Since I am the one with more driving experience between my sister and me, I am the one on the insurance, so only I can drive it. Because of this, the car sat for 3 weeks before I arrived while Anna was here on her own, and it was filled with mildew and mold when we opened up the door. We gave it a bit of a wipe down, and tried to sit on newspapers for a while. The mustiness has finally dissipated and the car smells relatively normal now. But it has some quirks…

There is a sunroof (oh, the irony of that name) and it leaks when it rains. This being the west side of Ireland, it rains or threatens to rain most of the time. To deal with this, when the car is parked at home, we put a big plastic bag across the top and anchor it there with a stone and a piece of wood. But sometimes I get cocky, because the weather seems nice-ish, and go into the house for the night with no rain barrier pileup on the roof. If it rains in the night, and I wake up and hear it, I wince, chastise myself and hope it lets up, but there’s no way I’m getting myself out of that cozy bed to go stumble around in the cold, rainy dark to pile stuff onto the car roof. (The outside light is broken, and our flashlight too.) If it does rain heavily, then next time I get into the driver’s seat, I pay the price of being dripped on the top of the head as I drive. At the moment there’s a row of tissues stuffed into the crack of the sunroof to absorb the leaking water, but this is only a mitigating measure, and not a full solution, because of course, once those tissues are saturated, they just start dripping too. Also, it comes through the ceiling light sometimes as well (which seems like it must be bad for the lights, but so far they still work…)

But our car has more probl– i mean quirks! Ever since we arrived, the electric locks have been a bit funny. They switch themselves into the lock position at random times. It can happen when we’re driving, or it can happen when the car is stopped and off. It can have been recently turned off, or it can have been turned off for hours, when suddenly the locks decide, “security time!” and the car gets locked up snugly. The key only works in the driver’s door, so when this happens, if it’s when the car is stopped and we’re all outside of it, I unlock the driver’s door and reach over to push the locks on the other doors up. I have to hold the lock up until the person outside the door opens it, because, if it’s in a really security conscious mood, it immediately relocks itself. Now, this quirk wasn’t a big deal really, until our latest car issue. The driver’s side door lock has stopped working, and the door no longer opens. The lock has become stuck in the locked position. A mechanic had a look at it, and, after struggling with it for a good 30 minutes, said that the only way he can resolve it is by taking the door apart (not simple when you can’t open the door!), and he has no idea how much it’ll cost to fix it until he’s done that and can see what the problem is. Not wanting to hassle the owner with potentially costly problems, we’re just living with it for now. I exit and enter the car through the passenger door, climbing gingerly across to my seat, trying not to get mud from my rubber boots on the steering wheel or any seats.

But the real fun comes when the car decides to lock itself up when we’re outside of the car. I can no longer get in through the driver’s side door of course, and the only way to get in when this happens is to open the trunk, climb in, unlatch the back seats and push them forward, and then crawl on my belly through and into the car interior. The last time this happened we were parked out front of the Lady Gregory Hotel, a rather nice place, that is often quite full of people, as it was on this occasion as well. I had backed into the parking space, with the back end of the car in a shrub. It was raining, so I didn’t have the luxury of waiting for a quiet, people-free moment. There was no help for it. I took my dignity, carefully folded it off to one side, climbed into/onto the shrub, and clambered in through the trunk of the car. This is as awkward and inelegant as it sounds. Luckily, it doesn’t happen very often. Three times, so far. But I think I need to start considering the potential ramifications of my parking space choices, and look for more out of the way spots.

Then there are the tires. Balding to the point of wire showing through when we got the car, we had the back two changed. But they were retreads and it turned out that the sidewalls of one were not in very good shape at all, cracking actually. We didn’t notice this though, until driving home from a neighbour’s one night and we got stuck momentarily in the mud on the side of the road. In our sudden exit from this mud, we scraped by a hidden rock and our tire burst. It being the dark of night, we just hobbled home gently on it and went to bed. The next morning we got up to look at it, to see if it was refillable with our foot pump so we could get to the tire guy. Nope. There was a gaping rip in the side. Not the sort of thing you could drive 15 kilometers into town on. This meant changing the tire to the spare, which is something that I have managed to get this far in life with zero experience of. A bit intimidated by the task, we resorted to drinking cup after cup of tea and poring over the internet, catching up on the news and emails and so forth. But, in addition to being an excellent procrastination tool, the internet has other benefits. Armed with a YouTube video on jacking up a car, and a step by step page on changing a tire, Anna and I eventually went out there and tackled the job. We only solicited male help once when we called the tire place to ask why the tire wouldn’t come off after we’d removed the lug nuts. He remembered the car from replacing the back tires and said that he recalled these tires being quite sticky to get off and suggested we use a sledgehammer and whack at it until it loosened. Anna went at with the blunt end of the ax a few times, and lo! it released! I must say, I felt pretty puffed up and pleased with us as we rolled into town on our spare. We’d have had some really cool music playing to celebrate that victory drive, but the stereo system needs a code that we don’t have.

The sun roof after a night of rain

Anna helping out with the water leaking issues

Anna assessing the situation

The work of one rock, hidden in the mud...

Working on the lifting of the car

Those lug nuts don't let go easy. There was some jumping up and down on the wrench

Anna, she can wield an axe, that girl!

Settin' her back down.

So, I’m keeping an eye on him, Mr. Suitcase. He’s a bit nervous and shy about getting out there and just grabbing one. I’m silently urging him on. “Go on, it’s your turn…” And he would sort of start towards one, and then someone newer but more pushy would get it. “Oh, dear…” I’d think. “Okay, next one, it’s yours.” Meanwhile, a mini-van had stopped and let some people out, some of whom had joined our taxi-seeking group. Now, I’m starting to feel a little territorial about taxis, and I feel that these people need to hang back for a bit, in all fairness, and I’m getting a bit tense. Luckily, a couple minutes after the arrival of the minivan, Mr. Suitcase, gets out there and snags a cab! I’m pleased! I’m proud! I’m rejoicing in my heart! Partly for him, and partly because I consider myself next in line.

So, Mr. Suitcase talks to the cabbie through the window, and then walks back a few feet to where his suitcase is, tapping on the trunk as he goes, to get the driver to pop it open for him, which the driver does. But, wait! Some guy, fresh off the minivan, opens the front passenger door and climbs in! The nerve! I can’t believe it! I’m incensed! Mr. Suitcase, a gentle soul, if ever there was one, stands frozen on the way to his suitcase, staring at the cab. At this point, I’ve half a mind to go up to the door, open it, and tell Mr. Pushypants that he’s made a mistake, and this is actually someone else’s cab (even though we all know full well this was no mistake – this was a blatant, outrageous taxi grab). But the trunk is popped, and someone’s going to have to close it before that cab can drive anywhere, so I just wait to see what will happen. I’m also looking at Mr. Suitcase and silently urging him to just get his suitcase, put it in the trunk and get in the taxi. A few tense moments, and all is resolved; the driver tells the second guy to get out, and he does. I say, out loud,“That was pretty pushy,” to him, which he ignores and he walks away. Mr Suitcase hears me, and calls out after him, “Pushy, eh?” I think Mr. Pushypants at least had the good grace to be embarrassed, because he retreated to the back of the straggly group of taxi-seekers, and focused on texting on his phone after that. I was quite rejuvenated! I had been quite tired, but apparently I just needed a little drama to perk me up!

I also managed to get my very own taxi a few moments later. Maybe other people had similar senses of who had been waiting longest and whose turn it was as well, because no one tried to compete with me for it. Or maybe they had seen me glaring at and calling that other guy pushy, and were concerned for my mental well being and just thought it would be better for everyone to let me get out of there. I really think a little sign saying, “Queue here,” which the taxis would pull up to, wouldn’t go amiss at that spot.

• I live right in the city this time, sharing a room with my mom in an apartment that we’re sharing with two other families – a Filipino couple and an Arab family (Syrian, I speculate?)
• I’m working in the city too, at a college where they like us to work 8 contact (teaching) hours a day, on a split shift basis. This means starting at 9 am, and finishing at either 8 or 10 pm, with a few hours break in the middle, leaving little time for any outside life. To give them credit, this was in the contract, but I didn’t take it seriously – I thought they meant, if they were in a pinch, they wanted us to be willing to pitch in and do a longer day on occasion. Not so, it turns out!
• No car – it’s taxis and buses this time around

The reason for these reduced circumstances is both my, and my mother’s, ambivalence about staying here for very long. The job is not a winner – as you can see with that schedule, there’s no time for any outside life! And so, in order to keep from being tethered by the ubiquitous year-long apartment rental contract, or by owning a car, we are renting this little room month-to-month, and taxiing (and occasionally busing), to get around. It would appear that in UAE labour law, an employee can give notice, effective immediately(!), within the three month probationary period of their contract. It’s been three weeks, and I don’t think I’m going to last three months, never mind longer than that! I don’t intend to leave them in the lurch, and neither does my mom, but neither of us feels inclined to stick this job out. I wouldn’t give them no notice, as it appears we legally can – that wouldn’t be right I don’t think, but perhaps two or three weeks notice? We’ll see.

Meanwhile, the housing situation, while not glamorous, has compensating bits of adventure and amusement built in. I believe that we are the only “Europeans” (read: Caucasian westerners) in the building; this brings us a small measure of fame. On occasion, in the elevator someone who we’ve never spoken to, and don’t recall seeing, will know that we need the button for the 10th floor pressed, and will even ask us, “Ten-zero-two?”, which is our apt number.

On a less endearing note, the kitchen, shared between the three families, is also shared by myriad six-legged wildlife. Mom and I have both discovered independently that it is a good idea to reach around the kitchen doorway to turn on the light and then just wait a moment before entering, to allow said wildlife to scuttle into hiding. This is less alarming for all parties involved, than the standard waltz-into-the-room-and-turn-on-the-light method, which results in panicked scattering of little beetle-y things, and a stifled scream from the human. The other two families are very clean, and even take their garbage out to the hallway garbage chute after cooking every meal (an example that we are following), but as the main renter and kind of our landlord, Jalil, said with an apologetic wince, “Is old building; some cockroaches, and other like this, coming some time.” Yes, they are coming sometimes, especially when the lights are out!

This round building is our neighbour. We're the boring square building on the right. Our room faces this street and is one floor below the top - it's an 11 story building.

The view from our room at night...

When I headed back to my gate, I could see from far off, that it was surrounded by a sea of pink-headressed women. When I actually got to the gate and sat down amongst them, I saw that they were a Muslim pilgrimmage group, going on the Hajj, from Cambodia, on their way to Mecca. There must have been at least 150 people in this group.

Pink ladies, heading to Mecca

The green patch on the back says 'Cambodia' in Arabic

Perhaps quite a few more, if you include the men, who didn’t stand out so much. My flight was scheduled to stop in Abu Dhabi and then continue on to Jeddah in Saudi. There were also several Indian looking men wearing what I can only describe as outfits made of large, white bath towels; each man wearing two: one as a sarong and the other as a shawl. I think this is the prescribed dress for men while doing the Hajj rituals but I don’t think you are also be expected to wear it on the plane. I guess they wanted to be really ready. Most strangely attired airplane gate company I’ve ever kept!  The pink ladies turned out to be fairly inexperienced with airplanes, and although I had deliberately waited till most people had boarded the plane so people would be settled in, when I did board, I was greeted by chaos anyway.  Diminutive Cambodian women in strange pink head coverings milling about confused and cheerful, sitting in the wrong seats, wandering past their assigned seats, then trying to make their way through all the bunched up people behind them back to their seats, trying to get things into the overhead compartments (which for a person under 5 feet tall requires assistance, or clambering, which they were quite willing to attempt!). Oh boy. When I eventually got to my seat, waaaaay back in row 60, it was, of course, already occupied by a cheerful little pink headed Cambodian lady. The flight attendant looked pleadingly at me and asked if I could just take any empty seat. We found me another window seat beside a Sikh man and he and I had a little conversation on the free-for-all going on around us. He speculated that on their flight from Cambodia to Hong Kong, there hadn’t been assigned seating. I speculate that it was like in my experience with Yemen flights – there is assigned seating, but it’s so universally ignored that there may as well not be. While we were sitting there talking, one older lady was attempting to stand up on her seat in the middle of the center section and, leaning way over her two neighbours, to reach around and up in order to put a bag in the overhead compartment. My expression must have conveyed my alarm, and my Sikh neighbor turned to see what I was looking at. He was just making a move to get up and help, before she or one of the bags tumbled onto other people, when the flight attendant ran over to sort it out.  Then he just quietly looked down, closed his eyes and shook his head. We were an hour late departing because of all of these shenanigans! But I have to say, they were awfully cute.

Now, the school has put me up in a very nice room, in a very la-di-da hotel, with a pool on the roof, and I’m going to thoroughly enjoy it!

Pool at hotel

View from my room,

The town of Xitang

I had a rather unexpected day. It started out quite unpromisingly. I had a bad night’s (non) sleep because of a cold, which has moved into the nose and head phase. The previous day, I had booked a train ticket to a town called JiaShan, from which I understood I could get a bus or taxi to the town of Xitang, which a friend of mine had let me know was apparently very pretty (thanks, Melanie!), so I had proposed to make a solo daytrip of it, since my friend and travelling companion, Jen, was flying home the night before. I booked a train ticket there for 8 am, and one returning back to Shanghai at 6 pm. However, come morning, and the miserable way I was feeling, I decided to skip going for my 8 am train and to just sleep and lie-in until closer to noon. On a previous train trip, to Beijing, Jen and I had discovered that if you show up late, as in, you’ve completely missed your train, it’s gone, they just change the ticket, no penalty fines, or change fee, not even a scolding! It’s great! I highly recommend China’s trains.  Superfast, prompt, clean and comfortable, and flexible on ticket changes.

So, round about 11:00, I started out my day, stopped at Starbucks for half an hour to have a coffee, and then off to the train station.  I finally got there around 12:40, over 4 ½ hours late for my scheduled train, and found an English-speaking window at the ticket counter to have it changed at. The next train was at 1:47, so I was switched over to that. While I was standing at the counter, I saw a blonde woman several windows down, talking to the ticket agent in Chinese. Oh, she speaks Chinese; interesting, I thought. She was with a tall thin Arabic looking man. Next, I decided to head upstairs to McDonalds for some sort of breakfast. Starbucks, McDonalds…I have not been frequenting Chinese foodstops. Jen and I read an alarming paragraph in the lonely planet, backed by this article about the reuse of cooking fat gathered from the sewers, and have been avoiding fried food, especially from Chinese restaurants, ever since. Anyway, off to get my orange juice and hamburger. And who should I see up there but the blonde Chinese speaker and her Arabic friend, and then again, in the waiting area before getting on the train. Maybe she’ll be on my train and I can ask her where she learned Chinese, I thought idly. But, really, what are the chances we’d be seated near each other – unlikely. At 1:40 the boarding call for the train was announced and we all fed through the turnstiles down to the platform. I was in car two, seat 4F. As I made my way to my seat, I saw the blonde woman standing in the spot beside mine, blocking my way in, so I tucked into row 3 so that people could continue past, smiled at her and pointed to 4F and said, ‘that’s my seat.’ Well, my idle speculations had materialized; it turned out she was in 4E! So we chatted: She was from Russia, near the Kazakhstan border and started studying Chinese 7 years ago in university. Her name is Kristina, and she works for a Chinese construction company. The Arab man with her was Qatari and was the manager of a company contracting her employer, and another, chubby Arab man that I hadn’t seen before was also with them and was the customer. The two men were giving off the unpleasant air of arrogance and rudeness that some Gulf Arabs have— an unfortunate byproduct of a lot of money quite quickly, perhaps. (e.g. they’d pushed in front of me as we were boarding – I wanted to say, “Really, guys? Seriously? We’re all getting on the same train, and it’s assigned seating.” Instead, I quietly glared at their backs. That’ll teach them. They then proceeded to block the aisle while they put their bags up top and loudly discussed which of them would sit in which seat.)  Kristina, however, was an excellent counter to my previously acquired dislike of Russians based on some unpleasant experiences I had in the Moscow airport, and their common tendency to be rather cold and unfriendly on initial acquaintance. Yes, I can make sweeping generalizations with the best of them! She was quite sweet, and ended up completely taking me under her wing when we got off the train. It turned out these three were getting off at the same train station as me, and when Kristina realized how vague my understanding of how to get to the town of Xitang was, she made a point of taking me around at the train station to people and explaining in Chinese my plan and sorting out the best way to do it. She decided a taxi would be best. I said my goodbye then, and headed out to get a taxi. But I didn’t see any, so I wandered over to some minibus drivers and was trying to sort something out there, when Kristina and her customers emerged from the station and saw me. She marched over, removed me from the minivan guys (“They will take too much of your money…”) and took me to some police officers to explain. Even the Qataris weighed in when Kristina retrieved me and said, “don’t go in those vans alone.”  The police officers told me where to stand to wait for a taxi, and stand there I did, as instructed, until one came.

It was a morning of stereotyping: I have already told you how quickly I pigeonholed and dismissed the two Qatari men, and the sweeping generalizations I have made about Russians (all of these not without experiences to back them up, but still, I know I really shouldn’t). Kristina then proceeded to add her own stereotyping into the day’s mix. “Chinese people,” she told me, “when they see you, or me? They get dollar signs in their eyes. But not just for money, but for any way the can use you. With me, they lose interest when they realize I am Russian, but from the right country, like Canada or America, they will become strategic with you. I have lived here for two years and I have not had one real Chinese friend – I don’t trust them!” I must admit, having had my friend taken in the tea ceremony scam days earlier, and had it tried on me and my mom on a previous trip, I wasn’t inclined to dispute her and defend the Chinese at that point. However, my afternoon was to teach me a further lesson in the unreliability of stereotyping…

Now, you may have heard, or even experienced in Vancouver, that Chinese people can be a little bit pushy about transport. For example, it took me three attempts to get on a subway at rush hour one day. There’s sometimes a bit of a line up when you start out waiting, but it all falls to pieces and becomes this quiet, determined, impersonal, but aggressive shoving when the train arrives. on my second attempt to board, I found myself ripped apart from Jen, shunted off to the side and further back than I had started, this despite our holding hands for that attempt. So by the time the third train had come I was all geared up, strategically placed to be in the flow and ready to shove my way on. They don’t even wait for the people on the train to get off before pouring on, which is very inefficient. Rush hour in the subway is not pretty and a little bit scary; you wouldn’t want to lose your balance in that crush.  Anway, the point is, I’ve learned to be a little aggressive about getting transportation here. So when a taxi showed up, and a Chinese family was running towards it from one direction, I hurried just as fast from the other, and, getting there a second before them, quickly asked him, “Xitang?” claiming the taxi as mine. He nodded. Then the family arrived, and I turned to them and smiled and asked them the same thing. They nodded too, so I gestured that we could all go together.  They were agreeable, so we all climbed in, me in the back with the daughter and mother, and the father up front.  Off we went. The mother started talking to me then, in Chinese, quite chattily. I smiled and listened, because her manner seemed very pleasant and friendly, and then said, “I’m sorry, I don’t understand. “ She laughed and looked at her daughter. I guessed the daughter to be about 13, and I thought it possible she might know some English from school so I asked her, “Do you speak English?” Turns out she did! A little anyway and she started translating. So we three chatted away, sort of. The girl was actually graduated from high school and just started university, so she must have been about 17 or 18, but she really seemed younger. She had the mannerisms of a 12 or 13 year old – whining at her parents when she wanted something, jumping up and down when she was happy about something (as I witnessed later), and burying her head in her mother’s shoulder when she was embarrassed or didn’t know how to translate. They were surprised I was going all alone to the town, and disappointed that I wouldn’t see it at night when the lanterns were all lit up. When we arrived, the father paid for the taxi, and when I tried to give him half the taxi fare, he wouldn’t let me.  He understood some English, and knew quite a few words, but his daughter said it had been so long since he’d studied that he’d forgotten a lot and couldn’t remember how to construct sentences, so it was only the daughter and I talking. And so, into the pretty little water canal town we wandered. Now, I assumed they’d want to go their own way, and that we’d all separate, but when I stopped at the top of the first bridge and was suggesting that I’d wander off to the left now, there was some consternation and conferencing, and they really seemed to want me to continue with them. Um. Okay. So, we carried on, and when I stopped to take pictures, thinking they’d carry on, they didn’t; they waited for me, and the girl took pictures, of the scenery and of me and her. Eventually, we got to their hotel, the father went in and put his stuff down, and then we all carried on with our wander. It was the funniest thing. Looking back, I think it may have been for the daughter’s entertainment that they stuck with me – like a stray puppy or kitten they’d picked up and she had taken a shine to. So we all wandered the town for the next couple of hours, stopping to eat items that I was highly suspicious of in terms of ‘what was this fried in?’, but felt I couldn’t turn down when they were pressing me so eagerly to try them. There was a vaguely fishy tasting fried tofu square –most of which I managed to surreptitiously throw out, but then a second was pressed on me, since I’d clearly liked the first one so

Our tofu snack being prepared. That oil doesn't look promising.

well and eaten it all up! That’s what I get for being duplicitous.  There were fried baby potatoes, which I gave in and just ate since I did actually like them (I told myself repeatedly, like a little mantra, only 10% of meals have sewer oil in them, so chances are good that these potatoes don’t), and some strange rice wine stuff, which I had a miniscule sip of and declined any more of, having learned from the tofu square to just be honest, and said I didn’t like.

I had also tried to indicate to them that I was okay on my own and didn’t need babysitting, by eyeing up coffee shops, and saying maybe I’d go for a coffee in a bit. But then they just took me into a restaurant of their choosing and bought me a Nescafe, at considerable expense to them, I’m afraid. 35 yuan for a small Nescafe?! That’s like $5.50! However, it was already done before I realized what was up.

After that, it was time for me to be getting a taxi back, but my return train ticket was from a different town than the one we came in to. I had actually noticed this and tried to change it at Shanghai station earlier, but the girl said that one couldn’t be changed. My new family had a hard time accepting that, and so they took me out to the main road to find a taxi. There weren’t any around, and the father disappeared up the road looking for one. He came back after about 10 minutes in one. He had negotiated a good fare for me, and made the driver promise to come into the station with me and change the ticket.

I said my goodbyes to my new Chinese family and headed off to the train station, passed on to the care of the taxi driver, who did indeed dutifully come into the train station, jump the queue, and try to get my ticket changed. After much moving around in the station, it was determined that because it was for a different starting point I’d just have to buy a new ticket. There was a train leaving in 10 mins, and a ticket could be bought for the equivalent of $3. And I was off home, after meeting little angels of helpfulness from the most unexpected quarters, and having some of my stereotypes shattered in the pleasantest way, before my eyes.

My sweet Chinese family

Awfully pretty place - I wish I could have seen it at night with the lanterns all lit up!

Some houses along the canal

A narrow canal with willows all along one side.

We left Fort Benning, Georgia, to travel to Kuwait on a military-chartered commercial jet, with a 2-hour stop in a small German city. During the stopover in Germany, I found some comfortable chairs I could stretch out on, and, along with a lot of other people who stretched out similarly, both contractors (like me) and military, I dozed off. I thought ours was the only military flight stopped there at that time, so I figured that as long as I could see the woman in uniform across from me, when I occasionally surfaced from sleep, I was fine; no doubt we must be on the same plane. I drifted in and out of dreams, dead tired. At some point, I heard them call for a flight, but assumed it wasn’t mine because I thought everyone in this holding area was on the same plane and my woman in army wear was still there.

And then, a little while later, I was shaken awake by someone, and asked, “Ma’am? Are you on that other world flight?” And for just a moment, a second or two, I was completely bewildered. I sat up and stared at him. Other world? Well, I HAD been dreaming, that’s otherworldly, and I have entered into a completely new world to me – that of the American military. And then my common sense woke up too, and I registered: I had seen a World logo on the wingtip of the plane, and on the safety procedures card. I said, “um, maybe; yes, yes, that could be,” and got up and followed the man to an exit. Sure enough, there was the tarmac bus all full of familiar faces, waiting. Luckily, there were three of us (all contractors, of course) who pulled this stunt, and I was the first one they hustled back, so my guilty embarrassment was mitigated somewhat by that.

Sleeping quarter tents in Ali Al Salem Air Base in Kuwait.

Between my arrival in Kuwait, and my arrival in Union III, which is one of the bases in Baghdad, I was on my own. This stretch was where the helpful, chivalrous tendencies of American men (and women too, actually) saved the day. I have never received so much unasked for, but very much appreciated and welcome, assistance in carrying stuff, as from these people throughout the entire journey. Two duffel bags, one with a lot of armour and helmet, and two carry-ons, each with a laptop, proved well beyond the puny muscles I carry on these sticks I call arms. (I have made and broken several promises to myself to start attending the gym here to rectify that before I head back.) I could only manage my own stuff if I did it in three trips, thereby necessarily abandoning some two-thirds of it during most of the procedure.

We arrived in Kuwait in the evening, were bused to a military airfield, and there in the dark hot night, we formed chain lines to unload our bags from the trucks. In my line, there were three of us women contractors, all kind of weak and sissyish, next to each other. So the guys arranged the line so that we stood as our own little parallel, offshoot line of three, and when a light bag would come along, they’d give it to us, but any heavy bags, they would pass along their own side. It was very sweet, because I think it was actually more work to include us, but they were trying to make us feel we were doing something useful.

Living large at Ali Al Salem! I don't know where these people got pillows. They must have brought them. I just laid my little fleece blanket on the bed to separate me from some of the sand it was coated in, and used a sweater for a pillow. I slept soundly though, so I can't complain really.

That Kuwait airfield was a funny place. I was only there for about 18 hours, and that was quite enough for me, thanks very much. It’s a very transient place. Everyone’s waiting to go somewhere else, sleeping in tents, (which always have to have the fluorescent lights on – day and night, because people come and go day and night) with no bedding provided, walking across the hot gravel and sand out to the bathroom buildings or to the food area. To leave this little patch of heaven, you go to the big flight-scheduling/waiting building, and get yourself placed on a list for your destination. After that, you’re responsible for checking the schedule, and then, for every time which is posted for your destination, you just have to show up, 3 hours early and hope to get a seat. My first flight option was for 7:00 a.m., so I dragged myself and my bags over to the building for the 4:00 a.m. show time and waited, hoping to make that flight. No such luck. Dragged all my stuff back to temporary baggage storage (with help from my new friend Terrance), went to have a shower and a nap until my next show time – noon. Woke up at 11:30 and ran back to the flight manifest building. This time, thank God, I was high enough on the list to get called! If you miss one of the show times and your name is called, but you’re not there to answer, it goes down to the bottom of the list. But, after my lapse in Germany, I had turned over a new, responsible leaf!

So, I was now manifested to fly on a C-130, which meant nothing to me, until we arrived at the airplane. I don’t know if many other people are familiar with this kind of aircraft, but it’s no commercial jetliner. It’s a big open plane inside, with a lot of the mechanics visible around you. You’re not tucked inside a cozy little shell with overhead compartments and movie screens and soft, reclinable seats with trays, perhaps a window, and a tidily coiffed flight attendant to bring you food and drink. No, no, no. The seating is all lined up vertically in four rows, facing the sides of the plane. Everyone’s carry-on is piled up at your collective feet. There are two rows, one each along the inside walls of the plane, facing each other, and two, back to back along the center line. Ear plugs are handed out before take off – very necessary! – and we had to wear our armour. There was no AC, that is NO air-conditioning. And it’s very, very hot in Kuwait.  Everyone’s face was covered in a sheen of sweat, sometimes rivers of sweat. It was not a comfortable ride. We were jam packed in there, I tell you. When one of the crew had to go past us, he literally had to climb over us. See photo below, that I found on the web, which illustrates this exactly.

This image is off the internet, but it was just like this, possibly even more crowded with all the rucksacks.

But it was quite interesting. I mean, when they move the wing flaps, you can see the mechanism moving on the ceiling, like a big axle (at least I think that’s what it was for). When the landing gear was lowered, I could see a bit of it from my seat. Duffel bags were on a pallet in the back, at the end of the seat rows. We entered and exited through the back of the plane where the pallet was placed once we were all on board. Upon approaching Baghdad, I guess they don’t like to take it too slow and shallow on the descent, because that would make the plane more vulnerable for longer, so we quite suddenly began dropping, and I think, spiraling, down. Oooooh, not a nice feeling. I was eyeing up those puke bags on the wall of the plane with some keen interest. At one point I felt like we briefly flirted with zero gravity, though that’s probably an exaggeration… maybe it was half gravity though? Like when a fast elevator suddenly starts its descent. Not helpful for nausea, I can report. Constant yawning, nose holding, and swallowing activities for ear-clearing purposes were the order of the day. We landed with no puking, thank God. Upon arrival, we all filed out the back, and out a ways down from the plane before turning and looping back up towards the entrance to the airport. I guess the circuitous route was to keep us away from the propellers, but they were still blowing a strong, hot wind; it was kind of like standing downwind of a giant hair dryer. 

To move around between bases — and I needed to first go to a base which was two bases along from where we landed — people are transported in different kinds of armoured vehicles called Rhinos (big and grey) and Ice-cream trucks (boxy and white) whose names, of course, are based on how they look. And that’s how I got to Union III in Baghdad, where I settled in for a few days of in-processing and an unsuccessful attempt at jet-lag recovering.

A Rhino, only ours was dark grey.

Ice cream truck - only no actual ice cream is be had from this one.

However, it wasn’t to be long stay, and 2 and half days after arriving, I was quite suddenly told to go pack back up, and bustled off to catch a Blackhawk helicopter as night fell. Things aren’t generally publicly scheduled, and routes always change, for security reasons, so you often don’t know when you might be suddenly making a trip, nor how long it might take. I was extraordinarily tired, but it was exciting, because it was new to me, and I am so enamoured of helicopters that you could practically say I have a crush on them, so I perked up. The ride is another, like the C-130, where you feel distinctly uninsulated from the discomforts and realities of the travel experience.  No glass in the side windows, so there was much warm, noisy wind rushing around the cabin(or whatever you call the inside of a helicopter).  The left side gunner was right in front of me, and the other Blackhawk with us (everyone must have a battle buddy – even helicopters), with all its lights out, was just a black silhouette against the city lights in the sky ahead or sometimes to the side of us. The ride was almost two hours, with about 6 stops. For some of it we were over the city, and for some, just over dark, empty looking land, an occasional small fire, an occasional small building with lights.

The man organizing us at the helipad wrote, in black marker, my destination stop on the back of my hand. As though I was five, or mentally challenged. How it happened was, I was the only one getting off at Taji, and he asked me, “Do you want me to write your destination on your hand?” I was all indignant, “No, I’m fine. Why?” And he says, “Okay, just make sure you don’t get off at the wrong stop – I told you that it would be the third stop en route, but it may or may not be. It can be difficult to hear, and it has happened before that people get off at the wrong place.” I stood there for about 5 seconds mulling that over, envisioning getting confused and off at the wrong base or missing my stop and being stuck, god knows where… So I swallowed my pride, stuck out my hand, and said, “okay, actually, do write it on my hand, please.” This turned out to have been a very good thing. Having your destination written on the back of your hand sends a message: this person is of marginal competence. I think the gunner, when he saw that, decided I was verging on special needs, and took particular care of me, moved me from my original spot in the back, to right beside him up near the front, made sure I stayed put when I started unbuckling at the wrong stops, twice(!), got me out when we had to refuel, and arranged for a guy to come out with a wheeled cart to carry my stuff from the landing site into the heliport when we at last arrived at Taji sometime around midnight. And that is how I got from Fort Benning, Georgia, to my new home in Iraq!

Our Blackhawk was like this, and I was just a couple of feet towards the back from the gunner. See the glass in the windows in back? Ours didn't have that, at least in the front one. I stuck my hand out the frontmost edge of the forward one once, just to feel the air, but the gunner glanced at me, and I thought perhaps I shouldn't be doing that and withdrew it.

One colleague, most appropriately geared up for the weather

This morning, I woke up at 5:00, looked out the window at the full daylight, and decided to go back to bed for an hour. We don’t have to be ready to leave till 6:55, so no need to rush into the waking world, right? I woke an hour later to the taste of dust in my mouth and a strange orange light coming through the blinds. Orange! I opened the door, and the world was orange and thick with dust. I’ve never seen an orange dust storm before. I don’t know if it was the angle of the sun, or the colour of the sand. I think it may have been the latter. It got into everything. My room, that I though was so well sealed was coated in it. The air conditioning filter I cleaned last week was filled with it again. My hair was like straw after a couple of hours.

There was some uncertainty about whether we’d be going to school because of the safety issue. Apparently attacks are more likely during a time like that, with the low visibility, for obvious reasons, and for teaching, we go from the relative safety of our base to the more dangerous Iraqi side. It was decided that we would go. So, slowly, carefully through a hazy orange world, we drove over there in our little convoy. Instead of the usual 6 hour teaching day, or 4.5 hour day on a Thursday, it became a 1.5 hour day. We were just beginning class, a bit late, when all the privates were hauled back out for a meeting for an hour, and then we were all sent home early a little while after that. During their meeting, I could see them standing out in the thick, windy dust, and when they came back in, they were all coated in it, eyebrows, eyelashes, and hair covered in pale dust, making them look oddly like very young men who were prematurely graying.

The school under normal circumstances.

The school, morning of the sandstorm.

So, after that short day, we headed home early – back home before noon! One of the teachers, who smokes and is asthmatic, and not so young, was really suffering from it all day, so in the evening, he and I went to the clinic. I had to go as well, for a sore toe (it sounds minor I know – but standing for hours makes it not so minor.) On our way back, we stopped at the coffee shop and bumped into a couple of colleagues outside. While we were standing there talking, the siren sounded, and then the ‘Giant Voice’ in the sky, “Incoming, Incoming. Take cover…” and we all dashed over behind the nearest T-wall, till we heard a couple of booms, and after a minute or so of quiet, we came out. That was the second attack I’ve experienced since coming here. In the first one, I was sitting in my CHU (containerized housing unit), on my bed with my computer on my lap, when the siren started sounding. I didn’t realize what it was at first, and I was looking at my computer, going, “what? Are you overheating?” I picked it up and held it up to my ear. Hm. And then the loudspeaker began, and I realized what it was, and wondered, “now what am I supposed to do again? Do I get on the ground, even inside, here in my CHU?” Turns out, yes, I was supposed to. And then you wait for the All Clear signal. And then everyone calls in on their walkie talkie or makes a showing for Accountability. The whole thing’s begun and finished within 15 minutes.

Some lovely local t-wall, just beside my CHU.

Anyway, it all makes me realize how sheltered and safe I’ve been lucky enough to be all my life. And even now– I have chosen to come here, knowing it was a war zone, and I am being pretty well protected and well compensated for the danger. But so many people, in this country and in others, have had war brought to them, with no choice offered, with no T-wall barriers set up to protect them, with no warning systems to alert them, and no financial compensation offered them for the danger… quite the contrary.

And I also feel incredibly lucky, looking around the region, with its recent uprisings, to have been born in a country with a fairly accountable governing system, where my own government isn’t likely to shoot me in the streets, or torture me in prison if I should openly disagree with it. And I’m amazed by the bravery of the people in the streets these days of Syria, Bahrain, Yemen and so on…who have protested, unarmed, peacefully, and risked and sometimes paid with their lives to simply get good, fair and representative government. When I merely hear a siren indicating there’s a slight possibility I might get hurt, I can be found tucked behind the nearest thick, cement T-wall. Now, of course, I have no ideological reason for doing anything other than that, but if I did, I don’t know that I could face guns down, and worse, even for such obviously fair and right reasons as so many Arab countries’ citizens are these recent days. I certainly have huge respect for their struggle, and I hope that these days of protest eventually lead to the fairness and good government and freedom from oppression that they’re seeking.  We are so lucky in Canada. We can keep an eye on our government, and loudly complain when we don’t like something, and they will listen, if enough of us are loud enough, and if they don’t, we can send them on their way at the next election. And all at no risk to life or limb. All we have to do is pay a bit of attention to what they’re up to. So anyway, I’m just feeling keenly aware today of my good fortune in terms of place of birth.

The dust has all settled now, so I’m going to go have a shower and clean house.

There has been no need for phone losing trickery. You just have to sit at a table alone, or ask someone a question and hey, presto! you’ve got new friends! I guess that’s partly due to the transient nature of the place. Everyone’s just passing through, getting processed to be deployed, or coming back. Still, I think Canadians are a rather more reserved lot. We could stand to be a little less so. My new roommates are part of a group of women being trained to accompany Special Forces groups in Iraq and Afghanistan to help in interacting with local women there. They spent a hellish (it sounds to me) training week getting 12 hours sleep in total and scrambling and marching around up in one of the Carolinas.

CRC - one of two main roads. It's quite small.

Driving around with CJ today, I made an observation about the very strong sense of pride there seems to be amongst many of those here in the military, and he said, earnestly, and with not a hint of irony, I swear, “Well, hell yeah; we can kill ANYone! No one’s got a stronger military than us!” Hm…I considered asking what he thought about that Maslow quote, the one that goes something like: to a man with a hammer, every problem ends up looking like a nail. But I didn’t. I actually quite like the man, though we have some very different views. It’s been interesting chatting with him. Maybe this sounds odd, but there’s something kind of innocent and sweet about him. There he is, with his love of hunting and of huge gas-guzzling trucks and making fun of people drinking Starbucks (“I’ll have a large yoka-loka” he says into the Starbucks drive-through microphone, making everyone laugh, including me, whow we’re there for, and the Starbucks guy), and I find him endearing. Maybe it’s his complete lack of self-righteousness, and his complete lack of artifice. That’s the thing about people. Just as you think you’ve got them sorted, categorized, and you know what you think of them, you don’t anymore. Incidentally, I have also grown extremely fond of Ingrid.  I wasn’t so sure about her at first, but the more we’ve talked, the more I’ve come to like her.

The weather’s cooled right down now; there’s been a little rain, and a lot of cloud, making the temperature very pleasant. In between watching a loooong video on how to handle being taken hostage, getting fitted for my flak jacket, and reading endless required PowerPoint presentations on all things considered relevant to being with the US military and to going to a combat zone, I have been going for some pleasant walks around the neighbourhood. There’s Ranger School up the road a ways with a difficult looking obstacle course that I played around on a bit, and a set of bleachers with a blackboard that someone has neatly written the setup and plans for some sort of war game to be played in the forest around there. In the other direction, there is a training area, with mock IEDs and broken down cars, and pretend town streets, all nestled in amongst the extremely lush forest here, pretty red birds hopping around, flowers blooming, greenery winding everywhere. We all had to have a session learning about IEDs here.  It was a little bit alarming. I thought if you were on the base, you wouldn’t encounter those. Apparently, not so.

At Ranger School

My first walk was a bit nerve wracking. When I set out, I asked of the guy in billeting – if I wanted to go for a walk outside of CRC, was there anywhere I shouldn’t go, or anywhere interesting/pretty he’d recommend. He suggested the Ranger’s School direction, and told me I needed to wear a reflective belt off of CRC grounds, even during the day. I went and looked at said belts in the little store, but decided against it, since during the daytime, it just seemed silly. However, he also gave me instructions I did pay attention to on how to deal with a wild boar should I come across one, which slightly alarmed me. Then, not 100 meters out of the gate, I game upon a largish snake carcass and recalled the women in the clinic discussing snake bites, and became even more alarmed. I carried on though, watching the ground quite closely and feeling increasingly skittish until, when I ventured offroad a bit, a crashing in the bushes close by spurred my adrenaline glands into action and made my skin all prickly. It turned out to just be a deer, running away from me, not a boar running at me, and I calmed down after this incident, but I stuck closer to the road too… I’m kind of a scaredy cat, it turns out! And this was just an encounter with a deer, in quiet little Fort Benning, Georgia. Hm.

The next morning at 5:30 (2:30 Victoria time!) I met Ingrid, who has been described to me as a “fireball”, “Tasmanian devil”, “whirling dervish” and a “firecracker.” She is indeed very high energy, but I think some of the drama she surrounds herself with is of her own making. On Thursday morning, after hours of driving around to get my ID, and to the clinic, she told Matt, CJ’s employee, to drive me to the airport to see if my bag had arrived at 11:00. The poor boy was operating on an hour and a half of sleep and had just been asked to drive two other people various places, and I could see him trying to figure out how to organize all this and get me to the airport. I suggested we skip the airport, since the Delta Air people had been pretty clear that they would bring the suitcase to me, so why bother. Ingrid swore up and down I wouldn’t see that suitcase for two or three days if we didn’t go get it. As soon as Ingrid left, I said, really, I didn’t think it was necessary and all I wanted to do was go to sleep anyway, so we gave the airport a skip. Sure enough, the Delta people called at 1:30, with my suitcase, saying they were five minutes away! Oh, the joy of that shower when I got my stuff!

I immediately lost my self-assigned status as Miss Calm, Collected and Non-overreactive though. I thought I’d lost my phone after Matt brought me back to CRC (which is the little processing area where people spend the week before they are deployed). I was looking around my room for it, and couldn’t find it in any of my pockets. So I grabbed the American quarter I had and ran out to the payphones to call Matt. I couldn’t work the phones for the life of me. I didn’t know if I was misdialing in some way or if I needed more money or what. I walked over to a designated smoker’s gazebo nearby where a group of people were talking and I asked them if they knew what I was doing wrong. One guy, whose name turned out to be Tony, told me to just use his cell, so he dialed for me and I talked to Matt, who then went into search mode, pulling over and looking in the van, going back to ACE (Acute Care Express) the clinic where I had just been for more shots and my hearing test, and a TB test, to look for it there. I hung around Tony and co., waiting for Matt to call back, feeling like a bit of a phone stalker. Tony promised it was no trouble at all, and was VERY entertaining and was telling many tales to the entire group, complete with acting out the parts, about his family dynamics and about his preferences in women (‘crazy, but not psycho’ along with illustrative stories). Now, I don’t if it’s related to being black, which this particular group was, or just that they’re southern, but I found myself struggling a bit to understand the accent/dialect, more so than with Matt and CJ, who are white. Perhaps there’s a sort of subculture dialect? But anyway, I have difficulty telling sometimes if someone is saying a word I know, but don’t recognize because of the different pronunciation, or if it’s a totally new word to me. So I was lagging a quite bit in following the conversation, especially at first.

Eventually, at my wit’s end about the phone, I had Tony call mine while I went back to my room to see if it was there, because Matt was having no luck, and yes indeed, there it was, in the bed, where I had taken it when I went to have a nap before jerking myself out of drifting off, in a panic about my phone. Boy did I feel like an idiot! Anyway, the upshot was that Tony said they were all having a bbq that evening because everyone was shipping out the next morning and I was welcome to come and join. So I did, and man, are Americans ever friendly people! Everyone there was hospitable and welcoming. There was enough meat there to feed 5 times as many people, and enough booze too. They’ve all left now, for Afghanistan, Kuwait, Iraq, etc. and I’m nearly the only one in the CRC left. Each cycle goes from Friday to Friday, but as a foreign national I had to come early to do those medical things. So a new group comes tonight. Maybe I should lose my phone again to make some new friends… just kidding!

A smoking gazebo, and one of the sleeping barracks. My room is the second one in with the open blind.

Piling ourselves and all our travel paraphernalia into the old Land Cruiser, or whatever it was, we set out on Friday morning. First stop – a viewpoint to see the valley where the Imam’s palace that we would be going to see next is. Very nice, very sweeping landscape, then back into the car, and down into the valley. The Imam’s Palace is now a museum, and so you can go in and explore the place. There aren’t a lot of displays or anything, but the building itself is really quite a delight to explore. Because it was a Friday, there were a lot of Yemeni families on their weekend being tourists at the museum as well. This is where we really started to encounter the phenomenon of people asking to have their photos taken. Not women, of course – we’re used to that now – so only men or children. But yeah, much desire for this.  I don’t really understand it. There was no request for payment, and only sometimes a desire to actually see the photo on the display.

The Imam's Palace

One exception was where this group, I think a couple of brothers and their sisters – teenagers or early twenties, shouted us over and wanted a photo of us. Actually, the girls were directing this operation, telling their brothers to go get us, and then where to stand in the photos beside us etc. This happens occasionally – in China, in Malaysia… It confuses me, because haven’t the westerners of this world gotten a bit overexposed over the last few decades? We’re everywhere.  What’s interesting to see here? But, anyway.

Abdullatif bought a bag of apricots on the road leaving the museum. I became a shameless show off here and gratuitously demonstrated knowledge of the word for apricot in Arabic (mishmish), which Mom, loving the apricots very much, committed to memory, and throughout the rest of our time in Yemen, occasionally requested of Abdullatif to procure us some more of those “mishmish!”

The old cistern in Haraba (i think it was called)

Next stop was a town called Haraba (I think) where we stopped briefly to see the cistern, which is no longer in use and is now used for a swimming pool. More children wanting photos taken and old, old buildings all jumbled up next to each other.

The village of Thula (cistern here in foreground no longer in use - not even as a swimming pool )

On to Thula, where a man called Sami met us and acted as our guide. We had been cavalierly drinking copious amounts of water, and therefore needed a washroom at this point, with no option of waiting further. The bit of Yemen we saw didn’t have nice modern gas stations with bathrooms you could just stop and use. It’s not like that; you really need to think about your liquid consumption. Sami said, “no problem, they can use the bathroom in my house!” Great! So we head over to Sami’s house. Houses are structured quite consistently like this: Ground floor – for livestock, 2^nd floor – storage of foodstuffs and harvest, 3^rd floor common, family rooms, mostly laid out for hanging out during the day, with seating cushions around the edges and converted to bedrooms at night, 4^th floor – sleeping quarters for guests (if you’re relatively well-off), 5^th and 6^th floors, and these can be interchangeable, are the mafraj, sitting area (for things like chewing qat and drinking tea), and the kitchen. Usually there is 1, that is ONE, bathroom, for the whole family. And we might be talking a family of 10 or 20 here. We went up to the third floor, where the bathroom was and took turns using it. While in the bathroom (I went first), I could hear more and more people collecting on the stairs directly outside. By the time I emerged and Mom went in, there were about 7 or 8 people gathered out there: Sami, his sister-in-law, her 3 or 4 children, another young woman, and two teenage girls above me, half hiding around the corner of the staircase, and giggling at everything. I sat down on a stair and found myself handed a baby, so dandled the little boy/girl? on my knee for minute, while a small girl studied me with a very serious expression.

My racy, scandalous black top. It goes down to my bum and is very loose.

Brief tour of the house and then we were off for our village tour! Of course, I’ve forgotten most of the details of the history and other tour facts, but what I recall are more people wanting their photos taken, three sisters following us around with trinkets and shawls to sell, and some old men going by and yelling at Sami, gesturing at us, and Sami yelling back. “Is there a problem?” I asked. “I understood something about Friday prayers and leaving?” I thought maybe they were giving Sami a hard time for not being at Friday prayers. No, it turns out, some guys were leaving the mosque early to come and have a look at us, and these guys didn’t approve, and thought I was not covered enough. Sami was embarrassed to tell us this. He said, some men are bad, like these guys, which seemed a bit harsh, but maybe he didn’t know the word for judgmental or perhaps ridiculous would be an appropriate word (if they left the mosque early to come and ogle the tourists, shouldn’t you be yelling at them, not us?). I was saying, “really, this shirt is a problem? I thought it was pretty decent –it’s all loose, and I thought high enough…” Sami was like, “you’re fine, just ignore it; they’re just old and crazy.” I was thinking, man if this outfit shocks and appalls you guys, you’d have a heart attack in Abu Dhabi…

Father and son in Thula - he requested we take this photo

Anyway, eventually back to the car, where an old man in his restaurant came out to greet us, offer us tea, and kissed Mom on the cheek. I bought one of the sisters’ shawls, which turned out to be a handy thing to have on the rest of our trip for defense against the cold at night, and to facilitate a mosque entry.