Take the Luang Way Home

Toward the end of 2016 a quarter-life crisis compelled me to get out of Dallas. Teaching young people rocks my world and allows me to sound smarter than large groups of people (never happens at work).  Plus, I needed to get weird. Thusly motivated I requested unpaid time off, booked flights, and shirked responsibilities personal and professional. Two blinks later I’m at Thailand’s Swerving Mama BKK (1) airport hopping on a plane to a communist, poorly-understood, beautiful country full of mountains, stray cats, tiny humans and funny-smelling food. My prior Laos knowledge base came entirely from a King of the Hill episode. And now I’m balls deep in it.  Here goes.

           In transit from Thailand to Luang Prabang, the bite-sized Thai flight attendant asked if I was sitting in the emergency exit row.  I responded in the affirmative “unless you want that seat then I’ll go somewhere else.”  The misguided attempt at friendliness sailed over her objectively low head. An American in the next row back gesticulated this fact to me, adding well-executed "you're dumb" eyebrows.  “This is a stretch, but have you seen the Archer episode about how the Pacific Islander people can’t handle idioms?”  Her confirmation opened the door to a cool friendship, and just like that I joined her team exploring LP for the next 5 days. We were a family.  Rad.

Didn't Find It

Choose Cool Shit

           This team speaks to a point that’s poorly understood about going out into the world, and needs to be addressed.  “I want to travel but don’t have anyone to go with” has become a broken record, which is sad. Crazy people travel to crazy places, goofy people travel to goofy places, and the under-pampered set sail in droves to locales rife with pampering.  If you want to go somewhere, don’t wait around your current social circle to find a team.  Just go there.  You’ll meet like-minded folks and be amazed how much you have in common. You’ll also find travellers younger and poorer than you who just prioritized the trip higher.  Everybody has choices. It’s your life.

Also, you’ll definitely encounter Australians (2) there, wherever you go, because they’re everywhere. It’s crazy.

           I digress.  My first day on the anachronistic streets of Luang Prabang started as many subsequent days would: Early.  Alarm clocks aren’t a thing here.  Everyone relies on the “racket of roosters” method (3).  This non-customizable wakeup device proliferates all across the city.  I couldn’t escape it and, till I found well-insulated lodging, woke up at Metric Farmer Time every damn day. Inexperienced as I am with un-plated poultry, I lacked respect for the depth and passion of roosters’ collective need for attention.  With a set of lungs like an Olympic Swimmer and a vocabulary bizarrely similar to xenophobic rednecks, roosters have become my sworn enemy.  For the rest of my journey I ate chicken as often as possible, hoping to rid the planet of these cock-ophanous poultrygeists before they have us all awake before the sun every day!

And Every Night

           Once out on said streets, I relied on previously successful Asian city exploration techniques and found the morning market.  In addition to strange knick-knackery, they offer a bizarre assortment of “food” for purchase, further preparation and consumption.  In no particular order, I saw the following for sale (and all very much alive): Beetles, finches, stingray, catfish, hamsters, bats, and entire pigs/chickens.  The flora diversity matched the fauna, and I think I could’ve bought pot there.  I tried the soup, my first tangible act of poultricide, and loved it. Weird place, incredible food.  Would become a recurring theme.

           Eventually sunrise threatened over the eastern edge of the city. Round these parts, that means the Giving of Alms to Monks will shortly begin.  The relationship between the city and Buddhism is a complicated one which goes back millennia.  I researched it a great deal. Buddhism sometimes gets a free pass from Americans exhausted and alienated by the Judeo-Christian/Muslim kerfluffle.  Buddhism’s negative impact to society is, to western eyes, minimal at best and far away at worst. But this doesn't represent reality correctly. To my surprise and disappointment Buddhist history contains all the textbook collateral of socio-religious interaction; war over scripture, widespread abject poverty, opulent temples, docile behavioral requirements justified by absurd afterlife promises rather than objective usefulness, systematic female exclusion, stupid robes. Sure, it encourages meditation and minimalism, but that doesn’t make the top-level system above reproach any more than Christianity’s big push for temperance and charity justify the other absurdities in their holy tomes. This concept is cleverly illustrated in the above video. Watch it. I dare ya.

Alm Nom Nom

           During the Giving of Alms, Monks from local temples march the streets of LP in neat single-file lines.  Monks are not permitted to work for their food, nor to beg for it nor to steal it.  So they walk through town with baskets called Baht (4) into which locals and tourists alike will place sticky rice and other savory morsels. Picture a group of unoriginal Trick-or-Treaters parading through a neighborhood full of Asian Dentists and you’re not far off. This routine has been in place for a long, long time.  It’s a somber, respectful tradition. Recently, however, a new feature has been added by Spoiled Chinese Irreverent Dipshits (SCIDs). Every morning SCIDs will crowd within 12 inches of a monk’s face with a flashing camera when the young man (Novice Monks can be as young as 6) is in mid-alm. This distracts and interrupts the ceremony.  The Monks do NOT like it. Signs prohibiting this are posted hither and yon in the streets. It’s hard to fathom knowing about the Monk Procession and simultaneously not knowing that it’s hugely disrespectful to flashbulb like this. By means of analogy, consider a tourist in Jerusalem or Mecca getting up in a local religious person’s space, interrupting his/her prayer session, and taking a flashbulb picture of it from dong’s length away.  Would never happen, right? That could be because religious practitioners in the Middle East tend to react immediately and passionately to insults.  Buddhists are by definition nonreactive, and Lao are by definition incredibly poor, so pushing back against SCIDs isn’t in their nature.  Seems like one young monk giving just one SCID a left-handed mouthful of chiclets would solve the problem for years to come, but that won’t happen.  Shame.

Wat Phousi Giggle

            After the alms concluded, I walked with a new friend to the center of the city to watch the sun continue its secant arc from the top of the hill.  A modest climb ensued to the Wat (Buddhist Temple) at the top.  This hill is called Mt Phousi, and is pronounced like an antiquated term for a cat.  The 12-year-old in me thusly concluded that I’d enjoy Luang Prabang because “It’s a town built around Phousi.” Special thanks to Eugene for ruining this joke in advance of this blog’s publication. Later on I’d become lost in the outskirts of town and see the Wat on high from some miles away.  To get home, II adjusted course to the South by 90 degrees – Turned down for Wat.  There are, as you may assume, too many examples of this wanton childishness on the tip of my tongue. This town and this language seem to have been created specifically for the pleasure of unnecessarily literate immature Westerners. Phousi.  *giggle*

Kuang Si Waterfall.  Oooooo.

           Thusly ensconced in Lao culture, I enjoyed the exploration process.  My walk-on team and I relaxed effectively, downright un-Rusty-ily, at oodles of laid back cafes and restaurants. We scoped out waterfalls.  We encountered firsthand most of the dangers of renting scooters and driving in a lawless country with no hospitals. And of great significance, we got a little loaded (5) at Lao Lao Garden and met some locals. They offered to take me out into the countryside for a homestay on Lao National Day.  This proved to be the second great adventure of my life (after playing trumpet with braces) and will take up the majority of the next chronological posting.  Also, that whole teaching thing. I’ll get to that. Eventually.

           There’s more to write, but this needs to wrap up because you probably need to get back to work.  If you liked this post, I hope you’ll read the next one.  And if you didn’t like this post, then I also hope you’ll read the next one. Checkmate, how you like that?

Saibadee,

R

(1)    Suvarnabhumi Airport.  Swerving Mama, Slurpaboobie, Surfinada and SupLaBamba were all posited at various times trying to get it right.  Someone also tried “SueKilledBambi” but that’s just silly.

(2)    They pronounce this place “Loo-WANG pruh-BANG,” which is as incorrect as it is consistent among Aussies as it is hilarious. Why don’t you just call it “PENIS GIGGLE” while you’re at it.

(3)    Actual name for a group of roosters.

(4) Monk’s Basket would be a reasonably cool name for a bar.

(5)    We were a lot loaded. A lot.

               

Crew Cuts

Ever want to learn more about how international flight attendants' lives actually work? Me neither! Cool! Short post, see ya later!

Nah, can't do it. It might kill me to be succinct and short-winded, and then who would tell all these stupid stories and waste internet space? The Emirates Cabin Crew I met in Dubai demonstrated remarkable hospitality, open-mindedness, and rival my oilpatch comrades for number of passport stamps and general hedonism. They fundamentally changed my estimation of their HQ, Dubai, to boot. Accordingly, this post is aiming to do two things:

This Exchange Actually Happened

1)      Pay homage to a gang who had no reason to be awesome to me but decided to do so

2)      Describe the lives of the folks asking you, again, to put your damn seatback up. They're actually pretty interesting. So get comfy and, well, put your proverbial seatback up. Here we go.

When last we left our ignorant, narcissistic protagonist, I was fresh off a beach stroll with the irreplaceable Amy. She’d informed my completely undeserving ass that friends of hers had spent considerable time and effort throwing together a Friendsgiving celebration. I was invited to attend. Friendsgiving, for the uninitiated, reigns supreme among holidays – all the alcoholism and bacchanal of Thanksgiving but without thinly-veiled guilt-tripping for not flying out to see Mom more often (1).

Because over 25,000 sky-people are employed at any given time, entire buildings are dedicated to their housing.  This creates a lifestyle not so different then college dorm life. After checking in as guests at the front desk, Amy and I walked into the home of Olivia (2).  Unbeknownst to us, Olivia had installed a wormhole into her front door so we actually walked into a quaint Midwestern apartment that reeked of turkey and happiness.  The meal had taken her the better part of 3 days to prepare, which is a feat more considerable given that Cabin Crew don’t habitually have 3 consecutive days in town to knock around.  And she didn’t miss anything.  Props.

Actual Medal

Ruining the image of being somewhere outside Twin Cities was the “This Is Diversity” pamphlet enacted in real time in front of us. Serbians, Americans, Aussies, Canadians and various pan-galactic alien species stretched out on the couches drinking, cavorting and generally bullshitting around.  Ideal. Working my way around the room I gradually became a strong enough Jedi phony to convince the two Serbian women that I was Cabin Crew myself, an accomplishment which gained me nothing because Serbs don’t do “humor” like the rest of us.  Lesson learned. It'll make me stronger.

So we ate and we drank and then drank more, migrating from the customary (“How’d you get into Crew?  Where have you flown?”) to the more comical and personal (“Wait, so what do Arab women wear under ninja suits?” “How funny is it when Saudi guys go to bars for the first time?”). The answers to the last two questions are, respectively, "nothing" and "incredibly so."

Casually gleaned from these interactions, here's what you don’t know about being Emirates Cabin Crew. First, the airline provides huge group interviews in a large number of cities scattered across the world.  They do this to ensure diversity.  Thousands of interviewees come to these events to compete for a handful of spots.  In many cases (like most of the folks I met) the jobs are hot commodities because they represent a lifestyle in a fancy part of the world and a cure for geographic myopia.  In other cases (folks from very poor countries) it’s one of the most high-paying job interviews that ever comes around, and the ones who get the offer lift their entire families up an economic bracket.

Once hired, the lucky neophytes ship off to Dubai to live in this college-but-not-college world.  They’re assigned to batches (pledge classes) and trained for several weeks on how to handle asshole customers, pre-flight checks, and the most polite way to interrupt lavatory sexual incidents.  They are, for all intents and purposes, flying waitresses (waiters), maids and bartenders with a casual safety responsibility. Which means, tragically, the actual “work” part of their work lacks mental stimulation, significance and personal growth.  Let’s explore this.

Consider the nice old lady who works the cash register at your local Kroger (Carrefour, Walmart, HEB).  You don’t know her name, she doesn’t know your name, but you have to have some trite, forced conversation briefly before you move on with your life.  She doesn’t move on, though.  She has to keep smiling and help the next ignoramus learn that a zucchini and a cucumber aren’t the same thing, just like she just did with you (Botany’s hard). And then she'll provide the same instructions to insert the chip into the reader instead of swiping. And then wait for it to read. Over and over again. Flight attendant-ing (attending?) can approach this monotony.  Lots of repeated, trivial, superficial interactions with lots of people who’ll likely never see you again.  Meanwhile, babies sometimes cry and random people just expect you to put their luggage in the overhead bin for them.  So, again, the actual work part of being a flight attendant sucks. Fact.

It's Hard... So Hard.

Roster Release Anticipation

Flights are assigned once a month according to the issuance of The Roster, a holy document of tremendous import.  Waiting for rosters to post wracks the nervous system, especially for newbies who can’t exchange their flights with others yet. Once the n00bs finish a probationary period they can swap flights with other Novices. Some routes obviously get more bids (Bangkok) than others (Peshawar).  The long hauls (Seattle, Dallas) come with 2-3 day layovers while the shorter ones (Abu Dhabi, Cairo) can be in and out in 24 hours.

Cabin Crew don’t usually know anyone on their plane prior to liftoff.  With 25,000 crew to choose from and not many sticking around for more than a few years, the math involved generally precludes even the most social among them from having friends on board.  This has three main implications for your in-flight experience:

1.       The team working around you to placate angry Indians and guide confused Arabs has never worked together before, so cut them some slack (They’re probably doing great).

2.       If you’re sitting at the bulkhead, the flight attendant in the uncomfortable jumpseat in front of you during takeoff and landing probably hasn’t had a conversation longer than 10 seconds with anyone since she got to the airport, and might not have one until after returning home.  So you should talk to her.  Even if she’s not a babe (unlikely) and even if you aren’t staying long in the city you’re going to (also unlikely). You’d be surprised what a kind gesture an honest conversation can be. Travelling can be lonely.  Reach out.

[PHONE NUMBER HERE]

3.       Don’t try to get her phone number.  They’re not allowed, even if you do Crossfit. I know, it's bullshit.  Traverse this bridge by jotting your own digits onto a napkin along with a crude drawing of a stick figure puppy (3).   Then when you meet up at an African dance club later and discover that she’s the one beautiful Romanian girl in Dubai with a boyfriend, well, damn.  You tried.

There’s not much else to say on the subject (there is, but I don’t listen well). Cabin Crew live a unique life, and not one I encountered expressed remorse about leaving behind whatever they left behind. I’m grateful for the opportunity to peer into that lifestyle, and hope that the next time any of the crew I met get stuck on a DFW haul they aren’t completely depressed by it. And if you do… bring back my speaker?  Too much Tito’s, I left it at Olivia’s.

Tired of reality?  Get a new one.  Apply here

-R

(1)    It’s also much less problematic if someone at the dinner table is making googley-eyes at you on Friendsgiving.  
(2) The Emirati Goddess of Turkey
(3) Don’t whip out a business card (ever) in a non-business environment as it makes you look like a douche. Stick with puppy drawings.

Roll Me a Dubai

This article covers my experience in Dubai, a glittering diamond clinging to the sand-chapped rectum of the planet. I flipped 180 degrees in my estimation of this place, a testament both to my complete ignorance of how stuff works and to the quality of the people I met there. Hopefully I can swing you ‘round to my line of thinking.  Or, failing that, make you laugh a couple times.  Here goes.

Not Shown: Hot Flight Attendants

First, facts and stuff. Dubai started out as a pearling city.  That provided a nontrivial influx of trade, diversity, math, and secularism in its early formative years.  Ironically much of this influx came from Iran.  Pre-revolution Iran was apparently a pretty sweet place, a concept that makes me go cross-eyed. Anyway, in 1966 hydrocarbons were discovered offshore Dubai in “Hi this is the Middle East” quantities.  Unlike the neighbors, the first thing Dubai’s leadership did was to spend these Dirhams on diversifying the economy and building infrastructure. The city’s population ballooned 300% in the first 3 years after First Oil. Nowadays, Oil revenue accounts for only 5% of GDP (compare to 35% for Abu Dhabi) with the lion’s share coming from tourism, aviation and finance. They run a little airline out of there.  You might’ve heard of it.

In other words, they got a head start and knew what to do with it. That’s why instead of a royal family that all have Rovers for their kids, the Emirate has amassed such wealth that you can’t swing a dead cat in the street without hitting two Lamborghinis (1).

Now back to the story. When EK222 finally put rubber on the tarmac, I was elated.  The rocket fuel in my veins came from the knowledge that I’d see Amy the Aussie soon.  Australian values tend to align exactly with mine – reverent to irreverence, comical and creative, bearish on sleeves.  Amy fits conveniently into all these stereotypes. A more fitting ambassador for her species you shall never find.

           Amy bravely volunteered to be my guide through Dubai. She also offered to show me the Emirates Cabin Crew world. More on that later. (2)

           We hopped a train to my AirBnB abode on Jumeirah Beach (3).  The word “beach” conjures up a lot of pre-programmed images in my head.  Because I’m in no way special, you probably have similar notions, especially if you (one of my 6 readers) spent any amount of time on Texas beaches:  Minimally sorted coarse-grain sands, a few restaurants, morbidly obese beachgoers in Spurs and Cowboys jerseys, and the odd hypodermic needle in a discarded Whataburger wrapper.  Know the place?

           Jumeirah Beach is not those things – rather, those South Texas Tetanus Factories aspire to be Jumeirah Beach when they grow up. Along the sport-court-but-squishy jogging path solar-powered wifi towers periodically sprout up, providing a cool new-agey feel even if it’s cloudy and they aren’t working.  A massive kite festival was taking place.  This didn’t inherently move the coolness gauge because, you know, kites, but floating tigers and dragons spice up any sunset. On the non-beach side of the running track exists every conceivable restaurant and child-entertainment-mechanism.  Volleyball courts were everywhere.  I could hang.  And off in the distance the Burj al Dubai hazily haunted the horizon, just obscured enough by the sand and smog to look like it could actually be a ghost.

"Ooooooooo" - me

           It was, in short, a reasonably chill strip of sand.  But this isn’t a real estate website, it’s a (terrible) travel blog, so I’m describing it as a means to an end; to talk about the people there. They were just like normal beachgoers! They were, if anything, more diverse and generally more fit. Everyone rocked western swimwear and seemed to be having an awesome time. Volleyballers were exactly as sexy as they ought to be, and everyone swore just as much when propelling Wilson into the net. I remained in a shirt-ful condition out of respect, but needn’t have.  My loss (4).  Damn.

           This started to chip away at my preprogrammed impression of Dubai, a misconception borne from being too lazy to not listen to lazy journalism, and having my previous Dubai experience tempered with proximity to an actual shitheap. Yes, Dubai belongs to the UAE, a decidedly Muslim and conservative confederacy. Yes, there are laws on the books that’d be out of place on Bourbon Street.  It’s also not a nice place if you’re a poor immigrant worker who came on a “I’ll loan you my passport till I pay off my plane ticket” plan. But Dubai is a huge, glittering city full of global elite who want to make money and have a great time.  For day-to-day expat or tourist purposes, that influence renders the prior concerns negligible. And while those detrimental characteristics suck, this is a (pedantic) travel blog, not a full-on investigative effort.  Can’t solve em all.

The assault on my uneducated perception of Dubai continued with the assistance of Amy and her fellow passport graffiti enthusiasts.  When you see a city with a group of people who all made it their home recently and are still be in exploration mode themselves, you see a unique side of it.  It’s a good side. I’d expected a culturally narcissistic, oppressively hot, downright boring place where I couldn’t express my ideas or find enthusiastically fun people. Mostly false, temporarily false, absolutely false, false and false, respectively.  I enjoyed being conspicuously over-served at a Friendsgiving party, went to an African dance club, encountered some local music at the AirBnB, and generally didn’t do anything that’d be out of place in any other big global city. Dubai is what you make of it, and there’s enough to do in Dubai to keep me happy for a handful of lifetimes.  

Culture-wise, here’s my breakdown. On a fundamental level, a society can either be fundamentally open-minded and diversity-oriented or it can be focused on religious crankdom.  Crankdom preserves a paradigm of unyielding patriarchy and “don’t ask those questions” ideology.  These two options exist at opposite ends of a spectrum, and it’s not possible to work towards both simultaneously; the former requires and praises new ideas and evaluates them based on objective usefulness, while the latter holds a certain set of old ideas sacred and violently opposes contradictory viewpoints. Prior to this trip I thought Dubai was more in line with its unacceptably backwards neighbor, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. But it’s clearly not. Dubai exists considerably further along that spectrum. Again, being not special, I assume that as many as 4 of the 6 people who actually read this blog share similar misconceptions.  

KSA Tourism Brochure

The ham-fisted religiosity endemic to the Middle East doesn’t like me and I don’t like it.  But in Dubai the primary deity is money, so the theologic camel manure doesn’t make it into the day-to-day in smellable quantities. Turns out the religious absurdities of Dubai aren’t tangibly worse than the religious craziness of the American South (5), but Dubai affords more opportunities to get a girlfriend with an accent and a cool career.  Point, Dubai.

If you take one thing out of this blog, it should be, and always should have been, that I don’t know anything about anything.  The Dubai portion of this trip served as a stark wakeup call to be more judicious in the information I let between my ears.  You only know the soup you swim in, and in my case that soup told me Dubai was a boring, sandy, oppressive (in all meanings) business park with a shopping addiction. Mostly inaccurate.  Shopping is the national sport. It also reminded me that every time I think I’ve been to a couple countries and seen a couple things, there’s an army of bigger fish.  In this case, the army all wears funny red hats and looks upon me pityingly when I announce I’ve only been to 30 countries.  I may as well have brought a half-cooked spaghetti noodle to a gunfight.
via GIPHY

You don’t come home from these trips thinking “oh, ok, now I know enough, I’m good.”  The sentiment is more along the lines of “The gap between what I knew and what I know is enormous, what other places can I go learn about? Gaps are fun.” Then you make the obvious joke about gaps, then you go somewhere else.  And it never stops being that way.  I loved the Dubai leg of this trip, and am eternally grateful to the friends I met along the way.

Yours in mediocre travel musings,

R

(1) Citation Needed

(2) I’m writing an entire post on the lives these people get to live.  They’re a rad bunch - interesting, ballsy and very attractive

(3) If you’re ever in Dubai, give Thierry a shout

(4) And also the loss of the whole city of Dubai.  Did you know I do crossfit?

(5) The hardest part of writing this post was picking which (I only get one?) article about crazy people in the South.  I like the one I settled on, but also considered this, this and this.

I Kurdistan These Stupid Puns Anymore

To Those About To Read, I Salute You

In this edition, I describe the actual process of expatriating, define relatability and realism in all things, fabricate emotional depth while describing the oil industry as a whole, and make too many jokes about sheep-love.  I sincerely hope you enjoy reading this.  Thank you for your attention.

I work for an energy services company.  We are run by a mafia of middle-aged white men diabolically plotting from an offshore volcano lair.  While stroking his equally evil cat, the chairman noticed I submitted a vacation request, and the blonde babe accessory to it, and immediately began cackling with delight.

"This is just what we've been waiting for!  This young man has optimism, others are enjoying his company, and he just completed a great project for Technology.  Let's punch him in the dick!"

So it's off to the Kurdistan on 72 hours notice.  Again.

First, the backstory.  Oil is now cheap.  Saudi Arabia is executing a global economic cockblock of unprecedented proportion.  They're doing so by turning their production spigot to "wide open," flooding the market with sweet, delicious crude oil and driving the price down.  It's working.  They can do this because dinosaurs were either A) all Muslim and on pilgrimage when the meteor struck or B) assholes (not mutually exclusive). A comical proportion of the world's easily accessible oil is buried in the Saudi Sandbox.

Figure 1 - Well, Shit

As an offshoot of this, the industry has collapsed into itself like external genitalia during a Swedish Fjord plunge (sounds dirty, actually isn't). In October 2014, 38 rigs operated in the Kurdish Autonomous Region.  In October 2015, there are 3. Layoffs have been widespread and rapid. The lack of imported Scotsmen, Canadians and Aussies is accordingly conspicuous.  And you can hardly hear yourself think over the audible sighs of relief from the local sheep population.

Figure 2 - Buy Her Another Drink, Try Again in an Hour

Enter: Rusty.  Got no trained operators still on the payroll?  Send the Technology guy!

To get to Kurdyland, one has a number of options.  Note that there are no good options involving this final destination. My preference, akin to preferring rectal thermometry to slamming my junk in a window, is to fly Emirates from DFW to Dubai, then Dubai to Erbil (Irbil, Arbil).  Emirates, it seems, makes an ungodly sum of money.  They tend to provide clean, 2/3 empty planes with bottomless booze on all flights.  Their flight attendants also somehow manage to be attractive and vaguely Arabic-garment-clad, a confusing juxtaposition. It's weird, but I like it (not mutually exclusive).

To get to Dubai, you pass through the following countries' airspace: Canada, Greenland, Sweden, Finland, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Romania, Iran and Syria.  This doesn't make any dad gum sense, until it does.  That's because two-dimensional maps lie to you with their East-to-West cleanliness.  On a globe, the fastest way from point A to point B doesn't give any regard to cartographic convention - look at a globe from above (as shown below) it then the "ohhhhh" will hit you.

Figure 3 - More "Oh"s Than a Box of Fruit Loops

The niftiness of this navigational trick placated and amused me for roughly ten minutes, then reality set in that I was once again going back to Kurdistan, and I drank a lot.  Drinking is good (citation needed).

Once in Dubai, I was immediately, consistently reminded that I am poor.  Dubai is a strange place.  Shopping, the national sport, dominates life.  I was honestly unaware of the variety of brands of watches, sunglasses, hookah-smoking accessories and superfluous status symbol haberdashery which existed in the world.  Thankfully they all exist in the arrival terminal in DXB, and the holes in my cultural awareness were spackled in one swell foop.

Figure 4 - Coming Soon: Character, Subtlety, Soul

Fast forward a few more meals served on trays, and I arrived in Erbil, the Las Vegas of Iraq.  An unnecessarily well-dressed and immaculately mustachioed driver greeted me and stared disapprovingly at my stained t-shirt and grey hoodie. He then escorted me to his car with the same shameful "don't judge me based on him" attitude I encountered 1,000 times while at SMU. Human worth in Kurdistan varies directly with quality of shoe leather, tightness of pants and is inversely proportional to time since last haircut.  My personal hell.

En route, he alternated between some Avicii-esque untz untz music and locally produced tunes featuring a tortured cat and some bongos.  This leads into my first Potentially Offensive, On-Point Occupational Observation (POOPOO): Music is enjoyed as a function of its specificity to the listener. This is why club music is a global fixture in clubs and dance bars - you don't actually give a rip about the music there, you want a background beat to dance and/or air hump while pretending to be interested in what some cute German girl is saying.  Most 20-somethings on this planet have heard "Levels" a thousand times because most of us are interested in pretending to care about cute German girls.  But you can only identify with details.  Avicii provides no details because none are needed.  I don't care about Kurdyland's Finest because I don't get the details.  But I LOVE  Bob Schneider because his details are like my details and I get it.  That's why I write about the details of these ridiculous trips I go on.  Because I want to be known, understood, accepted.  And only details can create this bond between share-er and share-ee.

Figure 5 - I Love This Song!

I digress.

We then arrived at the staff house, a microcosm of Kurdistan and much of the Middle East.  It was lavishly decorated, populated by oilfield expats who abused it, rotted in the foundation and infested with rodents and bugs. It also stank of unattended sewage backflow.  The ratio of effort put into the decor compared to essential structural elements, pest control, and sanitation was comical. But the chandeliers really tied the living room together.  Welcome to Erbil.

Then we worked.  Boy did we ever work.  Turns out oil is reluctant to flow from subterranean reservoirs in commercial quantity and quality (citation needed).  Whoda thunk.

This work was a constant team effort, and leads seamlessly into my second Kurdy POOPOO.  In the oil patch, the folks you work with are both the source of addiction and the support group to fight it.  No one in the world understands the life of a commuting rotation worker except other commuting rotation workers. So when we're on location, we all get it.  We're here for each other.  The witty bullshit and technical vernacular defy description, and the creative dick jokes flow like... um, like an oil well.  Sometimes.  We're the only ones who truly get each other, and when we're here, it's a big happy, diverse, shamelessly dysfunctional family.  My crew represented BFE Michigan, Basra (Iraq), Atlanta (Not Iraq but close), Romania, Libya, Nigeria, Tunisia, Malaysia, Egypt and Colombia on this hitch.  We collectively bro'ed our faces off, covering such important topics as the funniest movie title if it were actually about a vagina (Frozen, Home Alone) and whether or not it counts as peeing in the pool if there's no water in it (it does).

Figure 6, 7 - Oh My Squad

The third POOPOO came into light as a dingleberry trailing stubbornly off the second.  While rotation workers get it, and get each other, our significant others never get the same support group.  While we're away from home, we're constantly in the company of other people away from home.  Those we care about who we leave behind, however, don't get to just take a month and commiserate with folks missing their conjugate sexy pieces of dude-shwarma.  Because rotation workers tend to live in awesome places not commonly associated with the oil patch, there's no support group or meeting place.  They just go a month at a time without shwarma.  Which is awful. Oilfield WAGs have a hard gig and deserve more support and respect than they often receive.

Figure 8 - C'mon, I Had To

At the risk of trailing off into an existential description of rotational life, allow me to end on a happy conclusion.  While being far from home isn't easy, it's a growth opportunity which I encourage everyone to try.  Working with people who aren't from the "right" fraternity, neighborhood, country, or religious background is an absolute pre-req to internalizing the fact that none of those things even exist.  While missing birthdays, holidays, vacations, football seasons and volleyball games seems like the pits at times, getting covered in grease and learning how to swear in multiple languages truly is chicken soup for the soul.  It renders me appreciative of what I have, eager to spend time with loved ones, and as most of my friends know, it makes me completely full of POOPOO.

Figure 9 - ...YUP...

Thanks for reading, everyone.  See you soon.