We have a phone line after six months

An early entry this week: the neighbours who kindly let us share their line and broadband account are getting their own PC in, which means they need their account back, so no more internet access for us...that's bad! But we have our own phone line now (see below), so could get our own account...that's good! But the ISP has run out of network addresses, so we can't get an account until they upgrade in a few weeks...that's bad! But we may be able to wirelessly connect across to the neighbours for the meantime...that's good! The upshot is, I have no idea if we're going to have a home connection later this week, so I'm posting now.

To the newly installed phone line...so some telephone guy shows up earlier in the week, and connects the phone; the owner had to pay (‘make a facilitation payment’) some 2000 dinah (roughly 1:1 with the Oz dollar) to get that done.

They hooked into a phone line running across the back wall (we have been given our own phone number though, so I don’t think we’re still just sharing the neighbour’s line), ran a cable across the yard, through the dining room window and jerry-rigged it into the phone cable off our handset. It took about five minutes. Then they left.

Thirty years of Western experience said, no, no, they haven’t left, they’ve just gone to do something at the exchange, this was just to see if the line was working. They’re going to come back and connect us in properly so that all the literally dozens of phone sockets throughout the house work, they won’t leave a phone cable strung across our yard at garrotting height leading through a window to a single handset in the most inconvenient place in the house.

Six months of Libyan experience, unfortunately kicking in after they’d made their escape, said that’s exactly what they’ve done. I just wish they’d told me straight up that that was what was happening, so I could have at least got them to string the line in through the office window – you know, where we’d like our internet access to be. Never mind, Blue Sun maintenance will fix it.

Regatta

Regatta is just its nickname, it’s really called the Something Residential Village, and many expats and a few Libyans live here. It’s got this gated, guarded entrance, which you can see in the distance in the photo, plus security guards patrolling, which doesn’t stop young men gathering there on summer nights to take drugs, get drunk, and hassle the young expat women walking around. Supposedly nothing can be done about them, because they’re rich and well-connected, the brats.

Here’s the nicer end of Regatta, with the broad street (this is the street the Club 8 gym and pool is on – called Club 8 because 8 companies got together and organised it) and the view of the ocean at the end. You can see it's kind of like a planned retirement village or something. Not a place that appeals to me to live in, but safe for children and a good place for things like walking, jogging, roller-blading, cycling etc, away from all the traffic.

The beach is okay, though I’m Australian so a beach has to be pretty spectacular to impress me. This one would be nicer if it wasn’t so rocky and also without the lingering smell of sewerage in summer. Up the other end of Regatta, the flats are multi-story and older and not as nice in general; apparently it used to be army barracks or something along those lines. Regatta has a little pharmacy, corner store, internet café, barber, tennis courts, manicured fountain area, and this weird sculptural art thing.

I come here once a week to use the gym in Club 8 or to walk the beach with Dog (not in summer, when it’s very crowded, hot and smelly, and they charge you to get into the beach parking lot, even when you just want to go to the restaurant down that way rather than actually use the beach – and they charge per occupant, too, not per car, so it gets expensive for families).

Quite a few locals come to the beach; particularly young men who like to trail around after the bikini-wearing expat women, way to make the expat beach yet another place it’s uncomfortable to be, guys (along with First September Street district, an area with Italian clothing stores and English-language bookstores, and an inordinate amount of young men wanting to tell you they love you and you're sexy).

However, very many locals go the newly opened beach near Tripoli centre, which is a nice stretch of white sand with tables and chairs set up (well, it was; taking your rubbish away with you is a concept apparently foreign to many people). Mainly men, and the few women who do sit out there are still wearing the full outfit. I sometimes wonder what those women think when Libyan men stroll by wearing just a pair of boardshorts. Where do they go to swim, or is swimming just not an attractive prospect even if they had somewhere private to do it?

In general news: our gate is finally fixed (inshallah, they didn't seem do anything but flip the trip switch back up; for us, it just kept flipping back down again, for them it stayed up, go figure). I found fresh mushroom and bought half the supply - this place does promote a tendency to horde food. I learnt my lesson when I only bought one bottle of Italian olive oil and can now only find low-quality olive oil. Now when I see there's only 2 tins of coconut milk left, I buy them both in case it never comes back. I've also been buying coriander every single week from the vegie stall, just to show my approval of them having it available...

Fast Food Nation

It seems that Domino's suddenly decided to drop its normal menu and serve nothing but tuna and cheese pizzas, and then stopped serving pizzas at all...

You're not fooling anyone, Pizza "House".

The 'take away' sign here is written in Arabic letters but still says 'take away' ie it's an English word written in Arabic letters. This can be seen on other products too.

Well, either Burger King's lawyers are sharpening their pencils, or one burger franchise snuck its way in here well ahead of the golden arches.

Often signs don't reflect what the store sells - there's plenty of signs with burgers (suspiciously Whopper-style burgers, too) and coke on them, when the stores sell swarmas (kebab-style things) or roast chicken; or the sign is a Mexican hat and the store sells burgers.

In other news, it's freaking hot, and yet miserably grey; We've finished watching Carnivale S2 (thanks for lending it to us, you know who you are); I have a batch of sun-dried tomato coming along on the roof; There's a pizza store with supposedly the best ice-cream in Tripoli that we're looking forward to trying.

Congratulations to Libyan-born Hisham Matar, whose book, In the Country of Men, has been nominated for the Man Booker Prize.

Tripoli city

I’ve realised I’ve never given any overview pictures of Tripoli itself, so here they are. It’s pretty in the distance when you can’t see the rubbish or smell the summer air, postcard-worthy if you’re a better photographer than me. It’s gorgeous at night, too. The tall buildings are a mix of hotels and business centres. The smaller buildings are housing, I believe subsidised by the government.



In the middle photo, the cluster to the left on the seafront is known as the Upturned Whisky Bottles (I just can't remember the real name right now), the middle building is the Corinthia Hotel, and the building to the right of that is the Al-Fateh tower.


This is a close-up of one of the major landmarks, Burj Al-Fateh tower. In there is a new international post office, ATMs, and suspiciously cheap DVDs and CDs. It used to have a revolving restuarant in the top too, which no longer revolves but does have luxury meals, not that we've tried it yet.

Decorating the bottom is this tulip mural, very pretty and unusual, and note - no graffiti.

And lastly, a close-up of some of the apartment complexes, inner-city living.

The photos were mostly taken coming down Gurgi Rd and the coast road. There’s three roads connecting Janzour to Tripoli: Gargaresh Rd (a main shopping strip) closest to the coast, Gurgi Rd (where the famous bakery is), and the motorway or ring-road, which bypasses the city and you get off and come down part of Gurgi to come into the city proper. The Souk Thalat is at the giant roundabout which marks where Gargaresh and Gurgi meet at the Tripoli end; then you go on to the coast road to get to the Blue Sun office.

At the Janzour end, Gurgi, Gargaresh and the motorway meet at a little roundabout where you sometimes see people sitting selling bunches of flowers and garish clocks in the shade of the underpass – yeah, good place to encourage people to stop, my friends.

The grocery store

This is going to be a long and probably dull entry without many photos, sorry.

Grocery stores here are like the delis back home in Australia for the most part, or at largest the Supa-Value sized stores. There’s no dedicated parking, you just pull up out front. The grocery store I go to is known as the Dubai, though I’m not sure what its real name is. They’re nice there. I’m sure, when I go home, I’m going to be at Coles going, where’s my free chocolate for spending more than $20? And why aren’t you taking my basket when it gets too full or carrying my bags to my car for me? And where are the 20 different brands of tuna, or types of juice? Why does a big jar of Nutella cost a lot more than a few dollars?


This is a photo from the inside, not brilliant but I was a little self-conscious taking snapshots of a grocery store of all things. You can see it's not much different from a small Australian store except maybe a little more crowded. I’m standing at the back of the store where all the cleaning and laundrying products are, as well as soaps and shampoos. Off to my left is a section where a lot of women’s products (face wash, beauty products) are locked up and you have to ask and pay for them separately, don’t know what that’s about. Also off to the left is the entrance to an attached store selling a bit of kitchenware.

The aisle straight ahead in the photo has all the tuna down the left, and on the right all those things that turn groceries into meals: sauces, condiments, tins etc. The aisle left of that one is the juice aisle, with a little bit of long-life milk, and the cold section, mainly cheeses, strange things I’m not sure what you’d do with, and a bit of yoghurt, not much of which is palatable, since it’s long-life too.

The aisle to the right is the chocolate and sweet biscuit aisle, with a little cereal. It’s good chocolate too, Lindt/Lindor and Bachi and Ferrero Roche, costing a third of the price as Australia (I count myself lucky, when the first Blue Sunnys arrived a little more than a year ago, there was reportedly nothing but old whitened Cadbury).

Savoury snacks get less space, a display rack (Pringles, very few other chip brands). Then there’s an aisle of pasta and rice, and a little alcove for the spice guy, who sells spices (obviously), sugar, eggs, dried fruits, nuts and legumes. I’m not sure what his relationship is to the rest of the store; I go to him to get my dried apricots even though there’s pre-packaged ones in the cold section of the main store because I figure that’s better for him, but for all I know it’s all the same. There’s also an attached butcher.

So you can see it doesn’t really differ from an Australian store except there’s fewer brands to choose from (except tuna and juice, as I think I’ve made clear), conspicuously there’s no fresh produce section or pet food aisle (though a new addition recently is a pet food rack which even has dog food), much less savoury stuff, and hardly any pre-packaged or instant meals (with the exception of a few cake mixes; I think it should be apparent by now Libyans have a collective sweet tooth, but it’s not a baking culture so these are probably for the expats).

What you can get here is steadily increasing; I’m not sure if it’s expat influence or more money or lifted sanctions or what. But the cereals, for example – when I first got here, you could get a wide range of highly-sugared fun cereals, or cornflakes (7 or 8 different brands of cornflakes, mind you). The one multi-grain cereal was chocolate-flavoured. Now there’s quite a variety of healthy cereals, though still no muesli – I can get Quaker oats, so the potential is there to make my own if I really felt like it. One thing I spotted at the large supermarket was a range of gluten-free products.

I can get Worcestershire sauce, but not Caesar salad dressing. Anchovies, but not sun-dried tomato – and I miss sun-dried tomato (maybe the spice guy sells it?). You can get a decent range of cheeses – soft fetas, cheddar, edam, blue cheese, parmesan and mozzarella, ricotta sometimes, but no brie or camembert that I’ve seen. Pepsi is widely available, Coke more patchy. I had a lovely moment last week; you can get lemon and lime juice (you can get any kind of juice, including ones you wouldn't really think of, like banana nectar) and I had been wishing you could get bitter too – and I looked down and there it was, covered in dust at the bottom of the juice section.

I should say, though, maybe it is possible to get these things I can’t find, since there’s dozens of these stores in the area – one a few hundred metres up the road, known as the Damascus; a bunch along the main shopping strip of Gargaresh St; some up past the physiotherapy hospital – but there’s a limit to the amount of driving I’ll do to track down one ingredient.

You can’t get pork products, obviously, or anything with alcohol content. Fresh milk is rare, and last time I spotted some and brought some home, I think it might have been fresh milk not from a cow (if it was from a camel, we probably gave ourselves TB – just kidding). There is, however, a dairy nearby, which I keep intending to go to, which sells unpasteurised milk (boil it for a few minutes, it’s fine to drink), again it may or may not be from cows.

Plastic bags rule here; I did once try to take my re-usable bag into the one large supermarket, the one many expats go to, where there’s a parking lot, a large variety store, and you have to pack your own groceries and carry them to your car yourself – ideal, I thought, for using a non-plastic grocery bag – and also where there’s a security guard at the entrance.

Said security guard explained to me I couldn’t take my re-usable bag into the supermarket, because they have bags, you don’t need to bring your own (you silly Western girl, what kind of backwards nation to do you think this, of course we have plastic bags). I did intend next time to just sneak it in in my handbag, but as it turns out, I need every plastic bag I can get – because there’s no recycling and I don’t have a composter (unless you count Dog), so every single thing goes in the bin.


Lastly, this is a poster within the Dubai store (next to a stockpile of tuna and juice, mind you) – note the ‘No Danish’ scrawl on it, conveniently in English. I’m glad they didn’t stick with the boycott, because the Danish blue cheese is lovely.