Adventures of Mr.Behi

Blair in our neighborhood

British prime minister is touring Africa before leaving his office and we got a glimpse of his visit to Tripoli. His visit brought a very tight security to the city. Our backyard parking area is cleared by the police and there were checkpoints all around our street. I should have said first that our apartment is really close to the residence of British ambassador to Libya (I should take the chance and thank the ambassador for the good view that we enjoy everyday and for the beautiful sound of birds nesting in the tall trees of his garden :)

We managed to also encounter their convoy when police stopped the traffic for them to pass (everyone stopped: cars + pedestrians + little boys with their bicycles for 15 minutes anticipating the convoy).

You could see UK and Libyan flags in many places. Plain green flag of Libya and flag of the UK with that many lines crossing in it. I am sure Britons will as well make so many lines in the plain, untouched area of Libyan deserts in search of oil in years to come. It was announced that BP is back after 30 years and Shell is here already for a year, busy with exploration. I know  that British Gas is also here.

US-Iran positive blaming

Link from the BBC
Well, this is supposed to be so significant that US and Iran are talking! But is it so? They did so much yoohoo and woohoo about this talks to finally sit face to face and do this:

US: Stable Iraq is our interest
Iran: Stable Iraq is our very interest
US: We warn you...you are sending arms, you are making Iraq unstable
Iran: We warn you...get out of here..you are making Iraq unstable

after the meeting:

US: we are positive for future
Iran: There was a positive fruit in the talks

They probably had a chit chat. US is upset but as always, says there is a positive future (means current sucks) and by the way, what is "a positive fruit"? 

My interesting clients

Oil business is booming in Libya and you see oil companies pouring in from all corners of the world for acquiring exploration licenses in Libya. Almost all of these companies are considered potential or current customers for the services that my employer offers. My job is show certain innovative technologies to these companies through demonstrations, pilot projects, technical workshops, presentations etc.

The fabulous things about what I do is that I have the chance to see how different people/companies express their needs/concerns and it is more interesting to see how difference in cultural background influences the way they perceive you and your offer. I do not want to judge people here, not at all. Nor I am trying to see which approach is better or worse.

The other day, I had a meeting with a Norwegian manager. He asked us to go to his office, 10:00 a.m sharp to discuss a technical training we offered for his organization. Normally we would start explaining our offer in details to encourage the purchase. This guy know exactly what he wanted, what he did not want, what was enough and what was extra. He was very content about the timing for the delivery of the service, people who need to attend in training and what he wanted from us. It was the most precise and up to the point meeting in many months.

I recently had a very successful pilot project with a group  of Italian experts that resulted in a new sales after a week. I found them very emotional and at the same time very friendly. I walked into their office one day and soon enough, the talks diverted to cool things about the city, where to go and see while in Italy etc. Rather than telling me what they needed, they waited to see what I had to offer and were intrigued by any new thing they were seeing. The cool part was joining them around their coffee machine.  One of them told me that in his home city alone, there are 6 different version of coffee specific to the district and he explained how Italians are in favor of experimenting new things and how much they dislike branding and standardization for their food items. Once after lunch when I was with them in the elevator, listening to them talking in Italian, one of them turned to me and said: "Don't worry we are not fighting" :)

Camera Position

I have been enjoying a great photography podcast since last week. Jeff Curto is teaching photography in Illinois (see his website) and is running a very interesting podcast called Camera Position on creative side of photography. Each episode contains one or more of his own or someone else's photographs and he describes in a very interesting way, the components and of the picture, the ideas behind it and details on importance of camera position. Not at all about photography jargon, Camera Position is about creativity, so genuinely about art and human inputs to the photographic experience. I have downloaded all of the episodes and am listening to them one by one.

Camera Position website
Subscribe with iTunes
Subscribe to the feed

Where is MY dignity?!

From Mrs.Behi: It’s been more than one month that I am here in Tripoli, a city with a beautiful side of the sea, the ancient Roman ruins that while walking in its area I was trying to imagine the time of the Roman Empire here, the buildings with the Islamic architecture which you can still see the Italian colony’s traces in some of its areas…

Here in Libya I haven’t seen a couple walking in the street hand in hand. It seems to me as if taking this simple act of closeness feels very strange to them! And also you can rarely see any woman at night in restaurants with their friends or families, actually the atmosphere is kind of closed compared to Iran, but there are many nice things to do and to enjoy here, as I can say I loved living here so far.

Any way, these days I read in the news and some Persian blogs about this latest authority’s pressure on Iranian women’s Hijabs. Head-scarf has always been a sensitive topic in Iran and has been considered as a symbol of spirituality for Iranian women but in my opinion this does not really worth this much concern while there are tons of much more important things to think for a person in order to keep her spirituality alive and be a GOOD person instead of only focusing on covering some HAIRS!

… Here in Tripoli, there is no strict or official rule for this subject, so they are free to choose and wear whatever they want, but as I’ve been seeing, the majority of women apply Hijab in a way that they cover all of their hair but you can see various kinds of dress and all of them have one thing in common which is, you don't see any part of their bodies being revealed. They are covering themselves exactly according to Ghoran’s words but many of them don’t have any problem with wearing the very tight dresses! I guess it’s because there was no specific mention in the holy book about this part! 

Apparently,there is no distinction line or hard feelings between the group who apply it and the people who don’t … and see what is happening in Iran, there is a strict governmental rule for this subject, no matter what do you really believe, You have to obey it because you live in an Islamic country with so many valuable Islamic rules! You always can see women who are trying to escape from this rule by not applying it in a perfect way"according to the Islamic government", and you can always feel the cold invisible wall between those women who really like to apply it and the ones who don’t, you can see the ridicules categorization that always is taking place from the majority of people like:
1.You cannot be a spiritual person while you are not covering your hair, they just don’t come together, so you cannot be a part of my party.
2. You cannot be an open-minded person while you’re applying Hijab, so you cannot be a part of my party.

So, you cannot be accepted as who you really are and in one word you cannot be just YOU…

One of the roads to Rome

It was once said that all the roads end to Rome. This can still be considered correct for Tripoli because either of western or eastern roads can take you to famous Roman archaeological sites in Libya. Last weekend, we went to the small one in the west,  the Roman city of Sebratah.

I had to be careful not to loose my way so before going, I gave the coordinates of the place and important turning points of the route to the GPS. Google Earth can read from Garmin GPS(s) but can not write back to them so I had to manually read the coordinates from Google Earth screen and enter them in the device.

Sebratah is almost 80 Kms west of Tripoli. The road is fine if you stay alert of those drivers who flip your side mirror a little bit when they take over you! we got there almost around lunch time. See our route to Sebratah and our walk within it in Google Earth. You will see places where I moved back and forth with my GPS hanging from my belt and the result is interesting. See our route in GoogleEarth

Sebratah is a city that has footprints of many kingdoms but for a normal visitor, the dominance of Roman architecture is obvious. Our first stop was the beautiful theater with circling rounds of seats in front of the well preserved stage, surrounded by marble pillars and high walls (see pictures 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)
Along the costs, we could see remains of what once was sea side bathing room. Nice and creative tile works very well preserved after this many years made by small, coloured pebbles (see pictures 7, 8)
Not so many statues in here,probably many of them taken to museums if not else (I pictured these two 9, 10) paved streets of Sebratah (11) took us finally to seashore where we got the chance to out our feet inside the cool water and let the blue sea to absorb some of the heat (12)

Read more about Sebratah

A Delay and So Long (ADSL)

After so many weeks of waiting, our ADSL connection is up and running now and we can start blogging again. We have been very busy since last post...almost not felt how those days passed..no chance to blog during office hours and we were without connection at home.I still could not configure the wireless ADSL modem so Mrs.Behi is connected to the LAN port of the normal modem and is sharing her connection through her wireless port so I can get online...viva DSL...and we are in love with our Mac laptops...I also got a new Garmin GPSMAP with all the car accessories and am navigating and mapping tripoli with it on GoogleEarth...this is so cool...will write about it soon