Jim Smith

I was there in 78-81 so my info a bit out of date!!

However hope you get your entry visa soon.

Once you get your residence visa then you have (or had ) the pleasure of having to get an exit/re-entry visa if you want to go on holiday. Seemed to have varying number of stamps you needed related to your nationality. A Bulgarian nurse friend had 31 stamps on her paper before she could submit it!

Sure things have come on in leaps and bounds since then!!

We enjoyed 3 years in Tripoli, but that was enough!

Also in those days you could only remit 90% of your salary home if you were provided with housing!! It was bloody hard to spend the other 10% as nothing to buy, even went a month with no meat available!

Saludos.

Amazing Grace

Yes it was in more ways than one, we were there in 2005-06 and having been expats for over 30 years I have never had an experience like it. Both of us felt as if we were being watched all the time. Before I got there my husband rang me to find out about satellite telephones as the networks were not the best in the world. A couple of days later he was called into his colleague's office and told to shut the door and he told my husband that satellite phones were illegal. How would he have known that, the call had been made away from work and outside working hours. Another incident was an innocent joke about the locals in a car going to work and the same thing, called into the office and told to be discreet about who he made jokes about............BIG BROTHER or what. Cherry on the cake I had an accident and broke my leg badly, the care was fine but the day before we flew home for Christmas we were broken into, fortunately my screams scared him off but he left a big calling card of a large broken lock on the floor and a very large crow bar. I hadnt been seen to be seen since I broke my leg and they had been watching our apartment building and knew when my husband and his colleague left for work each day. It took me a very long time to get it in my head that where we are based now is NOT Tripoli, Libya although lots of sand.

It could be a very beautiful place, Leptis Magna is stunning and the Meditteranean sea is beautiful but watch out for the sewage.

As I said before and I really mean it good luck on your new job, I wish you all the best and maybe a guy on their own might not be so bad but having lived in lots of restricted places for women including Saudi Arabia I would go back to Saudi tomorrow but never again to Libya.


PS. Just another little snippet, a certain gentleman if that is the correct description was coming to town for the day to present certificates at the university and they shut down all the telephone networks until he had left again back to his big house....go figure