Adventures of Mr.Behi

Tripoli to The Hague via Tehran

It is a couple of days now since we finally arrived to The Hague in The Netherlands after a short stay in Iran. We went through an overwhelming amount of work and extremely busy planning to get over the two movements back to back and it is not over at all. Almost one and a half years living in Tripoli is now only a memory with all the sweet and swore moments and we are very happy for the change we unleashed in our lives, both the time when we went there and now that we left it.

It was nice to get back to Tehran after a couple of months. The lively city as we always knew it, was and still is experiencing a new level of heat this summer. We were there to watch the pictures of the new Iranian missile test filling the front page in all the news stands. The nuclear issue, although brings new waves of fear and rays of hope every now and then, it feels as if it is becoming like so many slogans the system has been broadcasting for years, so much heard. Like the background noise of Tehran highways.

I had some fun this time with the Iranian customs: We had like 200 kgs of stuff that we shipped by air from Libya. One day I went with the shipping agent to clear the goods and bring them home. The airport customs was the circus of financial corruption and perhaps the most corruption I had ever seen all in one place. The shipping agent already knew his way and I could see him slipping money to: The front gate keeper, the second gate keeper, the third gate keeper, the worker who opened the box, the agent who checked the box, the lifter driver who lifted the box, the truck driver who carried the box, the shipment supervisor who certified the box, the agent who released the box and then again on the way out, the third gate keeper, the second gate keeper and the first gate keeper! 

Those of you who know me from this blog for a while must have read so many stories of mine applying for visas. As if there is no way for me to get one without a little clinch. Our visas to the Netherlands were already issued when we got to Iran but we had to wait for another two weeks to get the stickers. On the due date and after waiting in line for like 8 hours, I discovered that I was given a nine days visa instead of a 90 days! That resulted in another day of 8 hours waiting to get it corrected. It kept us in anxiety till the last working day before the flight.

Now we are in The Hague. I have already started in my new job and in the past couple of days, we had the paper work with the immigration. We are living in a temporary place in Scheveningen which is a very neat district near the beach. Our search for a place to rent has started but not with much luck yet. The city has so many good things to like. It is very well maintained with a great public transport working round the clock. Bikes are so widespread and we can not wait to get ours. Let's see first when we can get our place to say.

Big News

We are moving to The Netherlands. I am changing company after wonderful five years in Iran and Libya and joining another one in The Hague. I think this now explains my very silent one-day trip to the city a while ago. My visit to The Hague came after a few phone conversations with my future company. It all looked very well and made me curious to visit their office. I should admit that the whole idea of leaving my current employer seemed a little awkward to start with. It is certainly looks like deviation from well worn path by many bystanders. I have also been so soaked into the organizational culture and feel so much like a domestic residence with my current company...after all everyone is concerned of change. But it came to me very strongly, the conclusion that I am also very passionate in storming out of my comfort zone and perhaps it was the reason for all that happened to me in the past five years with good outcomes in my career. So the big decision was made!

From Amsterdam to The Hague, I had a nice train ride with my eyes open to see things. What I could see was a classic image of The Netherlands: Grasslands stretching to the Horizon with water canals dividing them, deep roaring gray clouds in the sky stitched to green of the flat land. I managed to see one windmill to complete the image. By the edge of a farm with its barnyard animals calmly grazing and the farmer with his boat by the canal. His shoes though, were not made of woods :)

I did not get time to discover The Hague but I indeed liked what I saw. With Mrs.Behi though, we have been digging the web for information and found out a lot about things in our future city. We know for example that buying two reliable bicycles will be among the first to be done :) This is the country of bikes!

Time is now very short for us to pack and go to Iran, get our visas to the Netherlands and fly over. A lot of logistics to take care of and lots of good byes to give.

Memories of India

Recently my boss made a plan for me to go to India for a week to teach a course that finally got canceled and didn't happen. However, it brought back all memories from fall of 2003 when I spent around six weeks in India for my first competency training. It was only a few month after joining my current company. India was an unforgettable adventure in all levels. I need to squeeze my brain and remember.

I was with two other colleagues from Iran joining a diversity of others, mostly from east Asia. Arriving to New Delhi, we had a taxi waiting for us from the Hotel that took us through the most bizarre street of the entire stay. It was a crowded mingle of all barnyard animals, people with all shapes and faces and simple shops selling nearly everything. The five star hotel that hosted us, was located in the south western skirt of the town, kind of in the middle of nothing. It was very comfortable but very far from anywhere, leaving us with few options for pass time after full days of class room sessions.
India is so famous for its contrasting scenes and the way rich and poor are mixed. Each morning, we had a taxi taking us to our company office, heading out from the fabulous hotel, we used to ride along this road towards the town, watching primitive rows of tents that were home to people and of course the famous man who was showering every morning in a water barrel by the road.... read the rest below...

Flight to The Flat Land

It has been utterly quiet in this blog but so much noise is going on in my life. It turned out that the noise  has made my mind so confusingly plain and distracted. I just crossed the first phase and will see how things will roll out.

During this period, I had an extremely short visit to the flat land! where windmills, canals and farms fill the horizon. I went to the Netherlands for something a little longer than a single day.

Flying from Tripoli to Amsterdam was not that long. I flew KLM and was impressed with the way that flight was handled. It was the first flight I have been to in which the crew exclusively and personally trained the passengers who were sitting by the emergency exits on how to operate the door rather than just referring them to the "safety sheet in front of you". They also handed an infant life jacket to anyone with a baby rather than just announcing "life jacket for infants are available in the plane" :) There was no TV but it was for sure better than Alitalia that shows fashion shows and cheap magic trick circuses on the TV over and over. No wonder they had to be sold off!
I had a Libyan couple beside me who were heading to the states for their studies. Soon after the flight, the guy started to act impatient...delayed smoke...he kept asking for glasses of water one after another till the stewardess finally guessed what was going on. He was not at all impressed when she told him that Amsterdam airport is a non-smoking airport....he was on to a couple of hours of transit before an even longer non-smoking flight to the US mid-west!

Barcelona, Top Deck Tour

The gap between my posts are getting bigger and bigger. Some days during the big rush of work I just open the blog page not to forget how it looks like and try to remember what happened in life that I did not write. Again it is Friday and a chance to blog.

The week in Barcelona had a fun start. We had some good suggestions from visitors of the blog for places to go but we literally had only less than a day to explore the city and during winter that means very little chance. We tried to explore the city on top of a double decker tour bus. Barcelona has three routes of tour buses, the blue and green covering the southern and the red covering the northern part of town. We had no idea so just by keeping the finger up in the air and looking at the number of stops in the blue route, it became the choice.

Barcelona was very nicely built and maintained. Alive and with refreshing scenes. Maybe it was only Sunday morning but the calm and comfort of Barcelona attracted our attention. The second interesting thing was the great initiative of bicycle rent and go stations and the city was filled with those. You could see many people on those red and white bikes picked up from stations and apparently they could put them back in any other stations when they wanted to drop them. We eagerly wanted to do the same only we later discovered that the rental was not by credit card but via special cards and through a registration in the city hall. Mrs.Behi loves bikes and she was really looking forward to this. I had to distract her after this not-so pleasant discovery with a scoop of her favorite chocolate ice cream:).

From the explanations of the audio tour it was easy to understand that Barcelona got her fresh new look from the Olympics, renovated neighborhoods and the area near the port only became popular after the  event when the new residential blocks of the Olympics were on for sale and only the rich could buy. It was Sunday and people were out for refreshing their body and mind in a mild winter day. Flag of Catalonia with red and yellow strips on air everywhere and Catalonians on the bike, on the run or just walking the dogs  left us with a a very harmonic impression of the city.   

I could take a couple of good photos but I am not putting them here for one reason. I am shutting down the photo albums in my typepad blog and try to avoid putting pictures in the text any more. Instead, I have opened a brand new photo sharing account and I am uploading selected pictures from all my travelings into it.

After that one day of fun with Mrs.Behi I spent all the rest of the week in meetings. We had this company-wide gathering and many people from Africa, Europe and former Soviet states attended. It was fun meeting all those people but not easy to bare those many hours sitting and thinking about business. Good news, I won a prize! it is called the President's Club and 22 of us from Europe and Africa got it in a nice ceremony on a rotting restaurant on top of the Olympic village. Our company president was calling each person to the front with a little introduction and humor with information from our employee page. Mine was: Behi like to learn from other cultures, he likes digital photography and the Mac computer and he wishes to put our company products on Mac :) It is a great prize to be won in what I do and I think I am supposed to be more motivated now in fact I should really think if I am enough. Some heavy thinking is ahead. All I know is that I shall not settle till I find something that I believe is great work!   

Smile! You are in Spain

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!!

Notes From Italy- Part III: Verona

Well, it has been in the corner of my outlook task list to catch up with the remainder notes of our Italy trip. Actually the best pieces are yet to be told about the great time we had last September, first in Portugal and then in Italy and I wrote till Sirmione, the medieval town built on a narrow peninsula south of lake Garda, Northern Italy...and now the next step...

The little hotel in Sirmione was a kind of place where every inch of land was used for something. The owner was a young man with an unusual appearance; a white pair of trousers with black strips like rock singers of 70s, high hill mini boots like a Spanish tap dancer and an earing like...(I should stop pretending that I know cloth :). His little management office was more like a football poster exhibit and you could tell by hearing the stadium crowed from his TV most of the time.

We left Sirmione in a very rainy morning while it was literally pouring rain. The plan was to pass through Verona and get to Venice by the evening. It was a perfect plan..I did my homework before and could locate the arena of Verona perfectly on Google Earth and the coordinates lead us straight to it where we had to park our car and walk the rest into the heart of Verona.

We were lucky that the rain had already left the place and there we were, walking on the wet stone pavement of a big square where the focus of attention was the Roman amphitheater or The Arena. A purple and milky limestone monument with walls as high as a three story building. We soon discovered that the place was still being used for plays when we noticed a sign in front of the ticket booth: "The play will be here tonight even if it rains". After walking the spiral of stone seats in the arena, we headed for the next big attraction we came for and that was the House of the Juliet, a presumed house that is thought to be the impression for creation of the "Romeo and Juliet Tragedy". It was in the corner of Piazza Erbe, a rectangle shaped square with high houses on sides covered with ancient paintings, mystical statues and beautiful flowers hanging from the open windows. The entrance of the Juliet house did not look so romantic, black bulky stones almost entirely painted by drawings, signatures and names of tourists mostly with an arrow piercing a heart! That lead to a small yard from which a little balcony was the focus of all the eyes. This is where the story of Romeo climbing the ladder and meeting Juliet part happened. There was a bronze statue of Juliet below the balcony where all the tourists were lining up to take their picture with. We had a better idea: we went to the gift shop and bought two Romeo and Juliet T-Shirts. A white and blue for me and a little all red one for Mrs. Behi. We put the shirts on and took a picture of ourselves with the balcony. So cool it was...just behind us was the poor statue and the line of tourists but luckily the angle and timing of the shot was so perfect as if we were alone in that little yard :)

We finished with Verona with lunch in front of the Arena, rested our feet and got ready for the next big destination...The famous lagoon where we met Venice....(To be continued)

Crawling Back Home

We are finally back home in Tripoli. It is funny that before going to visit Iran I was saying we were going back home and now that we are back in Tripoli, we are actually returning to our home again. This became a really long vacation that had its fun and miseries at the same time. The delay caused by the unprecedented new passport rule in Libya made us stuck in Iran waiting for a resolution. We managed to do a lot of extra things and stay more with our families. Finally the Iranian foreign ministry accepted to put the arabic translation stamped in our passports and we were free to go.

It did not end there...one rainy day very early in the morning we found ourselves not in the passenger list of our flight...tired with 100 Kgs of luggage 30 Kms from Tehran...I was red to my ears, nagging about the whole universe...no way...they could not find us in the list. Next day in the airline office in Tehran I found out that someone somehow made a mistake in a 12 digit sorting code of our reservation and typed 253-xxxxx instead of 235-xxx and that delayed our return for yet another 2 days.

It did not end there either...there is yet no sign of two pieces of our luggage...the GPS, some of the computer accessories, lots of cloth and most of the nuts and dried fruits. we still waiting for them. We do hope we get them back by the next flight (if not already sent to East Asia by another typo :)

I missed Tripoli...one thing I missed greatly was the calm and peace early mornings and around sunsets. In Tehran, the rush of days, high buildings and stretching mountains rarely let me watch a perfect sunset over the horizon. Tripoli is gifted for this one.   

Update: The bag is back and we are happy like this :)

Notes from Italy- Part II: Sirmione

Approximately 140 Km eastwards from Milan, we found ourselves by the gates of Sirmione (see the route). Only those who have a hotel booked inside the city are allowed to take the car inside the walls and the medieval flavour of the city takes you as soon as you pass the security and find yourself driving through a very narrow entrance, on a bridge, below stony guarding posts. Driving in Sirmione is slow and you sometimes feel guilty to force all those walking people to move around and give way in those tiny streets. The city is kept so original and is very clean despite all the tourist rush. We hit there Saturday night and the place was filled with Italians who were cooling off for the weekend.

Sirmione is a narrow peninsula stretching into lake Garda in northern Italy and it is the lake that gives an additional specialty to the city. From a few streets that pass through the city, you need a few minutes walk in any direction  to find yourself by the shores of the lake and all your way you see restaurants, art and souvenir shops, hotels and villas.

We booked a hotel near the tip of the peninsula in a less crowded area and on top of a hill with a very pleasant view of the lake.

One aspect of Italy which is very popular is indeed "food". We spent two nights in Sirmione and around and hit the ice cream stands a couple of times :)

The boat ride: It was after a light lunch plus a bowl of cool watermelon and fruit and we were sitting outside the walls of Sirmione looking at the lake that one of the small boat riders offered us a ride around the peninsula and we hopped in...the fun part started when he tried to guess our nationality....:"Israeli??"...the old man asked and laughed with us when we told him that we were Iranians. It was a nice boat ride especially because we could see an ancient Roman villa on the tip of the peninsula (great taste, hats off to the Romans) and could enter the castle from the lake side.

The next morning, the rain was pouring and we headed towards Verona and Venice.

Photos of Sirmione in Italy photo album (+,+,+,+,+,+,+)

Sirmione in Wiki

Notes from Italy- Part I: Milano

Now it is time to start writing the details of our adventures Italy. I just started a new photo album just for this trip and will add pictures as I write about places we visited. I am down to more than 800 pictures, each around 10 Mb in RAW format and have some editing to do...

45°38'0.01"N, 8°43'41.00"E: Milan Melpensa airport: We used Alitalia to come to Milan from Lisbon to start our trip in Italy. The flight was smooth and the Italians did a lot of clapping when we landed. We had a lot of fun listening to Italians talking the entire trip . It is a real amusing language with such a sharp signature that Italians will never be able to give up no matter what foreign language they speak.

After getting the luggage, we went to the car rental booth of the company that I reserved the car online with earlier. I also booked by phone, a car navigation system that appeared to be one of the best spendings of the entire trip. I was lucky that I had the Libyan driving license with me. I had left the Iranian driving license back home and they did not accept the international driving license. I did not get how they could not accept the international license in English but could accept the Libyan one which was in Arabic and they could not understand a word of it!

With the help of our navigation system, we could easily find our hotel Milan to spend the night. The main building of the hotel was such an old, humble building with pictures of Humphrey Bogart all over its walls. It was recently renovated and we got a room in the new part which was clean and comfortable. They gave us a free wireless network password which was not working but surprisingly, there was another network available in the neighborhood, free of charge and we enjoyed it! Dinner was quick in a small Turkish restaurant, the only one in the walking distance that was open that late.

Next day, before leaving Milan, we took an hour in one of the fashionable streets of Milan with famous brands shining behind windows (picture) with prices in three and four digits! Even many of those who came for shopping, obeyed a certain dress code despite us who were in our casual jeans and T-Shirts and tourist backpacks. :)

From Milan, we went to Sirmione, a medieval city @  45°29'46.57"N, 10°36'14.96"E