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We arrived late last night here in Barcelona for a week long meeting. Today is the only free day and we are hopeful to be able to use it for the best and see some interesting stuff in the city :)
The Hotel we are staying has an extremely overprices internet service charge. If we get connection for the two of us for seven days it will cost like getting the room for an extra night!!
The past week was enormously crowded. I had to travel to two cities far from Tripoli and right after that, had a surprise training course to teach for which I had to study all night long to prepare for the days.
Benghazi is the second biggest city in Libya, somehow the rival for Tripoli. The two cities are right on the two corners of the coastal saddle where Libya meets the Mediterranean sea, more than a thousand Kms away from each other, almost an hour by air. Boraq air is apparently the best airline to take you there and I would say it was a convenient flight.
The trip plan was to stay one day in Benghazi and then ride to Bregha the next day. Benghazi left a better first impression on me compared to Tripoli. The structure and design of the city felt more natural and harmonized at least in the part of town that I passed through. This city is the fist stop for those tourists who want to go for the sightseeings of Libyan east end, the green mountain and the Greek ruins. I was told that the best season would be the start of spring so we will wait till then.
The next day, we departed from Benghazi very early in the morning, well before sunset. Our carrier was a mini van and we were four in it heading south to south west into the desert toward an industrial area and port camp of Bragha. It was familiar to me to ride in desert roads as I had done so many times but this time, I was there to watch a sensational down and dusk in the desert in my round trip (more below)
I hope like me, you have found or will find someone in your life to discover it with. Some one so close that you forget the time prior than the moment you first met. Someone with the same vision in life as yours and a way of picturing it that is out of your reach. Someone with whom you remember the places you have been when you play the music you heard there...especially if you are like me who does not have this ability. Someone with whom you revisit the past, watch the present and grow old in future. I hope like me, you have someone like Mrs.Behi. she is just about to enter a new decade of her life and while the only thing I can think of is where we will be by the dawn of the next decade for me, I am joyfully being touched by what Mrs.Behi imaged in her birthday. Happy birthday love...
CNN: Iranian boats 'harass' US. Navy
You can find this term in the manual of all human resource offices in todays business corporates. The word Harassment is so exclusively replaced by its most risky type (you can guess which). Almost in all grave cases of harassments of this kind, someone gets fired and will get an open blame. When the issue gets escalated to top management and the HR department, the harasser tries to show innocence and pretend that the action was all normal and not a big deal. However, he (normally the "he" end of the harassment case) leaves with his office box with all the eyes and fingers following him to the exit door.
Looking at the most recent harassment case between US navy ships and Iranian revolutionary Guard boats, it is firstly surprising to see the USS warships feel harassed by a few speed boats. If I am a little fish, I would consider even the presence of a huge shark as nothing but harassment :)
However, like the office example, the alleged harasser is making up contradicting stories. So far reading Iranian news websites, I noticed different accounts of this story from complete denial, story about invading US ships, and that the whole thing was a questioning and nothing else.The surprise is that normally these things make big news bombs inside the country and the government uses such incidents as political fuel. Hearing the foreign office calling this "not an important matter" is indeed a new change in the workflow. All this happening after recent eyebrow rising speech by Iranian supreme leader that "Talk with the US could happen" puzzles the mind. This is the leader who used to condemn US three times in every two sentence of such former speeches. Maybe after his recent speech he suddenly realized that he had gone too far and wanted to show the Americans that it is too soon to be very happy.
I am happy at least that this time, the harasser is not fired (at). I am sure just looking at an up to teeth armed USS ship is by itself a harassment to the peace of mind of any coast guard boat! but provoking a bull with twisted horns is not wise even if the provoker is as little as a small red handkerchief.
We still remember July 3, 1988 when a civilian Iran Air plane was shut down by a US warship in the same area. The excuse was that the US warship was in such hide and seek with IRGC boats and considered the approaching Airbus as an F-14 (a hard to buy story). Link: Wiki page of the incident
In Tehran, it has been a nice snow I look at the pictures on the internet and miss it. Here we are, year 2008, already one week passed and I was busy making business plans and forceasts at work -still am- but something down here is telling me that this year will be a year of swift changes for me (tell me which one of the recent years was not). Anyway, our little family has also started 2008 with resolutions and setting objectives and stuff. In the past week, I listened again to Steve Jobs commencement address to Stanford and even shared it to people in my office. I can listen to him over and over and it always feel like the first time. I think this was the greatest set of lessons I received in the year 2007. I was surprised because from almost 40 people that I sent the link to, only one actually replied and said "wow, great listen", two others saw me in the corridor saying hey Behi thanks for the file...cool.
Started 2008 with a new gadget, the 16GB ipod Touch which is just an adorable, slim pack of cool features. Also upgraded the Mac OS of my laptop to Leopard...the coolest ever operating system I would say.
Anyway, I have already started initiating some leads for a change in life..if the leads go somewhere then we will go with it...if not, I will be generating leads for my current company all year long here.
We are already thinking of some traveling. A business trip is coming up (still visa pending) and also a course may come up (boss permission pending). Have a happy 2008.
