Jordan

Oval Plaza


Colonnaded Street


Temple of Artemis

Testing the acoustics of the South Theater

Elephants in the Siq

The Treasury

The Silk Temple

The Monastery

View from the High Place

The Treasury at night

Aaron's Tomb

Only handrail in Petra

Floating in the Dead Sea

Mt. Nebo

Mt. Nebo mosaics

I still haven’t found much for entertainment or sight seeing in Kuwait but luckily I have to renew my visa every 30 days which means I get a chance to explore some of the local area. This month I went to Jordan, a country I knew nothing about 6 months ago. I found out I needed much more than the 3½ days I spent there.

Jordan is a relatively small country in the Middle East, bordering Israel, Palestine, Syria, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia about a 90 minute flight from Kuwait. It may not sound like the most welcoming place but I found it is a beautiful country with great people. I decided earlier this year that I wanted to visit Petra, the setting for the last scene of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. I didn’t know the name of Petra before researching Jordan but had seen pictures and thought it looked like a place in the Middle East so I started Googling and eventually found it. After doing more research and talking to a friend who had lived there for a while, I found out there was a lot more than just Petra to visit.

This was probably one of the more adventurous vacations I had been on. I was traveling alone in a country which I don’t speak the main language. When I got lost, I eventually got pointed back in the right direction by people that spoke adequate English or played cultural charades well enough to get me back on the right path.

I rented a car from the airport and the guy that brought me the car was Palestinian and had originally grown up in Kuwait. He told me that his family had fled Kuwait when Saddam invaded in 1990. He drove with me part way to my first destination, Jerash, gave me a basic map, and wished me good luck. (This link gives a pretty good description of a tour of the city.)

Jerash is considered on of the best preserved Roman archeological sites outside of Italy. After missing my exit and guessing my way through the residential area of Jerash, I finally found the visitor center of Jerash. I wish I had gotten there faster because I caught the very end of a Roman soldier fighting performance in the Hippodrome. So I moved on to the Oval Plaza, which seems to be the real beginning of a tour around the city. It was pretty empty that day and I was alone so I must have looked like an easy target. A kid approached me and asked if I needed a tour guide. I assured him that I didn’t but he walked around the Oval Plaza and the Temple of Zeus with me anyway. He knew some interesting facts so I told him I’d hire him for the hour and we started through the city. We walked down the Colonnaded Street, like Main St., to the Macellum. Inside were a bunch of columns and Raith rested a penny on rock and set one end of the penny under the column. He then pushed the column and you could see the penny moving up and down. He told me the columns were seated in a way to allow them to sway to prevent them from falling during earthquakes. Considering an earthquake did a lot of damage to the city in 749 AD, I have to believe him. Either way, I thought that alone was worth the price of admission.

The last place we visited was the South Theater. The design of the theater was to project the voice of whoever was performing to all of the seats. I went to the top seats and could easily hear Raith when he was on the ground. Also, he showed my how you could whisper into the base of the circular wall and hear it on the other side. Those Romans were pretty smart.

A lot of the temples and theaters were getting set up for a big festival that night. Raith told me it was a lot of cultural singing and dancing. At the time, I knew I had at least a three hour drive and wasn’t sure about the directions. I wish now I had stayed because I easily made it to Petra but I did get some well needed rest. I had three full days in front of me.

The drive to Petra was cool with the sun going down over the desert hills. I tried not to crash as I snapped a few shots of the sunset. I got in last to my hotel but it was a two minute walk to the Petra visitor’s center.

Petra was build by the Nabataean people but an exact date is not known. The best guess I’ve read is that it was sometime around the end of the second century BC. The place would have been great to defend as the narrow entrance to the city, or Siq, as the walls are over 100 feet tall and very narrow. Nonetheless, the Romans conquered Petra and made it part of their empire. And when the Roman emperor Constantine brought Christianity to the empire, the Nabataean temples were converted to churches and the idols carved into the rock were decapitated by the Roman soldiers.

Petra was recently named one of the new 7 Wonders of the World. I thought the place would be packed from the start the park opened. But at 7am, there were just a few people going into the park. I paid more than I hoped to for a guide but he pointed out a lot of interesting stuff I would not have seen without him. Some of these things were the carvings of idols in the rock and Nabataean, ceramic pipe running along the walls, and “Nabataean graffiti” carved in Latin, Greek, and Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus. My guide told me there were pipes running throughout Petra and there was running water in the homes and a sewer system.

The most recognizable place in Petra is the Treasury. It is the first thing a visitor sees when coming out of the Siq and is pretty breath taking to see. It is a giant carving in red rock. The acoustics are really interesting too because the area right by the Treasury is surrounded by 100 foot rock walls. This is really the starting point to exploring the park. There are several booths open selling souvenirs, maps, books, snacks, and water (essential for a day in Petra). You can rent a camel, donkey, horse, or a horse drawn cart to take you anywhere in the park. All are rented by the Bedouins, a nomadic people indigenous to the area. They were somewhat aggressive trying to sell things but were also very helpful even if you didn’t buy things from them. I was told by my guide that the Bedouins didn’t live in the park anymore. The Jordanian government recently built them a city outside the park but I found out not all of them live there.

The rest of the day I spent exploring the main sites of the park. The Theater, the Silk Tomb, the Great Temple, the Monastery, and all the other ones that were easily accessible. One of the beauties of the rock was the different colors in the different layers. The Silk Tomb is a great example of that, though my picture of it isn’t as striking because the sun isn’t directly on it.

The Monastery is at one of the far ends of the park. It is a pretty good hike and a lot of the tourists rent donkeys to carry them up. Riding the donkey looked like more of an effort than hiking and later in the day I saw a lady fall off of one. On the hike, I was invited to have tea with a couple Bedouin girls that had a souvenir shop. The tea was nothing special but it was interesting to talk to them. They spoke really good English, along with bits of Italian and Spanish, whatever they need to get more business.

The Monastery was really busy. It was around lunch time and I was really tired but wanted to get a good picture with the sun fully on the rock. So I found a place about a five minute hike away from the tourists with a great view of the Jordanian landscape and took a nap. The rocks weren’t that comfortable but it was absolutely silent except for the wind and I slept like a baby for about an hour.

I got my picture and decided on my last hike of the day. It was to the High Place. Not a very original name but it comes as advertised. It was only about a 30 minute hike from the base and the view was over all of Petra. And besides the Bedouins, I was completely alone at the top.

I lucked out by visiting the days I did. Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday night they offer a night hike through the Siq to the Treasury. They put candles down the path all the way to the Treasury. They ask everyone to be silent but it’s hard to keep 300 tourists quite. Once at the Treasury, they have a guy sitting in the middle candles playing a type of guitar singing Arabic songs. Really cool because of the setting and acoustics.

The next morning, I decided I was going to see what it was like to walk through the Siq alone. I was at the gate when it opened and was the first to walk down the Siq. All I could hear was a few owls and I got some good pictures of the Treasury. Since I had gotten an early start, I decided to take one of the longer hikes in the park, to Aaron’s Tomb. It is the place that is believed to be the burial place of Moses’ brother and is one of the highest points in Petra. Again, I was alone on the hike except for the Bedouin families that I past. They had homes carved into the sides of the mountains which looked really neat. Kids ran out to greet me at almost every home. They didn’t speak English as well as their parents but were pretty funny to play with.

About two hours into the hike I thought I was getting kind of close but still not sure how far away I was. I came across an old Bedouin man at a point where I could see the main trail I was on and a less obvious trail up the side of the mountain. He asked me where I was headed and I told him. He then asked if I wanted to buy some old coins from him. He said they were old Roman coins. I told him I didn’t have much money but felt like I was in the old Zelda video game, buy some coins from this guy and he’d tell me the way. He told me the coins were $100 for two. For about five minutes, I tried to convince him I didn’t have that much money on me. He finally told me to think about it and we would talk about it again when I got back from Aaron’s tomb. He then told me to follow the trail up the mountain. He said it was an old donkey trail. I wasn’t sure whether to trust him or not, but I did and it was the right choice. I ended up losing the trail a few times but knew I was on it when I saw new piles of donkey poop.

One of the great things about Petra is there are no signs telling you not to go places. So you have to lookout for your own safety. No walls or guardrails at the edge of mountains. Just a hope you will use common sense. But hiking up to Aaron’s Tomb, I think I found the only handrail in the entire park.

Finally after 2½ hours, I made it to Aaron’s Tomb. The scenery was amazing and could not see any evidence of civilization. I’ve read that from there, you can see Egypt, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. I had my lunch of an orange and cashews, took another nap, and started the hike down. By the time I got back in the main park, it was about 5pm, a had little water left and I was exhausted. I decided to my time in Petra was finished.

One quick story about the Bedouin guide I had. He was one of ten kids and the only one to be educated. His mother, father, and siblings still live with the tribe and are still live in tents. He grew up living in Petra and when the government moved them out his mother refused to live in a house. He said they still move from place to place depending on the season. I asked him how he finds them to visit and he said that he knows the general location that they will be whether it’s spring, summer, fall, or winter. And his father has a cell phone.

The next morning, and my last day in Petra, I got up well before the sunrise because I wanted to make it to the Dead Sea before my flight. The hotel told me to go back to the main highway and drive north until I saw signs for the Dead Sea and then head west. This was the long way and not very scenic but I figured it was the best because I didn’t want to get lost and miss my flight. Well, I somehow missed the turn out of town to get to the main highway but I could tell from the cities I was being directed to, I was on the right path. About an hour into the trip, I hadn’t seen a sign in a while but knew if I kept heading north I’d find my way. I stopped at what looked like a bus stop on the outskirts of a town to ask a guy if I was heading the right way to the Dead Sea (I’d had pretty good luck with getting directions to that point). When I rolled my window down to talk to him, he reached inside the car, unlocked the door, opened it, and hopped in. I guess that meant I had my first Jordanian hitchhiker. He started talking in Arabic and I started talking in English and we both realized neither of us spoke the other’s language. I said Dead Sea a couple time and pointed down the road. He shook his head yes and smiled which I assume meant that was the right was. So I drove down the mountain, which turned out to be a beautiful drive. We didn’t talk much and when we got to the bottom of the mountain the road came to a tee in the middle of nowhere. He pointed to the right, shook my hand, and got out of the car. I have no idea where he was going but he did point me towards the Dead Sea.

The Dead Sea was a trip. Everybody floats because of the salt content, which is around 4 times greater than the ocean. If you wanted to, you could lie back in the water and take a nap. I wanted to see how far I could walk into the water before I floated. I got to about chest high water and then all of a sudden I popped up. And then I lost my balance and fell onto my back. I could have played all day there but didn’t have time. After an hour, I showered up and was on my way. They only bad thing about the water is that because it is so salty, it tastes horrible and burns your eyes much worse than the ocean. If you ever go, I don’t recommend drinking any of it.

My last stop before the airport was Mt. Nebo. It is said that Moses reached Mt. Nebo and shown the promised land by God but told that he would never make it there. This is the final resting place of Moses. There is a small church on the top of Mt. Nebo and a small visitor’s center but not much else. I didn’t have much time there but probably would have only needed to spend another hour to see everything. The views and the mosaic floors of the church were amazing.

I made it back to the airport with time to spare. I was dirty, tired, and broke (after paying the airport tax I didn’t know about, I had 1 Jordanian Dinar left), I was ready to go back to Kuwait and get some rest.

Headline in this week’s paper… Riyadh, Saudi Arabia – MAN SCARED TO DEATH BY MUTAWWA “A Bangladeshi man died of fright after being arrested by Saudi Arabia’s controversial religious police for washing a car instead of praying, a local newspaper reported yesterday. The unnamed man died last week in the holy city of Madinah after being detained by members of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, Al-Jazirah reported. The Arabic daily said the man ‘convulsed in fear after he was arrested, leading to a drop in his blood pressure and causing his death’. The man was arrested by members of the commission, commonly known as the Mutawwa, for washing a car during a time of day when he should have been at prayer, the paper said. The Mutawwa enforce a strict Islamic moral code in the ultraconservative kingdom, and are increasingly being criticized by the public for perceived abuses.” Luckily Kuwait is not this strict but I sure miss the good old USA where you can wash your car any time you want...

Life has been pretty boring since I returned from Iceland. But I had a birthday last week and this year was a pretty unique birthday. It’s not every birthday that you get sung to by 30 Indian engineers. They also gave me a small piece of gold and a lunch of Indian food. Now if I could only get them to work faster, that would be a great present! The picture above is me with about half the people I work with. I should be fluent in Hindi by now.

It truly felt like my birthday today when I received a package of mail from work. Inside was about 10 birthday cards from home. I think Gamla had something to do with it because I have no idea when the last time I got so many birthday cards. I’ll have to live overseas on my birthday more often. Thank you to everyone that took the time to send me a card. It meant a lot to me.

ICELAND!!!

Reykjavik at 2am

American and Eurpoean tectonic plates

Gullfoss Waterfall

Langjokull Glacier

Geysir

Solheimajokull Glacier

Glacier cone

Skogafoss Waterfall

View from Skogafoss Waterfall

Upriver from Skogafoss Waterfall

Behind Seljalandsfoss Waterfall

The Blue Lagoon

Leifur Eiriksson and Halldrimskirkja Church

Reykjavik

Perlan

Iceland – I never imagined that I would have such a great time there. I flew from Kuwait and met up with two friends from Chicago, Charlie and Dom. Easily the best vacation I’ve taken in a long time. And every great vacation must start with being arrested, right? Technically, Charlie and I settled out of court for smuggling but that’s just details. I guess I got a little excited that I would be able to drink for the first time since arriving in Kuwait. So both Charlie and I picked up two bottles of booze and a case of beer at duty free and walked towards the exit. Neither one of us knew but the Icelandic government only allows an individual to bring in one bottle and a 12 pack of beer. We couldn’t carry our suitcases, bottles, and beer together so the bottles went in the suitcases. I guess we were the poster children for smuggling walking by security so they stopped us and asked to scan our bags. Well, they found the bottles of booze that we were “smuggling” and said we would be fined. $80 later and a chat with an Icelandic police officer, we were a bottle short and on our way. (They just let us pay the tax on the beer and be on our way.) I didn’t feel so bad after they stopped a Norwegian couple behind us for having too many bottles of wine.

After that, the trip was fantastic. The first night, July 4th, we went out of a few beers. The bars close at 1:30am on weekdays and as we left the bar, the sun was down but it looked like sunset. I knew this was going to be fun.

Our first tour was the Golden Circle Super Jeep Tour. Our tour group couldn’t have been better. Three girls from DC, the UK, and Australia, respectively, two guys from the UK, and the three Chicagoans. We all ended hanging out the entire weekend and they really made the trip. Our first stop was Þingvellir. It is the location where the Icelandic parliament, Alþingi was founded in 930, which makes it the oldest known functioning parliament in the world. It is also the place where the American and European tectonic plates meet. These plates are moving apart at about 1 inch per year. You can see where the plates are moving apart.

The next stop was the Gullfoss waterfall. We stopped at a rest area type place with a little gift shop/restaurant for what the guide said was a 15 minute stop. There was a trail so we followed it and to our surprise found the waterfall. The guide didn’t tell us about it because we were planning on stopping at it later in the tour. The waterfall was amazing and I could have easily spent a day hiking around exploring different parts of the falls and river but we had to move on to the next stop, snowmobiling on Langjokull Glacier, the second largest glacier in Iceland.

Snowmobiling was the reason to sign up for this tour. I mean snowmobiling in July, how cool. I emailed the tour organizer to check if they provided cold weather gear for this part of the tour. Luckily for the guy from Kuwait, they did. But it wasn’t too cold except when we were snowmobiling. You could see little creeks forming on the glacier from the melting ice. It was awesome. We probably spent about 30 minutes on the glacier. The water was clear blue in some parts. Simply beautiful. The snowmobiling was fun too. I almost dumped the sled a couple times (and Dom) but luckily kept it upright. 30 minutes wasn’t enough.

After the glacier, we stopped by the Gullfoss waterfall again but didn’t spend much time. The last stop of the day was Geysir, the most of the famous geyser in Iceland. It erupts regularly every 5-10 minutes and there was a crowd of people, including me, just standing around the geyser with cameras waiting for it to erupt. The whole area had a pleasant eggy odor and the people that got sprayed by the geyser smelled even better. I didn’t touch the water of Geysir but did feel the water of one of the pools near it. It easily passed the hot test. Here is a video of the eruption (sorry but you’ll have to tilt your head or the monitor).

The next day, part of group went on other tours, but half of us went on walking tour the Solheimajokull Glacier. (On the way to the glacier, we drove past Mt. Hekla. It was once believed to be the entrance to Hell until two hikers went to the top and safely returned.) They call the Solheimajokull a glacier tongue which comes off of the mother glacier, the Myrdalsjokull ice cap, the fourth largest glacier in Iceland. (Follow the Myrdalsjokull ice cap link and you’ve just went on our tour, minus the glacier.) The tour provided crampons for your books and an ice ax and we were on our way up the glacier. The first part of the glacier was steep and we lost a couple members of the tour but the rest of us went on. I thought that this glacier would be similar to the Langjokull Glacier but it was very different. The glacier was dirty. Parts of it looked like ice and snow but parts of it looked like someone had dumped piles of dirt all over the ice. The piles were called glacier cones and we were told they get there because a glacier does not slide over the ground. Instead it is constantly cycling the ice from the bottom of the glacier to the top and vice versa and that is how it brings up the dirt. The cones looked like you could just wipe them away but they were really a dirt blanket over a solid ice peak. There were still little rivers on the glacier and you could fill up your water bottle in the standing pools of water. However, if you were stranded on a glacier, the guide said you couldn’t survive on the water from these pools because the water had no minerals. So whether you’re stranded on a glacier or the middle of the ocean, you still need an alternate water source.

We spent most of the day just hiking around the glacier, trying to avoid falling in a crevice, looking at the rivers and pools on the glacier. But my favorite part of the day was the little bit of ice climbing we did. The guide found a 30 foot hole in the glacier and let us all have a chance to climb down and back up. I’ll definitely do that again!

On the way back from the glacier, we stopped at two more waterfalls, Skogafoss and Seljalandsfoss waterfalls. The hike to the top of the Skogafoss waterfall was rough but the view from the top was worth it. And if you climbed a fence and hiked just a little more, there was another waterfall. Not as high but just as impressive. At the Seljalandsfoss waterfall, there was a trail that made a loop behind the falls. What an amazing country!

The city of Reykjavik reminding me a lot of a college town. The main street is Laugarvegur and was very similar to State St. at UW-Madison. We had read that people stayed home and partied until at least midnight because it’s very expensive to drink at the bars ($15 beers). We went out at 11pm on Saturday and it was almost a ghost town. But two hours later, the bars were packed and everyone was having a good time. By the time we walked home after 5am, the sun was well up in the sky. A lot different from a 5am night in Chicago.

Sunday, we hung out with two Icelandic friends we made, Bergþóra (aka Begga) and Thelma. Besides teaching us the right way to pronounce Reykjavik, they took us to the Blue Lagoon. The water is really an eerie shade of blue. It gets even more blue in the winter because the algae changes color with the temperature. The whole lagoon is created by the run off from the Svartsengi power plant nearby. It pumps geothermally heated water from a mile below the Earth’s surface. It is like a big hot tub, without the bubbles. If you get too close to where the water is dumped into the lagoon you could get burned. You can be sitting there content and all of a sudden a hot jolt of water hits and you have to move to cooler waters. There are other spa amenities at the Blue Lagoon like a sauna, massages, natural mud masks. A good place to spend a lazy Sunday.

Charlie and Dom had early flights on Monday which left me to explore Reykjavik alone before my flight. I checked out the Hallgrimskirkja Church and Perlan. The Halldrimskirkja Church is one of the most famous landmarks in Reykjavik. In front of the church is a statue of Leifur Eiriksson, donated by the US government. We should give out more gifts like this. Entrance to the church is free but you have to pay to go up in the tower. Well worth it as you could see over the entire city from there.

Perlan is a building constructed on top of hot water tanks for the city. Inside is an award winning restaurant and a Viking museum. Outside of Perlan is a manmade geyser that is modeled after the famous Geysir.

Just a short note about the place we stayed. It is called Room with a View which is an apartment building on the main street in Reykjavik. If you’re going to Iceland, I highly recommend staying there. Anyway, when I called to book a room, the guy who owned the place told me I should pay in $US and not a credit card. The reason? The rates on the website were posted in 2005. Since the dollar has gone down so much in the last 2 years, it would be cheaper to pay in dollars than a credit card which would give the current exchange rate. It saved me $100. Pretty much an example of the people I met there.

So you can probably tell by the amount I wrote and the pictures that I had a good time. It was depressing to come back to Kuwait but New Year’s 2008 in Reykjavik is on the table. Anyone up for it?

I had heard about the Kuwaiti souk (market) and I finally made the trip into the city to take a look. The souk that we went to was not the open air market I envisioned but rather a big cluster of stores selling everything you can imagine. Rugs, blankets, toiletries, electronics, food, currency exchange (I saw Iraqi money for the first time), gold, jewelry, and fake watches. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to the souk until about 10am on Friday (the Muslim Sabbath) and a lot of the stores close down around 10:30 or 11 for Friday prayers. About half of the stores were closed by the time we made it around to them. I was told the better time to go is in the afternoon after the prayers are over, but it’s so hot in the afternoon it doesn’t make me want to spend a lot of time shopping. I’m sure I’ll go back.

The bottom picture is of people during Friday prayers (the Muslim Sabbath). I haven’t seen the people lining up on the street like this before and thought it was interesting.

I have left Kuwait to go on another adventure. I am meeting some friends from Chicago in Reykjavik, Iceland for a few days of vacation. We have a tour planned tomorrow that will take us snowmobiling on a glacier and we plan to stop at the Blue Lagoon for some relaxation. Besides that, I just plan to enjoy some place that is vastly different from the desert. I will have some good pictures in my next blog.

Hope you had a great 4th!

I saw my first Kuwaiti sunrise since I arrived in April and was so jetlagged I would wake up at 3am, unable to fall back asleep. The sun comes up around 4:45am so it’s high in the sky before I usually get outside to go to work. A friend had a birthday party last weekend and after a long night of Charades and Truth or Consequences (I wish I was kidding) the sun was almost up when I got home. So I grabbed my camera and the top photo is the one that turned out the best. When I first looked at the photos on my computer, I thought it looked more like a tropical sunset than a Middle East sunrise.

Last week on Monday, I got done eating dinner, stepped outside, looked up at the moon and saw what I thought was a bright star right by the moon and the second picture was what I saw. (In August, the Earth will be closer to Mars than it has been in about 60,000 years.) It looked like the mirror image of the Turkish flag with the star on the wrong side. Speaking of Turkey, did you know that in 1928, a law was passed there to make it illegal to use the letters Q, W, and X?

I can say that I’ve been waterskiing in the Persian Gulf. I was in Abu Dhabi on Saturday and Sunday (I would say the weekend but everyone works here on those days) and the hotel I stayed at offered waterskiing for about $20. The boat looked decent and it had a 135HP outboard motor so I didn’t think it would be a problem. It was pretty windy and there were whitecaps on the water. The driver thought I was crazy for going skiing when it was that choppy but I figured it would be my only chance to waterski this year so I had to take advantage. Unfortunately, 30 seconds into the ride, the motor died. This happened 3 times and finally we gave up. Hopefully I’ll get back to Abu Dhabi when they have their boat fixed. Besides waterskiing, I didn’t have any free time. We did drive by the biggest mosque I’ve ever seen, the Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan Mosque. I haven’t been to the Taj Mahal, but I was with someone who has and they were more impressed with the mosque, even though the Taj was built over 350 years ago.

From the local newspaper…”Pakistani Sorcerer in Police Custody (June 19, 2007) Kuwait: Hawally police arrested a Pakistani expatriate in connection with sorcery in which the man would cast spells for a fee of KD 3000 (US $10,800). Police raided the man’s flat and the ‘sorcerer’ threatened to harm the police by using his magical powers but police still arrested the man (how brave) and he was referred to the authorities. During interrogations, he confessed that he executed over 70 magical spells and mostly Kuwaiti and expatriate women were his customers.” Along those same lines, I heard that an astrologer predicted the cyclone that hit Oman a couple of weeks ago. It’s very rare for cyclones to hit in this area so the police arrested the astrologer but later let him go. The reason…the cyclone didn’t do too much damage. Strange place, the Middle East.

I am looking into places in the area to go on vacation. I am planning a trip to Jordan to see Petra, the setting for the last scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Dubai, and Egypt. If you know of any other good places to visit, shoot me an email.

I am friends with this Italian guy who last week started telling me about a machine he invented to wash dogs. It’s similar to a car wash but on a smaller scale. He sold the drawings and specs to a business man who has since franchised the idea and I guess they are all over Italy and Spain, though I have never seen them. He had a bunch of pictures and it looked like a pretty simple machine. I’ve looked on the internet but couldn’t find anything. This guy was pretty passionate about his invention though. If anybody is looking for an investment opportunity, I can put you in touch with Guillermo.

Fardin, Navid, Adam, Yosef

Well, a full week in Kuwait is hardly as exciting as a single day in Korea. At least that’s what it seems like. My excitement for the week would have been meeting up with my friend, Captain Eric Raasch, a Marine helicopter pilot who was in Kuwait but has since left. I mentioned him in last week’s entry. He was stationed at an airfield about 2 hours northwest of me, living in an air conditioned tent, if the AC was working that day. He couldn’t leave the airfield and I could not get a hold of the right personnel quickly enough to get an access badge. It would have been great to meet up with a friend from home, 5000 miles from home.

Two of my Iranian friends are going back to Iran Thursday. Their one year work contract is up and they have decided not to renew it. So I tried to throw a going away party for them at my apartment. Unfortunately, the female guests showed up after 11pm, which I learned is the cutoff for women to enter the hotel property who are not wives, sisters, or mothers of the registered guests. I had a very heated discussion with a short man in a long white robe about this rule but finally gave in. We moved the party to another apartment but learned similar rules apply there. Every apartment building in Kuwait has a security guard. Besides keeping the building free from criminals, he holds the role of the religious police. He makes sure the residents aren’t bringing in women they aren’t married to, aren’t drinking alcohol, no parties, etc. Kind of like the high school atmosphere I have written about before. Luckily, Fardin, the guy that lives there, pays his security guard the equivalent of $20 a week to “wash his car.” Fardin didn’t go into detail about what would happen if we were caught, he just said it wouldn’t be good for him. But for me, because I’m American, it would be ok. Which is nice but I don’t think I’ll try to find out.

Hope you have a great week.