Hoosier Hysteria

Late Thursday, March 3rd, I arrived back in Indiana. You don't know how excited I was to be home safe and sound and with family and friends. I had the opportunity to spend ten days on the island of Malta. I have included some images of Malta in the blog. Many people have not heard of Malta until these past few weeks, but let me tell you.....it is an amazing place. The people are very friendly and the views of the Mediterranean Sea are fantastic. I hope I can go back some day and see more of the architecture and historical sites.
I am going to try and jot down many of my Libyan experiences, but I need to be careful that I do not say something that might affect some of my fellow hotel project colleagues.

Solar flares or government intervention

I am not trying to come up with excuses for not being more forthcoming with my blog updates, but as I mentioned before I was a little busy over the past week. I did not have any TV reception because the last sandstorm that went thru Benghazi which had taken out my TV satellite dish. My internet wifi device was off and on and then finally off when the turmoil started on the 17th of February.
I had to start using my iPhone as a text messenger......even though each text message was going to cost me $.50 for outgoing messages, it was worth it to keep up on the news of the day. I started getting worried about my Libyan cellphone credits too.....the cellphone worked pretty well but the system in Libya only charges you credits on your phone for outgoing calls. I was trying to be frugal with my calling in case of an emergency. Sure enough, it was a good thing I had purchased some credits the week before the ordeal.
I had heard a rumor that some sort of solar flare was causing issues with the internet around the middle of February. That could have been part of the internet issue, but I think it was someone in Tripoli that might have pulled the plug. Anyway, it looks like I have a pretty good connection in Malta, so I will try to do a better job in updating everyone.

What a Week

A number of people have emailed me recently and were wondering why I have not posted any new things to my blog. Well let me tell you, I have been a little busy. I cannot go into too much detail about what my life has been like over the past week or so but I can tell you that it was something that I do not want to repeat again. A number of Libyan people told me that they did not think the unrest would be so dramatic as Cairo and Tunisia. Let me tell you it was dramatic and will leave a memory that I will not forget.
I was surprised that gunfire sounds a lot different in real life than it does on TV. It was a good thing that I had a small suitcase packed up to get out of town before the violence turned nasty.
I got a flight to Tripoli on Saturday the 19th. Arrived in Tripoli and stayed at the RW Armstrong guest house on Saturday night and Sunday things started to get a little dicey with more gunfire. So a number of us got a ride out to the Tripoli airport and flew off to Malta on Monday afternoon.
So I have been hanging out in Malta for the past week. I will try to post some photos of Malta in future blogs. If you have not been to Malta, you need to add it to your bucket list.

Trouble in River City with a Capital T

How do I get myself into these things..........if you have not heard we are having a little turmoil in Libya similar to Egypt and the rest of the Middle East and Northern Africa. So far my neighborhood where my apartment is located and where the job site is located, seem to be away from the hub-bub. But other parts of Benghazi have seen their own fair share of violence and police action. I have been trying to stay low and under the radar. I have a bag packed just in case I need to head to the airport, but so far nothing has gone too far near my location. We shut the job site down a little early today, because of the rallies that were going to happen downtown and the wind was picking up again for a pretty good sized sandstorm.
I will keep you posted on how things go today and tomorrow............thanks for your prayers.

Google Guys are brilliant

I downloaded a new app on my iPhone. It is called Google Translate. You can type in a phrase or say it with your own voice and the app will translate from English to Arabic (it does other languages too). Anyway I typed in "I would like a Margarita pizza with tomato sauce, cheese and olives, thank you". It not only said the phrase back to me in Arabic, it also printed the sentence in Arabic on the screen of the iPhone. My coworkers checked the written part and it was perfect. The spoken part was very close. It messed up the part about the sauce and said cheese sauce instead of tomato sauce. So I think I am able to go out in the World and communicate with my iPhone and my little bit of Rosetta Stone lessons and see what happens.
Now I just need to find out what the name of my street is so that I can tell the cab driver how to get to my apartment. That is something that I noticed around here. The mail is delivered to a post office and not to the houses. Hence no street addresses are used for mail purposes. I have not figured out how the police and fire departments know where they are going. That is something I will work on and get back with you.....

More Reflective Moments

This week has been a time for me to reflect on life again. I hope these moments do not bore anyone. A couple of things came to mind this week. We have been having a great deal of rain and sure enough a leak developed in the roof of the job trailer. Guess where it leaked first....?? My desk was flooded and lots of drawings got wet. Thank goodness my computer missed the downpour. I discovered that my great looking shiny wood desk is actually a Masonite desk with shiny wood grain paper veneer. The rest of the architects in my office have Formica desks and they still look good after the rain water. First observation: looks can be deceiving.
With all of the rain coming down around here, I have seen three rainbows this week. Everyone of them different. Some almost complete arches, another one was actually a double rainbow and today was just a large shaft of colors coming down from a grey cloud. I got my camera out and tried to get a picture of it. My second observation: why can't the technology of Sony be able to capture some simple beautiful colors. God figured it out with just some cells and blood and electric signals to the brain. He is Awesome.
I will try to jot down other ideas that pop into my head and share them with you another day.

Looks GREEK to me

Sorry for the delays in blogging again. The weather has been bad (rainy). I should not complain about the weather after hearing about the weather in Indianapolis. So I will talk about my recent trip to Cyrene. About three hours East of Benghazi we have an area called the Green Mountains. After you see some of the pictures displayed below, you will understand why they are called that. The land is lush green and the mountains even though pretty rocky have green short trees on them. One photo of a valley that we visited, has some caves in it. They reminded me of the cave dwellers of Arizona. Cyrene was our next stop. A large Greek city near the Mediterranean Sea built around 600 B.C. On this site is now a little town called Shahhat. There is another town between Shahhat and the Sea called Sousa. This is where you will find Cleopatra’s Bath. A large stone building was built within a shallow lagoon and the Sea water would provide water for the Bath area. The Romans later took over Cyrene. In the Bible, Simon of Cyrene was mentioned as the man who helped Jesus carry His cross. In 365 A.D., there was a large earthquake that destroyed most of the city. Even so, the structures that are still standing are amazing. I hope you enjoy the photos below.

Off work early

Got a chance to start my weekend early on Thursday. We had to shut the job site down a little early because of another sandstorm. It rained all morning and then the sandstorm came up in the afternoon. I have posted some photos of the sandstorm that I took from the car ride home. I understand that this type of storm is considered to be just a plain old sandstorm. When we get a ghibli then it will be a sandstorm in conjunction with extreme hot air coming from the desert. Can’t wait to experience that new event……

Had dinner on Thursday with my new found English teacher friends. Instead of going to the Pisa Restaurant, we met at the villa where most of the teachers live. Met a few new people at dinner, one person from South Africa, another one from the UK and a German guy and his wife is from Chile. So my Libyan experience is becoming quite international. It is great to meet new people and now I am expanding my network to include all sorts of countries.

Got to sleep in on my day off and since the internet was down due to the sandstorm I thought I would fire up the Wii and improve on my scores. I thought I would rearrange some of the power plugs and not have the back of the TV so messy with wires. Had everything ready to go and blew a circuit breaker. Got that back on and then discovered that my Wii box might have tripped the breaker. Now the Wii does not seem to want to work. I guess I will have to do some more investigating and see if I fried something on the Wii. Keep your fingers crossed that it is nothing major.

Computers and food

You have probably noticed that a number of my blogs have to deal with food and lately I described my new laptop that I just received at work. Well now I might be writing more about food and computers in the same blog. I have discovered that I have a computer store located in the same building as the Pisa Restaurant and it is very close to my Cheese Cake Factory wanna-be store. Who would have thought that computer chips and chocolate chip desserts could be in the same building?? Looks like I will be going to the Pisa Restaurant a little more often than before.
I needed to get a mouse for my new laptop, so I decided to look into getting a wireless mouse. Sure enough, my computer store had quite an assortment of mice to choose from. So as I am purchasing the item the manager handed me a store calendar and a peel and stick protective cover for my laptop. I do not think that I ever got a calendar and other free stuff from Best Buys or Fry Electronics. I will have to look into my monthly budget and plan on getting some more computer items, just to make sure these guys do not go out of business. After all I need to help support the local economy.

Cheesecake Factory

I think I mentioned in a previous blog how I discovered that people are the same world wide. Well tonight was no exception. Friday starts the weekend for folks around here. So what do people do on the night before their big weekend…..they drink…..well, that does not happen in Libya, but they do go out to eat and hang out with their friends. So most of the restaurants are very busy after 7:00 p.m.

My local hangout is no exception. The guys were all hanging out in the lower section of the Pisa Restaurant, eating and having a good time watching…..guess what…..WWE RAW.

Guys of all ages had their eyes glued to the TV while three guys are wrestling in a cage match. Nothing goes better with a chicken shish-kabob than three sweaty overweight wrestlers trying to tear the other one’s head off and climb out of a cage.

The evening was complete when after leaving the restaurant, I discovered that I now have my very own Cheesecake Factory right next to my Pisa Restaurant. Just had to check it out on the way home and discovered they also sells éclairs. I am set for another week.  To top the night off, there was a full moon. Wonder what I will discover tomorrow on my day off??

Geek Squad where are you

Some people have told me this, but I did not want to believe them......I AM A GEEK. It is hard to admit it, but when you get so excited about getting a new laptop computer that you rush back to the house, throw open the door, throw your stuff on the floor just so you can plug in a new computer, I will admit that I am hooked. The drug of RAM, the smell of Gigabytes....there is only so much a person can take. I will try to calm down. The kind folks of RW Armstrong sent me a new Dell laptop with 500 Gb of disk storage and Windows 7 on a 64 bit machine......did you hear that.....a 64 bit machine. My life is nearly complete....I have a great Mac laptop and now a pretty nice PC laptop. Only thing left to finish out my collection is an iPad2. Maybe if I get a few more checks from Apple for my wallpaper app, I might be able to get the iPad after the new ones come out.
This week has been a good one. My new boss is getting settled into the ho-hum life of Benghazi. He is a good guy and I think he will do a great job on the hotel project. We had a great deal of rain this past week. The waves on the sea this week were pretty impressive the way they were crashing on the rocky coastline.

More expats in Benghazi

Sorry for not posting things to the blog lately. I had to bring some work home this week and read up on some reports that the contractor finally delivered to our office.
Life is full of changes and life in Libya is not much different. Turns out that my boss has accepted a new job and will be leaving RW Armstrong later this month. My new Project Manager boss will be coming into town on Sunday of this week so that he can transition into the way things seem to go around here. All I know right now is that he is a Syrian/American citizen. He speaks English, Arabic and French. So he will be able to communicate with just about everyone on the jobsite. He bleeds Black/Gold....not sure what years he went to Purdue.
I am looking forward to meeting him and hopefully we can keep the hotel project on schedule.
Last night I had the opportunity to meet up with a number of British expats that live in Benghazi. I had signed up for an Benghazi expat website and sure enough a guy emailed me and said that his little group of six English teachers go to the Pisa Restaurant every so often and would I like to join them. I said "Sure, that will be great....". Well it turned out that besides the six English teachers, the group included his three adorable children (one boy and two girls and they reminded me of my grandkids), it also included two guys from an engineering company that is doing work in Benghazi. It turns out that they are from a Spanish company and they actually were sub-contractors for my American neighbor that got moved back to Hawaii. Super small world.
So all in all there were twelve of us sitting around the table all speaking English....true some of it was British English, but still it was music to my ears.

Tipping not required

It is interesting how God has things planned out. I found out this week that my American neighbors across the street are moving back to the USA. Alex was laid off from his engineering company. So the family packed up and is moving back to their home in Hawaii. I met them for dinner a few nights ago, sort of a Bon Voyage dinner. They had been in Benghazi for a little more than two years.

So the next thing you know, I get an email from an Ex-Pat that saw my name on an Ex-Pat website that I found about Ex-Pats in Libya. This guy said that he is an English teacher at the British school in Benghazi. He said that a group of the teachers get together every Thursday night at a little restaurant in Benghazi called, you guessed it "Pisa Restaurant".....hmmmm......I know that one. So this week I am going to try and meet up with this gang of teachers and see what happens.

Speaking of restaurants, I have taken my other frequent food diner one notch down on my list. The place where I can get a $3 burger/fries and coke is not doing well in customer service. Tipping in Libya is not necessary and these guys at the diner are not getting any more of my hard earned money unless they shape up. I thought I would try something new instead of a burger and fries and a coke, I went with a chicken tawook which is like a Penn Station chicken and cheese sandwich. So I got the sandwich/fries and Coke. I did not want to vary my diet too much. Anyway, I got the sandwich, the fries and then my waiter had a Coke in his hand and the next thing I know he sits down to watch a soccer game and starts drinking my Coke. The tip meter dropped dramatically. So I had to get up and get my own Coke. Just not the way to make friends with me. So it looks like I will be going to the Pisa Restaurant a little more often. You do not want to keep me from my Coke if you know what is good for you.

Can't get away

Friday....my only day off from the work week. Usually I enjoy sleeping in until 9 or 10 a.m. Not this morning. Since we have had so much rain lately the residential contractors that are working on a house across the street have had their project put on hold due to the weather. So the first morning that they could get back on schedule was "you guessed it" this morning at 7:30 a.m. Just my luck they are building wood forms to pour some concrete. So besides the pounding of nails into the wood forms they then fired up the cement mixer and proceeded to lift the concrete up to the second floor of the project. It appears that the product WD40 does not exist in Libya. That had to be the squeakiest winch ever made. But then again, most of the tools and equipment around here are not that old, it is just that the weather and salt air plays havoc on anything metal.
Talk about problems with metal........we are having trouble figuring out what to do with a number of metal gates that we have planned for the hotel. Being so close to the Sea, the salt air will be very hard on whatever we choose. So the process of finding the right material and testing it to make sure it will work is a whole other process.
We got a special treat yesterday afternoon. To start out the New Year as a team building effort, we had a special luncheon for the whole office. About 20 of us met at this familiar restaurant down the street from my apartment the Pisa Restaurant. They have a very nice banquet room upstairs. We had a full Italian meal from soup to salad to pasta to main dish to dessert. Everyone was stuffed. I came home and took a long nap. I might not have to cook for a couple of days after all of that.

Wonders of Nature

Maybe I go on and on too much about the various sights around Libya, but the thing that has impressed me this week is the fact that we have had two beautiful rainbows in the past three days. Today's rainbow was actually a double rainbow near the seaside. The water of the Mediterranean was a dark blue and the white clouds in the distance were fluffy and a bright white. I will need to keep my camera close at hand for more scenes like that one.
When I am not talking about the natural beauty of Libya, I am usually talking about food. Well I have discovered a resource for bread. The various types of bread around here are very good. The restaurant that I tend to go to the most often has this terrific pita bread that comes with each meal. Last night I asked them if I could take four small loaves to go. They said what else, "No Problem". They put together a bag of four loaves and said "No Charge". So now I have a bread resource that will not kill my wallet. I will just have to watch how often I ask for the to go package, or they might get wise.

Back to Work

Monday morning came early for me today.....after traveling for nearly 24 hours on multiple plane rides, I made it back to Benghazi. This morning I woke up to rain hitting my window and the streets were nearly flooded. As I stepped out on my front door steps, the rain stopped and a rainbow appeared in the West.
I have added the picture of the rainbow to my photo collection below. Not a bad picture from my iPhone. So I thought, today is going to be a great day..........well it was not too bad. My morning meeting was short, the rain came back and flooded the parking lot at the job site. We now know where the low spots are on the site. Most of them are in places that should be the high points, so I guess we will have to push a little dirt around and get things fixed.
I brought back with me some snacks and candies to share with the gang at the office. A bag of Oreo Double Stuffs was a big hit along with a box of Abbott's Caramels. I think both items were cleaned out within minutes of me putting them in the common area. Good to know that my fellow co-workers have a sweet tooth like me.

Home in Indiana

Well the past eight days in Indy for Christmas went by so quickly that I cannot believe that it is 2011 already. True I was up for 48 hours traveling from on Dec. 22nd and 23rd from Benghazi to Tripoli to Rome to Chicago and finally to Indy. The good news is that I have another 12000 miles to add to my frequent flyer program. The bad news is, I do not know when I will be able to cash some of them in. I seem to get stuck flying different airlines all over the place.
Time home with the family was fantastic. Got to spend some time with family and friends. Charley and Jenny brought the grandbabies home for a few days from California. I had some good quality time with the whole gang. Got to spend a lot of time with Nicki and Brian too. I did not feel like I should make Carol cook at home, so we ate out a lot so that I can put some weight back on. I figured out that I have lost nearly 20 pounds in the three months that I have been in Libya. I think I put about 5 of that back on after going to Skyline Chili, Cracker Barrel and Outback Steakhouse. I needed to get my daily alottment of pork into my system before heading back to Benghazi. It is amazing what a wonderful animal the pig is. You can have pork nearly every meal and it comes in different forms (breaded tenderloins, pulled pork, bacon, spiral sliced ham and pork loin.) I was able to double up at Sahm's with a healthy chef salad that happened to have sliced ham and bacon. That hit the spot when you add in the cinnamon coffee cake on the side.