One year anniversary

One year anniversary

It’s been just over a year since we came to Tripoli, so this post is a photo-less session devoted to a few of the things that have changed since then.

Let’s see…there’s a couple of Egyptian fast food chains now, but no McDonalds (yet). Coke’s shown up, in the stores and in actual vending machines – it was rare when I got here (rumour: not allowed in because of Coke factory in Israel, conveniently circumvented due to Coke factory in Tunisia) and still is in restaurants, where Pepsi holds sway. Coke, by the way, translates nicely into Arabic, as this other blog agrees. On a ‘Big Two’ fight I actually care about: Mastercard ATMs have proliferated even down to our end of town, while Visa needs to Lift Its Game and supply more than the two constantly-out-of-order ATMs it currently has in-country.

The roads are busier than ever. We saw our chummy plumber from a year ago today; he was driving a brand-new car and so are a lot of people. Car dealerships have popped up all along Gargaresh, and, as one expat put it, ‘that bloody woman driver in that bloody yellow car’ is all over the place ie every day, I see women learning to drive in yellow learner cars, and they’re braver than I am to get behind the wheel for the first time ever in this place – I only hope their instructors are teaching them the organic rules, not the real ones if they even exist (Men, by the way, don’t have to pass any kind of driving test to prove they’re roadworthy, which explains a lot).

One unwelcome addition to the roads is four-wheel-drives, which recently became legal and have naturally become the car of choice for the privileged little brats. I’ve even seen a Hummer, those 4WD tanks that are twice as big as what Australians consider a 4WD. But that was a nice Schadenfreude feeling as we gradually left it behind completely gridlocked in traffic along Garagaresh, because here’s a clue for drivers here: small gaps require small cars.

Can’t park on Green Square anymore, and there’s even been photo and art exhibitions held on the previous parking lot. Meanwhile, bus stops have shown up…unused as far as I can tell except for parking in front of and sleeping on. The buses (a shared-taxi kind of system) remain the bane of other cars with their erratic, aggressive driving and the authorities change their mind regularly about where the buses get to pull over on the coastal road to the office.

Advertising became legal quite a few years ago, and the airport has gradually got a few billboards up, but billboards in general have remained rare, and people on billboards rarer still. Alcohol, still not legal. Lots of new restaurants, standards still low (even the ones that open well gradually decline in quality). I’ve mentioned the new clothing stores before. New supermarkets are opening, but there’s still just the one large one; range of products still limited but expanding. There’s a brand new multi-storey building coming up on the large Souk Thalat roundabout, rumoured to be a new mega-giant-super-market, we’ll see if it ever gets finished (hint to the builders: surely you have room for a multi-screen cinema in there…).

Lots more tourists in the medina and prices rising accordingly. Less rubbish on the roads…could be I just don’t notice it anymore. We haven’t lost power for ages, even during a massive thunderstorm last night (weather otherwise as pleasant a spring as could be wished for), so that bodes well for infrastructure upgrades.

Next week: a little about our holiday in Austria and Germany.