[Note, I have a bunch of pictures I’d like to show but the internet connection stinks right now and I can’t transfer them from my phone. I will include them in my next unfortunate diatribe]

Lets just pretend this old photo of me in the UAE is a photo of me in Riyadh just for now….

Now, here is the one thing I was not prepared to expect: Its cold here. Not like, snowing shivering meat locker cold, but it’s not the blazing desert heat I was expecting. Its jacket weather, and I didn’t bring a jacket, so I have been wearing long sleeve shirts over my short sleeve shirts like it’s the 90’s. Man, I remember when that was a legitimate style…

Anyway, here it is, the last day of the install. All eight cabinets – two complete systems each with two QLS-40 UPS cabinets, one QLS-ST-B battery cabinet, and an ATS-40 – are all installed, powered up, and the commissioning done. Monday was our heavy work day. Running large semi-rigid cables to each of the cabinets is, I don’t know, its like wrestling an anaconda. An anaconda who refuses to bend in the very direction you desire it to travel. Seven conductor 2/0 wire is a hell indescribable to bend into a 90 degree conduit elbow. I know that doesn’t mean much to you. It’s my job to know that pain so I’ll take the responsibility of knowing that. The singular saving grace is that Mark, and his father before him, has been an electrician his whole life, so he is used to it. His forearms bare the power of a light World War One battleship; his hands can crush a man’s scull, and by the end of Monday, even he was exhausted.

Beginning Tuesday, I taught a QLS technician certification course to the three technicians here that will be responsible for the systems. Abdulla, Sammi, and Feras were all great guys, real fun to talk to, easy to teach, and fast learners. The training took well into Thursday but I actually finished early due to the quality of my students. Splendid, I have no fear of leaving the systems in their capable hands.

One of the biggest coincidences of the trip is that Chris Schmutz, the systems engineer and project manager from Boeing, turned out to be LDS, a fact that he, Mark and I found to be funny. The three of us probably constitute one half of the Mormons in all of Riyadh and we had somehow ended up together. It sort of greased the camaraderie that you usually get when you find other Americans in far off lands such as this.

Thursday, after all or work was complete, the systems commissioned, and the figurative keys handed over, Chris took us out for a night on the town, as it were. And by that, I mean, he took us to a series of locations to show us a good cross-section of Riyadh life, and the results were successful, or at least success adjacent.

We first left the AEC facility in the early afternoon and departed desertward in a direction we had yet to travel thusfar. Chris described the area as “Bedouin-ville,” a road that passed through some of the lower class towns and areas on the outskirts of Riyadh. Passing by street side outdoor markets and Camel traders we stopped for gas at a rundown station. Chris spent something like 67 Saudi Real (that’s pronounced as the soccer team is pronounced, both the Salt Lake and the Madrid variety) for about 110 litres of 95 octane fuel. This translates to around $18 for al little under thirty gallons of non-taxed gasoline.

We stopped off at Chris’ Villa, a large two story home within a 400 villa compound, insulated from the outside world by a double thick wall, strung with barbed wire, and an outer gate manned by Saudi National Guard soldiers. It was a facility specifically designed for Westerners to stay at, and to feel safe and at home. Chris had been here for a few months and would remain here until the end of the year. Looking around at the manicured complex, complete with swimming pool, market, gym, restaurant, bowling alley, squash, racquetball, tennis and basketball, courts, I wondered out loud what the big deal was. “There can’t be that much of a security threat,” I said.

“There isn’t,” Chris said as he showed us around the sprawling community center. “For now, anyway. But like a lot of the developing world, things can change very quickly.” ISIS, for one thing, is a new threat and the Saudi government has thrown their full support in fighting the radical Islamic militants to their north. As a result, there have been an increasing number of attacks on the Saudi people. Police officers being gunned down and the likes.

After that discussion, we decided to head over to a local mall to take in more of the local flavor. You see, Saudi’s don’t drink, they don’t have movie theaters, and they are fiercely family centric, so among the most popular pastimes is going shopping. We drove for about half an hour through the crowded streets of Riyadh to the Riyadh Gallery Mall (which can be found right across the street from the Riyadh Town Plaza Mall, and about two blocks south of some other mall). Saudi’s love their shopping.

Thursday night is their equivalent to Friday night for us. Time for the weekend, suckers. Put on your dress Thawb, trim that beard, grab the kids, hop in the family SUV, and lets all careen down the controlled chaos of King Abdulla Avenue to the mall with thousands of others! Yeeehaw!

I am serious, this mall was huge. Massive. The only one I have seen that was bigger was the Mall of the Emirates in Dubai, but you could land a jumbo bleeping jet in that mall, and I am pretty sure they accidently have on several occasions. Anyway, Riyadh Gallery Mall was packed to the brim with people, Thawb’s and black Abaya’s everywhere, with thousands of children running around like it was an amusement park. Until you got to the third floor where there actually was an amusement park, then it was a nightmare inducing fiasco. And I will never understand how those kids knew which woman with her face covered in a black Abaya was their mother, but they did. And on that note, yes, kids everywhere, all across the world, across every culture, religion, and language, are all unrepentant narcissistic sociopaths, incapable of anything but the nosiest of communication modes or rational behavior. (Maybe someday I’ll grow out of that stage too…)

In the food court, it surprised me to find that they had separate ordering lines and eating areas for families and for “single” men. We might interpret that as segregation of sexes, but Chris explained that its more like they are dividing the “riffraff” of men without their families from women, children, and men with their families. I also have to reiterate that women wearing black Abaya’s was ubiquitous, even universal. Chris also explained how this is analogous to how Victorian women would not be caught dead in public without certain accouterments, so it is here. Or, he said, not wearing them would be like a woman in the US walking around with their tops off. It’s just not proper. Not illegal, but very very not proper.

Prayer time came about 6pm, and every shop, every restaurant and store closed their doors. It was an insane rush, a mad dash at every counter to complete transactions before the call to prayer was sung over the mall’s PA. At this point, a small percentage of the patrons therein disappeared into the mall’s four or five mosques, but the rest remained in the hallways and the food court, waiting until prayer time was over.

As soon as it was, I took my opportunity to conduct my only time-honored tradition of international travel; I ordered a quarter-pounder with cheese at McDonalds. And to be clear, I have quarter-poundered it in the UAE, Korea, Japan, Germany, the Netherlands, but not – and this may be a huge compliment to them – Pakistan. The data I have collected thus far is partially conclusive, or rather, conclusivish, but all the more frightening; McDonnalds is exactly the same no matter where I go in the world. Of all the varied permutations of results that could have been possible, this is by far the worst, and has the most far reaching of consequences. I do not sleep well having discovered this.

Alas, my experiment completed for the evening we rose from our seats just in time for the second of the evening calls to prayer to begin. But, Chris wanted to show us another store called – and I wish I were joking – Hyper Panda. Now, to understand what this means, think not of a large black and white ursid hailing from the Chinese subcontinent in a hyperactive state of being, but rather think of it as the difference between a Target and a Super Target. Is a Super Target a really exceptional, high value objective to lob projectiles at? Well, maybe, but in this case no. Well, probably not, anyway. Um, yeah, what I am getting at is there is a store in Saudia Arabia called Panda and they are a standard grocery store and it has a larger sister chain called Hyper Panda which also contains housewares, appliances, electronics, apparel and also no bathrooms. Remember that last part, its important.

Well we reached the Hyper Panda just as the gates were about to close and instead of leaving, we walked in and the gates closed behind us. You see, during prayer time, you can walk around inside the Hyper Panda while all the employees are on break, do your shopping, and be waiting at the head of the line when the gates reopen. Well, I didn’t know it was Chris’ intentions to do such a thing, or I may have protested such a thing.

The pressure began soon after, as we browsed the isles, that growing gnawing feeling that I had to take care of some important business. Bathroom business. I’m trying to paint a picture here guys. For the plethora of things Hyper Panda had, including the only cans of Mountain Dew Code Red in all of Riyadh (believe me I checked), they lacked the one thing I truly needed and I was locked inside of this store.

So when the gates rose I darted out in search of a toilet. I cast aside all who stood in my way, leaving a wake of sorrow and devastation wherever I trod. In frustration I fruitlessly searched the second floor, then ran in panicked desperation to the third, impatiently plowing through the gnarled crowds, where, way in the back of the food court, I found the most unkempt, ill-treated, derelict lavatory one could imagine. It was the most beautiful sight mine eyes have ever beheld.

Anyway, look, I may have misjudged the Saudi people of Riyadh a little in my last post. I was a bit fearful because of the internet and things that people had said. I thought I could totally trust the internet and now I am thinking that may not always be the case. I mean, Besides the fact that they have some interesting customs, they are all really great people. They’re just like you and me. They just want to be happy. The driving is a little intense, yeah, but there is a certain directness and honesty about it. I know that sounds weird, but they aren’t passive aggressive and they certainly don’t take traffic issues so darn personal. Also, I was wrong about the “religious police.” They do exist, yes, but they do not have the authority to imprison anyone. So, yeah, much like the BYU honor code office.

Ugh, okay, our last stop of the night was at the Ritz Carlton hotel that was right across the street from out dinky old Courtyard Marriott. Holy Crap™. Boeing put Chris up in this place for a month before his villa was ready and he showed us everything. Some people have waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much money.

Okay, I’m headed back to the States tomorrow and I am sure I will have a couple more things to say on the way. It was a good trip. Had a lot of fun, but looking forward, as always, to getting home.

Okay nerds, talk at you later…

Beautiful Riyadh. I did not take this picture, in case you were wondering.

You know its getting bad when you make the realization that a trip to a foreign land, entirely alien to your own, is framed in your mind as routine. I know that’s weird, but I am no longer panicked at these things, or overtly worried about obstacles that present themselves on the path to my work. But I will have to say that the first couple days of this trip had the smallest obstacle to success ratio so far.

First, the flights heretofore addressed. Our panicked sprint across the entire length of terminal A at Detroit International was a race we won, but a race that apparently our luggage did not. We entered our Air France flight sweaty and out-of-breath, our lungs burning from the cold dry winter air.

When we arrived at Charles Du Gaulle Airport In France, a sense of foreboding hung in the air. The horrific shooting at that satirical newspaper had just taken place a few days earlier, and the news being splashed on every outlet in the terminal was that the two suspects of the shooting had been cornered but a couple miles from the very spot we sat. Well, splendid.

Part of me realizes it may be slightly rude to rail against Air France as I did in the last post, as I have nothing but respect and a sense of solidarity with the French people during their time of loss. But, naw dogg, Air France still be wack, yo. Like, fer reals.

Exhibit A, the state of my relationship with my luggage a day after arriving, and the lamentable lack of proximity therewith. I sat in the same stinking undies from Thursday morning in Utah to when my luggage wsa finally returned to me Sunday morning in Riyadh. I am so lucky I bought a travel sized deodorant on a whim at Salt Lake.

Anyway, The second major blunder that brought woe unto our state is that I forgot/ran-out-of-time/didn’t-care to get my international driving permit renewed, and Mark’s is expired as well, so we were unable to rent a car. This left us with the option of taking a taxi to the hotel, or walking. I’ll let you guess which one we went with. And to be honest, the drivers here are much like the rest of the world, i.e. insane, so I really don’t mind not driving.

Traveling has really given me a better perspective on the scale of bad driving that I experience every day. Driving in Saudi Arabia, much like driving in Pakistan, much like driving in the UAE, and much like driving in the Indie 500, is an anything goes sort of experience. Blinkers are used occasionally and more as a last second “I’m getting over even if the space between you and the next car is not of sufficient size for me to fit.” Single lane onramps and off-ramps are quite often treated as two lanes, and during straightaways, it is not uncommon to be passed by someone traveling well in excess of a hundred miles an hour. Drivers will quite often wait until the very last possible moment to get over to exit the freeway, dashing across three or four lanes of traffic to do so. Also, lanes are more of a suggestion than a rule and horns are used with prolific regularity. Our taxi drivers have two modes: full throttle, and brake mashing with little else between. My cringe reflex is already worn out.

Riyadh looks to be a thoroughly modern city. There is a large city center with towering new skyscrapers, the roads and freeways are modern and well kept, and there is construction all around. It is, however, quite dirty. A constant brown haze hangs in the air, particulate matter from the talcum-fine sand that is ubiquitous, and easily transported by wind. Outside the populous areas is utter desolation, desert as far as you can see, much like Las Vegas. But unlike Vegas there are no mountains, no grass yards, no natural vegetation, and no strippers.

The most common form of construction around here is masonry or concrete; there is no wood for thousands of miles. Architecture is quite often a confluence of modern appearance in a traditional middle-eastern form factor. Homes are boxy, two story structures with flat roofs and high ceilings. During the summer months, the heat in a home will congregate up near the ceiling so the lower areas can be kept cool more effectively. Most of these boxy homes look nice and are painted or covered in stucco, bug a large number are also left bare or unfinished, looking gray and drab.

The only chance I have to take pictures is from the Taxi. Sorry about the blurry shot.

While driving to and from the facility where we are doing our work, we pass by areas in the desert where permanent and semi-permanent tent camps have been set up. These are where the less affluent live, but also, where plenty of middle and upper class live, feeling more close to their environment and traditions living as their Bedouin ancestors did. Sometimes the tents and camps look quite large and elaborate. I have been told that most of these places have electricity and satellite TVs.

Mosques are everywhere, and the five daily prayers are piped over loudspeakers wherever you are. I wake up every morning to the sound of the fajar prayer echoing outside my hotel room. Most of the prayers are actual people singing, their own impromptu tunes sometimes clashing, sometimes complimenting each other. They are beautifully haunting in their own sort of way.

The Islamic culture here is very near universal. The fact is that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia fairly close to a theocracy, where adherence to certain religious statutes are mandated by law. Alcohol, pornography, and all pork products are illegal. Bacon is considered a controlled dangerous substance. The fact that I wear short sleeve shirts while working immediately signifies that I am not from around here. Women are not allowed to drive, and the joke that presently comes to mind is that you’d think the driving would be better here, but that sort of joke is below me, in the first place, and in the second place, well, I have already discussed the lack of sanity that prevails upon the streets.

A noticeable majority of the men dress in what you think of as the stereotypical Arab clothing; an ankle length wool shirt called a thawb. On their heads they wear a guhtra with a corded circlet called a igaal. Women wear an outer cloak called an abaya, most of the time black and they must have their heads covered and quite often you will see them with all but their eyes covered. I don’t think the Saudi’s have even a remote grasp of the idea of female equality. Lets not get into the points about women not being able to speak to men or be seen in public without a male relative.

They even have religious police here, much analogous to BYU honor code enforcers, but these guys have the right to send you to prison for moral infractions. But unlike the BYU honor code, the moral codes in Saudi Arabia contain a modicum of logic and reason as beards are allowed here, and are encouraged.

There are dozens of other little interesting things I have noticed. It seems to be an okay place, I suppose. I wouldn’t want to live here for any extended period of time, but the people are nice, very cordial, and respectful of visitors. On the plus side, the crime rate is incredibly low and violent crime is almost nonexistent. On the down side, we are in close enough proximity to “the North” (i.e. Iraq, and the other less stable Arab States) that there is still a small reason to worry. Our hotel is gated and our vehicle is inspected every time we enter. It’s not like Pakistan though. This is much more safe feeling, much more modern wherever I go. Riyadh is a nice comfortable middle ground between the excess and opulence of Abu Dhabi, and the developing-world feel of Islamabad.

Then there is this thing in my hotel bathroom:

I don’t know. I just try to pretend its not there.

Okay, Nerds, talk at you later…

Well, here I am, heading off to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, with good old Mark Watkins. Off to install a power supply for a AH-64 Apache flight simulator. I apologize for the deplorable lack of regularity in my blagging, but well, I did start school again, you know. I gots me some stressful times behind me these last few months. I do have a few people yelling at me about it though. You know, “hey, when are you going to do another blog?” And “hey, when are you going to finish your posts on your Germany trip?” And “Hey, you just ran over my dog!” Lots of pressure here guys, sorry.

I have also invited a few more people into my circle of blog followers. Welcome friends. Welcome to my sarcastic, Rube Goldberg writing style, where I take the most circuitous, nonsensical linguistic rout to make a simple point. Why say in five words what you can write an entire paragraph about? Please feel free to peruse my past writings, musings, and adventures. My entire point here, besides honing my writing skills (or writing disease, however you wish to see it) is to entertain, so please enjoy.

So let us begin, as we often do, in the dead of night, somewhere over the Atlantic on an Air France A340.

And lets be clear. I don’t sleep on planes. Not that I don’t try, mind you, but as my longsuffering and supremely patient wife will attest to, conditions must be night unto perfect for me to attain slumber. My dear Emily can sleep through most anything short of a full-scale tactical nuking – but don’t hold me to that. I do know she can and has slept through me accidently setting off the car alarm in the garage at 6am, or those impromptu band practices I hold bi-weekly with my death metal band Mürder Spönge. (Hey, if you can sleep through one of Sjürd’s six minute long guitar solo’s, more power to you.)

For myself, conversely, it must be dark, it must be cool, it must be quiet, with the soothing hum of a ceiling fan on low, and there can be no movement. But I think above all, comfort and the option to spread my tall, lanky frame out in whatever direction I need at the moment, to rearrange myself in accordance to the whims of that infernal and most unexplained itch from deep within, that requires of me both the tossing and the turning until the exact position of optimal comfort is acquired. The only thing actively preventing this on most occasions is the purring 18 pound mass that is our orange tabby Byron leaning stubbornly against me. No human has ever slept half as well, or as content as that tub of furry lard, and I do envy him.

And so, we come to this, yet another edition of the “joys” of international travel, as I sit, restless and unable to find a modicum of comfort on this flight from Detroit to Paris. Not even the soothing chaos of turbulence tossing this behemoth about like a rubber ducky in a tsunami can bring respite. It is easy to write about air travel: there is plenty of time to do nothing but think about your miserable lot in life. And I know I do this a lot while I travel – write, and complain, and complain in writing, and even complain about writing – and I have flown many places and on many aircraft. But I am ready to say it, this is – and my hat is off to you, Air France – the worst flight I have ever been on.

I have been stuck on a plane for 16 hours, I have been shoved into a three decade old Pakistani Air Force cargo plane that leaked rain on me, I have sat next to a crazy guy who was using his tray table as an invisible laptop, typing away on nothing, writing the next great American novel or something. I have even had someone try to sell to me that most wretched of multi-level-scams known to the plebeians of the world as essential oils – an insult I can barely abide. Well, good job Air France, Pakistan’s Air Force is better at flying people around then you are and their cabin wasn’t even pressurized.

I’m exaggerating, obviously, but yeah, I am not enjoying this flight. First of all, the snow storm there in Detroit made our arriving flight late so Mark and I ran from one end of the concourse to the other. But what’s the rush? We then sat on the plane, locked stationary in that tube of misery for an hour before moving. Meanwhile, there was a small French child screaming bloody murder the whole time, in French mind you – well, not that any of the gibberish a child says can be remotely discernable from French in the first place – and his inconsolable protestations continued at great volume in fits and starts for the duration of the flight. How can a child scream for so long without losing their voice? What dark engine powers this ungodly fount of sorrow and despair? What evil doth lurk in the depths of a child’s lungs that can spew forth such shrill wretched hate?

I was excited to add the Airbus A340 to my list of varied aircraft I have flown on, but oh how quickly doth the joy depart from me and anon. This specific aircraft was likely manufactured in the mid nineties, and I would not be surprised if the interior has not been updated, or cleaned for that matter, in the intervening decades. The decor feels old, boxy, cheap looking, like that of an early nineties Volvo. I can see dead bugs behind the plastic florescent light covers above me, yellowed by time. An ugly dark blue colors the worn seats, the padding long bereft of its once welcoming fluffiness, the plastic scratched and worn to its natural black in many areas.

Furthermore, the recline of the seats respond like the fall of a hammer, and are so slow to return to their upright and locked position that you actually have to grab the seat and pull it forward. And it is criminal how far these seats recline back. Like, egregiously far, like, excessively. Great for you, until the guy in front of you reclines his and suddenly you can’t even lean forward to reach the bag of delicious Combos you have in your carryon.

The inflight entertainment system is slow and clunky, the screen is old and the lines signifying that it is to be controlled by touch are starkly visible. The quality of the screen, or lack thereof, is apparent in the fact that color fades into odd washed-out hues if it is viewed from any angle but directly straight on. It is also quite diminutive.

Now hold on, I know, this is total first world problem stuff, but I look forward with great anticipation to my in-flight movie experiences. I use that dead, sleepless time to catch up on movies I didn’t otherwise find interesting enough to spend money on, and usually I find quite a few jems. I mean, come on I watched such favorites as Europa Report, Her, Grand Budapest Hotel, and even the dreaded and much overexposed Frozen on a whim for the first time, (and we don’t need to plumb those snowman lined depths again, now do we?) So it pains me to say that the entertainment selection is woefully lacking on this flight. Maybe three dozen movies to chose from, and this is orders of magnitude less than what is usually available on other air carriers.

Then there is homeboy in front of me. His unshaven face, his unkempt platitudinal hipster clothing interlaced with plaid, and his oversized beanie hiding long unruly hair made him look as an unemployed lumberjack, were it not for his nose ring that is. Well, I’m trying to watch The Equalizer – a movie I would recommend if you are in the mood for an acceptably well made revenge thriller – you know, fully immersed in viewing Denzel distribute death wholesale upon members of the Russian Mob and other ner-do-wells of the Boston underground, when Paul Bunion in front of me throws his seat back.

Suddenly the three cubic feet of personal space I have gets halved, and my screen is now at an angle that I can’t see anything. I have to crouch down to get the cheap, turn-of-the-century flat screen monitor to, well, do its job and be a screen. That can be viewed. By me. I very carefully activate my seat recline in hopes that I can get a better view, whilst also trying to be a nice guy and not do the same thing to the poor sucker at my six-o-clock. But of course, merely pressing the button causes the seat to drop like a rock and now I am just one more person on this conga-line of misery.

Air France redeems itself ever-so-slightly as we board our next flight from Charles Du Gaulle Airport in France. While it looked to be completely full when I booked my flight, Mark and I discover that our A330 is only half full, which means I can chose whatever seat I like. While this aircraft seems newer and the amenities more suited to a discerning traveler such as myself, the screens are the same crappy ones as on the last plane, and the French accent of the flight crew is so thick I can’t understand a word of their almost whispered announcements.

We arrived in Riyadh somewhere around 10pm local time, the jetlag already taking hold and making me forgetting what tense I am/was/are wrote this blog in. But its okay, because a quick jaunt through customs and baggage claim, then we grab our rental car and off to the hotel.

This story ends there, because the problems start after the not-so-quick jaunt through customs, then moves on to us finding that our bags were left in Detroit. Detroit, you know, 18 hours in the past Detroit. Come on Air France, get your luggage game on lock. I got important business to do.

Okay, fine, I’m just going to come out and say it. Screw you Air France. Let me know when the Pakistani Air Force offers flights to Riyadh.

Okay, Nerds, talk at you later…

[Written Saturday September 13^th, 9am, Luxembourg Airport.]

The non-stop hectic bustle of the absolutely incomprehensibly huge Luxembourg International Airport.

Hmmm, where do I begin?

Ah, yes, internet. The lifeblood of the modern social economy, the heartbeat of contemporary communication. The information superhighway. Cyberspace, yo. Them webs what are there for to download the NASCAR website.

Most of the civilized world has it and it is easy to take it for granted. Heck, most of the less civilized world has it available. Even in the nowhere that Jacobabad Pakistan was smack dab in the middle of, access to the world was right at the tip of my fingers, albeit, just a little sluggish. Which is why I was surprised to find out that my place of residence here in Bitburg Germany lacked sufficient interweb bandwidth to post a single Facebook blurb, let alone a picture or heaven forbid a blog post. Email was a false dream, a specter, an apparition of a past promise long abandoned. My data passed like a kidney stone, racked with pain, and accompanied with a veritable litany of sound and fury.

Like a kidney stone as well, my writing built-up pressure, and I stored it all, ready to release in one spasmic posting of horrifying magnitude. But no, I shall do so gently. I will not be aggressive in my linguistic expelations herein. Tell you what, lets do this. Although, as you read this, I am safely home in the warm embrace of my American, Utahn-ian, Springville-ian home, let us, you and I, play pretend for but a moment. Let us sit by this proverbial fireside and use our imagination. Let us envisage that Joe has just alighted upon the virgin shores of picturesque Germany this very day, the shores of an innocent land that nary have felt the bitter steps of a Chambers. I will, over the next few days, release my writings in measured doses, cutting and pasting here and there the parts I find most relevant or coherent, metered as to allow for proper digestion. I will also try to note when exactly such a thing was written when possible.

I will sum up really quick though. My experience in Germany was awesome. I highly recommend it. Of all the places I have traveled in the past couple years, this was the first that I found myself saying that I could not only visit, but I would be excited to setup residence therein as well. That includes all the states I’ve traveled to, by the way. Besides all of the amazing sights, the friendly people, the clean air, the tasty food, and deep history, there is nothing to compare to the hilarity of listening to little kids speaking German at a million miles an hour. Ahem, sorry, kilometers per hour.

And don’t worry, pictures. Oh, I’ve got pictures, darn near 400 of them. I will audition them for you, and present only the best for your discerning pallet.

Shut up Joe. Write something that has meaning.

Sheesh. Okay, here we go:

[Written Monday September 8^th, 5:12am, Bitburg, Deutschland]

Needless to say, jet lag, that fickle, ever present flirt, is screwing with me. This one isn’t so extreme as say, Pakistan, but its sure there. I again have to laugh at the idea that my 20 something hours of travel yesterday was really “not that bad.” Once you experience an extreme, it’s hard to compare anything else to it. My journey to Pakistan earlier this year has, apparently, inoculated me to extreme travel effects, despite the mayonnaise thick sarcasm I used in my last post.

Firstly, I arrived in Hampsterdance, welcomed to the nation of the Netherlands by a skilled and pillow soft landing of our giant Airbus A330 aircraft. As I said, I was actually in shock at how short and painless the journey felt. I watched a few movies (The Grand Budapest Hotel, Neighbors, The Dallas Buyers Club, and part of 21 Jump street) on my tiny in-flight entertainment system. I can certainly recommend all of those movies (I mean, depending upon what movie ratings you allow yourself to see), though I think with Grand Budapest, I have finally reached the maximum level of acceptable quirkiness from Wes Anderson’s hipster drenched aesthetic. Homeboy needs to branch out a bit, if you ask me.

Anyway, I wandered about Amsterdam’s sprawling and crowded Schiphol airport for a couple hours, eventually finding my next flight to Luxemburg. That flight, as opposed to the previous, was less than an hour and I barely got comfortable before we were touching down in the diminutive nation of Luxemburg and its one and only major airport. And by major airport I mean probably one of the smallest international airports I have ever been to.

I was picked up in Luxemburg by my coworkers who have already been here for a week, and was driven the five minutes through the bulk of tiny tiny Luxemburg, and into Germany. And if you have never been there, but want to know what it looks like, just take a trip to Pennsylvania. Seriously. That’s it. Western Germany looks exactly like Pennsylvania. Or, if you prefer, like rural Harford County Maryland. Rolling farmland, thick deciduous forests, quaint medieval looking towns, solar power stations and wind turbines everywhere. Okay, PA may not have much of those last ones, but I did feel very at home here.

A quiet morning in Harford County, Maryland. OR IS IT!? I was surprised how rural this part of Germany is.

I decided to stay up instead of crashing yesterday, once we reached the hotel, and although painful, this tactic, combined with copious amounts of chemical stimulants, takes much of the drawn-out pain of jet lag. It is analogous to the proverbial ripping-off of the Band-Aid. At least for me. The crew wanted to go see some sites and I was obliged to participate. We took a drive through the country and stopped at a couple of castles.

Just a castle. Just, you know, chillin’ there. No big deal.

The first was along the road as we were driving. We didn’t stop to take a tour or anything. All we had to do was pull over and take a look. That’s just how it’s done here. Driving along and all of a sudden, oh look, a thousand year old stone bastion built by a feudal monarch of some varying level of prestige on the backs of serfs compulsed by hundreds of years of violent theological and monarchial oppression to do the bidding of his very whims all in an obsessive and desperate need to maintain military dominance of a relatively miniscule land area only to perpetuate a system of exploitation, human suffering and intellectual stagnation for hundreds of years.

How quaint.

Well, by the time we reached blah blah castle (wait, no, it’s called Burg Eltz, blah blah is in Lichtenstein) and hiked out to its glorious promontory, I had been awake for an entire twenty-four hours and was losing grip on reality. No I didn’t take a tour along with the other half of the crew. Sorry. Instead, I fell asleep on a bench. So, sorry to not be able to provide details about that part of my adventure. Here are some pictures though, and here is the Wikipedia article. Go learn about it yourself. Slacker.

Berg Eltz from the trail.

View I had upon waking from an unplanned nap. Now, I’ve seen Game of Thrones. I know a horribly violent battle is but inches away from this scene. That or fanny-pack clad German tourists.

Side note: I now know what true disorientation is. It is waking up, looking around, and realizing that you are in the courtyard of a thousand year old castle, everyone around you is speaking a strange tongue, and quite a few are wearing fanny packs and sporting moustaches. Either this is the start of a bad 80’s time travel/fantasy adventure movie where our hero, ill-suited in his nerdiness to fit in during his own time period suddenly finds himself magically transported into the fantastical world of Gar’goroth where said characteristics help him defeat the evil wizard who has brought darkness and oppression to the land, OR, the less likely scenario, I forgot I was in Germany.

My first experience with real German bratwurst was here, at the cheap-o little concession stand. I had a curry bratwurst with pommes frites (That’s French fries in German. See, even the Germans know you don’t have the word French in something as amazing as fried potatoes. Yeah. Freedom Fries! ‘Murica!)

Curry bratwurst and pommes frites for lunch. Everything in Germany comes with pommes frites. I’m not complaining.

We got back to the Hotel sometime around 8pm and I was out like a light. And that was the extent of day one. Today, we are headed off to Spangdahlem Air Force Base. My fellow Pakistan alumni Mark Watkins is here with three of his guys, Dave, Mike, and Brandon, to do the electrician work, the actual install and wiring of the systems. I’m here to help wrap up the install, inspect, test, commission, and do the paperwork to hand over the ownership of these bouncing baby power supplies to L3 Link Simulation. Work I can do in my sleep, but stuff that can take a lot of time and effort if anything goes wrong. Lets hope we get done early.

Okay, nerds, talk at you later….

I know it is well into May, but I finally decided to do an accounting of all of the movies I saw that were released last year. I started writing a post about my 10 favorite movies of 2013 and surprise surprise, it ended up being way too long, overwrought, and in the end, boring. I have discovered that one of the things I need to learn how to do in writing is be more succinct. That is why, what you have here, after way too much editing, is a list of my top ten favorite movies of 2013, with a more in-depth analysis of only the top three or four.

I decided to do this because I saw a lot of movies last year (mostly on planes) and had nothing better to write about this week. That and I do love analyzing movies. A lot. Particularly, I like making fun of bad movies, but besides Star Trek Into Darkness, I didn’t see any truly truly awful movies this last year. I saw some lame ones – like Elysium, The Host, and A good Day to Die Hard – and I saw a few that weren’t bad but weren’t great either – Monster University and The Hobbit – and I saw some that were ostensibly not good, and even arguably bad, but I inexplicably liked anyway – Ender’s Game and Oblivion being at the forefront of that category.

And, on a side note, I have started to enjoy the Marvel movies a lot more this last year or so, mostly because I stopped looking at them as movies. No, each one is an episode of a really well done TV series, and once I started seeing them as such, they got better to me. While Thor 2 and Iron Man 3 did not make my list, I did enjoy them and I am more of a fan than I once was.

Okay, okay, okay….Enough with the long-windedness. Here are the runners-up of my favorite movies of 2013, in no particular order. And again, I am not necessarily saying these are the BEST movies of 2013, or that you should like them, but that these are just the ones I liked and I perfectly understand if you didn’t. So, on we go…

10. Oblivion

9. Gravity

8. Ender’s Game

7. Sound City

6. American Hustle

5. Captain Phillips

And the top 4 with a little more to say about them:

4. Europa Report

Does your favorite brand of sci-fi include ‘splosions, lens flares, and so much unnecessary action that you don’t have time to realize how many plot holes there are and how bad the script is? Well, this movie ain’t for you. In fact, I could only think of a handful of people who would enjoy this movie as much as I did, and even then, I wonder. If you are, however, looking for a found footage, slow-burn, ultra-realistic, space sci-fi thriller produced on a ridiculously low budget (somewhere around $10 million) about an ill-fated mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa, then this one is most definitely for you. This may just go on one of my top ten sci-fi movies of all time. I enjoyed it that much. Indeed, it is the opposite of number three below…

3. Pacific Rim

I hate the whole giant robot thing, and the giant monster thing, and I especially hate brainless action flicks. So call me straight up shocked that I loved Pacific Rim. It is a movie about giant robots that fight giant monsters. That’s it. What more do you want? And somehow, this comes in as one of my favorites of 2013. It’s weird because it did so many things right that modern day popcorn thrillers, which have essentially just as dumb of a premise, get totally wrong.

Like what, you ask?

Well, one of the most interesting things about these giant robots is that they are so big and complex that it requires two pilots synched together through some neural mind-bridge, to drive them. So the more in-synch the two pilots are in real life, the better they fight. So, this has the effect of making the interpersonal struggles of the main characters effectively part of the action, instead of being revealed in lame side stories. The whole point of the movie is “hey, you two, get over your $@#&% so you can more effectively punch that giant monster in the face!”

It also operates off of the idea that you can have lots of fun, without being stupid, or treating the audience like they’re stupid. It says to you, yes, this is essentially a cartoon, but let it be a cartoon! This is a ridiculous premise, so just let it be ridiculous! Michael Bay needs to learn from that. His movies (i.e. Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, Transformers, etc) are all overly complicated, over-wrought messes that are chock full of plot holes and straight up contempt for the intelligence of his audience. In other words, this is what Michael Bay’s Transformer series should have been! It’s a fine, fine line, and I don’t blame you for getting the opposite impression from this movie than I did. I don’t blame you one bit.

And I would be remiss in excluding the fact that the fight scenes are so well made and the action, though ridiculous, is spectacular. That being said, the acting isn’t the best, the script is lacking, and the realism may suffer at times from the sheer preposterousness of the situations, but dang it if they don’t sell it well. They build the world and ask you nicely to enter therein, without holding your hand or alternately bashing you over the head with it.

I do have a small bit to say about the deuteragonist (that’s big boy speech for secondary protagonist) named Mako Mori. She has become my new example of a well-crafted female character. A strong but flawed person who goes through their own story arch, achieves greatness, and does not rely on the affections of a male character to define who they are. (Oh, and by the way, that is how you make a good character PERIOD. Duh). Granted, her arch has to do with daddy issues, BUT that issue is much more universal than the typical damsel in distress bologna and she doesn’t get over this issue by falling in love.

It’s refreshing to see an original movie, not a sequel, not based on a comic book, not a reboot or adaptation, that is able to achieve this kind of notoriety in a time when all other movies are nothing but those things. And fine, this nerd needs a brainless ‘splosion fest just as much as the next guy and I will fully accept this one!

2. Prisoners

Prisoners is one of those rare movies that REALLY makes you, the audience, pay the emotional price of having expectations about characters. No one in this movie is a purely sympathetic character. Everyone descends to differing levels of moral compromise because of the circumstances they are put through and everyone is a deeply flawed prisoner of their own failures and fallacies.

On the surface, it is a movie about two young girls who are abducted from their families on Thanksgiving Day in broad daylight in their own neighborhood. Yes, you follow an experienced detective as he becomes obsessed with finding out what happened, and yes you also follow the parents of the two children as they do the same, but that is not what the movie is about. You see, the questions that Prisoners throws at you with sadistic glee time and time again is how far would you go, what morals would you compromise, and what would your beliefs do to you if you were placed in this situation? What if one of those crazy, dark, insidiously elaborate mysteries with horribly evil villains and twisted and convoluted motivations like The Silence of the Lambs or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo actually happened to real people in the real world? What if you didn’t have a Jack Bauer, or a Sherlock Holmes, or a Horatio Caine and all you had was a normal detective who could only act within the confines of what a normal person could do? The answer turns out to be one of those character pieces that show how most people struggle to react rationally, or even morally, to crises such as this.

And yes, it is a dark and twisting crime drama, but it also asks some really really hard questions. It is definitely an indictment of our belief in the infallibility of the heroic father figure who will do anything for his family. Indeed, it is the very opposite of the two hours of wanton destruction and vengeance that is Taken (a movie I quite enjoyed when it came out, and for those very reasons, mind you). And it is amazing how the writers and even actor Hugh Jackman himself are able to turn around one particular character as the most sympathetic to the most loathsome while still remaining compelling and believable. It’s so darkly brilliant. I am a huge sucker for twists and unexpected turns and this movie had several of those, some far more predictable than others, but tense and shocking all the same.

It’s a little long, maybe a bit too complex, and there is a red herring near the end that is so big it can’t help but call attention to itself as such, but besides that, holy cow this was a 2 hour long nail-biter that had a lot to say and said it like a hammer to the head.

And without further ado, my favorite movie of 2013.

1. Frozen

I know, I know. Joe Chambers, a 31 year old male sci-fi nerd and hard rock music junkie loved Frozen? Yep. No getting around this one folks, my inner child apparently isn’t dead, despite my best efforts. My favorite movie of the year – (exasperated sigh) – was a Disney princess flick.

To be fair, I tend to isolate myself from pop-culture news so I was almost completely unaware of the film and the mania and subsequent backlash that surrounded it while it was in theaters. I also don’t have kids so I was not forced into it against my will and then kept enslaved thereto by the repetitive adorations of my overly enthusiastic brood as some of my friends have. In other words I am entirely to blame for this.

Truth be told, I didn’t even see this one coming. Sure, I had seen the previews, but the ad campaign was bafflingly inaccurate. And I remember a cursory desire to see it just because I had seen and loved both Tangled and Wreck-it Ralph and figured Disney was on another good-movie kick like they were back when I was a kid. And then I saw it, one night over the North Atlantic as I flew to Pakistan, and was, pardon my language, FREAKING blown away.

And why? Well, I don’t really know. The best I can describe it is that the themes, art, music, plot, character, emotions, and did I mention music of this movie were projected from its surface in exactly the right shape so as to fit the current locations and configuration of the ever-changing keyhole weaknesses on my cynical chitins armor that I have been working so hard to build for decades now. It’s my long-ignored childhood coming back to bite me. Hard. And it doesn’t help that it is actually a legitimately great film or that my wife also loves it. Dang you Disney and you magically effective emotional manipulation machinery! I hate you so much!

But on the more explainable side, the animation was mind-blowing, the characters are well developed and, at least to me, extremely sympathetic and it was genuinely funny. The theme of familial love, sacrifice, and redemption, especially among siblings, as well as the themes of finding happiness through self-discovery, are all universally relatable and happened hit me particularly hard on an inexplicably gut level. The music, and I am not just talking about the songs but the soundtrack itself, was extremely well done and in some cases, painfully catchy. And as I said before, I am truly a sucker for twists, and boy oh boy was I not expecting the twists in Frozen. Because, who expects twists in a Disney flick? Seriously.

Most of all, I loved how different, yet how familiar it was. I was shocked that they so expertly embraced and praised but also critiqued, changed and modernized the usual, tired old Disney Princess recipe, (dare I say trope) without turning it into a Shrek-style jaded gag-fest. It went so very far to convince you that it was all part of these tropes, that everything was stock and normal, then in the end gently turning it all on its head. Even the “princess” (or in this cases princesses)… Well, instead of being paragons of a bygone feminine ideal, the main characters were both flawed and relatable – like, I don’t know, real people – and only manage to look the part. It actually surprised me in how unsuccessful the main character Anna is at being a “Disney princess” despite her best efforts, even being part of a cautionary tale about the dangers of “Love at first sight.” And her sister, Elsa (word of the day, kids, the deuteragonist) actively rejects her royal mantle for no other reason than self-discovery, whilst simultaneously belting out the most powerful YOLO song since “Part of Your World.” And this, by the way, is the first time I have ever seen a movie effectively sell the idea of a character being an antagonist WITHOUT being a villain. Sorry if that’s a spoiler.

Yeah, and it has its own problems like the whole baffling rock troll thing, it seems to be missing a song or two, the admittedly loveable comic relief character Olaf the snowman does become ever-so-slightly obnoxious at key moments, and a couple of the characters seemed a bit underdeveloped within the narrative. Long story short; I certainly understand it if you didn’t like it. I, however, thoroughly loved this movie and I don’t entirely know why. Then again, I seem to be okay with that now. Best Disney cartoon since, well, probably The Lion King. Just my humble opinion, though.

Okay, well, that’s it. There are several movies of last year that I still want to see, like 12 Years a Slave, Dallas Buyers Club, Her, The Wolf of Wall Street, and Mud. So the list above could probably change. Maybe. I don’t know. We’ll see.

Okay, nerds, talk at you later…

So my adventure for this last week was a journey to Arlington, TEXAS. Its not Pakistan, heck, its not even very interesting, but my goal for this blog is to document my travels, and I would be remiss in neglecting even the small ones, so document I shall. Lucky you.  I don’t have a journal, per se, so in twenty years when my kids ask me what I was doing between the ages of thirty and whenever, I can simply point them to the neglected, dust-ensconced website that you now read fresh and unsullied by time. Of course in twenty years, they will inhale websites like spores that flower vivid images entirely within their own mind and this forum may contain one or two less dimensions than their usual Internet experience. At that point we will finally be able to answer the question, “what does HTML smell like?” “Do JPEGs have a texture? Or perhaps a flavor?” I imagine the Internet of the future will be an experience not unlike The Matrix, where you will open your eyes after a few moments of unconscious, rapid-eye-movement, and mutter such profundities as “I know Kung Fu.”

And this meandering thought process, in case you were wondering, is the type of consciousness flow that I battle with. I was going to quantify that statement with an “on occasion” or “sometimes,” but no, it is best left with a period. It is a constant companion. This is the type of consciousness flow I struggle with, period. Start taking about Arlington, Texas, and end up pontificating on the psychedelic potential of the interwebs…

Anyway…

TEXAS (sometimes mispronounced Tay-Haas) is a nation just south of our very own United States. Much like the island nation of Australia, TEXAS is a vast and barren land with its own very unique language and culture, and is too surrounded by an ocean, though in this case it is an ocean of, um, nothing. I mean, literally nothing. I should take this moment to mention that instead of flying to TEXAS, Mark and I drove there, so I experienced, in all of its vapid glory, a part of our nation that is best left for desert rodents to reproduce then die, and, well, that’s pretty much it.

Our purpose of driving to TEXAS was to deliver a pair of custom 60kva (That’s 60,000 Watt) Uninterruptible Power Supplies and their associated battery cabinets to an L3 facility in Arlington. These systems are designed to power the servers and computer systems for a pair of H60 Blackhawk helicopter simulators. For reasons that are well above my pay grade, though, the decision was made to drive these units to TEXAS instead of shipping them and meeting them there. So we drove in Mark’s big Chevy Dually truck dragging along a trailer with 12,000 pounds of Power Innovations equipment.

The glorious chariot…

My adventure started last Saturday night, where I drove and hour from my home in Springville to the Salt Lake City Airport, where I hopped a 50 minute flight to St. George Utah to meet Mark and the equipment there. Yeah, don’t think about that too long. I drove for an hour in the wrong direction to take a flight so short I didn’t even have time to recline my seat, in an airplane that could literally fit six times over inside the 777 we flew to Islamabad in.

Anyway, I spent the night in St. George – more famously known as Party Town USA – then we got on the road and drove for two days through the most desolate region of the United States I have ever seen. And it was a bit slow-going with six tons of equipment behind us, but we made it to the site Monday evening no worse for the ware. And not to continue with comparisons, but being in a car for 12 hours is somehow SO much less torturous than being in the aforementioned 777 for essentially the same amount of time.

Or maybe I am just that broken.

Though we planned for a full four days of installation time, we worked hard and got the systems up and running, tested and commissioned in two. And by Thursday morning, we were once more on the road, leaving the colorful nation of TEXAS behind.

And I guess I won’t question the wisdom of the decision to drive this trip too much, but it seems to me a bit inefficient to have four days of driving for two days of work, especially when I have many-a-project still to accomplish back at home base. Oh well, I took full advantage of the seeming lack of oversight I am given over what and how much I eat on the company dime. Like I have said before, there are few physical benefits to my travels, so I take advantage of the ones I am afforded. And by that I mean I ate one of the best Lobster’s I have ever experienced the other night, not blinking once about the resulting bill.

And I do not want to sound sacrilegious or irreverent, but Jesus is BIG in TEXAS. Like, Coca Cola big. Like billboards, flags, and bumper-stickers everywhere kind of big. And according to most of these advertisement methods, he also “saves?” I guess? Though what, ostensibly, is being saved, and the method by which the saving is taking place seems to consistently be omitted from the media campaign. I may have to look more into this. Okay, done with that. The humor of the preceding might not have been worth the imperilment of my eternal standing. I don’t know, I can’t control what is on my mind. Flow of consciousness, people, we’ve been over this before. Pay attention.

Sheesh.

My only remaining observation has to do with my turn driving Mark’s vehicle. It is the first time I have driven such a large truck with such a large load, and almost immediately I felt my entire countenance change as I applied power to the turbocharged diesel engine below the over sized hood. I felt I needed to immediately apply overtly patriotic, red-neck-praising, emotionally manipulative country music to my ears. I also felt like I needed to be chewing something and also wreak something. Not havoc, not destruction, but…something…

Instead, Mark’s choice of music ran the gamut of 80’s era hair metal bands, like Europe, Def Leppord and Firehouse, with such classics as Walking on the Edge and You’re too Bad. Speaking of smelling things, I am sure I detected the faint odor of sweat, hairspray, spandex, and cocaine wafting from the speakers as the five minute long, ear-shredding guitar solos of each and every hair-metal song commenced. As a fan of rock, this is an era of music that I recognize and hold reverence towards because of the influence it bares on current vectors of the genre. It is, however, an era I can, as a blanket statement, say that I can do without being familiar with.

Okay, so that’s it. I have used the framework of a rather uneventful and, dare I say, boring, business trip to ramble on incoherently about…um…stuff. Way to go Joe, being all efficient with your words and all. Ugh. Long story short, even my less eventful trips are still exciting and I am enjoying all this travel with Mark. Which is great, because we are going to be back to the same facility in six months to break down the same systems and ship them to Taiwan. Shortly thereafter, we will be in Taiwan to reinstall and recommission them there. Good times. Thanks Power Innovations, for all the interesting experiences.

Okay, nerds, talk at you later.

I am safely and happily back in the sates and decompressing from the long journey home. However, in the throws of despair, fourteen hours into a plane ride, I wrote the following. It is a small glimpse into the depths of insanity, the depraved nature one might achieve when tortured nigh unto death by the white hot poker of excessive travel. Be ye therefore warned:

Now, I know what you are thinking but I am not making this up and I am not exaggerating, because I neither have the energy, creativity, or the latent sadism to think it up, whole cloth, but I was rained on. Inside of an airplane. I have spoken at length about my previous trips in the Pakistani Air Force C-130 cargo planes and I thought it could not possibly get more, um, colorful. Well, it did. In fact, things took a turn.

There I was, an hour and a half into my two hour flight from Shabaz AFB to Islamabad, in the back of a several decades old military plane, sitting in the section where the two rows of seats facing each other are perhaps only a foot apart because it is right below the wing root, my knees intimately interlocked with the young and well-bearded PAF Sargent facing me, with no window in sight, a baby screaming bloody murder a few seats down and no music to listen to because my phone died and I am starting to lose the feeling in my buttocks, a quite frightening feeling I might add. Despite the uncomfortable nature of my situation I count myself lucky compared to the folks behind me in the standing-room-only section of the plane. (Read that again in case you missed the standing-room-only part of that description. I was unaware that airplanes were like rock concerts where you have seated tickets and tickets for “the pit.”)

I’m about to get into this Time Magazine article and info-graphic about the history of boy bands, and I just about have enough time notice how the trend of boy bands using their own instruments died off in the 70’s and picked back up momentarily in the 90’s to give us such national treasures as Hanson and BB Mack when all of a sudden I feel a large drop of water hit me squarely in the head. It is followed by another, then a steady parade of all of their friends, and this continued on to landing.

The water is dripping from above, somewhere in the guts of the wing root. I can see electrical cables, hydraulic lines, and the various viscera of the aircraft above, and amidst it all, condensation, as manna from the heavens. I strain my neck to look out a window on the other side of the plane and sure enough, we have descended into clouds and it’s raining. Therefore the only logical explanation for this water pelting me in the face is that it is rain. Now, I have been on, and have my self been at the controls of many aircraft in my life – some as old as this one – but never have I ever felt such dread for the mechanical integrity of a flying vehicle as I did at this point. I’ve dealt with engine failures with more composure than I did at this time because I knew what was happening and that I could do something about it. Right then, the left side of my brain looked at the right side of my brain and said, “its dark in here, and we may die.”

I exchange a conspicuous look with the Sergeant in front of me and make clear my surrender to the Fates. He smiles and shrugs, accompanied by a small chuckle. We don’t speak the same language, but dang it, we sure as hell understand each other. That’s when the song “Let It Go” from Frozen – one of the many movies I watched on the outbound flight from Atlanta – starts screaming through my mind and for once I am obliged to heed the advice of a Disney song.

Well, that flight eventually landed in Islamabad where we got back to the Serena hotel for approximately 10 hours and a little sleep where I also unceremoniously shaved off the blasted beard I had been growing since December because some of my friends had informed me that doing so would help me fit in better. (Dear friends, you shall never be trusted again) Our security guy picked us up at 4:30AM local time and we got on our flight to Dubai. I will not endeavor to detail the unmitigated chaos that is the Islamabad International Airport, except that the new airport they are building to the south of the city is sorely needed. At Dubai, we had a twelve hour layover. Yes, that is twelve, as in two more than ten and four hours less then our next flight, from Dubai to Atlanta, which I am still in the middle of as of this writing. Pakistan is really cool, but getting there and back can be a hell unending.

Since taking off from Islamabad – um, lets see, three plus twelve, plus fifteen, carry the two, add the exaggeration factor, move the decimal – approximately six hundred and eighty two hours ago, I have watched four full movies, the ENTIRE second season of Game of Thrones (I don’t know guys, I have this really good feeling that absolutely everything is going to work out swimmingly for house Stark in season three), watched about half of the first season of Invader Zim, finished writing a chapter in my book that I may have to just pitch entirely because of the physical duress in which it was birthed, and had time to hack out this little blurb. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is my way of asking someone who is in their right mind and/or a professional editor, (two conditions that are quite often mutually exclusive) to count how many exhaustion-induced run-on sentences are contained within the walls of this ill-advised diatribe, and, should that number exceed five, to please kill me. Because at that point, my own writing has developed an ego and is eating itself and I do not want to be conscious for what happens next. See, I know its next stop will be my medulla oblongata, at which point my corporeal form will be reduced to a blithering pile of improper grammar and pointless metaphors. Too late? Yeah, maybe. But dang it, I can breath again.

Ugh, sorry for the rambling, but I am in that mood. Come on buddy, only two more hours to Atlanta…

Wait where was I?

Oh, yes, Pakistan. Great place to visit, even better place to come home from, regardless of the method. Yet I do miss my new friends. Thank you for being proper and admirable examples of your nation and culture. You have changed me for the better!

Okay, nerds, talk at you later.

Me and the crew from PAF Base Shabaz, with Mark (lower right) and one of the guys from the simulator company.

Saalam Alekum, and hello from Jacobabad Pakistan. I am sorry if this post is a little less entertaining and more educational than usual, but I have been absorbing Pakistani culture wholesale the past few days and I wanted to record it whilst it is still Febreze fresh. My sarcastic complaints about my accommodations and the bloodsucking helicopters that leave itchy welts on me every night can wait.

First, a status report. Mark and I have installed both of the QLS-80 systems, and we have had one fully tested, commissioned, and blessed by the holy father of UPS systems, yea verily. The other is providing some problems, and my need an exorcism, but we should be finished with the install and testing by the end of the day tomorrow. I have enjoyed watching the simulator team assemble the flight simulator as I’m doing my work. They have allowed me to take pictures of the sim, but have asked that I not post them online, a request I am happy to oblige. They’re really neat, so ask me to show them to you the next time you see me. It’s already been two and a half long days of work, I am tired, scratched-up, and sore, but it is made all the better by the people I am working with.

System #1 finished and running. The smaller cabinet to the left is full of batteries, the larger is the 80kva Uninterruptible Power Supply.

I mentioned it before, but the Pakistani people are intensely kind and talkative. I have made a few good friends here. Of particular note is Sgt. Nisar Houssein, or just Nisar. We have had many opportunities to talk at length over many diverse subjects. He speaks very good English and is quick witted. I think it has been an eye-opening experience for the both of us as we discuss the differences and similarities of our cultures. On the surface, we share many similarities that have proven to be a lens by which I can observe Pakistani culture more finely.

My friends Nisar and Ashfaq Akhbar.

Nisar, for one thing, is my age, born just three months after me. He is married and has two children. He makes $4,000 a year as an NCO in the Pakistani Air Force, and is completely happy with that. He has a large house that is built on land he inherited from his father, which he paid nothing for, and like most men here, he will probably retire around the age of 40. He doesn’t own a car, he plays video games, he likes American movies, and he loves cooking and fishing. I told him he would have a great time in Utah if he ever came stateside.

I love the simplicity of his life, and he likes the variety of mine. We have similar desires, similar hopes and dreams, similar interests, though our cultures point us in differing paths. The ingredients are different, but the dish is the same.

I’ve had to teach a few of these guys how to operate the systems I am installing and they are all quick and eager learners. In return, they have been teaching me a few phrases in the local language, Urdu, which can be difficult as is sounds nothing like the European based languages I am used to. Yeah, I’ve been laughed at a few times mispronouncing some things, but hey, I’m trying. The thing they keep stressing is that in their culture, a guest is a blessing to have and they treat me with great respect and kindness. It’s humbling to me how serious they take their culture.

For instance, the greeting I wrote at the beginning of this post, Salaam Alekum, literally translates to “peace be upon you.” I like it because it is an active greeting. It is an action, a blessing. It conveys a hope of happiness to the recipient. It is both a greeting and a farewell, appropriate for any time of the day. Granted, it’s longer than hi or hey, but it also carries proportionately more meaning in its girth.

Sadly, they also seem to have a sense that Pakistan is misunderstood or looked down upon in the states. It’s not even unspoken. They say it to me. “Please tell everyone that we are good people. Tell everyone how good of a time you had.”  But I think they understand as well as I do the latent tension between our nations. They have made a great and positive impression on me though, one that I wish I could share more fully.

And fine, I’ll say it out loud. Muslims are great people and their culture is fascinating. It is a shame that it has been perverted and spoiled by so relatively few.

I am not naive enough, though, to discount the fact that I am working off a small sample size. I am keenly aware that there is a dark element here, one that I have been very noticeably shielded from. I freely give the benefit of the doubt though, to a fault, and I know this. I am constantly searching for the good in others. I am as Luke to his father Anakin, the erstwhile Vader. It is a proclivity within me as thick as any other, a compulsion I can blame squarely on my father, and I know it has come back to hurt me in times past. But I feel, in the end, thinking the best of my fellow human will somehow bring balance to this world – to the force – as negativity is a pathos all too common.

That being said, it is now time for a list of observations!

First, they drive like the Brits here. Left side of the road, with the driver on the right side of the car. I will not hold that against them as this infection was given to them unwittingly by their former imperial rulers. Which reminds me, Nasir and I have joked about both of us being from former British colonies, much to the chagrin of the guys who are here from England.

The food here comes in two varieties: Chicken and rice or rice and chicken. Chose wisely. While they may be flavored differently each time – the familiar bouquet of curry never far – the canvas remains the same. The food is also quite spicy at times and my bowels are constantly in a slow burn “Occupy Wall street” level of civil disobedience. The riots that ensue on occasion and are rare, but leave a lasting impression.

Sign taped to the door of my bathroom. not sure what it means, but I do keep the fan on. Always.

Food is delivered regularly and in bulk. I am served a breakfast of omelets, boiled eggs, bread and butter, and fried flatbread every morning around 6:30. I am left with only the best of utensils – my bare hands – to consume the feast, though I have, in my audacity and obstinence, used the knife of my multi-tool to spread the butter. Sometime around ten, we are ushered from our work by our hosts to have a brunch, followed by lunch at noon. The ingredients of these two meals rarely stray from the aforementioned chicken/rice – rice/chicken combo. Dinner is similarly themed.

Breakfast. The Monster is there to take the edge off the jet lag. The Doritos are there to take the edge off the Monster.

Typical brunch/lunch. Wash, rinse, repeat. Also, poop.

The game of Cricket is big here, and if you have never watched a Cricket match, might I highly recommend such a thing. You will find it entertaining, and indeed, a breath of fresh air amidst the stale stagnation of professional sports in the states. I would compare it to Major League Baseball, but that would do a grand disservice to Cricket. It would be like explaining what a green Maryland forest looks like to a Nevadan; language fails to penetrate the gulf between the concepts.  Cricket is exponentially more exciting to watch because things actually happen in Cricket. I would apologize to any baseball fans in the audience, but I can’t imagine why I should. Your sport is boring.

Okay, I’m sorry that post was kind of rambling and unfocused, but I have been thinking on my feet so much that even my strategic reserve of neurons are slow to rise from the well. To sum up, I am enjoying my trip, I am learning and experiencing so much, I am making some great, unexpected friends, and I feel very lucky to experience this. I do miss home, I miss my wife and my cats, and I miss my comfortable bed and my predictably warm shower. Anyway, time for bed…

Okay, nerds, talk at you later.

Jetlag is an unkind sort of companion, the very definition of a jealous and spiteful lover. Its like a codependent relationship that just won’t end, no matter how many times you tell the her to be gone from your life. Right now she’s singing an old Matchbox 20 song to me; “Baby, its three AM, I must be lonely…” Yes, I love the song, but dang it woman, now is not the time for musical reminiscence.

It is indeed three in the morning for me right now and I am experiencing the kind of awake that facilitates action. My brain refuses to rest, eloquently arguing a profound case for consciousness. This condition is in stark contrast to how I was feeling before I fell asleep last night at around seven. I suppose I need to fill in the details of my adventures since my last communiqué, and being who I am, I aim to please.

So, there we were, trapped at PAF Base Mushaf, waiting for the weather to clear at our final destination. I have previously shared the view from and the opulence of my first hotel room in Islamabad. This, in stark contrast, is where I stayed in Mushaf:

Our lovely bedroom.

A room with a view.

Mushaf Air Force base.

At 8am yesterday morning, we were given the go-ahead to board the plane. Now, I know I spoke of my first experience in that military transport with no small amount of joy, but this time, the thrill of the experience diminished rapidly and I saw it for what it truly was; A dark, uncomfortable, smelly, noisy ride. I now know what cargo in the belly of a FedEx plane feels like. Next time I receive a box from Amazon, I may have to look at it with empathy, pat it gently, and call it brother. Photographs were discouraged, but I may have accidentally hit the shutter a couple of times on my phone. Whoopsie doodle.

Our faithful steed.

A hastily taken photo of the inside of the C-130.

I call this my surreptitious C-130 selfie.

For those of you who are curious, I found out that this particular aircraft is a C-130E model, formerly owned by the Australian Air Force and dutifully refurbished by Lockheed Martin. For the rest of you; this be one o’ dem old like planes what them kangaroo people used to have.

We landed at our destination at PAF Base Shahbaz in Jacobabad, Sindh province. If you look it up, Jacobabad is smack dab in the center of Pakistan. I have been to some strange places in my life, but this is the farthest I have ever been from anything I would consider familiar. It took us four days to get here. FOUR. The only time I have traveled that long was when my family would drive to Utah from Pennsylvania, and that was with scenic stops at Yellowstone and Mt. Rushmore and that was orders of magnitude more scenic than central Pakistan. To paraphrase the great Jedi master; if there is a bright center of the universe, this is the plant that it is farthest from.

Immediately I was told about the monster storm that had come through the night previous, the weather that had prevented our timely arrival. Turns out, that this had been the biggest storm in a very long time. How long, you ask? Well the gal I was talking to said that before 2006, it had been a hundred years since it rained here. Apparently the water table is so high here that rain really isn’t needed for agriculture. I proceeded to tell her about this magical land of utter, stark desolation in the states that by all rights should not be able to support life; I told her of the dark and cratered moonscape we call Las Vegas, and she reeled back in horror.

Hmmm. Two cracks at Nevada in two posts. I’m thinking a three for three may be forthcoming…

Anyway, Shahbaz isn’t bad. It feels like a typical military base. Security is tight, the facilities are okay, and everywhere a sense of purpose. The people here, and I may pontificate upon this at a later time, are super nice. Very polite, very friendly, and very talkative, if you give them a chance. It also helps that most everyone speaks English, some better than others, but at least everyone I’ve met understands me. Now, weather I can always understand their English, well, that is a different story entirely.

Mark and I arrived at the simulator facility and found our UPS systems, parts, and tools had all arrived there safely, and we immediately set to work. We are half a day behind schedule and we need to be out of here on Friday no matter what. We are installing the power supplies for a pair of flight simulators for the PAF, and that’s the most I am going to say about what I am doing here for now. The guys from the simulator company are here as well, assembling the actual simulators. They are all from a strange and distant land called Texas. And as welcoming as this place is, I can understand their grumpiness at having to be here for three plus months. Yeah, that sounds really fun.

Early in the afternoon a debilitating case of jetlag struck me. An exhaustion of indescribable magnitude. I wasn’t understanding Mark, let alone the Pakistani men we were working with. This is the kind of tired that not even caffeine, in all of its chemical glory, can penetrate. So, I soldiered on in a zombie-like state for the rest of the day.

I returned to my room, had a shower, and was asleep before 7. This is the reason I didn’t get a post out yesterday, let alone email my wife, despite my best intentions. This also brings me back to the present, wide awake at this proverbial ungodly hour.

Well, I’ll post more tomorrow, I suppose. Maybe the next day. The traveling is over so I am hoping that a comfortable sense of routine will set in and I won’t need to be so talkative.

Okay, nerds, talk at you later.