Last Supper

It's almost habitual that we eat our last supper outside of the shit at the Irish Village in Dubai. It's surprisingly Irish for the Middle East, with pretty good mutton and some insanely dense soda bread - if you like that sort of thing. By and large, it's an opportunity for a few pints of Guinness before heading to someplace that, alcoholwise, is drier. As an added bonus, they've got a few caustic Irish lasses doing the serving, so if you get too drunk, they'll tear you to shreds.

Not so this trip. The eruption at Eyjafjallajokull forced us into a more southern crossing of the pond, entering Eurozone airspace around southern Spain, and delayed our arrival here by more than an hour. Then, when one of our equipment crates failed to find the luggage belt, I was pretty certain that alternative dinner plans were in order.

Is one missing bag out of 18 good or bad?

Let's say bad.

Worse was that it contained my Mechanical's personal protective equipment,... which he'll be needing real soon,... in freaking Afghanland. One thought was that we take the detachable ballistic codpieces off of the vests of the five sets that did arrive and fashion something Gilligan Islandesque to at least protect his, er, cod, but none of us are that good of a seamster. Besides, a good vest are only a fourth of the system. He'd also need the helmet, ceramic plates, and respirator to make up the full set. The trip's young, though. We'll figure something out.

Now, when my Mechanical (a different Mechanical) lost his bag flying in for Afghanland II, we went through the same motions that we're doing this time - report it to the authorities and follow up, follow up, follow up - but his bag never arrived. Never. As in never ever. It's probably still out at JFK, crammed behind a pile of trash in the boiler room.

My hope is that this time will be different. Besides, the lost bag is really a hard sided plastic crate crammed with seventy pounds of mission stuff. And, we didn't fly through JFK, so it's likely holding up the lunch fridge in the boiler room at Dulles.

And the lunch fridge mentioned in the last paragraph leads us back to the supper conversation. That, in the bidnezz, is called a segue, provided I stay on topic and don't drift further and further away, a likely result and effect of a nine hour lag. Anyway. Supper. Right.

Due to lack of time, we decided to eat at the restaurant at the Traders Hotel, in which we are esconsed for the night. It's a nice hotel. Quiet, clean, free q-tips. The wait staff had a little difficulty in my request for a table for nine (my crew, the client, and two more Companymen who are headed in on a different assignment tomorrow), but once they compared the number of people standing at the table to the number of chairs present at the table, they got the idea.

The menu was prix fixe, with choice of entree, sides and starches, and one of a selection of four gravies.

Four of them. Four distinct and individual gravies. Mein gott! I was stunned.

And if that wasn't enough, on the desert buffet, next to the torts and cheesecakes and cookies and those little shredded wheat, fig paste and honey things they make over here that I could eat forever, was a bowl of gummy worms.

I wonder if they'll survive the trip in my pocket?