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.
3 comments:
I thought your suburbs all had bitumen roads, had no idea it was 'country lanes', which is probably a good thing, one less substance to soak up the heat. You could always send the jumper back here Cap't - it'll be 3 to 17 ish all week.
In most hardware stores they sell batery operated doorbells - I think they are around 20 dinars or less. That might solve your bell problem.
Thanks for that khadijateri, that's exactly what we ended up with - after a few more short circuits that saw most of the outdoors electrics stop working as well...:)
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