Getting directions..

Giving someone directions here is somewhat different. Firstly, except for the major highways, streets are not named. In fact, most suburban areas are a warren of small dusty alleys, often barely wide enough for a car to pass through. Properties all have high walls surrounding them, not for security, but for privacy. Maps are useless, news roads appear every month, and no-one has ever mapped the older parts of town.

“What to do?” as the locals say. You navigate by landmarks – buildings, shops, mosques – and roundabouts (traffic circles). Roundabouts usually have some form of decoration in the middle. Close to my home there’s the blue mosque roundabout (a mosque with a bright blue dome next to the circle), lantern roundabout, coffee roundabout (a huge coffee urn), and clock tower roundabout. In the old town you get pearl roundabout (two monstrous oyster fountains with revolving marble pearls inside them) and the dhow roundabout, which has a full-sized ship I the centre of the traffic circle.

So you navigate from landmark to landmark. Typical instructions would go like this. “Turn right at the coffee pot, turn left at the lantern roundabout, then you go a while until you see some shops on the right, Make a u-turn there, go about 200 metres and then there’s a small road next to a car shop I think its called Grand garage. Go down this road and we’re opposite the graveyard. Call me when you get there and I’ll come look for you.”

This all sounds reasonable, albeit a bit long winded. But you have to know that the mosque at the blue mosque roundabout is no longer blue, and as for Mercedes roundabout? Well that’s highway now and both the roundabout and the Mercedes dealership were moved three years ago….

The pic is of the lantern roundabout near my home. That where you turn right until you get to Istanbul, and you turn right again. We’re opposite the date plantation and the old fort…