by Kitkat Tue 07 Jun 2011, 11:27
krisisle wrote:You are so lucky living in London KK. You have just about every shop/culture/ingredients etc. Whereas most of us have just Tesc0s etc.
I know for a fact I couldn't find those ice creams or anything like it here in Worcester.
Oh, I don't know about that, krisisle. Tesco, Asda etc nowadays sell just about everything you can think of. I normally do all my shopping in the supermarket anyway.
When I was living in Libya, there was one shop in the compound where I lived. Normally that shop had nothing (and I mean
nothing) in there but rows and rows of empty shelves. With the sanctions at that time, most essentials like sugar, etc, were rationed anyway. Sugar came in huge cones (no packaged, refined stuff) you had to break off bits as and when you needed it with a hammer or whatever utensal was handy, and when it was available (as with other things) it was for a very short time indeed. The word would go round - there's SUGAR in the shop ... and literally every shelf would be filled with these sugar cones. By the end of the day, after the rush for this precious commodity (sugar was used in great quantities amongst the expats for wine-making ... everyone had their own wine-making kits, bought from Boots when home on leave. Boots were the best because they came with various sachets in a box which you could separate and pack in different places in your suitcase (you got rid of the box as the sachets had no writing on them) so the customs and various other checkpoints along the way would not know that you had the makings of shock! horror! alcoholic beverages in your luggage) - then the shelves would be empty again. Another day the news would be Tins of tuna in the shop. Same thing ... shelves and shelves of tuna etc.
The only thing that was guaranteed as a daily item was bread, which was freshly made in the various little bread making places in the town. There was also one of these places a bit of a walk up the road outside our compound. The locals would bring their ingredients to these places and bake the bread themselves, queuing up to use the one stone oven that was there for that purpose.
Every morning around 10 o'clock a little van would deliver these freshly baked little baguettes to the shop in our compound. Of course we wouldn't normally be there at that time during the week, we would be at work. The company minibus used to come every morning at 7 and stop outside the shop to pick up the expats living in the compound to take us to work. (a few long-term expats had their own cars and would drive the 30-40 mins or so journey into work - but driving in Libya has got to be the worst possible experience of anywhere in the whole world! - to pass a driving test there you simply had to pass an eyesight test) There were also a few Italian expats working for that company, but they lived in a different compound about a few miles down the road, so they would be picked up first and already in the minibus. The Italians always sat at the front and the British (and Irish - me!) hogged the back end. (It was a "them and us" sort of situation). Usually the driver would have Arabic music playing on the radio on the journey into work, but quite often you would get Gadaffi come on preaching to the people. On these occasions the driver would turn the radio up to full blast. It was quite intimidating and a little scary ... as even though these rantings were in Arabic, the words often repeated were FERANSA! BRITANNIA and AMEREEEEEEEEECA (the 3 countries who had imposed the sanctions on Libya at the time) and you could really feel the hatred in the tone. Other than that the daily drive into work was usually quite an enjoyable one - the road for the most part was all along the coast, but there was one particularly bendy area which was pretty daunting on days when the sea was rough. These huge waves would crash across the road at this particular point. You honestly never really knew for sure that you would arrive safely into the office. One morning the minibus didn't arrive at our pick-up point. We found out later that our minibus had been found abandoned by the side of a desert road - where the driver had been hijacked at gunpoint and made to drive off somewhere ... who knows where .. and who knows for what ...
Anyway, back to the supermarkets ... unanimously, for anyone who ever worked in Libya ... coming home on leave, their first port of call on arriving home would always be ... to Sainsburys and Boots! Absolute heaven.
xxx
by 
61-BLUES
