show that I’m pulling over to the side of the road (to go to the grocery store or vegie stall, wherever). When I do this, I get beeped, and in the ‘idiot’ way, not the ‘don’t pull out I’m coming past’ way. Whereas if I just pull over without giving any notice of intention, it doesn’t seem to bother anyone. So I don’t know what that’s about.


Back to the photos. Here’s an example of a light-on traffic jam. Note how two lanes are indicated by the lane markings, but one car has decided it’s wide enough for three lanes. In heavy traffic, everyone’s gone to three lanes, and some people try for four.

And this is the reason for the traffic jam – the bakery to the lefthand side of the photo. Like I said, this is a light-on jam (it’s a Saturday, like the Western Sunday), caused by people having to reverse out into traffic after getting their bread. On the bad days, or good days for the bakery, people just start parking in the right-hand lane(s), and there’s white-uniformed police officers directing traffic (ie telling the traffic to keep doing exactly what’s it doing). All I can say is, that better be the best bread for 50 km, people.

Hotel Zomeet

Digressing this week to showcase this new hotel that has opened in the Medina, or Bab Albaher according to the brochure, near the Marcus Aurelias Arch. First opened in 1816, it was a hotel used as a meeting point for merchants on the caravan routes from Africa and Europe.

Some of these photos are scanned from the brochure, and some are from our camera. See if you can spot the difference.

Here's the big doors to the hotel.

And then when the people-sized door is open.



Inside, a few views of the Arabic session hall. The doors lining this courtyard lead to the rooms.

It's two floors with 17 rooms. Here's a photo of one.

And I'm not sure what this room is, maybe part of a suite or part of the restuarant.

And lastly, they have this great mosaic in the reception hall.





I've got no idea what it's actually like as a hotel but it's certainly beautifully presented and I thought it deserved a plug. We're definitely going to try their restaurant out some time.

www.zumithotel.com. "Your visit is a journey through the time."

Also, here's a bit of an odd website I meant to post last week: www.janzour.com. Lots of photos there.

Our neighbourhood II

This week, we are turning right from our gate. To the right in the photo, you can see our neighbour's gates, and straight ahead at the end of the lane is, we think, a power sub-station, which may explain why we've had precisely one power outage since we've been here (touch wood, inshallah) despite our power running off a single power pole that also seems to serve 3 or 4 other houses. The gap to the right of the sub-station leads to a farm.

Take the sharp turn right at the end of our lane, and you are now on this lane which runs parallel to the main Janzour Rd. It runs for maybe 400m and meets up with Janzour Rd at the corner of GEM School Rd (ie the road you take to get to the school).

It is lined with the usual walls, but it does have cacti hedges along part of it, bordering farms.

A close-up. On Malta, the cactus fruit is used to make a kind of rum. Here, maybe jam?

Here's another lane leading to a little cluster of villas; it is parallel to our lane but like I said last week, the two do not link up.

The main lane opens up to this big dirt area. During Eid, sheep are penned here. See the blue car? It's heading in the right direction down that one-way access road - the amount of people who would rather go up the wrong way into oncoming traffic to get to the main road than waste a minute going around and doing a u-turn is phenomenal.

This is Janzour Rd, heading into the city. Up there, you can make out the Janzour traffic lights. These are a great landmark as they're the only local lights, and there's a physiotherapy hospital on the other side of them. Therefore, if you need to show someone where you live, you meet them at the hospital lights. Our local bakery is up there, I'll get photos of that some other time.

Then this is the other way, further into Janzour, and the way I go to get to the medium-sized supermarket, called the Dubai store (I go to two others, a little one in walking distance (just across the road in that previous photo), and the one Coles-sized supermarket for hard-to-find items - like large bin liners).

And finally, this is the road that leads off to GEM School, and also is a short-cut over to the motorway. That oncoming car is about to do exactly what I described, go the wrong way up the little slip to nip across Janzour Rd rather than going the other way and doing a u-turn.

Our neighbourhood

We're down on ground level this week. This is the view as we step out our front gate. Note the rubbish under the trees, left mostly by the builders who were working on one side of us and are now working on the other side of us (four months and never a day without building noise - we even had construction outside our hotel window in Malta).


Turning left as we come out the gate, we're heading further into our little sub-suburb. We were only the second Blue Sunnys to move into this street, but it’s a regular Blue Sun Lane now, and possibly the constant back and forth of labelled Blue Sun Golfs make the lane a bit of an obvious target for thieves (had I mentioned our neighbours were robbed while we were in Malta? The walls, they do nothing).


Walking a little further along, the track takes a little dog to the left. Straight ahead, those large gates lead to a huge property devoted mostly to a flat open area, maybe meant for riding horses on.


You can see part of it over the wall to the right in this photo. To the left, that gap in the walls opens to another newly built house (in the concreted shell stage; it'll progress once it's rented - the owners don't have to pay tax until the house is finished, so they let it sit unfinished until they know money's coming in). This has been built on the farm where another house was recently rented to a Blue Sunny - the owner gets the money and starts the next house.


A little further along, and to the left behind that lovely greened wall is another expat with a large garden, large house, and two large German Shepards who Kelb ('dog' in Arabic; 'my dog' is Kelbee which is easy to remember considering the Kelpie part of him) takes great exception to. Note the green writing on the white wall in the distance...


Sadly, there's now a new house where the mini-golf course was to be.



And then around the corner, this lane leads off to a few short lanes which end in people's yards; it deadends and you can't get through to the other lane which runs parallel to ours.

See the grey bin - we use the exact same for our rubbish; the collectors come twice a week (randomly, though, I never know what day they're going to show up - maybe they come by every day and take the rubbish whenever they see the bin is full...). I didn't think we'd be able to completely fill a bin twice a week, but having no recycling and cleaning up the rubbish across the road does manage it. Even though these grey bins are very very common, I had an incredible time finding the right size bin liner for it, I eventually found it in the supermarket all the expats use - a clue that noone else bothers...


Lastly, here's our low-tech solution to the breakdown of our high-tech gate system three weeks ago - 'knock loudly'. I'm thinking of going medium-tech and hanging up a brass bell. No, we didn't write the Arabic bit. We can write our own names, however.

In general news, it's still hot and our air-cons still leak, and there is now a mouse living in the hole in the bottom of our still-empty pool. I'm loving working with fresh ginger, not that you couldn't get it in Oz but I have more time now. I am also knitting a jumper, because we all know 40 degrees just isn't warm enough.

Next week, I'll head in the other direction down to the main Janzour strip. You'll finally see that Tripoli isn't completely deserted.