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Text of the page (random words):
t as being rather like alice s wonderland i hope my stories will catch some of the unique flavour of the country and its people about me i went to libya in 1973 to direct the international house language school in tripoli i lived there with my first wife sue until 1977 our daughter emma was born in tripoli in 1975 blog archive 2015 4 april 4 flying with friends different country different customs keep right on to the end of the road with a little help 2013 25 august 4 july 9 april 1 march 5 february 4 january 2 2010 8 february 2 january 6 2009 35 december 6 november 4 october 8 september 17 monday april 13 2015 flying with friends libyan arab airlines laa was not the best airline in the world but it was a reasonably safe and effective one however actually getting onto its planes was always a hassle no matter how far in advance you had booked you would usually arrive at the check in desk only to be told that the flight was already full the root of the problem was not inefficiency but rather the importance that libyans placed on friends and family foreigners would book their seats weeks in advance but then the laa reservation clerks would be approached by colleagues or other airport workers needing to book a seat for their brother or their cousin or a friend of their cousin or someone who said he was a friend of a friend of another of their cousins since it would have been unthinkable to refuse such a request from a fellow libyan the clerks would simply add the names concerned to the top of the passenger list so each flight would be grossly overbooked i encountered this problem several times when i had arranged to fly out of libya on laa luckily i was in a better position than most other non libyans who had booked seats our school provided english courses to many laa employees and the airline s general manager georges h was himself one of our students although i never asked any favors of georges i wasn t above using his name if necessary this always made for an interesting and enjoyable interaction at the check in desk me hello here s my ticket i m on the 1 00 pm flight to london clerk i m sorry but the flight is full you must wait for another flight me can you check the list please i m sure i m on it the clerk would pretend to check clerk i m sorry you are not on the list me can you check it again please the clerk would pretend to check once more clerk no you are not on the list me that s very strange i made the booking through georges h your manager he s a friend of mine and a student at my school clerk oh you know mr george let me check again yes there you are i didn t notice before because your name is at the top of the list posted by jeff mohamed at 6 38 am no comments tuesday april 7 2015 different country different customs there were a lot of things you couldn t buy in libya sometimes this was because the items were banned alcohol fell under the heading of banned goods as did bacon and all other pork products also banned were any magazines or books that included photos of women with bare arms or legs or wearing clothes with low necklines some other items weren t banned but were simply unavailable avocados for example weren t grown there or imported and individuals were forbidden from bringing them or other fresh fruit or vegetables into the country inevitably the unavailability of these items meant that expatriates living in libya spent a lot of time and effort trying to smuggle them into the country every time a flight arrived at tripoli from a western country several of the passengers would try to sneak in some forbidden goods usually including a bottle or two of whisky the libyan customs officers were wise to the situation they would search every passenger s luggage with great care and they would confiscate any illegal items that they found while you were waiting in line to go through customs you would hear and see different reactions from the customs officers depending on which items they found in people s luggage the discovery of fresh fruit or vegetables would bring merely disapproving looks and comments the discovery of a bottle of johnny walker black label or a copy of cosmopolitan would be celebrated with shouts of glee sometimes the officers who found whisky would disappear into a back office with the whisky and reappear a few minutes later looking even more gleeful the discovery of bacon would generally elicit a more hostile reaction i have even seen customs officers who found packets of bacon in a suitcase throw the packets to the ground and literally jump up and down on them all the while shouting abuse at the offending traveler i myself never tried to smuggle alcohol into libya as the director of a school i knew that being caught smuggling alcohol would have reflected badly on the school and might even have resulted in its closure however i missed avocados bacon and ham so much that i spent time developing a technique for getting them through customs i would travel with the forbidden food in two plastic shopping bags together with a bottle of whisky when i reached the customs desk at tripoli airport i would put the shopping bags on the counter open them to show the contents and hand over the bottle i would say i realized the goods were banned and would apologize profusely and abjectly for having brought them with me the reaction was always the same the officer would immediately confiscate the whisky and put the bottle under the counter he would then give me a stern lecture about the ban on alcohol after that he would hand me the two bags of banned foods and tell me to go through i guess this shows that honesty really is the best policy posted by jeff mohamed at 9 41 am no comments labels customs keep right on to the end of the road driving in libya was always interesting and often challenging one reason for this was that libyans frequently ignored driving laws and rules so they would stop without warning in the middle of the road to greet a friend who was walking on the verge or who was driving in the opposite direction they would also do irritating things like driving the wrong way down one way streets however many of the roads were at least as much of a problem as the drivers let me give an example marabouts are muslim holy men and are greatly venerated it has become customary to bury them in a square stone or brick tomb situated at the exact spot where they passed away these tombs can never be moved unfortunately a surprising number of marabouts happen to have died right in the path of modern roads so what you are probably thinking all you have to do is bypass each tomb by routing the road around it this would be the logical solution but it was one that was never employed in libya instead a modern well surfaced road would be built to within maybe 20 30 yards of a marabout s tomb then the road would simply stop to start again 20 30 yards on the other side of the tomb so you would be hurtling along on a nice fast road when suddenly and without any warning you were driving on dirt and heading straight for a rather solid looking tomb it wasn t normally a major problem during the day but it could certainly give you a very nasty fright if you were driving at night talking of nasty shocks at night reminds me of something that happened on one of our trips to the oasis town of ghadames we started off from tripoli rather later than usual and so we were still maybe 50 miles from the oasis when night fell and we ran into a rainstorm a huge rainstorm the rain was absolutely pelting down and the wipers on my volkswagen beetle couldn t cope although i was only able to catch occasional glimpses of the road through the rain and darkness i knew it ran as straight as a die for miles and so i kept on driving however we eventually reached a place where i couldn t see any sign of the road at all i stopped i got out and walked ahead of the car to check that we were still on the road we were but the road only extended perhaps five yards in front of the car before it came to a ragged edge overlooking a vertical fall it seemed the storm had totally washed away the bridge over a wadi river bed if i d kept driving for just a few more seconds we would have plunged into the wadi and been swept away by what was now a raging river as it was we had no choice but to turn around and head back home that isn t the end of the story though back in tripoli i told a libyan friend from ghadames what had happened i mentioned that i wished we had started the trip a few hours earlier because then we would have crossed the bridge well before it was destroyed by the storm oh no he laughed you would have had the same problem that bridge was washed away two months ago i didn t ask him why nobody had thought of putting up barriers or signs to warn drivers using that road i d been in libya long enough to know not to ask stupid questions like that posted by jeff mohamed at 6 00 am no comments labels roads wednesday april 1 2015 with a little help as the director of a private language school in libya i always felt bad that the pay and benefits i could offer our teachers were nothing like as good as those enjoyed by the much less effective teachers employed at the language school run by the oil companies however there was one area in which i took great pride my ability to arrange exit visas for those of our teachers who wanted to leave the country when we had 3 day weekends the oil company school s teachers had as many 3 day weekends as ours had but their administration could never arrange exit visas for such short breaks time after time our teachers would get to spend a long weekend in malta or tunisia while their oil company school counterparts were unable to leave libya but at one point in my third year it looked like this one advantage was about to disappear a 3 day weekend was on the horizon and three of our teachers wanted to spend it in malta they were fairly new arrivals and they were all very excited at the prospect of hitting the italian restaurants of malta and shopping at the marks and spencer store there in the two weeks before the break all these three teachers could talk about was malta malta and more malta once i had completed all the necessary paperwork mansour the school s fixer took the exit visa applications to the immigration office the applications were rejected mansour didn t know why the following day i sent him back to try again the papers were rejected the next day i sent him there once more this time accompanied by the school secretary ali the papers were rejected neither mansour nor ali could tell me why so the following day which was just one day before the teachers were due to fly to malta i sent mansour back to immigration but this time i went with him mansour and i got to the immigration office at 7 00 a m and we spent the rest of the morning either waiting in lines or being sent from office to office nobody could tell us exactly what was wrong with the applications but every official we spoke with agreed that they could not be approved by noon we had spoken to every immigration officer that we could find and we had to admit defeat we walked out into the parking lot mansour was close to tears i was about as angry and frustrated as i d ever been mainly because i was dreading having to tell the teachers that their malta trip was off suddenly mansour grabbed my arm and dragged me across the parking lot towards a libyan army officer who was just getting out of a car abubakr abubakr he shouted the officer turned and greeted mansour warmly he was abubakr younis the head of the libyan army and one of the twelve young officers who had mounted the libyan revolution as luck would have it he was also an ex student of our school mansour introduced me and then proceeded to explain the problem i crossed my fingers give me the passports and come with me abubakr said and led us into the immigration office i was expecting some kind of discussion between him us and the immigration officials there was no discussion abubakr just walked up to the main counter leaned over and snatched an ink stamp from the official behind the counter he opened each passport and stamped it then he threw the stamp down on the counter gave me the passports shook hands with both of us and walked away mansour was so proud i thought he was going to burst abubakr my friend he told me he kept on repeating it all the way to the school of course i didn t mention any of this to the three teachers as far as they were knew the whole process had been routine they had asked for exit visas and mansour had popped down to the immigration office and picked them up posted by jeff mohamed at 8 07 am no comments monday august 19 2013 turning heads when sue and i got to beirut in 1970 i found it very irritating how people in the street would stop and stare at sue okay so she was blonde and it was the era of miniskirts but that still didn t justify the way pedestrians cars and even buses would stop when we walked down hamra street one day i complained about this to the owner of the school where we worked he laughed they aren t looking at sue he said they re looking at you me why me because they ve never seen a man with long hair before the n ext time sue and i walked down the street i looked more carefully at people s reactions our employer was right everyone was staring at me me in 1970 p s a few weeks after this episode the barbers guild of lebanon passed a resolution condemning long hair on men the resolution further stated that any men with long hair who came to their shops would have their heads shaved i take some pride in thinking that i may have contributed to the barbers resolution posted by jeff mohamed at 7 00 am no comments eating disorders eating with libyans was normally an informal affair everyone would sit or lie on the floor around a large communal bowl of food you would sometimes use a spoon but often you would just pick up pieces of the food using pieces of bread or just your fingers unfortunately this relaxed style of eating didn t always go down well when translated to other cultures my daughter emma used to run into problems with this she spent the first five years of her life in libya and she spent much of that time with a libyan family that we knew well so she learned to eat the way libyans ate at home this caused problems whenever she went back to the uk where she would tuck into a plate of spaghetti or even a bowl of ice cream using only her fingers i didn t see anything wrong with this but her grandma was absolutely horrified by it i ran into similar problems when i travelled from libya to visit an international house school in cairo i was invited as guest of honour to a party at the home of one of the school s receptionists my first mistake was deciding to sit on the floor when i saw there weren t enough chairs for everyone the hostess said this isn t libya and brought me a chair then came the food this consisted of tiny 1 5 inches across pizzas ...