Items of note for the week:
Week started off pretty quiet as usual, went to a nice steakhouse for dinner on Saturday. The salad reminded me of the salads available at Souper Salad. Steak was placed on a hot rock, and slowly sizzled as I ate it. Pretty tasty, and with good company. Got to talk to the parents and sister via Skype on Saturday. That made the night for sure. My new stache/beard thing that I got going on kinda confused mom and dad. They think it's so that I'll fit in better. I just think it's cool. Maybe not. I'm still keeping it. The weather has been pleasant, almost warm some days, but not enough to complain about. It has been super windy. With wind in the desert, you get sand storms. It's gloomy outside, kinda brown. The big difference, is that there is tiny sand blowing all over the place. Not enough to sting your face, but enough to get in all your nooks and crannies. I really have to wash behind my ears now, and blow my nose more often. Might have to let my nose hairs grow longer to filter all that extra sand, haha.
http://astorblack.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/mi4sandstorm.jpg?w=540
Played some cards sometime mid week, it was nice. Incredibly delicious spicy sausage. Crazy game. I've never seen so many 4 of a kinds, straights, or full houses. None of them were mine, but I was lucky enough to get second place. Made my night. Well the sausages reminded me of what happens to spicy found in my gut as I was going to work. I was 1/2 an hour late to work because of that. Which isn't that big of a deal compared to what I had to deal with in a couple of days.
One of the guys that I worked with previously, and who traveled over here short time, left this last Wednesday, which was kinda sad. Good guy though. Anyways, we took him out to dinner at a fancy Chinese food place. Well, it's one of the very few Chinese food places here. Good amount of food between 5-6 people. Nothing crazy, egg rolls, garlic fried rice, tempura shrimp, shredded garlic beef, sweet and sour chicken, dry hot pepper chicken, and some other shrimp stuff. Hot and sour soup was pretty tasty too. 100 riyal a person, which is pretty pricey for Chinese food, but it's so foreign here in KSA, that people pay more for it. It's like how we pay quite a bit more for food at Nikko's Nikko's. It's a lot of food, but it's still expensive. But that's not the point. The dry hot peppers, if you haven't had one are literally that, dried, and HOT. Well, some of them are. The ones I had definitely were.
http://image.made-in-china.com/2f0j00PMOtzjHfakgD/New-Crop-American-Red-Chili.jpg
No big deal at the time, there was plenty of actual iced tea to wash it down. The next day though.... So right before a stifling 3 hour staff meeting, my stomach starts rumbling, and I need to use the bathroom. If you know me at all, then you know that I wait until the very very last minute before taking a poo. I'd rather run and try to make a photo finish than sit on the pot and get a misfire. I think it's a total waste of time if I have to go to the bathroom and don't relieve myself. TMI. Alright, to the point. If you read my first blog, you'll know that they have squatter toilets, and regular toilets. I wear mechanic's coveralls.
http://i21.geccdn.net/site/images/n-picgroup/91380.jpg
If you notice, it's basically a onesy. So if you have to use the toilet, you completely drop the top of your shirt down to the ground. No big deal normally. However, a couple things about people who are used to using squatter toilets, and who clean themselves before prayer time. So there's a drain next to the toilet, and a hose in the stall. You wash yourself down in the bathroom. So the floors are obviously wet. Secondly, if you've never had to touch a toilet seat, the concept is pretty gross. You wouldn't touch it, and if you had to pee, well, you know how women complain sometimes about leaving the toilet seat up? (Because it's so hard to look at where you're about to sit?) It's worse if they just pee on the seat. Alright, combine the three scenarios.
1. I have to poop fire.
2. The floor is wet.
3. There is pee all over the seat.
I'm in a hurry. I grab toilet paper, and try to dry off as much pee as I can, and drop the bomb. I sit down and realize two things. Firstly, I missed wiping the inside lip of the toilet seat. Gross. 2. The arms of my nomex onesy is sitting in water. Double gross. I wipe over and over, hoping that somehow this cleans the horror of sitting in pee. And I just pooped fire. So it's not the best thing in the world. Oh, and it's not super soft, cottonelle either. It's generic Costco brand tree bark. Well, at least the pee's sterile. I go to wash my hands, try to dry off arms, and go to meeting.
During meeting, I smell this weird smell of cigarettes and pee. I look around, thinking it's someone else, but eventually find the smell emanating from my sleeves. And then the light bulb hits. If I was peeing all over the seat, why wouldn't it splash on the floor? My arms are covered in pee, and I cannot leave this staff meeting, since I'm already late. Normally the staff meetings are 1 hour. This one is 3. By the time the meeting is over, the pee has dried up. I haven't payed attention to anything in the meeting, because my arms are now covered in dry pee, and cigarettes. The slight ammonia smell wouldn't have had been so bad, had it not been the slight finish of cheap cigarettes at the end. Needless to say, I was pretty much mortified, and there was a lot of washy washy, gagging, gagging, sobby, sobby at the end of the meeting.
So one of the other guys that I knew before coming over here, is leaving next week, and some of the guys wanted to throw him a party as well. This is done at a place called "Beach Camp A." It's owned by the company, and it's pretty nice. Place to fish, big area to hang out, basketball court, and a volley ball court. One of the nationals offered to buy all the food. There are 2 shifts that hang out. The majority of our workforce are Filipino contract workers. They get paid very very little for how much they work. I won't go into the details, as it's not published. But trust me, it's jack squat compared to what we get paid, but then again, it's a lot compared to what they could get at home. It's all about perspective. Anyways, the guys do get home, and food, but it's a small dorm style apartment, with multiple roommates, and bland crappy food. So, they all showed up for this party, maybe 50-75 people total at the camp. It's pretty quiet, people are hanging in their clicks, kind of waiting to see what's next. You don't have the option where there's beer and alcohol to help stimulate discussion. So, the fruit arrives, as an appetizer. A box of bananas, box of granny smith apples, box of red delicious apples, and a box of oranges. We're all kinda staring at it, not knowing the best way to distribute. One of the contract guys says, "Hey, throw an orange over here." And it begins. He gets an orange thrown at him, and he drops it. Everyone laughs, and another one is thrown at him, he drops it again. Some of the other guys are yelling, "Hey, throw it at me, I'll catch mine." OK, you asked for it. It's food fight time! Only we have all the ammo on our side of the table. All the contract guys aren't going to throw it back, they'd rather eat it. So we start throwing fruit all over the room. The room itself is probably about 100' x 200' long. We're lobbing fruit, and zipping it along. Tossing most of the fruit, but there are some cocky guys, who you just gotta zing an apple at em. 4 boxes of fruit, 50-75 hungry Filipinos = awesome. The bananas didn't throw too well. The oranges actually split pretty well when they hit the wall. All the fruit is consumed. We then proceed to play some 5 on 5 basketball, I'm awful at basketball, plus I'm out of shape. The contract guys kick ass, and don't even break a sweat. I'm soaked from the game. But it's time to eat now! What a spread. Mixed grill, pizza, and KFC. Can't beat that. All the food is eaten, we take pictures. Everyone loves to be in pictures, and it's 45 minutes of just taking pictures with the Americans. I look Filipino, so no one really wants pictures with me. They wouldn't know the difference, except that I don't look hungry, aka FAT. It was a really fun night.
One of the other guys from work has a tent out in the desert, and with the guy I mentioned above leaving, they wanted to throw him a different party. So this is literally a place out in the desert, probably about 45 minutes south of where we live, about a kilometer off the highway. We first stop off at the Harley Davidson shop, pick up some souvenirs, I take some pictures, and we start heading to the camp. We cross city boundaries, and take off onto a dirt road to the camp.
It's kinda a dirt road, but not really. More of a sandy, I hope you have four wheel drive kind of a road. The building itself is very nice, and he's an incredibly gracious host. He tells us that it's customary for the host to literally host everything, including pouring drinks for everyone, bringing out the food, and to not relax honestly. He provides both tea, and arabic coffee. Very different from the traditional type of coffee. It's freaking delicious.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_coffee
There's dates, caramels, and assorted nuts. The nuts are coated in lime salt, and I couldn't stop eating them. We come into the same situation as last night, where you chit chat and BS for a while, and then it gets quiet. We go outside to explore. Now the other ex-pats have been making the "Hey, if you hear a camel grunt, you have to cup his balls to make him stop, haha."joke all day. Yeah, all day. Ha ha. The guys show us how they get water, apparently, there's a buried freshwater pipe, not pressurized, so you have to pump it up to the surface. We watch as he primes the pump, and there's water. Pretty neat operation actually.
I see camels way in the background. I grab my camera, and start taking pictures. Same joke as above. Yeah, yeah, I can't hear the grunts, so it doesn't count. We notice that there's an actual herd hanging out pretty close to where we were. We start heading that way, hoping to get up close and personal. I ask if they're wild, but our host tells us that they're owned by someone, and they're just grazing. Just like cows. They're domesticated, and don't really mind us. So we pet, and take pictures, and make camel toe jokes. They are big animals. Very lean too. It explains why the camel I ate the other week was so dry. No fat on them at all. Interesting thing about them. No flies anywhere near them. When I think of cows, I think of flies, and genuinely smelly animals. These animals are pretty clean, don't smell, and we don't see flies. There are flies, we saw that around the food back at the camp. Clean animals. Good. We start walking back to the camp. I find a hole in the ground, and start trying to take pictures, and am out of sight. The camel starts grunting, and I hear a laugh, and a "Huy, where you at? He's lonely." I stay on the ground and wait out until the punchline is over.
We go back, and hang out for a while, dinner's in a few hours, and the time just passes by as we hang out, small talk, and watch the sand continually pass us by. More and more people show up, one brings a remote control helicopter which gets picked up by the strong winds, taken out of range, and crashes. It gets dark, a little chilly almost, and after a while, dinner arrives, and it's a great amount of food as always. Fresh hummus, tabbouleh, grape leaves stuffed with rice, cream of chicken soup, braised goat and rice, mixed grill of chicken and beef, some salads, and lasagna. Weird. But all very delicious. We all were hungry, and eat too much, watch the truck driver who brought the catering food and tables almost get stuck in the sand, and then almost take out the water tanks. We laugh, and make the long drive home. We're all pretty exhausted, stuffed, and pretty content for a relaxing quiet day at the beach. Well it's like a beach minus the ocean.
To see the photos,
http://www.flickr.com/photos/75661280@N07/
Let me know ahead of time, so that I can put you on the friends list to access the photos.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Letter to: ******
Sup dude. Hope everything is going well back in H-town. I saw that you all did the 10k, I'm jealous. I don't have too much motivation to run, but I still try to run at least the 5k. I can't think of too much to say right now, but that I'm doing ok over here. Getting adjusted pretty well, things are still kinda sur-real mostly, and I'm enjoying the fact that everything here is different and new, even if it's boring things that other people do every day. One more month, and I'll either be doing start-up work, or on vacation for travel, so it'll be cool either way. I definitely miss family dinner, the fact that Saturdays are my Mondays, and my Mondays are Wednesdays still confuses the heck out of me, but it's cool anyways. That's all I can think about right now, keep cool, keep losin weight, keep kicking ass, and I'll see you in 1-3 months, haha. Send my best to the fam, and talk to you later.
-Huy
Week started off pretty quiet as usual, went to a nice steakhouse for dinner on Saturday. The salad reminded me of the salads available at Souper Salad. Steak was placed on a hot rock, and slowly sizzled as I ate it. Pretty tasty, and with good company. Got to talk to the parents and sister via Skype on Saturday. That made the night for sure. My new stache/beard thing that I got going on kinda confused mom and dad. They think it's so that I'll fit in better. I just think it's cool. Maybe not. I'm still keeping it. The weather has been pleasant, almost warm some days, but not enough to complain about. It has been super windy. With wind in the desert, you get sand storms. It's gloomy outside, kinda brown. The big difference, is that there is tiny sand blowing all over the place. Not enough to sting your face, but enough to get in all your nooks and crannies. I really have to wash behind my ears now, and blow my nose more often. Might have to let my nose hairs grow longer to filter all that extra sand, haha.
http://astorblack.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/mi4sandstorm.jpg?w=540
Played some cards sometime mid week, it was nice. Incredibly delicious spicy sausage. Crazy game. I've never seen so many 4 of a kinds, straights, or full houses. None of them were mine, but I was lucky enough to get second place. Made my night. Well the sausages reminded me of what happens to spicy found in my gut as I was going to work. I was 1/2 an hour late to work because of that. Which isn't that big of a deal compared to what I had to deal with in a couple of days.
One of the guys that I worked with previously, and who traveled over here short time, left this last Wednesday, which was kinda sad. Good guy though. Anyways, we took him out to dinner at a fancy Chinese food place. Well, it's one of the very few Chinese food places here. Good amount of food between 5-6 people. Nothing crazy, egg rolls, garlic fried rice, tempura shrimp, shredded garlic beef, sweet and sour chicken, dry hot pepper chicken, and some other shrimp stuff. Hot and sour soup was pretty tasty too. 100 riyal a person, which is pretty pricey for Chinese food, but it's so foreign here in KSA, that people pay more for it. It's like how we pay quite a bit more for food at Nikko's Nikko's. It's a lot of food, but it's still expensive. But that's not the point. The dry hot peppers, if you haven't had one are literally that, dried, and HOT. Well, some of them are. The ones I had definitely were.
http://image.made-in-china.com/2f0j00PMOtzjHfakgD/New-Crop-American-Red-Chili.jpg
No big deal at the time, there was plenty of actual iced tea to wash it down. The next day though.... So right before a stifling 3 hour staff meeting, my stomach starts rumbling, and I need to use the bathroom. If you know me at all, then you know that I wait until the very very last minute before taking a poo. I'd rather run and try to make a photo finish than sit on the pot and get a misfire. I think it's a total waste of time if I have to go to the bathroom and don't relieve myself. TMI. Alright, to the point. If you read my first blog, you'll know that they have squatter toilets, and regular toilets. I wear mechanic's coveralls.
http://i21.geccdn.net/site/images/n-picgroup/91380.jpg
If you notice, it's basically a onesy. So if you have to use the toilet, you completely drop the top of your shirt down to the ground. No big deal normally. However, a couple things about people who are used to using squatter toilets, and who clean themselves before prayer time. So there's a drain next to the toilet, and a hose in the stall. You wash yourself down in the bathroom. So the floors are obviously wet. Secondly, if you've never had to touch a toilet seat, the concept is pretty gross. You wouldn't touch it, and if you had to pee, well, you know how women complain sometimes about leaving the toilet seat up? (Because it's so hard to look at where you're about to sit?) It's worse if they just pee on the seat. Alright, combine the three scenarios.
1. I have to poop fire.
2. The floor is wet.
3. There is pee all over the seat.
I'm in a hurry. I grab toilet paper, and try to dry off as much pee as I can, and drop the bomb. I sit down and realize two things. Firstly, I missed wiping the inside lip of the toilet seat. Gross. 2. The arms of my nomex onesy is sitting in water. Double gross. I wipe over and over, hoping that somehow this cleans the horror of sitting in pee. And I just pooped fire. So it's not the best thing in the world. Oh, and it's not super soft, cottonelle either. It's generic Costco brand tree bark. Well, at least the pee's sterile. I go to wash my hands, try to dry off arms, and go to meeting.
During meeting, I smell this weird smell of cigarettes and pee. I look around, thinking it's someone else, but eventually find the smell emanating from my sleeves. And then the light bulb hits. If I was peeing all over the seat, why wouldn't it splash on the floor? My arms are covered in pee, and I cannot leave this staff meeting, since I'm already late. Normally the staff meetings are 1 hour. This one is 3. By the time the meeting is over, the pee has dried up. I haven't payed attention to anything in the meeting, because my arms are now covered in dry pee, and cigarettes. The slight ammonia smell wouldn't have had been so bad, had it not been the slight finish of cheap cigarettes at the end. Needless to say, I was pretty much mortified, and there was a lot of washy washy, gagging, gagging, sobby, sobby at the end of the meeting.
So one of the other guys that I knew before coming over here, is leaving next week, and some of the guys wanted to throw him a party as well. This is done at a place called "Beach Camp A." It's owned by the company, and it's pretty nice. Place to fish, big area to hang out, basketball court, and a volley ball court. One of the nationals offered to buy all the food. There are 2 shifts that hang out. The majority of our workforce are Filipino contract workers. They get paid very very little for how much they work. I won't go into the details, as it's not published. But trust me, it's jack squat compared to what we get paid, but then again, it's a lot compared to what they could get at home. It's all about perspective. Anyways, the guys do get home, and food, but it's a small dorm style apartment, with multiple roommates, and bland crappy food. So, they all showed up for this party, maybe 50-75 people total at the camp. It's pretty quiet, people are hanging in their clicks, kind of waiting to see what's next. You don't have the option where there's beer and alcohol to help stimulate discussion. So, the fruit arrives, as an appetizer. A box of bananas, box of granny smith apples, box of red delicious apples, and a box of oranges. We're all kinda staring at it, not knowing the best way to distribute. One of the contract guys says, "Hey, throw an orange over here." And it begins. He gets an orange thrown at him, and he drops it. Everyone laughs, and another one is thrown at him, he drops it again. Some of the other guys are yelling, "Hey, throw it at me, I'll catch mine." OK, you asked for it. It's food fight time! Only we have all the ammo on our side of the table. All the contract guys aren't going to throw it back, they'd rather eat it. So we start throwing fruit all over the room. The room itself is probably about 100' x 200' long. We're lobbing fruit, and zipping it along. Tossing most of the fruit, but there are some cocky guys, who you just gotta zing an apple at em. 4 boxes of fruit, 50-75 hungry Filipinos = awesome. The bananas didn't throw too well. The oranges actually split pretty well when they hit the wall. All the fruit is consumed. We then proceed to play some 5 on 5 basketball, I'm awful at basketball, plus I'm out of shape. The contract guys kick ass, and don't even break a sweat. I'm soaked from the game. But it's time to eat now! What a spread. Mixed grill, pizza, and KFC. Can't beat that. All the food is eaten, we take pictures. Everyone loves to be in pictures, and it's 45 minutes of just taking pictures with the Americans. I look Filipino, so no one really wants pictures with me. They wouldn't know the difference, except that I don't look hungry, aka FAT. It was a really fun night.
One of the other guys from work has a tent out in the desert, and with the guy I mentioned above leaving, they wanted to throw him a different party. So this is literally a place out in the desert, probably about 45 minutes south of where we live, about a kilometer off the highway. We first stop off at the Harley Davidson shop, pick up some souvenirs, I take some pictures, and we start heading to the camp. We cross city boundaries, and take off onto a dirt road to the camp.
It's kinda a dirt road, but not really. More of a sandy, I hope you have four wheel drive kind of a road. The building itself is very nice, and he's an incredibly gracious host. He tells us that it's customary for the host to literally host everything, including pouring drinks for everyone, bringing out the food, and to not relax honestly. He provides both tea, and arabic coffee. Very different from the traditional type of coffee. It's freaking delicious.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_coffee
There's dates, caramels, and assorted nuts. The nuts are coated in lime salt, and I couldn't stop eating them. We come into the same situation as last night, where you chit chat and BS for a while, and then it gets quiet. We go outside to explore. Now the other ex-pats have been making the "Hey, if you hear a camel grunt, you have to cup his balls to make him stop, haha."joke all day. Yeah, all day. Ha ha. The guys show us how they get water, apparently, there's a buried freshwater pipe, not pressurized, so you have to pump it up to the surface. We watch as he primes the pump, and there's water. Pretty neat operation actually.
I see camels way in the background. I grab my camera, and start taking pictures. Same joke as above. Yeah, yeah, I can't hear the grunts, so it doesn't count. We notice that there's an actual herd hanging out pretty close to where we were. We start heading that way, hoping to get up close and personal. I ask if they're wild, but our host tells us that they're owned by someone, and they're just grazing. Just like cows. They're domesticated, and don't really mind us. So we pet, and take pictures, and make camel toe jokes. They are big animals. Very lean too. It explains why the camel I ate the other week was so dry. No fat on them at all. Interesting thing about them. No flies anywhere near them. When I think of cows, I think of flies, and genuinely smelly animals. These animals are pretty clean, don't smell, and we don't see flies. There are flies, we saw that around the food back at the camp. Clean animals. Good. We start walking back to the camp. I find a hole in the ground, and start trying to take pictures, and am out of sight. The camel starts grunting, and I hear a laugh, and a "Huy, where you at? He's lonely." I stay on the ground and wait out until the punchline is over.
We go back, and hang out for a while, dinner's in a few hours, and the time just passes by as we hang out, small talk, and watch the sand continually pass us by. More and more people show up, one brings a remote control helicopter which gets picked up by the strong winds, taken out of range, and crashes. It gets dark, a little chilly almost, and after a while, dinner arrives, and it's a great amount of food as always. Fresh hummus, tabbouleh, grape leaves stuffed with rice, cream of chicken soup, braised goat and rice, mixed grill of chicken and beef, some salads, and lasagna. Weird. But all very delicious. We all were hungry, and eat too much, watch the truck driver who brought the catering food and tables almost get stuck in the sand, and then almost take out the water tanks. We laugh, and make the long drive home. We're all pretty exhausted, stuffed, and pretty content for a relaxing quiet day at the beach. Well it's like a beach minus the ocean.
To see the photos,
http://www.flickr.com/photos/75661280@N07/
Let me know ahead of time, so that I can put you on the friends list to access the photos.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Letter to: ******
Sup dude. Hope everything is going well back in H-town. I saw that you all did the 10k, I'm jealous. I don't have too much motivation to run, but I still try to run at least the 5k. I can't think of too much to say right now, but that I'm doing ok over here. Getting adjusted pretty well, things are still kinda sur-real mostly, and I'm enjoying the fact that everything here is different and new, even if it's boring things that other people do every day. One more month, and I'll either be doing start-up work, or on vacation for travel, so it'll be cool either way. I definitely miss family dinner, the fact that Saturdays are my Mondays, and my Mondays are Wednesdays still confuses the heck out of me, but it's cool anyways. That's all I can think about right now, keep cool, keep losin weight, keep kicking ass, and I'll see you in 1-3 months, haha. Send my best to the fam, and talk to you later.
-Huy
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