30-Dec-06
Al-Khobar, Saudi Arabia
The flight from Dulles to Frankfurt was oversold so the Lufthansa agent bumped me up to a business class seat. It sucks when you know that the best thing that will happen on a trip happens on day one. It’s all downhill from here. The flight to Bahrain wasn’t oversold so I had to sit in steerage with the rest of them.
Winter has arrived in Saudi Arabia. I think it is colder here than it was when I left Virginia. You can stay warm if you sit in the sun and stay out of the wind. The wind blows steadily from the mountains to the north bringing cold air and rain occassionally. The forecasted high today was 12 degrees C with a low tonight of 3 degrees C.
It rained here last week and it was a real mess. Al Khobar is right on the Gulf and the ground is flat with a high water table. Any rain that falls has got nowhere to go. The sewers back up and sewage runs down the street. A couple of years ago one of the underpasses filled up with storm water but the locals drove through it anyway. Their cars flooded and people died.
The locals are all bundled up against the cold. The Saudis have switched to their winter-weight robes, typically in gray or brown, that are heavier than the white summer robes. The TCNs (Third Country Nationals, the Sudanese, Sri Lankans, Indonesians and others) are really bundled up with toques, scarves and parkas.
Booger the parking lot cat is gone. LeMarr took over feeding him when I left in November. After feeding the cat for a while and gaining the cat’s trust he was able to get close enough to scratch him. And grab him. And bring him back to the labor camp with him. LeMarr kept Booger in his room but the houseboys kept letting him out. Booger would wait at LeMarr’s door and go in for a can of tuna dinner and play Nintendo all evening. LeMarr even made a litter box for Booger and no training was required. Then one day he was gone. I noticed there is a significant drop in the number of cats at the compound since I last left, down from dozens to just a few. It’s a hard life being a runty parking lot cat.31-Dec-06, New Years Eve
Our Project Manager came in to my office today and announced that this was the first New Years in 8 years where he didn’t have to buy a goat. He just arrived from our office in Egypt. Each New Year he would buy the office drivers a goat. They would butcher it, share the meat and eat it for New Years. No goat for us, I guess. Maybe he’s afraid to buy us a goat after what happened to Booger.
1-Jan-07
I needed two forks, one for in my room and one for at my desk. The Panda only sells forks by the dozen ($1.75 for 12) so I bought the whole pack. I gave the extras out to the Filipinos in the office today while wishing them each a Happy New Year. I told them it is a Canadian custom to give away cutlery on the New Year. Nobody batted an eye; they just accepted the forks, thanked me and got back to work.
2-Jan-07
The Eid holidays will be over Wednesday and not a day too soon. We have had housekeeping once since I arrived and the towels, thin as they are, do get a bit skanky after a few days. I’m hoping too that they will pick up the laundry soon too. Else I will be rinsing out my shorts and hanging them in the trees to dry on Friday.
The good news aboot the holidays is that the customer hasn’t been in the office all week and we have been able to get some work done. The office has had a more relaxed atmosphere without the customer and the Filipino Engineers have been playing music all day. This particular group favors Tony Orlando and Dawn, Englebert Humperdink and Celine Dion. Over and over and over. With singing along and tuneless whistling. I’m ready to tie a yellow ribbon around somebody’s neck.
We had Dinner and a Movie at John’s place tonight. LeMarr made a pretty good pot of spaghetti and we watched Animal House. LeMarr is so young he had never seen the movie before. We pulled all kinds of quotes out of the movie for our wall of inspirational quotes in the office.
When we pulled back into the labor camp tonight the guards were huddled around a fire. They had moved the fake jersey barriers (most jersey barriers are concrete. These ones used to be painted plywood but now they are made of sheet steel) into a square and had built a fire inside of their makeshift fire pit. They were all busting up wooden pallets for fuel and looked like they were having a great time. It isn’t that cold out either. Maybe 10 degrees C. They’d never last in Sudbury.
3-Jan-07
I spent the afternoon in the Saudi police station. It wasn’t much of a police station, just an out building in the parking lot. A few chairs, a couple of tables, a steel roof and some signs in Arabic. No phones or fax machines, no real door and no lights. But it was a pretty interesting visit. There was a group of Indians (not the cowboy and Indian kind, the other ones) that looked like barbers. I’m not sure what they were there for as they just sat there and didn’t talk to anyone. I also saw a guy with the most unfortunate unibrow I have ever seen. The hair across his nose wasn’t just a few hairs sticking out. The hair across his nose was thicker and bushier than his eyebrows. I just couldn’t stop staring. You know you shouldn’t look but you just can’t tear your eyes away. The exciting group was about ten guys, one who was bleeding from the forehead. They were all yelling (Dirka, dirka! Mohammed Ali! Jihad!) and waving their arms around, crowding around the cops trying to get their points across.
Earlier that day: LeMarr is leaving Saudi tomorrow so he offered to take us out to lunch today. We piled into the cars and headed downtown. Pett was navigating as I drove the lead car. Pett apparently doesn’t have clue how to get from our office to the Thai restaurant and we got lost. Picture a scene from the TV news showing Beirut or Baghdad, one-way narrow streets, cars parked on both sides, buildings crowding the streets creating poor visibility at intersections. So we’re cruising along, still in the lead car, and we enter an intersection. This is where time slowed down and I saw the van, speeding at us from the right. Wham! The van slammed into the passenger side front fender and shoved us through the intersection. Time sped back up again right about then. Nobody was hurt. Fortunately it wasn’t a Saudi driving the van but an Afghani (not the cowboy and Indian Afghani, the other kind). Everybody jumped out of the cars and cell phones were popping. It took the police about an hour to arrive on the scene and our Saudi agent and office manager were already there when the police arrived. Good thing our agent was there as the police didn’t speak English. It turns out the stop sign that was supposed to stop the Afghan van was no longer on the signpost.
But the important thing is (besides the fact that nobody was hurt) was that LeMarr came through on his promise to buy us lunch. While we were waiting for the police to arrive he went to a corner store and bought us each a soda and a couple big bags of chips. What a guy! We will miss him.
So, I spent the afternoon in the police station with our agent, the Afghani, Mr. Unibrow and the barbershop quartet. I had to re-enact the accident for the police report. I was the pack of Marlboros and the Afghani was a cell phone. We ran them into each other a few times, signed a few forms and we were on our way.
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