Well worth a read….Michael J. Totten visits Libya:
The main drag along the sea into the city [Tripoli] was one straw short of a freeway. There were no houses, businesses, restaurants or shops along the way — only clusters of vertical human-storage units surrounded by empty lots the size of a Wal-Mart.
Trash was smeared on the sidewalks. It clogged all the street gutters. Almost every available blank space (and, oh, were there plenty of those) was a dumpsite.
I got agoraphobia walking around. The streets were too wide, the buildings too far apart, the landscape barren. The traffic was too fast, too close and too hectic. I was pinned on a thin ribbon of sidewalk between the Mediterranean and the freeway.
There was no way I could cross that river of mayhem and steel unless I found a traffic light and a crosswalk — an unlikely event from the look of the place. There wasn’t much worth seeing on the other side anyway. Those towers and the empty lots strewn with soda cans, candy-bar wrappers and billowing plastic bags didn’t get any prettier as they got closer.
The sea was all but boarded up behind blank white walls and a decayed postindustrial concrete catastrophe of a “waterfront.” In the few places I could get a glimpse of the shoreline, it didn’t have the look and feel of the familiar Mediterranean, but rather an inland sea in a Central Asian republic. The city felt harsh and jagged, and the close but unreachable sea could not take the edge off.
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