You know when your luck has run out.

Back again in the Middle East, this time at some beastly hot and dusty base outside of a modern gleaming city. We overcame some logistical trouble on the way here – delayed flights and a Lufthansa pilot strike being the major culprits – but persevered. Soon after landing, we picked up our rental cars and got lost, but a spate of dead reckoning served us well. At the base the next morning, our US military contact met us at the gate and got us right through. We thought we had survived the worst of it.

But on day three in country, the tides changed. I’ll blame arrogance. Not mine, not my team’s, but our government minder, who ignored all of the warnings and warning signs.


This trip falls coincident with one of the major Eids, a Muslim holyday that gets celebrated for a week. Imagine, however, that instead of going home to celebrate with your family for a few days, you get to stand post. Further imagine that the base is entirely empty, because everyone you work with is celebrating with their families, a stark reminder that you should have the day off and not be standing post. The next bit of imagining would be your reaction when a representative of the great Satan wants access to your base, forcing you from your reverie to open the gate by which you are standing post.

So it was absolutely no surprise when I saw the guard demand the backpack from said minder driving the car in front of us and confiscate the enclosed laptop. We had been told, numerous times over the prior few days, that local security might not want to be there over the holiday, and might take it out on us, so keep your technology in the trunk. Someone wasn’t listening.

Once alerted, the following two vehicles were stopped, trunks opened, and computers confiscated.

There’s a full color, two meter tall panel at the Host Nation badging office that clearly shows what they don’t want you to bring on base; weapons, computers, smart phones, GPSs, data storage devices, and VHS tapes to start. Our minder had an obvious computer bag on the front seat, a Blackberry in the console, and a GPS struck to the windshield, yet his reaction to the guard’s action was that he had done nothing wrong.

Wrong. The tacit arrangement was that we wouldn’t be jerks about violating their rules. Instead, we needed to spend ninety minutes retrieving our machines, so that we could lock them in the trunk of one of the cars that we would now leave outside of the gate. Who knows what a day’s worth of Middle Eastern sun would do to the contents of a trunk? We didn’t have much of a choice, short of returning to the hotel in the city and losing a few more hours.

Cleansed of our computers, we made it through the first gate, but were stopped at the second perimeter, where the now fully alerted guard snatched one of our cameras. This was turning into a slow morning, but plenty of cajoling and assurances got it returned to us and we were on our way to the third gate, U.S. controlled, where the guys at the gate had a different playbook, and allowed access with our computers, smartphones and cameras.

Except that later one of our cameras was confiscated by the US security, who thought we were photographing something on the list they can’t show us of things we can’t photograph. The resolution to that took another 40 minutes, four cops, and the deletion of everything on the data card.

Since then, we’ve left our machines at the hotel, risking the smartphones we use to take clandestine pictures of things we’re pretty sure are engineering related and not secret squirrel related. The major downside is that we have to take notes by hand, which equates to many hours of transcribing them by lamplight well into the evening. This cuts down on the time available to eat shawarma and mezza.

Again, we’ll persevere. If you can’t improvise and adjust to changing circumstances, you won’t make it long in the chaotic world of a global engineering consultant.

For example, this morning, we were trying to get some data off of a laptop (FOUO data, not Classified data). We’d tried emailing the files, but without an appropriate connection to the mother server attachments were impossible. We’d tried printing as pdf’s to mail, but the machine wouldn’t let us print. Ultimately, we hooked up an external hard drive as a file transfer device. This worked to get one set of files transferred, but ended up giving my machine the computer equivalent of SARS, or MERS, or Ebola. Regardless, I don’t have wifi now, which makes getting data from every other source a little more difficult, especially since the data outlets in this hotel don’t seem to work.

Maybe we can open up my phone as a hotspot and hardwire the phone to the machine? Some kind of McGruder solution is sure to do the trick.

Or blow up in my face.

I’ll let the help desk figure it out next week.
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Watar, Watar, Everywhere

In one of the local newspapers the other day, I read that the origin of the word Qatar came from some other term, and some other before it, but the one before that meant “search for water”. This is not at all surprising, as it’s danged hot here all of the time, and I never step outside without a water bottle. It would be worse if your job was to keep your sheep from withering, but in the past week I haven’t seen a single sheep, or goat, or camel. I did see a couple of cats in a souq, but I’m sure they take care of themselves.

What I have seen is an abundance of water, no searching required. Not always in liquid form, but the evidence is there; grand boulevards lined with date palms and topiary; sweeping lawns, manicured gardens. They’ve got the Persian/Arabian Gulf all around them, and their huge oil and gas reserves fuel massive desalination plants. It could well be that the irrigation water is all treated effluent from the municipal sewer plant – but that hasn’t been commissioned yet. Much of the effluent would be hauled to specific irrigation sites, but I’d guess a large volume of the irrigation water comes direct from the potable distribution system.

Yesterday morning, I went down to the beach to watch the sun come up. The silence was eventually broken by the hotel staff doing their morning things. They need to drag the beach of any footprints remaining from yesterday. They set up the poolside bars and restaurants. They sweep everything that isn’t grass or beach. They hose down all of the furniture. And there’s lots of furniture, from the lounges at the pool to the other lounges near the Gulf. From the al fresco dining areas near the hotel to the snack bar near the kiddie pool.

They do this with a hose, with no control or nozzle, turned all the way up. It took an hour. If our well system could produce half of this volume, I’d never worry about irrigating the garden again. These guys never worry at all, just throw more dinosaurs at the power plants and strip the salt out of another few million gallons a day. The Peninsula reports 437 million cubic meters of desalinated water per year. This equates to about 150 gallons per day per capita. In the States, 150 gpd is a pretty good planning factor, but most of the States aren’t in a desert and most of our water comes from freshwater sources without the energy cost of purifying it. In the Qatari defense, they are really rich. Really rich. And the oil and gas comes out of the ground like lies flow out of Washington. I can only hope that their rhetoric about environmental sustainability is more than simple rhetoric.

And for full disclosure, our per capita water in the US of A is almost ten times 150 gpd, but 80% of that is for cooling power plants and irrigation, the rest is for manufacturing, commercial and domestic use.

Meanwhile, the impetus for this trip came from the need for me to attend a meeting. A single meeting. A single meeting scheduled to last an hour. A single meeting scheduled to last an hour on the far side of the planet.

Success!

The other side of the coin is that I need to be in Saudi Arabia for two days of site investigation, but that’s not until next week. So I could have flown home, spent two days there, then flew back to this side of the world, or I could do what I did, hang out in a four star hotel on the water for five days. I’m not entirely sure I made the right choice.

The Intercontinental, while nice and all, is one of those mostly inclusive places. Not inclusive in that everything is provided for one daily rate, but inclusive in that there is nothing else near this place, so I’m sort of stuck eating every meal here. Sure, it’s all expensed, but I’m just not sure I’m getting the best value for the Company at their 240 Riyal buffet (about 65 bucks). Alternatively, I could take a taxi into a restaurant in the city center and back, but would likely total the same.

Besides, taxis in the Middle East (or anyplace I get sent) can be exciting places, and the more I do this, the more I evaluate risk, and carefully select the exciting places I frequent. Maybe that’s just me becoming more crotchety. Maybe it’s just me being bored in Qatar, waiting for these five days to end.

I did make a trip out yesterday. I went to what was once an ancient souq just off of the water at the city center. Parts of it were very, very old I’m sure, but the boutique hotels around the perimeter told a different tale. It was hard to tell who actually shopped there, as I went there very early in the day, wanting to see the place open up in the morning, when it would be cooler and more quiet, and didn’t see much trade. There was a mix of touristy and housewares, local clothing and spices. All of it in shallow, narrow shops, crammed pell-mell into some seemingly random shape with crooked lanes, blind alleys, dim lighting, roofs and ceiling of differing heights and coverage, plenty of shadows, unclear sightlines, and elevation changes out of nowhere.

I took a lot of pictures, but not especially for posterity. The one hour meeting concerned special training facilities, and realism is key for those types of places. When I finally get to design my training souq, I’ll incorporate many of the geometric and architectural elements of this place.

Bottom line, just more work. I’d never vacation here. I’d rather spend time on the water.


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Busy, busy, busybody

Busy, busy, busy.

I'd type more, but need to catch a flight in a couple of minutes. For the curious, I'm in Kuwait this week, heading to Guam tonight, then back home next week. It's been frantic, but there's been shawarma. Not as good as Saudi shawarma, but shawarma, nonetheless.

We're at the Crowne Plaza which, in Kuwait, is a five star hotel. They've been hosting swank weddings all week, which seem bigger and louder than any in the States - despite the lack of booze. Last night, I stood in the parking lot to watch the Bugatti's, Maseratti's, and Rolls's roll in. Quite the sight as I ate my Baskin Robbins.

They ain't all filthy rich here, but there's a lot more of it that the other sides of the planet.

Sure it's short, so here's some filler by Neil Peart. For this week, change the hours from nine and five to five and nine. Oh, and eliminate the reference to beer. This is the Middle East.

Working Man

I get up at seven, yeah
And I go to work at nine
I got no time for livin'
Yes, I'm workin' all the time

[Chorus:]
It seems to me
I could live my life
A lot better than I think I am
I guess that's why they call me
They call me the working man

They call me the working man
I guess that's what I am

I get home at five o'clock
And I take myself out a nice, cold beer
Always seem to be wonderin'
Why there's nothin' goin' down here

[Chorus]

Well, they call me the working man
I guess that's what I am

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Incident at Tabuk

John got the call as we were packing up and getting ready to catch our flight to Tabuk. There were no details as of yet, only that there had been “an incident” in Tabuk and that said incident could thoroughly mess up our next site investigation. All we knew for certain was that we would no longer have local transportation provided for us. We were on our own.

Once on the ground, I needed to get a car – something big and fast would be my first choice. We were learning more about the incident itself, and the phrase “revenge squads” kept coming up in conversation. My choice was the fastest car on the lot, a Lexus ES 350. It had an annoying turbo lag, but seemed quick enough and stout enough to get us out of trouble with alacrity. It was also a shiny black Lexus, which made us look like big shots, and hopefully, the big shots weren’t going to get harassed.

The incident, as it was eventually revealed, was a traffic accident between an American in a large SUV and an unhelmeted Saudi motorcyclist. The motorcyclist didn’t survive the encounter. Enshallah.
On occasion, this sort of incident can get the people riled. Just imagine that you’re the mob, and one of your own has just been offed by an infidel. Would you accept the decision of your god to take this pilgrim’s life, or would you thrash out at anyone who believes differently than you? From my point of view, this was a matter of expecting the best, but planning for the worst.

Ultimately, there were no incidental issues, and we got to tool around Tabuk in a flash car for a couple of days. There were other issues, of course. There are always other issues.

Typically, expatriates in Saudi Arabia are housed in western compounds, where we have a lesser chance of subverting the pious. In the north, this was a group of single story villas within three perimeters and also within the base perimeter – they really didn’t want us sullying the people there. The villas were constructed by the Corps of Engineers in the 1960s to house their people while constructing the adjacent Military City, and it showed. Each villa was equivalent – an old, dirt colored concrete building with fifty year old dirty finishes on dirt lots barren of practically all vegetation. The neighborhood looked like those fake cities that the Department of Energy set up to test nuclear weapons – the empty towns with scattered toys and clotheslines. Sort of depressing, but we did get local fare within a few miles, so we ate well.

In Tabuk, I think the villa complex was originally built by Aramco. It was encircled by a couple of four meter concrete and razor wire walls. Here we had a nice two story villa with regular internet access and irrigated, fruited grounds. The problem was the camp restaurant. Not that the food was bad, but the service sure was. Our last night there, one of us ordered the special, baked lasagna. Now, you’d think that serving the special lasagna would be a matter of spatula-ing a hunk out of the pan, tossing it on a plate with the vegetable du jour and bringing it to the table, but you’d be wrong.

Who knows what they were doing, but they eventually served a stone cold corner section, and only after our other two diners had finished their meals entirely. We swore we’d never return which, in all likelihood, is exactly what will not happen. Not much of a threat since the project doesn’t require we come back.

Back in Riyadh, we’ve been staying at Eskan Village, a very large complex of single and two story villas with multistory, multifamily structures at one end of the compound. There’s room for a few thousand residents. Back in the middle of the last century, the Saudi government thought that they should bring the camel herding nomads in from the desert and set them up all civilized like. It didn’t stick. The American armed forces (and flunkies, sycophants, and hangers on), however, seem to like it here, and for good reason. The villas are nice.

Ours have been single storied, three bedroom places, with modern kitchens and baths. The entire roof is accessible and under shade (a nice spot for one of the Cuban cigars they sell at the haji store). There’s cable TV and daily towel service. Plus, the restaurant has well trained servers, a varied and fresh menu, and they serve bacon. Tasty, tasty bacon. Upstairs, they serve beer. Tasty, tasty beer. It’s not like I’m an addict, but when someone tells me that their god arbitrarily says I can’t have something, I want that something.

We haven’t tried the pool, or the driving range, the spa or the gym, but I’m sure they’re very nice, too.

We’ll hit the final western compound for my last couple of nights in country. Word is that it’s the best one of all.
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Curses!!!

When I woke up this morning in Tabuk, I was only eight flights from home. I hadn’t been so far away since I found myself in remote northern Afghanistan. No helicopter rides will be required to facilitate my return, but it will take six different airlines – seven if you count United Express, and eight overall. Add to that seven cities in two countries, ten different beds and four different rental cars over four or five weeks, and it’s no wonder my brain is hanging upside down.

So far, so fun, though, except for our reentry into Riyadh a week ago. We had spent a few days in a rundown western compound within a large Saudi military –industrial complex in the north and needed to head back to the capital to drop off most of the traveling circus and to spend a couple days to catch up with the work before heading into the field again. Our client was driving the lead vehicle, our US Army major had the second, and I took the rear.

The drive was scheduled to take five or six hours, and would have, but we tended to stop every hour or so at a truck stop for snacks and biologics. This slowed us down, as did the sometimes heavy rain, so we had only made it to the outskirts of the city in five and a half hours, with the sun close to set and afternoon traffic in full swing.

In Riyadh, afternoon traffic is hardly distinguishable from morning, noontime, or evening traffic. It’s awful. It’s crowded. It’s manic. Now, it would be one thing to simply drive through town to our hotel, have the valet park the cars, and retire to a nice Japanese meal at the Radisson. Yeah, that would be nice. In reality, we drove to the city center, then down some minor avenue to the Sheraton, where we dropped off three of our crew. They needed to be downtown to facilitate some meetings the next day.

I would have liked to have made a left turn out of the hotel and headed back to the highway. Yeah, I would have liked that, too. Left turns at the time were not going to happen. The four lane road was hosting six lanes, and none of them had any gaps in the traffic large enough to fit three large left turning SUVs. So we turned right, into the heart of it. Somehow, the traffic got thicker, so it quickly became a chore to keep behind the leading vehicle, then it became a struggle to keep only a single local car between our convoy components, and then I turned on the offensive.

Being a nice driver would have been a recipe for disaster. One local car slipping between us would have turned to two, three, or ten, and before you know it, the lead vehicle would have been out of sight. Maybe this wouldn’t have been so bad, except that it was dark, sort of raining, we had no maps or GPS, and we really weren’t sure where we were headed. Our lead car did, sort of, know where we were going, but he had never got there from the Sheraton, so dead reckoning was the call.

We found the Sheraton after crawling for an hour. We found our intended accommodations at Eskan Village three and a half hours later, a distance of no more than 16 crow flying kilometers. It didn’t help that numerous highway underpasses were flooded and/or closed. It didn’t help that our Major driver was an Army aviator, who was more used to flying over obstacles than driving through them.

At one point, the lead vehicle was making another u-turn, and the trailing two vehicles were forced to make the maneuver after the signal turned red, scoring us a couple of flashes from the traffic control cameras (I’ll include my 500 Riyal ticket on my expense report). At one of the underpasses, floodwaters were over the floorboards, and we had to pass through that one twice. At another point, it was very dark, still raining, and I swear we were driving through a landfill.

I eventually lost interest in the task, and was about ten minutes from taking charge when we finally reached our destination, where we spent an hour getting through security and finding our hooches.

Totally worth it.

The final hour, I mean, not the three and half that preceded it. I’m not particularly subject to flashbacks, but the endless drive around Riyadh reminded me too much of crossing the wire in the sandbox, except for the lack of weapons. Driving a single vehicle would have been no problem, but keeping the convoy together when there was an unclear plan of attack was no less than stressful.

Someone said that Mark Twain said that "I have found out that there ain't no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them." When I first heard this, I didn’t know if the subject was people in general, like you would travel with on a plane or shared highway, or people in specific, like those you would have in your vehicle or tour group.

Now, I’m pretty sure he meant both.
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Chiller

The display on the Expedition’s dash says that it’s 24 degrees outside, but I don’t believe it. I wouldn’t go any higher then 17, although I do think it’s rising. Regardless, it’s even colder in the facility we’re working on and in, and I’d already spent a couple hours outside on the windy and overcast tarmac in my shirtsleeves, so I came out to the vehicle to run the heater for a bit. I didn’t exactly plan for sweater weather when I packed my kit for this trip, but there you are, or rather, here I am, freezing my proverbial nads off on a fine desert afternoon.

Well, not really fine. The thunder woke me up at 0300 or so, and rain was still falling when I first stuck my head out the door around 0600. Our planned very early start was delayed and the rain had stopped by 0700, so I left the raincoat on a chair, shrugged off the leather coat I was saving for my December arrival in the Middle West, and headed to work.

There was only one general at our inbrief, and only a brigadier at that. I was sorely disappointed, but only sort of. He had fabulous snacks – bowls of dates dipped in dhibs, small platters of pastries, assorted nuts, bottled water, and the tea boy brought small cups of some piping hot ginger-clove tea. Steve and I made sure to try each of the varieties of tiny pastries so that we could circle back on the best ones – scientific methodologists to the end.

At a later meeting with one of the contractors working here, I only got a cup of weak, sweet coffee, but no snacks. Most of the other scheduled meetings have had tea served, sometimes strong and black, sometime strong and a little sweet, but always really hot. The best beverage so far was some ginger and herb infusion that followed the first round of tea. I couldn’t tell you where or when at this point. There’s been a lot of meetings, and an awful lot of tea.

The best snacks, though, were at the date factory.

We had a relatively slack day on Saturday, manufactured by our decision to stay at Al Qassim for the weekend instead of driving back to Riyadh. Either way, we would have to head to our current site eventually, so sticking around meant less driving overall, and there’s still a lot of driving remaining. We really didn’t mind the two hours down to Al Koht, where we called Mr.Dilham, who sent his driver to escort us from the giant tea pot at the interchange to his facilities.

The area was unlike any part of Saudi I had seen up until then. We dropped through a steep cut in a high mesa to town, and then followed a fertile valley upstream, through palm farm after palm farm, until we arrived at a large collection of structures backed up against a shear wall of sedimentary rock. This was the signature facility of the Al Fakhra Date Company, although I had only known them through one of their retail outlets, this one in Abu Dhabi, called Bateel. It became evident that it was one in the same once we sat down in their well appointed conference room and I recognized the stuffed dates we were served as those I had found in their shop last year sometime.

We had dates stuffed with orange, dates stuffed with walnuts, date cookies, and some type of sparkling faux wine with some type of date based fortification. And tea, and coffee, and water. It was only after we had sat for most of an hour snacking, watching the corporate video, and chatting with our host did we finally start the plant tour. We walked through the receiving and sorting warehouses, to the huge refrigerated storage building, then to the factory floor, where the dates were sorted, cleaned, and sorted again prior to packaging and further processing. Some of the premium dates went to be stuffed. Many of the less than premium rejects went to the dhibs process, where something akin to honey was pressed out of them.

Then it was back to the conference room for more tea and more talk. Soon enough, we toured their offices and then headed to a rooftop for a small snack of fried chicken, eggrolls and hummus, then back to the conference room for one more round of talk, another round of tea, and presentation of a couple of kilos of dates to each of the eight of us as we made our extended goodbyes. Out hosts for the rest of this tour are going to have to step it up a notch.

Throughout the outing, the plant manager graciously answered all of our questions about productivity and processes, but what he really wanted to talk about was how well he was managing his staff. He painted himself as their benevolent father. Calm but firm. Kind and disciplined. Eager to teach them about how to behave in a modern business, and how to behave in a western restaurant – sitting in chairs, using forks – that sort of thing. Feed them cake, show the love, but never forget the iron fist of leadership. Be vague about assignments, yet micromanage.

Honestly, it made me a little dizzy. Still, it was a plant tour, so I’ll claim a couple of hours of continuing education credits for my next license renewal.

We could have stayed longer, and would have probably been invited to dinner, but dark was fast approaching and we wanted to get back to Al Qassim in daylight. It was raining lightly as we got in our vehicles and worked our way towards the highway. There are plenty of dangerous road conditions here. Driving after dark is definitely one of them, but light rain might be the worst. The roads here are mostly asphalt, and they’re built well, so they last a long while. The trouble with road longevity is that the pavement abrasiveness tends to decrease over time, so the roads get slick. Add a layer of motor oil and heavy dust and they get more slick. Now add a little rain and traction becomes seriously compromised.

As I pointed the Excursion down the on ramp, there was a jack-knifed semi on the mainline just before the merge, and cars sliding into the median and shoulders from both sides. We crept with the trucks down a long steep hill at about 40 kph, while the opposing traffic was jammed solid as they inched uphill. Of course, the wipers sucked and we ran out of fluid, but we did make it back at dusk, just in time to head out for more shwarma.
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Poppe Wanted a Turkish Coffee.

Poppe wanted a Turkish coffee, so we walked to the Bon Café drive through on the way back from lunch. It’s open 24/7/365, except for prayer time five times a day. Even now, I’m not sure what to think of my cappuccino, as the thought of a Turkish coffee so close to Turkey had me wary. It was hotter than blazes, thick, and immensely powerful. I probably won’t need another dose until tomorrow. And silt. Lots and lots of silt.

Fortunately, it only cost me 10 Riyals – cheap anywhere for a froo froo coffee. On the whole, this seems the right cost. I bought lunch for four of us for 65 Riyals, about 17 bucks, and we were stuffed – hence, the need for strong coffee. It’s been worse, costwise. The lunch buffet at the Radisson in Riyadh was 208 Riyals (you do the math). Expensive, but the lamb was mighty tasty.



Riyadh was another huge middle eastern capital city. Not quite as chrome and glass as Abu Dhabi or Dubai, but still expansive, crowded, and dusty. Traffic was horrible. Not as crowded as Cairo, but the drivers are worse and they tend to drive large American cars and SUVs. No shit, I think the most popular car here is the Crown Victoria, followed closely by the Grand Marquis. It’s like a step into the past, except that they all look to be of fairly recent vintage. Of course, if could be that the arid desert climate keeps them pristine, but if that was the case, we should be seeing more thirty year old Tatas.

[Actually, I have no clue if Indian cars were ever imported into “The Kingdom”, or if it was even an automobile manufactory thirty years ago, it’s just that women are very rarely on the street, and those that are are very well hidden – so it’s just Freudian.]

I eventually choked down the coffee, but fluidization is paramount here, so I’m now enjoying (if that’s the word) a Green Apple Flavored Budweiser Non Alcoholic Malt Beverage. Perhaps one day, centuries from now, real beer will be available here, but I’m not counting on any change very soon. The cultural restrictions here are too deeply ingrained. Meanwhile, the GAFBNAMB isn’t horrible, probably better than the Tang they serve for breakfast, so I’ll likely have another. There are small shops scattered generously around the hotel, so a new supply of beverages is easy to obtain, along with some tasty local dates and, as has become the norm on these excursions, ice cream after dinner.

The ice cream selection isn’t nearly as good as in Japan, but ice cream is, usually, ice cream. I say “usually” because Jim and I stopped at a small shop in Riyadh while walking around last week and what they scooped and served to us looked like the real deal, but must have had something extra to prevent melting. Perhaps it was latex, I can’t be sure, but it was sort of rubbery, and I broke the little spoon.
With the free time we have today, a group of us will head south from Al Qassim to Al Koht, where we are scheduled to tour a date plantation and factory, and perhaps check out a heritage village. It’s sure to beat spending another day in a crowded conference room. Besides, we leave Al Qassim tomorrow for points north, and I’ll probably never have another chance to see the sites of this district.

This tour started in Riyadh, the seat of government and, for my purposes, the seat of the Ministry of Defense and its assorted acronymic agencies. Over the next few weeks, we’ll visit four more sites and do our thing. I’m not entirely sure how the Saudi Land Forces are organized, but our meetings thus far have been a little top heavy, with three generals attending the first and two more generals attending the last. Fortunately, as aviators, they all speak pretty good English, so it’s easier to get various points across. “No problem” is a common phrase, but I think that’s just them trying to sound accommodating – some things are a real bono fide and actual problem, which is why they hired us.

But we solve problems like these all the time, so logistics have been the biggest problem. There are twelve of us on this traveling squad, so our ability to modify plans on the fly is severely curtailed. It also means a three vehicle convoy (we’re driving borrowed USG Expeditions) and an hour to check in and out of each hotel, which means slow going most of the time. No problem. After the second week, the bulk of the group will head home, and we should be down to a more manageably sized contingent.

Word of advice – avoid the restaurant at the Al Qassim Ramada. There is a line of schwarma shops just down the street who do a fine job. Visit them instead.

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Exhaust

Outside of Osan Air Base is one of the endless suburbs of Seoul. Immediately outside the gate is a system of narrow streets and alleys, chock a block with shops and food stands and bars, many of which are prominently labeled inside the base as being off limits to military personnel. The neighborhood is colorful and loud, and has been morphing into its current form since 1950. Prostitutes are evident along this street, but I think they target the younger service men more so than the middle aged married guys.

Except for a comparatively much older woman, somewhere between fifty and sixty it seemed, who looked, as they say, rode hard and put away wet. “You want sex?” she asked. “Huh?” “You want sex?” “Uh, no thanks.” I like married women, anyway, and it helps if they’re married to me.

Later on Guam, I related the story to an USAF enlisted guy who had served at Osan a decade or more ago. His reaction was, “Is Old Sadie still working?”

Notorious, she is.

There’s a fine line between what I can comfortably accomplish in any given week, and what feel like ragged, sloppy output. Granted, I’m not a perfectionist, professionally. Not even close, but I make it up with conservatism, making me generally comfortable with the results. There’s a line, though, and these weeks I’m approaching it. After 15 hour days in the R-O-K stacked atop a 14 hour time shift and air travel, I was ready to take a break after the first week. But then I flew to Guam and continued the process.

I had a few hours Saturday and a few more on Sunday not working, but not to myself. Saturday, I accompanied a couple of Company folks who just relocated here. They were trying to find a house to rent and I thought I’d offer my services as Tropical Island Relocation Consultant, offering the wisdom obtained when I first started writing these missives. Local hint – there are a lot of places with multiple chickens as neighbors. If you’re not a cock-a-doodle-dooer, you’ll need to look longer for suitable digs. I spent the rest of the day writing notes for the meetings last week, and getting ready for the meetings this week.

Sunday morning, I started by wading into the ocean to watch the sun rise over the hotel (they have bright blue starfish here), and then I went on a circle tour of Guam to see some of the military history sights. This was really kind of cool. Even though the island is just 30 miles long, it was pivotal during WWII. The evening was spent preparing for the charrette.

Now, it’s a hot Friday afternoon already, and the AE JV team is working on the slides for our outbrief to the Brigadier. Well, some of the team is. Most of us are lounging as best as we can on the folding chairs available to us in this borrowed chapel classroom. We could have piled into the rental and ran over to the local beach, inaccessible by Guamanian locals, but easily reached by those already on Anderson Air Base.

But it’s even hotter outside than it is inside, so my team is dozing and waiting for the next session.

The week went well, by and large. The project is large, and has a mess of moving parts, but what makes it a mess is that it’s a Marine project on an Air Force base managed by the Navy. There’re plenty of toes to step on, so we step as lightly as possible. Also messy is the Joint Venture, a group of three small business architectural firms. Bear in mind that this is a major infrastructure project, and the only architecture is the design of a substation building, but that’s neither here nor there. The Company, on the other hand, has the bulk of the design, but are mere subconsultants to the JV. In fact, we are one of thirteen firms assembled by the architects to tackle the effort. We are, to use the vernacular, Team Gigantor.

I picture the tattoo as a thirteen headed Godzilla with three tails. The tails represent the three joint venture partners, and I’d be more than happy to lop one of them off and toss it into the ocean, but I’ve held my cool so far. There were times earlier in the week when I wasn’t so sure I could and our opinions of said tail dominate our 45 minute drive back to the hotel every evening.

We really shouldn’t be here still. My team had their 40 hours in by Wednesday evening, and we’ve covered everything that needs to be covered. After the client briefing this morning, we should have headed back to the hotel and got some pool time before flying out tomorrow morning. One of the tails, though, thought our time would best served waiting on the chapel for two hours, watching him direct the development of a power point presentation, so that we can sit in a room with the Brigadier who won’t ask any technical questions.

I dislike this tail.

Meanwhile, as with any military job, there’re new acronyms and catch phrases that dominate the discussions. We found a couple we liked and have been making fun of them consistently all week, going so far as to develop a drinking game around “Tiger Team”, “SME”, and “Hotwash”. If only the powers that be would let us drink en charrette.

We anticipate a couple of trips back here before the project is complete, and I’ll try to schedule additional days before or after. It doesn’t look like I’ll get any free time during under the current management, and especially this week.

The hotel’s nice, though, the food’s been good, and the team gets along, so I suppose I could call this a success. Just need to chop off a tail.
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Yokohama and Yokosuka

I hadn’t noticed until this very moment that the town we’re staying in, Yokohama, shares half of its name with the town we’re working in, Yokosuka (the George Washington is berthed there this week). Perhaps that’s no different than working in St Cloud and commuting to St Paul, but I’m pretty sure than Yoko doesn’t mean Saint. Perhaps this is something I can research once I catch up on my sleep, scheduled to occur once I get back to my own bed.

This is the first trip I had since receiving my United Premier Executive Gold status, my reward for spending too many hours on aircraft. My perk over the old Silver status? Nothing. Maybe next time. Thanks for playing.

At the Hotel Plumm, there’s not a single perk, only the tiniest of rooms, with deep tan walls, charcoal grey carpet, and hot pink furniture. The staff put the six of us in six adjacent rooms. Strange, but efficient. The décor suggests that they host annual Hello Kitty conventions, but their literature suggests that they specialize in weddings. For fear of even greater confusion, I won’t turn on the television.


Okay. I turned on the television, but it’s only to pass the time until we start heading towards home. It’s the usual morning infotainment shows, hosted by three to five talking heads. Sadly, the baseball scores are in Japanese, so I don’t know how the Carp did last night. The ads, though, are worth the effort to watch them. As if the bright colors, seemingly foreign soundtracks, and unidentifiable products, weren’t enough, many are populated by mascots and cartoon characters that make one question the seriousness of the entire people.

In the last one, an increasingly haggard businesswoman was shown hustling through her day, hounded by a short girl in a chubby, plush costume with little wings, somewhere between an angel and a snowman. Eventually, the businesswoman consumed something that looked like an oversized stick of gum, and she was instantly revived. I couldn’t tell if the plush angel-snowman was responsible for any of this, or was just hanging out in the scene.
In another, a couple of kids dropped a small metal can into a cup of water, causing it to steam and foam. Seconds later, their bathroom is sparkling clean.
And they have wireless Rock’em Sock’em Robots. Totally cool.

We’ll leave the hotel soon, and take the train to check out some of the sights of the Yokohama waterfront. The cherries are in bloom. They’re early, but beautiful, nonetheless, and add a nice touch to the urban landscape.

Lots of train travel this week, starting with an express from the Tokyo/Narita airport to Yokohama. We couldn’t get rooms adjacent to the base in Yokosuka, so we’ve been commuting by train every morning and evening, about 75 minutes door to door (including a short base taxi ride to get us to and from the gate to our temporary offices). We thought ourselves lucky to even get to the base the first morning. Perhaps five rail companies share the facilities at the Yokohama station, and their trains head out in at least ten directions. We found the right tracks eventually, but found ourselves on a local train, which makes 17 additional stops between here and there. We thought we had it figured out on the second day, but it was the Equinox, so they used a holiday schedule.

Yesterday, though, limited expresses each way, all the way. And today we leave. By the time I return (whenever that may be), I’ll have forgotten.

However, I’ll never forget the Hello Kitty themed breakfast I had this morning, definite change of pace from the noodle shop I had been frequenting. I liked the noodle shop because they had a comprehensive picture menu, which is the best thing next to an English menu, but the latter is a rare thing indeed. Mostly, it’s hit and miss. Fortunately, a lot of Japanese restaurants are tapas (more or less), so the commitment to something awful will only affect a small portion of the meal. With little dishes, we need a lot to feed six Americans, and to slake our gargantuan thirsts. At the end of supper last night, we were presented with an bill that looked more like a grocery list, and nearly half a meter long, once everything was itemized.

The weather’s been nice, which brings out the bikes, reminding me that I need a new battery when I’m CONUS.


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Take the Long Way Home

When we last left our insipid traveler, he was in southern Japan, under the impression that he would be travelling CONUS in just a few days. Well, I’m still headed CONUS, but taking a slightly longer route to get there, primarily via Doha, where there’s some engineering thing I need to resolve. For good or ill, I’ll be making my first ‘round-the-hemisphere* trip. It would be ‘round-the-world, but I’ll be staying at mostly the same latitude and never dipping south past the equator. That excursion is still on the To-do list, but isn’t currently on the itinerary.

“Isn’t currently on the itinerary.”

It’s all subject to change. This last modification came about over the past 36 hours. We’re working with a contractor in Qatar who adopted a half complete building from the client. The main reasons it was half complete are that the original design was half-assed and would result in a structure that would blow over in the first stiff breeze, and the original contractor was about half effective in meeting scope, schedule, and quality control. My task, since I’ve decided to accept it, is to look at various holes in the ground, and the concrete that fills them, and write a report as to what I observed. It’s not particularly rocket science, but it’s simple enough that a Senior Project Manager can do it. Plus, I’ve got in my possession a very rare and difficult to secure piece of government plastic that grants me, specifically, access to the location in question.

Ultimately, my valid Common Access Card and relative proximity were the deciding factors, which is why I’m sitting in the ticketing lobby of the Fukuoka International Airport waiting for the Asiana counter to staff up. It’s about 1400 now, and the flight‘s not until 1925, so I’ve got some time to waste, either on this side of the immigration folks or the other. After I write this, I’ll find a noodle shop and order something off the picture menu that looks like it doesn’t have too many tentacles, then secure a boarding pass to Korea.

Until this week, the furthest west I’d ever been was Oregon, and the furthest east was Afghanistan. Although my flight to Doha stops in Incheon, I hesitate in counting landing at an airport as actually being in the country. Someday, I’m sure the Company will send me to work in Viet Nam or India, so I’ll wait until then to say I’ve been around the world. This trip will have to maintain an asterisk. As for south of the equator, we have continuous work on Guam, so I may get one of those projects eventually. There was some talk this week as well about me covering for our project manager on Chuuk when he finally decides to take some PTO. For now, though, Fukuoka to Incheon to Doha to Frankfort to Chicago to Moline. Another five days and 12,000 miles and I’ll be home.

I’m just glad I had the hotel do my laundry yesterday.

In reflection, Japan certainly holds a top ten slot on the “Nice Place to Visit, But…” list. I’m sure the Japanese like it here, but there’s just too little space for my liking it over the long term. They’ve got ways of dealing with it, fine-tuned over the centuries. They queue very well, and aren’t large, loud or stinky. Public transportation can take you most anywhere and isn’t entirely a mystery. The taxis are propane powered, have doilies on the seats and are operated by uniformed, whited gloved drivers. Cities are nicely walkable. Did I mention that most every meal included tentacles? I’ve got serious issues with tentacles. However, the Kirin girl at the ball game last night, upon serving a fresh beer, bussed my empty cup. Nice.

We had a free evening yesterday in Hiroshima, and went to see the local major league team at their fairly new stadium. Sadly, the Carp got filleted by the Swallows. The 3-1 final score doesn’t tell the story of how hapless the Carp were, but I’ll try. Their only run was in the first, when a lucky bloop hit had enough energy to clear the left field wall. From then on, it was all Swallows, outhitting 10-3 and under-erroring 0-2. Towards the end, the Carp’s third pitcher was ejected for hitting two batters in a row. He was replaced by their 6’ 8” giant, who threw little but dirtballs. Overall, it had the look of Triple A ball, but with Double A pitching and Single A hitting, all in a major league stadium.

The crowd didn’t seem to care. Although quiet into the second inning, they overcame their cultural silence and became a bit boisterous, though it seemed that their cheers were entirely supportive, leaving the general derision to myself and my mates, not that anyone could understand our English “Use the good eye, Ump!”.

And the whistling. We had to do that, too, as the Japanese don’t seem to whistle. Anyway, during the seventh inning stretch, the fans sang the team song, and then launched balloons, this being perhaps the weirdest thing I’ve seen here. We’d been warned, so for three hundred yen, we bought a four pack of long, red Carp balloons. Each had a hard disk in the open end to assist in blowing the things up to almost a meter in length and 15 centimeters in diameter. This disk also worked to weigh the nozzle down so that the balloons continued to climb until they were completely deflated, at which time they’d flutter back to earth, all 10,000 of them. I fully expected the stadium floor to look like the parking lot of a shady truck stop, but the fans bussed the balloons that fell near them, and order was again secured.

I’m sure this won’t be my last trip here.
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Plans, Trains, and Automobiles

I’ve pulled all-nighters. In the time before, they were used to make sure that all of the available beer was consumed. Shortly thereafter, they were used to make up for the studying not done due to the beer consumption activities prior. In recent years, I’ve ridden all night on various endurance missions, but have spent more long and sleepless nights travelling from home to wherever (sleeping on a plane is really just being unconscious, so it doesn’t count as sleep). This trip is more of that, as you can’t fly halfway around the hemisphere and not take a mess of time to do it.

After the quick flight to O’Hare and a quicker lunch at Chili’s (not my choice), we boarded a 747 for the flight to Tokyo. I hadn’t been on one for decades, I suppose, although the novelty of being on the storied aircraft wore off as soon as I passed the stairway. Since my seat assignment wasn’t upstairs, who cares?

The international airport at Tokyo Narita is similar to every other large international airport, except that there’re more Japanese in attendance. With each successive meter we progressed away from it, things got progressively weirder. Such is the nature of Japan. We caught an earlier flight to Hiroshima, caught it barely in time, and had to be escorted through security and to the bus that would take us to the plane. On that bus was another of our crew, who was flying in through Singapore. He’d been here before, and I hoped he remembered how we figure out the final legs.

He didn’t.

The Hiroshima flight was half full, but all of the seats were assigned from front to rear, leaving the back of the plane empty, which is where I relocated once we were in the air. By this time, I’d been up for 22 hours and still couldn’t sleep, so I watched the clouds go past, and then counted golf courses once the cloud cover broke. It’s obvious how little space there is here. Cars are really small. Hotel rooms are really small. Compared to Americans, the Japanese are really small. Available land is really small, yet I could see golf course after golf course from the plane. As one disappeared from view, we’d start to pass over the next.

In Hiroshima, I pulled 10,000 Yen from an ugly teller, and got a single crisp, new bill. With each purchase thus far, the bills have been perfect, crisp and new. The coins are well circulated, from a single yen to 500 Yen, about seven bucks. The bills start at 1,000 Yen. I also got a well travelled Where’s George? Dollar as change at the base coffee shop, but won’t release it until I’m back CONUS.

Approaching the 24 hour point in any trip my wits are flagging, yet most critical. If I can’t wrap my sleep deprived noggin around the logistics, I’ll end up on some disputed island in the Sea of Japan, instead of in my cozy business hotel room. So very carefully, my crisp 10,000 Yen note went into the bus fare vending machine and not the soda and beer vending machine right next to it, or was it a bento box fish and rice vending machine? I can’t remember.

The further away from Tokyo you get, the less English you’ll encounter, be it people who can speak the language or dual language signage, so selecting the right bus could be stressful. However, if you can mostly pronounce the destination to a local, it all works out in the end, and we found ourselves still at Hiroshima, but 40 minutes away at the train station. There, we had our choices between trains and train lines, ticket tellers or ticket vending machines, and three levels of trains, one of which might take us to Iwakuni at 100 miles per hour or in the complete opposite direction at the same velocity. In retrospect, we should have taken the local train instead of the bullet train, as it would have brought us to the station a two minute walk from our hotel, instead of the station a twenty minute cab ride away from the hotel. The train was cool, though.

Anyway, I made it alive and unscathed and in bed in only 27 hours, ready to face whatever arises, for example, the really small hotel room, and the really, really small bathroom in the really small hotel room.

The first thing you notice is the electro-mechanical toilet.

Pause.

The next is the faucet on the sink, which is long and moveable, like the one in your kitchen. This is so that it can be swung over to fill the bathtub. The shower wand also runs off of the sink tap, so there’s just one set of controls. The tub is almost as deep as it is long, and it’s not much long to start. The room is efficient, compact and serviceable, and included a cool Japanese robe and slippers, the better to wear while heading downstairs for a steam.

We went to dinner last night, to a place that was a Korean-bred fusion of a fondue joint and a grill your own steak place. Shoeless and crammed around a low table, we ordered the Full Satisfaction Meal. This provided us with as much beer as we could consume and as much meat as we could cram down our collective gullets in 90 minutes.

Immediately, charcoal braziers were dropped into holes built into the table. Seconds later, we were surrounded by beer. Just after that, small plates of meat arrived – various cuts of beef, chicken and seafood. Our job was to grill the food and eat the food, drink the beer and order more beer, and continue this process for an hour and a half, at which time we’d be served a small bowl of ice cream, signifying the effort’s completion. There was salad, too, if I recall, but the bowls of kimchee, cabbage, and greens were lost in the flurry of carnivoracity.

Most of the dining here is more sedate. There’s plenty of rice and noodles, of course, and some thick brown curries. Breakfasts have been at the hotel buffet, where they’ll have eggs in some shape, rice, noodles, fish, curry, fermented soybeans, orange juice and coffee. Lunches we have on base at the food court, where I stop at the local place for Asian food, while the bulk of my crew eats at KFC, Subway, or Taco Bell. I don’t understand it, but that’s what they do. My first dinner in Japan was from the local 7-11, including some hot skewers of meat and a bento box of buckwheat noodles.

Surprisingly, it’s not all sushi, so I think I’ll survive the trip.
I’ll survive as long as I don’t go drinking with the client’s project manager every night, which I’d guess can easily get out of control. Recognizing this, I limited myself to three beers, a couple of shots of sake, and two songs at the karaoke bar. Seriously, what trip to Japan would be complete without participating in awful karaoke? At this particular location (and I don’t know why the others would be much different), a small wireless device was used to search the catalog, find a song and reserve a place in line, After that, the entire process was automated, so there was no need for an imaginary cape-wearing DJ. I chose a transportation themed tune by the Monkeys for my first outing, saving for my final number a dusty NOFX classic, “Seeing Double at the Triple Rock” (…when in Minnesota and you’ve got a drinking quota).

Immediately thereafter, we were presented with our bill. Coincidence? Hard to say.

The colors here are brighter on most things manmade, and big eyed cartoon imagery is everywhere; on clothing, billboards, television, and product packaging to name a few. Meanwhile, since roads are narrow and speeds are low, construction lanes closures are oftentimes delineated with a barrier of 2” pipe. At one local worksite, the pipe was supported by 30” big eyed, green plastic frogs at eight foot centers, each featuring a word balloon that says, “Sorry!” Our orange cones at home seem so impersonal by comparison.

Weirdest thing so far: this is work in the First World. How novel is that?

Next weirdest, Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni is an enduring base, and I see spouses and kids all over the place. On Saturday, the local Boy Scout troop was tramping about in their uniforms. We pass the elementary school and commissary on our way to the borrowed conference room, the community room of one of the family housing mid-rises. On base there are playgrounds, a skatepark and a bouncy bounce. It’s completely at odds with past experience.

Third weirdest, the local Hiroshima ball club are the Carp. I need to find a T-shirt.
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Taxi

I hear what could be a singer down the hall and through the paper-thin walls of my room at the Sheraton. I think he brought his ukulele. I need thicker walls.

This story begins at the airport, where I arrived via Addis Ababa with nine others on a mission that only required four. Be that as it may, there were ten of us at this rinky dink third world airfield, thoroughly jet lagged before noon, and with the uniform thought of finding our hotel. Rental cars would have been an annoyance to manage, so we’re spending this week at the merci of hapless Djiboutian cabbies and their haplesser Djiboutian cabs.


We started a simple game early on, rating the cabs on the newly minted Djiboutian Taxi Scale. It’s the usual one to ten thing, but based on the notion that the best of all possible Djiboutian cabs is worse than the most beat up wreck you’ve ever driver. We didn’t really know what would be up or down limit on this scale, but we tried to be fair in our rating.

The average cab, a four point five, is a green over white Toyota Mark II. [They look to be seventh generation, which would make them between 16 and 20 years old.] Typically, the average cab has a manual transmission, three out of four cylinders in constant operation, no less than two windows uncracked and operational, peeled vinyl seats, and mostly working interior door handles. This is average, and average gets you anywhere in town for 1,000 – 2,000 Djiboutian Francs (six to twelve bucks), depending on the distance and regardless of the number of passengers you can cram into the thing.

The best thing about them is that they can’t go very fast on less than all cylinders, so any crash would be at a survivable rate of speed. The worst thing about them (and this is true around the world) is that if the radio/stereo works, the driver will crank American Pop/Country tunes through broken and tinny speakers, hoping to make us feel at home. Fortunately, working sound systems only occur on cabs rated five or better.

The variations of the bottom half of the class seem endless, depending on how battered the particular machine happens to be, and includes an assortment of these:

• Cracked windshield - where the crack grows during the ride
• Smashed windshields - with the apparent impact point directly in front of the front seat passenger’s head
• Inoperable window controls - nice when it’s 110^ outside
• Nonexistent windows - improves the overall dust to passenger ratio
• Lack of window trim at the door frame - leaving exposed and jagged metal right where your arm wants to rest
• Worn, cracked, and sagging seats - for added comfort
• Seat covers, dash covers, and package shelf covers in a variety of artificial and authentic animal skins - perhaps it’s roadkill
• Air conditioning (not hardly, just checking to see if you were still with me)
• Trash - it’s ubiquitous
• Generally decrepit bodywork - it’s expected
• Brush applied paint - it’s obvious
• Left or right drive - gives the left front seated passenger the added responsibility for checking traffic during passing
• Bald tires - but they don’t need wet traction
• Wobbly wheels - might fall off
• Rattling and inconsistent brakes - scary
• Spoilers with LED effects - tres cool
• Bad stereos, blown speakers, and amplified ululation - for appropriate theme music

In general, an automatic transmission is worth an extra point, although power windows are typically worth one less point, due to the fact that they never work. Most of the front seat belts seem to latch, but if they hold up in a crash is still a mystery I don’t need to solve.

Operator condition is another factor relating to the overall quality of the ride. Our ability to communicate in their mix of Somali, Patois, French, and a smattering of English (mix and match) is a hurdle, although we have usually made it to our various destinations on the first attempt.

In the afternoon, most of our drivers have a mouth full of green teeth brought on by the khat chewing they’ve been doing since their lunchtime siesta. Mid afternoon seems a good time to catch them, as they are well past the manic needy stage they’d feel before they start using and are on the mellow, downward side of their daily high. Those hopped up on khat are a little less attentive than in the morning, but still try to pass everything else on the road, which is sort of funny if they’re driving a cab rated two or three, foot to the floor, and riding the clutch so they don’t overburden the motor.

Once I’ve taken the same cab twice. Once I’ve taken the same cab thrice. In each case, I’m sure the condition got worse between trips.

Fridays here are like Sundays in the States, if the States were desolate, trashed out desert cities. Our driver that morning seemed to enjoy the totally empty streets and put his particular Mark II (a solid 7) through its paces, pedal to metal on the straights and using the entire roadway for the corners. Now, long ago, Dad told me that the first thing I need to do when travelling to a foreign place is to learn the phrase “you’re going too fast” in the local language. Sometime, though, the thrill is just what I need to set me up for the day, so we let him drive on unencumbered reaching speeds of 30, 35, and even 40 miles per hour.

It was intense.

The other night, we took cabs rated 2 to 6 downtown to find a locally renown Lebanese place. We found it next to the darkened windows of a snooty looking French place and hustled our group upstairs and into the dining room. After some chaos, we found that it was in fact the French place after all, and that it was the Lebanese place that closed, only to be occupied by the French place.

Dang.

And the food was horrible, by the way, and not just because it was French, but because it was horrible French. We drank them out of Tuskers, too, and the lack of additional bottles didn’t add to the experience.

It was dark when we left the place, and worked our way from the side street back to the square, past the ranks of higglers, beggers, and con artists. With ten of us, we needed three cabs, so I started scanning the square as we approached. Then, just to the right, I saw a pale green glow that seemed to both soften and brighten as I started to focus. Once within ten meters, I knew it was a very special taxi.

Typically this week, I’ve taken on the role of Team Logistics, which includes goat roping, security coordination, cat wrangling, schedule conflict resolution, nose counting and the development of cab assignments. In the latter-est, I first ascertain who has local currency, and then place people into taxis. It’s not real hard, but (I swear) these engineers are idiots sometimes and can’t figure out how to enter a taxi without someone telling them to get into a taxi (sheesh).

Usually, I’m in the last cab, because I want to be sure that everyone is accommodated, but not this time. I quickly arranged for the others, gave seating and payment assignments and practically ran to this extraordinary machine.

As I ran my hand lightly over the highly polished quarter panel, I was drawn to the pristine white vinyl seat covers. The underbody had LED effects, as did the spoiler, with a LED ring around the end of the tailpipe. The wheel had stark white wheel covers and matching mud flaps. The rear door opened without a creak, and clicked shut solidly. It was tidy, it was clean, it had a battery operated closet light mounted on the headliner. It had dingleballs and a little stuffed cherub glued to the dash. With automatic transmission and four working cylinders, I was sure that this was it, the elusive Ten, and the Brandi he played had never been so loudly (or most distortedly) amplified.

Minutes later, we were back at our hotel and the ride had ended, with only the memory of his illuminated ornamental hood bird to sustain me.
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Ants Shufflin'

This has been one of those field trips where someone eventually says, “You know, working twelve hours shifts is still just putting in half a day”, and the mild humor is acknowledged and everyone gets back to task.

What a week is been. Well, more than a week, but the contract did say eight days, so twelve should just about do it. Once we fly, though, I’ll get home and then it’ll be fourteen more days of beating on other people to produce, so I get a break from the self flagellation, and my domestic team gets to feel the sharp sting of my performance enhancing doughnuts.

[Mmmmm, flagellating doughnuts.]


The work this time is sort of confidential, so I won’t dwell on the details. Needless to write, it does involve lots of fully automatic weapons, an evil plot to take over the world and a hollowed out volcano. But that’s all I’m saying about that.

Meanwhile, back at our temporary digs in the 12,000 square foot villa,…

No shit. It’s huge, with seven bedroom suites, nine bathrooms, servants quarters, and a kitchen that could feed 200. It’s a Company place located immediately adjacent to the office, which is in a villa exactly the same, but the mirror image, and the office villa is full of cubicals. The office still has the nine bathrooms and monster kitchen. In the office kitchen, by the way, the Egyptian nationals on our staff have to wait to cook their lunch until after the Indians have cooked theirs, otherwise, the spices clash too much for anyone’s taste.

In the residence, we use the microwave, if anything, and the kettle, but that’s about the extent, as we eat most all of our meals at the restaurants within walking distance. I’d like to use the pool but, for reasons unbeknownst, we only clean the office pool, and we don’t have keys to that building.

The local restaurants are nice, but they aren’t particularly local. Mostly, we go to the Traders Hotel just down the street, or one of the upscale places at the small shopping mall next to it. At each, we get to eat outside, which is a real plus while the weather is still relatively cool. My favorite meal, though, was at a local Lebanese place in downtown Abu Dhabi where, for 20 AED, maybe five bucks, I received a plate piled high with meat shawarma, fresh flatbread, tabouli, hummus, a plate of fresh vegetables, and a Fanta. Sadly, it’s a half hour or more to get there, parking is awful, and we really don’t have the time.

Mostly, we get up at 0600, go to the office, meet with the client mid morning for a couple of hours, return to the office, leave at 1900 for supper, work until 2200. Rinse, lather, repeat. We got to the site on the second day, about 90 minutes away and pretty much in the middle of the desert. We used the LTC’s Range Rovers to move about the site (as our Galant would have been bogged down in the first little bits of sand). I think he really enjoyed getting off road, as there was no valid project reason to blast over as many sand dunes as he did, or to chase that herd of camel.

We used our “free” weekend Friday to drive to Dubai to see the sights. The tourist activity, however, was continuously tempered by the need to view these sights in the context of the fake city we’re planning to build, so most of the day was work. We saw the Burj Khalifa up close, but didn’t spend the money to take the tour. It’s really, really tall, but that’s about it.

We examined the local elevated rail, which required an 8 station train ride, and a walk through two of the region’s largest shopping malls. One had an indoor ski slope which, next to war, is about the dumbest thing I have ever seen (and I’ve met my Congressman). By and large, they were really, really big, but that’s about it. The train was very modern.

Of course, everything in the UAE is modern, as it was entirely built since the mass extraction of crude began in the latter half of the last century. There’s a sometimes fine, and sometimes monstrously large line between modern and tasteful, and this line is a blur to the local architects. Their attitude seems to be that, if it doesn’t look good when it’s done, we’ll just tear it down and build a new one. Likewise with cars – if I get a scratch on my Rolls, I’ll just trade it in on a Bentley.

This is a place like no other. The amount of wealth is staggering. Fine cars. Fine hotels. Immense construction. Everything is shiny and new, yet there is no sense that any of it is productive. It’s a vastly more consumption based economy than the States although, in the Emiratis defense, they can afford it. I get the feeling, though, that once the oil gets used up, everything will dry up with it. The first president here recognized the fleeting nature of money and constructed infrastructure. He planted and irrigated tress, built highways, and spread the wealth around to the locals. The next generation constructed large buildings and edifices. Their children, only now starting to move up into positions of responsibility, don’t seem all that responsible. You can see them at the malls, strolling about, looking bored, largely purposeless.

Once the wells are all tapped out, I suppose they can get jobs herding goats again. Once the wells are all tapped out, there won’t be power plants or desalination stations. Once the wells are tapped out, this will all be a desert again, and all of my work here over the past decade will be buried in sand.

Cool.

Until then, work follows the money, so this won’t be my last trip to this end of the world.

Uncool.

Whatever. Cats gotta eat. Ants gotta shuffle.

Here’s the Draw Your Own Analogy section of the post:

The office villa and the residential villa are separated by a high concrete wall. The wall extends around the perimeter of each villa. To get from one location to the other requires three or four steps, manipulation of heavy iron gates, and a walk of about 30 meters. I’ve recently noticed that along the sidewalk, next to the wall, is a narrow strip, devoid of dust, and populated by a steady stream of ants moving in each direction, from the yard internal to one villa to the yard internal to the other.
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Precious Tina and the Prostitute

The Liberians have recently completed their second set of “free and fair” elections since the end of their civil war, reelecting Ellen Johnson Sirleaf to her Constitutionally last term as head of state. The inauguration ceremonies are Sunday, just days away. It was a somewhat disputed election, so I’m glad to be flying this evening, just in case the losers get uppity. I doubt that will be the case, as the mood of the people seems high and preparations are in full swing.


Our CEO will be here for the festivities, as well as our VP of International. Joining them will be dignitaries and VIPs from around the world (and perhaps a few VVIPs), and they are starting to fill every hotel in town, including ours. Every morning and evening, there are new folks here, the more recent ones better dressed than those who came before. Nicer cars fill the parking lots, and the drain on the power grid must be measureable, as we just had a brief outage.

Our Mainer, Brian, knows all numbers of people in Liberia from his work in the Peace Corps in the 1960’s and through multiple subsequent visits and sabbaticals. He’s on the phone talking with locals, or having us drop him off somewhere, or getting picked up at the hotel, so it was no surprise a well dressed young woman appeared at our usual veranda dinner table. My first thought was that she was the daughter of a friend, come to pick him up, and he was taking the opportunity to introduce her to potential American contacts. That seemed true, as she said that she knew Brian because he worked in her village while in the Peace Corps. Although that was fifty years ago, and she couldn’t have been more than twenty five today, I attributed it to my lack of understanding of the patois.

Being polite expatriates, we invited her to join us and bought beers for everyone. [The local brewery, Club, makes a very nice lager, and was one of the very few factories that weren’t damaged during the war.] Shortly thereafter, a couple more of Brian’s local friends showed up, and we were introduced, but what I thought for a moment would be a large group for dinner turned smaller, as Brian left with his friends, and left Precious Tina with us.

After we completed the construction of the dam in the 1960s, the Company hadn’t returned to
the project site until a year or two after the breech, in 1993. A few of our current team were there at the time and related a story about how one of the crew, an avowed teetotaler, fell off the wagon one night and, while trying to ditch a persistent local prostitute, fell down a set of unlit stairs and broke his ankle. Due to the political situation at the time, he had to be evacuated overland to the Ivory Coast and more intensive medical care.

The main floor of the power house is full of large and small holes, just right for eating ankles. Then there are the turbine pits in which you could fall thirty feet before getting sliced into very ugly parts by what wasn’t stolen of the turbine blades. There’re no rails at all along the perimeter of the powerhouse to keep you from dropping twenty feet on to jagged rocks and water. Examining the embankments and channels forces you to scramble up and down sharp, uneven, and sometimes unstable gneiss. The trails through the bush are full of snakes, there’s malaria and yellow fever, and the Liberians drive as bad as Jamaicans. Historically, however, the biggest threat to a consultant’s safety is escaping from hookers.

That’s why, when our small group had drifted off except for three of us and Tina, and she was joined by a more obvious working girl, we remaining three quick bade them good evening and, carefully minding the stairs, hightailed it to the safety of our rooms.

Why Brian introduced us to local prostitutes is still a mystery.
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Wet Work

Few things are as powerful as water. That’s one of the reasons I like working with it. Storm sewers surcharge, culverts overtop, levees fail, and foundations scour. Heck, I can design the heck out of most any facility, but always run up against the need to economize, so the cost of a larger facility is balanced by the risk of failure (damn). For dam design, we’ll look at historic and maximum probable flood events, but no one ever designs for political instability. The original design of the dam and facilities was sound, it just couldn’t hold up to political pressures.

As a result of the circumstances of the failure, we’re also concerned that the raging draining of the impoundment scoured the material around the powerhouse, potentially undermining the foundations. So to answer this question, someone needs to look at the interface between the powerhouse foundations and the surrounding earth. A simple task, unless the interface is deep into crocodile infested and parasite filled waters. When this situation occurs, the Company looks for that special someone who will jump into shitholes all over the world, and I guess that’s a small list, since I was the only one in the water yesterday morning.

The locals assured me that the crocodiles migrate downstream during the dry season, but agreed to keep watch for them, regardless. Apparently, the fishermen amongst our labor pool regularly catch 150 pound groupers in these waters, which means there are even larger ones lurking about, but I imagine they go after much smaller fry than me. My biggest concern (besides drowning in some freak accident) was the unseen beasts, microscopic bugs that would burrow deep into my pores, resulting in an embarrassing, Alien-like, lunch spoiling scene, where the foot long, drooling parasite bursts out of my chest in an explosion of organs and viscera. Embarrassing, indeed.

So far, so good, though. As soon as I got out, I took a sponge bath in a strong bleach solution, which should have killed most of the little beasties. As a brief aside, I might have been the first naked white man seen on that rocky shore in human history. So far, I think I’ll live, as will the powerhouse foundations. To the best of my poking and prodding ability in two foot visibility waters, it looks like the foundation sits keyed into bedrock, just like it’s supposed to be.

Today, Marty and I rented a hand hewn, dugout formed from a single cotton tree trunk to examine the tailrace channel for signs of degradation and/or deposition. The boat came with a ancient Liberian captain and his mate, one of our laborers, and they would take us down to the mouth of the channel, a couple of kilometers downstream. Meanwhile, we had an angler’s depthfinder and a GPS to record the actual channel depths as we moved along.

The canoe itself was less than 20 feet long, and listed heavily to starboard. The seats were adjustable, meaning the three sticks that spanned the bottom could be moved fore and aft, depending on the cargo and passengers. The captain had the only paddle, the shaft from a two inch round stick, and the blade shaped from a small portion of a white plastic water barrel. The mate was in charge of launching, landing, and bailing, because the boat had a fairly substantial leak (what do you expect from a carved wooden boat?). The bail bucket was what’s called a tapping pail, the likes of which we had seen the day prior attached to rubber trees on a plantation that we pass on the drive in.

Except for the constant leaning to port to keep the thing level, it was a very nice way to spend a couple of hours in a rainforest. The highlight was the mouth of the channel, where it joined with the main channel of the St. Paul River. There, the waters widened markedly, to many hundreds of meters. The flow got shallow as well, but was completely still before it babbled across the layer of rock and continued down to the ocean. Around us was absolutely no sign of civilization, except four humans in a dugout canoe.
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Existing Conditions

Although the air quality in the city leaves something to be desired, conditions improve mightily in the bush. Daily temperatures have been topping out below 90 on most days, and the humidity is tolerable, provided you never get more than a few feet from a bottle of water. The real challenge is the vertical. Although we’re only 50 feet above sea level on the floor of the power house, we need to go down two and three levels to get to the locations we’re trying to measure, and then back up again, a score or more times in a day. From the floor of the power house to the top of the intakes is about 70 feet, and then down another 100 feet to the water, scrambling down course embankments and even courser rock… then back again… and again.


The other day, I accompanied our two dirt and rock guys to the main spillway to assess conditions on that side of the current rivercourse. We made multiple trips down to the embankment toe and back up again, looking for scour holes and other signs of erosion. Throughout the excursion, we were accompanied by anywhere from three to six local men, who may have been contracted to assist us, but could just as easily had nothing better to do than watch the white guys poke at rocks.

As we moved about, we conferred and consulted, and eventually walked down to the forebay canal to ascertain what might have happened when the impoundment drained through it all at once. There was even more severe scrambling there, as the flows had removed all of the smooth surfaces from the old channel, scouring it down to clumps of the hardest rock. It’s beautiful, really, from a post-disaster mindset, but required a huge amount of climbing, all with light packs full of tools and water, lots and lots of water.

Trying to find the forebay canal was a little confusing, as the only consultant in our little group was there only once nearly twenty years ago, and the bush tends to change the looks of trails and buildings in a short amount of time. Fortunately, Liberians are a very friendly and helpful people, and an elder from the tiny village where we were stymied immediately volunteered to show us the trail to the canal, the same trail used nearly twenty years ago. When we got to the bottom, I figured that he’d head back home, but was mistaken. He kept with us throughout our conferring and consulting, and then showed us the shortcut back to the main dam.

Ultimately, it was a shorter route, but first involved heading directly away from our destination, and further downstream along the rocky and broken shore of the canal. There, our tiny group, changed shape, as our earlier group of hangers on crossed the river at the shallows and went home, but we and our elder were joined by a few more returning to their village after doing their laundry on the rocks. One of these was a girl, still a teenager, with a three month old strapped to her back and a basket of clothes balanced on her head. She led us to the shore where we headed up an almost vertical trail to the top of the bank forty feet above, where a relatively flat trail led us back to the van.

Before, after, and simultaneous to this event, we’ve been working to measure the roundness and plumb of the turbine pits. This is one of our primary tasks, and one we’ve been working on since our arrival. You see (or perhaps you don’t, because you aren’t here), there is an apparent gap between the powerhouse structures of Unit Three and Unit Four, a gap that doesn’t appear at any of the other interfaces. If the gap was caused by the great flood event, and has somehow tilted the powerhouse and turbine pit, then retrofitting Unit Four will become exceedingly difficult. By taking the appropriate measurements, we can ascertain if the turbine pit is still a true vertical cylinder. We’re hoping so, but need to make sure.

To do so, we turned carpenter, turning a big pile of hand milled 2x8’s and 1x4’s into a working platform twenty feet below the powerhouse floor founded on what’s left of the wicket gate spindles and operators. Then we built a second platform ten feet below the first, balanced on the unsalvaged vanes at the bottom of the gates. A couple of feet below that is water. There’re large holes in the center of each platform so that we can run a 20 pound plumb bob to just above the water, suspended on thin piano wire from a simple bridge we use to span the upper rim of the turbine pit. To dampen the movement of the plumb bob, we’ve suspended it in a flimsy galvanized bucket full of motor oil, which is tied to a couple of points on the pit walls. It took a day and a half to build the first one, but we should get all four finished within the five days we have before our turbine guy bugs out.

Of course, we don’t do any of this by ourselves. Our typical powerhouse crew is close to a dozen, with two or three local carpenters mixed into the labor. Over 150 were used to clear the vegetation from the main dam embankment prior to inspection. There’re usually a few more accompanying the geo-scientists as they poke around the rocks nearby. And we have our drivers, of course, and Liberian Electricity Corporation security personnel. It’s quite the entourage.

The first day we were working on site, we were also visited by another hundred locals, who would move up to the hole in groups and watch and comment for a time. It’s obvious that we’re working in the powerhouse, but it’s not clear at all why we would be cutting and assembling all of this lumber in a dank concrete pit. I think it helps, though, for at least the labor to know what we’re trying to do, so in my best Pigeon English, I simplify.

Ultimately, when we’ve centered the plumb bob, it should run down the axis of a vertical cylinder (the turbine pit). Measurements from the wire to the walls at various elevations will let us know if the pit is still true and round. If not, adding a turbine to Unit Four will be more difficult.

But I’m okay with more difficult, as long as I can enjoy the view.
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Mount Coffee

In 1964, the Company performed construction management services on a dam we had designed upstream of Monrovia in Liberia at a site called Mount Coffee. We originally constructed a long main dam, a forebay dam, an interconnecting channel, tailrace, intakes, powerhouse and two hydroelectric turbines to harness part of the energy tumbling down the St. Paul River. Soon thereafter, a European outfit added two more turbines in an extended power house. With four turbines in operation, the facility produced a nominal 65 megawatts of power for the next thirty years, until…


Instability in Liberia took its toll on Liberian infrastructure. As the story goes, one day in October, 1991, the dam operators were prohibited from reporting to work by one of the various factions fighting for control of the country. They weren’t there at a critical time during the rainy season to open the large tainter gates on the main dam and let the swollen river pass through. Instead, the reservoir filled to overtopping, then overtopped the dam.

What happened next must have both frightened and thrilled anyone lucky enough to witness the breech of 400 meters of earthen dam, and the immediate draining of the 30 meters of water stored behind it. The flood changed the course of the river, but also changed the course of the country, because there was no replacement facility for the power that Mt. Coffee produced, and even now, the government capacity in Monrovia is a scant 15 megawatts, barely a fourth of what they had before the failure.

At that time, the only real damage was to the forebay dam, which could be repaired without too much delay. However, the situation of the civil war didn’t allow the safety or economic conditions that were needed to have been in place for reconstruction. Instead, insult was heaped upon injury, as a very organized group of looters worked their particular form of dark magic on the power plant.

They took everything except the concrete and the tainter gates on the main dam, and some embedded parts that would be too difficult to cut up and sell for scrap. They took wires and lights and siding. They took the control room hardware and cranes and turbines. They took the motors that used to open the tainter gates, and they took the towers and transmission lines that used to convey electricity to the coast. All that remains today is an empty concrete shell, and we are working to fit a new power plant inside it, one that will generate up to 100 megawatts of power, as turbine efficiency has improved over the past half century.

But first, we need to make sure that there was no significant damage to the pieces we want to reuse. During this field exercise, we are examining the damage caused by the escaping water along the floodpath, we are examining the dam embankments for subtle signs of failure, we are making sure that the turbine pits are still round and vertical, and we’re examining the submerged portions of the powerhouse to make sure that it wasn’t scoured by the flood.

It’s great fun.
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Robertsfield

I couldn’t see much of the ground during our approach to the Robertsfield airport outside of Monrovia. I suppose having the window blind closed made a difference, but even when it was opened, you can’t see much from the aisle. I did eventually open the blind and leaned into the empty seat beside me to catch the view, and saw mostly haze until about a thousand meters, when the dark, grey-blue ocean faded into sight, revealing a sliver of tan beach, backed by an increasingly verdant landscape beyond.

Closer to the airfield, I could start to spot open field and rough tracks cleared through the bush, leaving stark red soil in their wake. Not a village to be seen, though, nor even a road, as Robertsfield is pretty much far from everywhere, except the chaos which comes standard in the Third World.

Immigration was a jumbled mess, but paled to the baggage claim, where the luggage from a mostly full A-300 was dropped on a belt that would fit in my living room, making it about eight times too short. Almost immediately, the ground crew started dragging bags off of the belt and adding them to a dense pile in one corner of the densely populated room. I was lucky, and had pushed myself forward enough to see my two bags enter the room, then asked a couple of local passengers to make sure they both got around to my side of the space, so a couple of other local passengers could haul retrieve them. Twenty minutes after we hit the ground, the flight from Belgium would arrive. Perhaps their bags would stay on the plane until my flight was finished with the room, but I doubt it.

Bags in hand, I waited for the other six on this team; a Canadian geologist, Chinese turbine guy from Seattle, a Mechanical from Maine, and our Geotechnical, Civil (Hydro), and Project Manager (also a Civil (Hydro)) from Minnesota. We were met by our local element who had transportation, but also, and most importantly, had permission from the Ministry of Getting Things into Liberia to get us and our things into Liberia without having to deal with Customs, and we had a mess of stuff that would slow us down through Customs - weird tools, construction supplies, survey equipment, underwater stuff, to name a few. It was enough stuff to pack an extended Econoliner, leaving just enough room to shoehorn the humans into the remaining seats for the ninety minute drive into the capital.

Our first full day here might have been my best day at work in recent memory. Up with the sun to start, then a nice breakfast on the hotel veranda overlooking the mild Atlantic surf. We had a couple of hours before we introduced the team to the client, so we split into a few smaller teamettes and drove a couple of blocks to what serves as the local Home Depot, but was actually two blocks of small and mid-sized shops crammed into a street crowded with the types of people you’d find at a Home Depot in West Africa – builders, homeowners, contractors and consultants, and women selling road food out of hammered aluminum pans and from transparent containers balanced upon their heads. It was noisy and hectic, but still relatively cool, and the street had a feeling of industry and a sense of the day’s potential.

A few miles away, down increasingly crowded streets, through various market districts, honking continually, was the client, the Liberian Electricity Corporation, behind a chain link and concertina fence. The kickoff went well. The government expressed their commitment and desire for the project to be complete as soon as possible and the consultants expressed their commitment and desire that we take the time required to get it right the first time. The first twenty minutes were softly punctuated by the rovings of a colorfully dressed woman, who ultimately brought in two trays of coffee cups, one tray of instant coffees and adjuncts, a couple of jugs of hot water, a tray of cold sodas, a tray of glasses for the sodas, two boxes of tissues, and individual plates of snacks for the sixteen of us. It filled the conference room table. Why we don’t do this in the States is beyond me.

With assurances firmly stated, we started the hour and a half trek to the project site, a drive we’ll be performing twice a day until our field work is complete. The first third of the time is just a struggle to get through Monrovia, where traffic seems worse than Cairo, but slightly better than Baghdad during the occupation (the main difference being we probably weren’t going to get blowed up).

There are more motorcycles here per car than I’ve seen anywhere. Most of them are Chinese and Indian thumpers, probably no bigger than 125-150 cc’s. Most all of them are taxis, with fares oftentimes higher than the four wheeled versions, due to the fact that they can lane split and weave through the standstill. Rarely do I see one without a passenger. Some with two passengers, one with two passengers and a baby, one with a couple of stacked plastic hampers, one with a folder mattress on the passenger’s head. I wish we had an open car. Not only could I get better pictures, but I could better hear and smell the streets. Liberia is a poor, poor place, but there is rampant economic activity throughout the city. It’s exciting.

The second third is along a section of road running up the left bank of the St. Paul River. A section being reconstructed under contract with a Chinese firm. They seem to be making progress, but are obviously slowed by the need to maintain traffic and commerce along the road. This section goes by easily, especially when compared to the final third of the trek.

The last bit is along a road that, at best, makes our little lane at home seem like an immensely wide sheet of plate glass. It’s barely as wide as the Four Runners we’ve rented, and portions are so rocky and rutted that it’s a real work out to maintain hold of the Oh Jesus Strap. At one point, we cross a bridge with a deck barely two meters wide, although it seems much narrower as we cross it.

Over the final ridge and the project comes into view, a site of nothing but potential.
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Nothing New Under the Sun

After a few hundred thousand miles, I thought that I had this International travel thing figured out. Sure, there’s not much you can do about a lost bag, except wait for it to be found. [To mitigate the potential loss, though, it’s a good idea to split stuff between your checked bag and carry on, just in case.] The effect of missed, cancelled, or incredibly delayed flights can also be eased through the use of a really good travel agent, that the Company has so, while inconvenient, there are logistics workarounds. I carry plenty of reading material and plenty of meds, and even got a dual band world phone. This, more, and armed with the “Be Prepared” motto I found in the Boy Scouts generally prepares me for whatever’s going to go wrong.

But not always.


We got off of the plane in Doha with no incident and little fanfare. There are just two of us, so it was an easy task to round up the team. The flight was fine, the bags were delivered. All we needed to leave the airport was a rental car (an unsatisfying Dodge Avenger, with huge blind spots).

The rental car business is somewhat smaller in the Middle East than in the States. There’s not the massive parking lot dedicated to each agency that you might be used to. At Doha, the agent is in a countered cubicle adjacent to the countered cubicles of each of the other 20 rental car agencies. Once the documentation is complete, another nondescript (except to his mother, of course) appears to walk us out to our vehicle, perhaps half a kilometer away in a small lot lost within the mass of public parking lots. Even in an Englishcentric environment, I think it would be hard to describe how to find the place. Of course, using well designed signage would be cheating, but would also relieve Mr. Nondescript of his job.

Anyway, we trudged along behind him through the 100^ heat of the late evening. At the car, he unlocked and started it, so that the air conditioning would warm up and cool down the interior before our drive to the hotel. In the mean time, we did the visual inspection and locked our bags in the trunk. Final papers in order, I reached for the front door, only to find it locked, car running, bags sealed in the trunk, air conditioner blasting.

“Hmmm”, I said, actually saying, “Hmmm.”

About 40 minutes later, a second set of keys appeared, which was about 38 minutes after we had exhausted the entire English repertoire of Mr. Nondescript. The lesson – take the keys and keep them.

A couple of days later we dropped off the car, simply leaving it in the public lot and taking the ticket back to a small shack and letting the attendants know about where we had left it. The inside of the shack was lined with very small carrels for the representatives of each of the various car agencies. As I dealt with my business, I watched the screen of the adjacent agent, who was systematically paging through great collections of Facebook images, selecting the pretty girls and making friend requests of them, at a rate of close to 10 per minute. He was a friend making machine, and I wish him all the best.

On the other hand,… Zach and I are being accompanied by up to five government minders, all bureaucrats from the United States who work to make sure that we don’t spend money from the cyan pot, when this money is only to be spent from the aquamarine pot. They are masters of tiny little regulations. It came as some surprise, then, when the one I really wasn’t getting along with tried to enter the UAE with his diplomatic passport, when only the citizen passport is accepted, unless he had a letter from the State Deportment countersigned by the local embassy, in quadruplicate.

Bottom line, he wasn’t allowed past the immigration desk and got deported within hours. So, with the scheduled early departure of one of the others, we two are down to just three minders, but for just two more days.
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