Items of note for the week:
So i'll just start off with the really bad news. My mustache was taken away in the night by some right wing conservative bureaucratic paper pushers. My beard, stricken from grief, passed on, the following day in the shower. Maybe that's exaduration. The long story is that you must adhere to the clean shaven policy unless you have religious beliefs that are against that. I can't think of a verse in the bible that supports mustaches and beards. Especially as bad as mine looked. I did get my stache trimmed before it went away, at the barbers. No sign on the door, you wouldn't be able to tell it was a barber unless you knew where Faiha Barber is. I am constantly amazed by how bad-ass people can do things, and do them manually, rather than using electronics, or machinery. Case in point, my hair cut. The entire thing was done by scissors. I think I got charged more because I asked him to trim the neck using the electric trimmer at the end, and trust me, he did not need a trimmer to get a clean edge, or a transition edge. That I can understand too. I should pay extra for the electricity, the maintenance, and any wearing edges on the razor. I've been told that stylists will cut your hair with just scissors, but it'll cost more. That's like asking an accountant to do your taxes, and he charges more to do it with an abacus. I'm ok with him doing it with the slide ruler, but I'm not payin for it. Anyways, the cut was nice, quick, and he rubbed my head with tissues, to get the hair out. It really worked too! Not a drop of hair anywhere on me for the rest of the day. That was the first thing I noticed when I took a shower. (Different place, not the hair cut place). And then he asked do I want him to trim my mustache? Hell yeah! It looked less like a walrus in puberty and more like, well me with a stache. Kinda cool, but generally kinda creepy, and filipino apparently.
The rest of last weekend was pretty quiet too, a friend made hamburgers and hot dogs, I brought over french fries, tossed in Tony Chacheres, some garlic powder and truffle oil. Pretty good. The hot dogs did not plump when I cooked em. We drank a bunch of Budweiser. The N/A stuff of course. It's a very interesting tasting beer, I'll have to try a O'douls when I get back in the states. But then I would hate myself if I did, so maybe not. I found out vacuuming tile's kinda hard. I left a tums in my pocket when doing laundry. My clothes had a high pH, but was all very berry blend red. Sorry, can't have exciting weekends every week.
Week 6:
Kinda a rinse and recycle weekend from the Bahrain trip the last week. We did do some more site-seeing this time. I didn't bring my camera of course. Bleah. We used our fancy company phones for this, so I'll upload them. I talk about it a little bit below. That night, quiet night, but we ate at a place called shrimpy's. Fast food place, they shwarma everything. Philly cheese steak shwarma, actually spelled awfully. Something like fylli cheestik sanmich. Once I figured it out, I ordered a regular chicken swarma. Pretty tasty. It's still cool how some of these places work. There's a Walmart Greeter type guy at the door. He shakes everyone's hand, with gloves on. Then he goes picks up trash. Who's the underpaid smart one here? He's got gloves to pick up our crap, and then we shake his hand. Glad I washed mine first. Not everyone put those two together. Haha. We had some amazing thai food, it had a funny name. Wang thai, or something like that. *giggles*. Should not have ordered the super spicy curry. (See week 1 and the adventures of the squatter toilet). I've adapted now to it though, just like a friend mentioned, you learn to stuff your "onesy," if you've work FRC, you know what I'm talking about. I basically take the sleeves, stuff them in my pant legs, and roll it all up, or down, whatever your perspective is. You have a flash-proof roll of clothing. Still don't understand how to do this without holding onto the walls. I swear, those guys must just get naked and go. No more poopy stories.
This time, I spent a lot of times with some friends talking about careers and life, and how to best approach life. Not sure I agree with all of what I heard. But I can't say no to it, I haven't tried that yet. And besides, the worst that could happen, well at least to me, is that I'll smell a little nicer, and have some nicer clothes. Although if my jeans are too tight, I might only have girls for the rest of my life. Haha. Speaking of that, man, got swindled like suckers at the mall. Perfume shop selling cologne. Good smelling stuff. started off about about 75% of retail price. Ok, here we go with the haggling. Let's see how far we can go. Knocked down to 50%, still battling, alright let's try 25%. They're balking, saying that's ridiculous. That's all we're doing, final offer. They take it. We think we're making it off like bandits. $25 dollars for good cologne, that retails for 4 times the price? Too good to believe. Definitely so. We did the first dummy thing, and didn't open the bottle right then and there. We inspect the box, and bag. They were most definitely legit. The bottles, also legitimate. The cap and more importantly the bottle seal, were fake. I.e. refilled. i.e. cheap ass cologne you buy by the gallon. Same color though at least. Needless to say, some people that I don't like too much, but am obligated to like are getting some good colored stuff. And at least I learned the valuable less that every one learns, if it's too good to be real, it probably is. The final clue should have been when the guy sold a buddy a fake rolex, that came in the real box. Haha. At least they didn't sell me a bridge.
Alright, tree of life.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_Life,_Bahrain
So we have some time to burn until dinner, and ask what's the best thing to do in the meantime? We have beer in the car, and nothing to do. Well, we can drive around and drink, or do something touristy. Answer: Both! Let's go to the museum and visit the tree of life, and drink on the way there. I'm glad our DD doesn't drink. It makes us feel better about our safety. The museum that we visited was right next to the tree of life, so we couldn't help but go. It was a museum dedicated to the oil trade, and all the things that it spurred. Now, Bahrain doesn't do much more exploration and drilling, but it still does a bit of refining. So, in either case, it's still quite important. We took some pictures in front of the original well that was drilled back in the 1900s. Haha, looked like original equipment. One of the guys that's a big wig now over here is in one of the pictures. That's pretty crazy.
We then proceeded to try to get to the tree of life. Now, what you'd usually see for a national monument is big signs, and big a nice paved road. This is authentic old school stuff. You have to definitely know where you're going in order to find the place. The one thing that I still find great in the country is that (as long as you're a guy, sorry) everyone is quite friendly. We were shamefully lost, and asked for directions. They guy who didn't know us at all escorted us all the way to it. No problem. Mia mia. (Saudi slang for good. It means 100, 100 i guess it's like the percentage. So so is then 50/50. I think its noose noose, or something like that) The tree is big. And it's in the middle of nowhere. And that's about it. There's a fence around it that's new. The tree was quite wet. In the desert. I'm assuming someone felt as though they needed to water the tree of life. (with pee) My favorite part of this entire trip is the two polar reactions that occur when we pull up to the tree of life.
1. Pure amazement, seeing this large tree, in the middle of nowhere. There is no water source, or anything near by. Only a ice cream truck, of all things. I don't think the ice cream truck has been there since the tree. You start wondering how the tree got there in the first place, where the seed came from, and maybe, just maybe, if a tree can make it out here, then we can survive anywhere in the world in any condition.
2. (From our Saudi friend who had been driving). What the hell is this? We drove for 45 minutes getting lost to look at a tree? We have bigger trees than this in Saudi, what's the big deal? You American guys are weird. I'll go take you to a big tree that people pee on in Jubail, Saudi if you really want to. Let's go already. Ooh, ice cream. Maybe it was worth the wait.
The rest of the car ride was both sides trying to convince the other who was right, no one won. Alright, now what? We call the restaurant, and the earliest they can get us in, is 9:30 pm. It's 6:00. Hmm, what can we do? Our driver friend recommends we go to a Saudi club... Hmm what kind of club? Club with women. Club with what kind of women? Oh, you'll see. Uh oh. I think we all know what kind of club this is in the states. Eh, let's give it a try, we all thought that this kind of stuff is prohibited over here. So we go to the club, and it's pretty normal, no cover, which is expected, it's only 6:00. We go in, there's a few women singing on stage, very traditional music. Or maybe not, it didn't sound poppy to me. There's a gaggle of girls in the back, all looking bored and hanging out. Everyone is elegantly dressed, something like evening wear I suppose, long dress. First thing I notice (sorry, i'm shallow) is that they all have big personalities. Not fat, just very curvy. Very curvy. Kinda fat I guess. Anyways, I digress. It's dark like you'd expect, and we sit down, the waitress takes our order, and we all get a beer, i get a Walker Red and coke, and a few of us get some sheesha. The water cooled tobacco stuff. There's not much to it, you're smoking cooled smoke, not as filtered, some people claim the water filters some, which is probably true. If you smoke a lot of the stuff, it could be worse than cigarrettes. Depends on how often you smoke it. It's flavored double apple, and it's pretty tasty. Still bad for you, tsk tisk. I digress again. We all are just watching, seeing what's going on. There are Filipino waitresses handing out flower necklaces to people. We ask, hey what is that for. "It's a tip for the pretty ladies." Ok... So what she do for the tips? Do? She's doing it right now. Standing there? Yup. She'll look your direction. Ok... Hmm, what else? Well they'll dance with you too. Oh, ok maybe that's what they're talking about, a "dance." So we watch for a while, they actually meant dance dance. (Revolution, hahahahaha, aw, not funny). So its in bad form to give a singer/dancer money directly, instead you give the Filipino waitress, in this case 3 bd (8 bucks) the money, and then she goes to the dancer, gives here the flowers, and tells her who gave her the flowers. Ok, if you give her enough flowers, she looks at you more intensely? And then eventually she'll go to you, and you do some awkward hand holding dance. Still 6th grade style with 18" between yourselves. Eh, it's a living I guess. So the women singers get replaced by a guy, and he gets a bunch of flower necklaces. Enough that you can't see him anymore, he's head to toe in bright red flower necklaces. He's by far the most leyed person of the night. (haha) People continue to come in, and the club's getting busy. There's a group of guys, and you can tell they're ready to party. They all stand up in unison, and start dancing with each other. Hmm, ok. The girls just stand across from them as they dance. Hmm. This is a pg-13 strip club. Maybe even PG. By this point, my head's spinning due to all the tobacco in my head. One of the other guys says screw it, and buys a girl a flower necklace. They do an awkwad dance, neither of them really speak or understand what they're saying, but good for you, way to try something new. Communication is 90% body language anyways right? It's now 9, and we're ready for dinner.
Dinner time. We start making the drive back, towards the city, now that we're all treed out. Dinner is at a nice Asian restaurant, asian fusion style food called Monsoon. It was nice, and we were classy. Until someone fell in the fountain. In his defense, this was a fountain that was not curbed, and it was below us. One of our friends who will remain nameless just took a step backwards, and, well caught himself, so all he did was go thigh deep (one leg) into the fountain. Apparently this wasn't the first time, since the hostess, who was very nice about it brought towels, I mean bathing towels out immediately for him to dry off. No one really laughed, everyone noticed, but we were the ones laughing the most. Anyways, it was time for us to be shooshed away to somewhere, where we couldn't embarrass ourselves. We had 5 people, and ate at one of those sit down booths, where you sit on the floor, but there's a sub-floor that you put your legs and feet in. It gives an illusion of being close to the ground. One of the guys will always order egg rolls and fried rice no matter where we go, regardless of the country of origin, if it's Asian. So we order egg rolls for an appetizer, they have some Viet food which I jump on. They have spring rolls with lemongrass beef, and one lemon grass chicken. We definitely have to order that. Main entrees were also quite tasty, some Thai curry, pad thai, Humour fish cooked in a nice broth, and some beef stuff I can't remember.
Our driver has some international lebanese music on that's quite catchy. Poppy really. I liked it, and proceeded to borrow the CD. If you're interested, or want to help translate, it's: Nancy Ajram. Very mellow, and pretty. She's quite a looker too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Ajram
And that was all we really had time for, we had work the next day, and it was time to go home. So we did, and continued trying to solve the world's problems one beer at the time till we got to the border, and had a nice long nap on the way back home.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
So i'll just start off with the really bad news. My mustache was taken away in the night by some right wing conservative bureaucratic paper pushers. My beard, stricken from grief, passed on, the following day in the shower. Maybe that's exaduration. The long story is that you must adhere to the clean shaven policy unless you have religious beliefs that are against that. I can't think of a verse in the bible that supports mustaches and beards. Especially as bad as mine looked. I did get my stache trimmed before it went away, at the barbers. No sign on the door, you wouldn't be able to tell it was a barber unless you knew where Faiha Barber is. I am constantly amazed by how bad-ass people can do things, and do them manually, rather than using electronics, or machinery. Case in point, my hair cut. The entire thing was done by scissors. I think I got charged more because I asked him to trim the neck using the electric trimmer at the end, and trust me, he did not need a trimmer to get a clean edge, or a transition edge. That I can understand too. I should pay extra for the electricity, the maintenance, and any wearing edges on the razor. I've been told that stylists will cut your hair with just scissors, but it'll cost more. That's like asking an accountant to do your taxes, and he charges more to do it with an abacus. I'm ok with him doing it with the slide ruler, but I'm not payin for it. Anyways, the cut was nice, quick, and he rubbed my head with tissues, to get the hair out. It really worked too! Not a drop of hair anywhere on me for the rest of the day. That was the first thing I noticed when I took a shower. (Different place, not the hair cut place). And then he asked do I want him to trim my mustache? Hell yeah! It looked less like a walrus in puberty and more like, well me with a stache. Kinda cool, but generally kinda creepy, and filipino apparently.
The rest of last weekend was pretty quiet too, a friend made hamburgers and hot dogs, I brought over french fries, tossed in Tony Chacheres, some garlic powder and truffle oil. Pretty good. The hot dogs did not plump when I cooked em. We drank a bunch of Budweiser. The N/A stuff of course. It's a very interesting tasting beer, I'll have to try a O'douls when I get back in the states. But then I would hate myself if I did, so maybe not. I found out vacuuming tile's kinda hard. I left a tums in my pocket when doing laundry. My clothes had a high pH, but was all very berry blend red. Sorry, can't have exciting weekends every week.
Week 6:
Kinda a rinse and recycle weekend from the Bahrain trip the last week. We did do some more site-seeing this time. I didn't bring my camera of course. Bleah. We used our fancy company phones for this, so I'll upload them. I talk about it a little bit below. That night, quiet night, but we ate at a place called shrimpy's. Fast food place, they shwarma everything. Philly cheese steak shwarma, actually spelled awfully. Something like fylli cheestik sanmich. Once I figured it out, I ordered a regular chicken swarma. Pretty tasty. It's still cool how some of these places work. There's a Walmart Greeter type guy at the door. He shakes everyone's hand, with gloves on. Then he goes picks up trash. Who's the underpaid smart one here? He's got gloves to pick up our crap, and then we shake his hand. Glad I washed mine first. Not everyone put those two together. Haha. We had some amazing thai food, it had a funny name. Wang thai, or something like that. *giggles*. Should not have ordered the super spicy curry. (See week 1 and the adventures of the squatter toilet). I've adapted now to it though, just like a friend mentioned, you learn to stuff your "onesy," if you've work FRC, you know what I'm talking about. I basically take the sleeves, stuff them in my pant legs, and roll it all up, or down, whatever your perspective is. You have a flash-proof roll of clothing. Still don't understand how to do this without holding onto the walls. I swear, those guys must just get naked and go. No more poopy stories.
This time, I spent a lot of times with some friends talking about careers and life, and how to best approach life. Not sure I agree with all of what I heard. But I can't say no to it, I haven't tried that yet. And besides, the worst that could happen, well at least to me, is that I'll smell a little nicer, and have some nicer clothes. Although if my jeans are too tight, I might only have girls for the rest of my life. Haha. Speaking of that, man, got swindled like suckers at the mall. Perfume shop selling cologne. Good smelling stuff. started off about about 75% of retail price. Ok, here we go with the haggling. Let's see how far we can go. Knocked down to 50%, still battling, alright let's try 25%. They're balking, saying that's ridiculous. That's all we're doing, final offer. They take it. We think we're making it off like bandits. $25 dollars for good cologne, that retails for 4 times the price? Too good to believe. Definitely so. We did the first dummy thing, and didn't open the bottle right then and there. We inspect the box, and bag. They were most definitely legit. The bottles, also legitimate. The cap and more importantly the bottle seal, were fake. I.e. refilled. i.e. cheap ass cologne you buy by the gallon. Same color though at least. Needless to say, some people that I don't like too much, but am obligated to like are getting some good colored stuff. And at least I learned the valuable less that every one learns, if it's too good to be real, it probably is. The final clue should have been when the guy sold a buddy a fake rolex, that came in the real box. Haha. At least they didn't sell me a bridge.
Alright, tree of life.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_Life,_Bahrain
So we have some time to burn until dinner, and ask what's the best thing to do in the meantime? We have beer in the car, and nothing to do. Well, we can drive around and drink, or do something touristy. Answer: Both! Let's go to the museum and visit the tree of life, and drink on the way there. I'm glad our DD doesn't drink. It makes us feel better about our safety. The museum that we visited was right next to the tree of life, so we couldn't help but go. It was a museum dedicated to the oil trade, and all the things that it spurred. Now, Bahrain doesn't do much more exploration and drilling, but it still does a bit of refining. So, in either case, it's still quite important. We took some pictures in front of the original well that was drilled back in the 1900s. Haha, looked like original equipment. One of the guys that's a big wig now over here is in one of the pictures. That's pretty crazy.
We then proceeded to try to get to the tree of life. Now, what you'd usually see for a national monument is big signs, and big a nice paved road. This is authentic old school stuff. You have to definitely know where you're going in order to find the place. The one thing that I still find great in the country is that (as long as you're a guy, sorry) everyone is quite friendly. We were shamefully lost, and asked for directions. They guy who didn't know us at all escorted us all the way to it. No problem. Mia mia. (Saudi slang for good. It means 100, 100 i guess it's like the percentage. So so is then 50/50. I think its noose noose, or something like that) The tree is big. And it's in the middle of nowhere. And that's about it. There's a fence around it that's new. The tree was quite wet. In the desert. I'm assuming someone felt as though they needed to water the tree of life. (with pee) My favorite part of this entire trip is the two polar reactions that occur when we pull up to the tree of life.
1. Pure amazement, seeing this large tree, in the middle of nowhere. There is no water source, or anything near by. Only a ice cream truck, of all things. I don't think the ice cream truck has been there since the tree. You start wondering how the tree got there in the first place, where the seed came from, and maybe, just maybe, if a tree can make it out here, then we can survive anywhere in the world in any condition.
2. (From our Saudi friend who had been driving). What the hell is this? We drove for 45 minutes getting lost to look at a tree? We have bigger trees than this in Saudi, what's the big deal? You American guys are weird. I'll go take you to a big tree that people pee on in Jubail, Saudi if you really want to. Let's go already. Ooh, ice cream. Maybe it was worth the wait.
The rest of the car ride was both sides trying to convince the other who was right, no one won. Alright, now what? We call the restaurant, and the earliest they can get us in, is 9:30 pm. It's 6:00. Hmm, what can we do? Our driver friend recommends we go to a Saudi club... Hmm what kind of club? Club with women. Club with what kind of women? Oh, you'll see. Uh oh. I think we all know what kind of club this is in the states. Eh, let's give it a try, we all thought that this kind of stuff is prohibited over here. So we go to the club, and it's pretty normal, no cover, which is expected, it's only 6:00. We go in, there's a few women singing on stage, very traditional music. Or maybe not, it didn't sound poppy to me. There's a gaggle of girls in the back, all looking bored and hanging out. Everyone is elegantly dressed, something like evening wear I suppose, long dress. First thing I notice (sorry, i'm shallow) is that they all have big personalities. Not fat, just very curvy. Very curvy. Kinda fat I guess. Anyways, I digress. It's dark like you'd expect, and we sit down, the waitress takes our order, and we all get a beer, i get a Walker Red and coke, and a few of us get some sheesha. The water cooled tobacco stuff. There's not much to it, you're smoking cooled smoke, not as filtered, some people claim the water filters some, which is probably true. If you smoke a lot of the stuff, it could be worse than cigarrettes. Depends on how often you smoke it. It's flavored double apple, and it's pretty tasty. Still bad for you, tsk tisk. I digress again. We all are just watching, seeing what's going on. There are Filipino waitresses handing out flower necklaces to people. We ask, hey what is that for. "It's a tip for the pretty ladies." Ok... So what she do for the tips? Do? She's doing it right now. Standing there? Yup. She'll look your direction. Ok... Hmm, what else? Well they'll dance with you too. Oh, ok maybe that's what they're talking about, a "dance." So we watch for a while, they actually meant dance dance. (Revolution, hahahahaha, aw, not funny). So its in bad form to give a singer/dancer money directly, instead you give the Filipino waitress, in this case 3 bd (8 bucks) the money, and then she goes to the dancer, gives here the flowers, and tells her who gave her the flowers. Ok, if you give her enough flowers, she looks at you more intensely? And then eventually she'll go to you, and you do some awkward hand holding dance. Still 6th grade style with 18" between yourselves. Eh, it's a living I guess. So the women singers get replaced by a guy, and he gets a bunch of flower necklaces. Enough that you can't see him anymore, he's head to toe in bright red flower necklaces. He's by far the most leyed person of the night. (haha) People continue to come in, and the club's getting busy. There's a group of guys, and you can tell they're ready to party. They all stand up in unison, and start dancing with each other. Hmm, ok. The girls just stand across from them as they dance. Hmm. This is a pg-13 strip club. Maybe even PG. By this point, my head's spinning due to all the tobacco in my head. One of the other guys says screw it, and buys a girl a flower necklace. They do an awkwad dance, neither of them really speak or understand what they're saying, but good for you, way to try something new. Communication is 90% body language anyways right? It's now 9, and we're ready for dinner.
Dinner time. We start making the drive back, towards the city, now that we're all treed out. Dinner is at a nice Asian restaurant, asian fusion style food called Monsoon. It was nice, and we were classy. Until someone fell in the fountain. In his defense, this was a fountain that was not curbed, and it was below us. One of our friends who will remain nameless just took a step backwards, and, well caught himself, so all he did was go thigh deep (one leg) into the fountain. Apparently this wasn't the first time, since the hostess, who was very nice about it brought towels, I mean bathing towels out immediately for him to dry off. No one really laughed, everyone noticed, but we were the ones laughing the most. Anyways, it was time for us to be shooshed away to somewhere, where we couldn't embarrass ourselves. We had 5 people, and ate at one of those sit down booths, where you sit on the floor, but there's a sub-floor that you put your legs and feet in. It gives an illusion of being close to the ground. One of the guys will always order egg rolls and fried rice no matter where we go, regardless of the country of origin, if it's Asian. So we order egg rolls for an appetizer, they have some Viet food which I jump on. They have spring rolls with lemongrass beef, and one lemon grass chicken. We definitely have to order that. Main entrees were also quite tasty, some Thai curry, pad thai, Humour fish cooked in a nice broth, and some beef stuff I can't remember.
Our driver has some international lebanese music on that's quite catchy. Poppy really. I liked it, and proceeded to borrow the CD. If you're interested, or want to help translate, it's: Nancy Ajram. Very mellow, and pretty. She's quite a looker too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Ajram
And that was all we really had time for, we had work the next day, and it was time to go home. So we did, and continued trying to solve the world's problems one beer at the time till we got to the border, and had a nice long nap on the way back home.
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