AOL (Africa OnLine)

Wow… it took me THIS long to get online over here! I’m going to post the following entry that I wrote a few days ago but havent’ been able to post online yet. I’ll post more later. Love you all! Tommy! (Begin older post) Greetings and salutations to the world once again! Yes I’m alive. I would like to apologize for not being online more my first week here but we do not have Internet access at the hotel, and I don’t have the time at work to even begin to make a detailed update of our adventures since we have arrived. I finally made the team take an evening off semi-early so I could have some time to write you all and tell you how things are going. I’d love to hear from all of you too if you have time. Please feel free to write me and drop me a line to let me know what’s going on. Truthfully, I miss home, but this country is extra ordinarily beautiful so there is still enough distraction to keep me from having the time to miss too many of the creature comforts I’m accustomed to. No computer games, no internet access, no English communication with other people, ( you should see me stutter in sign-language.. that’s really funny). To explain to you what it is like would not do it justice but I will try my best. It is 7:36 PM right now my time, so it’s noon where you all are. I am sitting on my balcony listening to the roar of the surf from the Mediterranean Sea beneath me. The sun is setting in the western sky directly ahead of me, casting a dreary pall over Africa. You can feel the culture slow down with the setting of the sun, as though the heartbeat of the city slows in the coming darkness. The roar of the surf is both a comforting familiar sound and, at the same time, startlingly new to me. The sea side is rocky reef, surrounded on sides by sandy shore. I hear the steady rtythm of the waves beating their song against the sand, but there is a percussive flavor to the sound occasionally when the tide crashes mid-wave against the reef line below me. Unlike the ocean where I grew up, there is no salt in the air, no tang of salt on the skin. When the wind blows from the north it carries a completely clean scent into my room, billowing open the curtains that I leave open all the time. When it blows from the south, I can hear but not feel the sand beating against objects far below on the coastline. It is quite an amazing way to begin and end each day. Now I guess it is fair to tell you the events that have transpired since our arrival here in Africa. Even here, you don’t hear many people say Libya, they refer to it as Africa instead. They are very proud of their unified culture but very interested to learn what other comforts they can find from Americans. The locals who are friendly to you are always asking you questions about how you do this and that in America. I guess I should begin with the flight from the States and move forward. You’ll have to forgive my occasional leaping ahead in the diatribe as I am having a difficult time deciding what thoughts to share. They are all running rampant in my head and trying to make it onto the keyboard in a mad jumble. The flight to NY city was as expected, uneventful. From take off to landing, I was pretty much occupied with my iPod and my audiobooks. I thank GOD for my iPod. I am quite sure I would have gone insane without it on this trip. Once in New York, we were blessed with 7 hours of layover in which to visit the city. However, apparently the New York Airport Tram system was too confusing for an entire team of network engineers who perform complex mapping equations for a living. After spending over an hour just trying to leave the airport itself, I made a judgment call that we should probably hang up the idea of seeing New York on our layover. If we cannot even effectively circumnavigate the airport subway, then the NY subway system was far beyond our abilities to tackle given such a short time frame. So, basically we stood around for 4 hours until the Alitalia airline ticket office opened up and then we stood around for 3 more hours until the plane took off. I took an hour of this time to lay down on the floor in the middle of the airport and go to sleep. Once we boarded the plane I gave up hope of a comfortable flight. All my flights prior to this one have been filled with courteous stewards and people who are generally happy to help make your flight a welcoming experience. Not so with the Italians. They pretty much didn’t care. Seeing your face just means that they have to turn around and fly back 15 more hours before they get to go home. The food was horrible, the service was horrible and the general comfort was found lacking. Sitting in a tight confined chair for 15 hours is by far enough reason for some people not to want to make an international flight. Italy: We arrived at 8:12 AM local Italian time ( 2 AM your time) in Milan, an international hub for travelers going in and out of Italy. Security here was fairly tight and we had to be scanned again after coming off the plane, even though everyone knows we were scanned before we got ON the plane in the first place. At this point Desmond and I have been going for 15 hours with no cigarettes and we are down to 3 matches between the two of us. We spent some time traversing the duty-free shops and made a decision to sample some local Italian cuisine (Pizza!) The pizza was excellent, even in the airport. It tastes nothing like any pizza you will ever find in the US. From this point we went to the gate to await our flight south across the Mediterranean into Tripoli. Libya: What can I say about landing in Libya… wow… I was here for 30 seconds and was already in love with this country. My blood ran cold at the first “no-smoking” sign I saw directly after disembarking the plane but I was immediately confused by the fact that I could most assuredly smell cigarette smoke in the air. For those of you who don’t smoke, a smoker who has not had a cigarette in almost a full day is extremely sensitive to the smell of cigarette smoke. It’s like a homing beacon for us. As I looked around, everyone was smoking. Everywhere. No. Really. Everywhere! Something you have to understand about African architecture is relevant here. There is no wood. Almost nothing here is constructed with wood. Think about it for a moment; they live on the edge of the worlds largest desert. Hardwood trees are not prominent here. Even the palms and other trees you see here don’t grow natively. They are all flown in and planted in the sand. Since that is the case, everything is concrete. Specifically, everything is marble. And I’m not referring to marble tiles you can see in America. This entire country is still standing today, throughout hundreds and hundreds of years of habitation because everything is solid sheet-marble. The masons here even use marble for their decorating and accents. Anyway, I digress. The point was, that cigarette butts can’t possibly stain marble floors because they don’t get hot enough to damage the floor, so people over here just throw cigarette butts into the middle of the floor in all the buildings and the cleaning staff cleans them up. Since their leader is a smoker, it’s an embraced tradition over here. Ok.. on to the next part of the story. Our drive to the hotel was one of rapt amusement and downright fear for our lives. In case you ever want to drive over here, I’ll warn you in advance: there are no speed limits here. Anywhere! Ever! Additionally there are no street signs at all. Apparently, after the Reagan administration used military intelligence to map out the locations of important buildings by street designation, their president had a brilliant idea. He figured that Americans can’t navigate without signs to guide them to unfamiliar places, so….. he had them all removed. There are no signs here directing you to anything or anywhere. Entire cities are comprised of roads that no one except the locals can navigate. This has bred a new kind of taxi service. Not only can you rent a car here, but you rent the driver as part of the package. They know that there’s no way you can possibly find your way around your self so they rent you a driver to take you to whatever you want to see. I am starting to feel the fatigue from the efforts of the day so I am going to make some notes here about things I have yet to tell you about and I’ll detail them in later posts on the blog: Things to write about: Eating Dog Burger Coffee Dark Oranges (yeah, this one is funny) Dirt Biking in the desert. Italian Dining in Africa No Ice Ok. I am going to go for now, but I hope to hear from you all very very soon. My love to all of you!