INDOT should listen up

It appears that the white line on the roads in Libya just means that someone has a job to paint them on the street. It does not mean stay in your lane. Maybe this is the way INDOT could save money and just educate people that they can get three or four cars side by side on a two lane highway. After all they get three cars in a row side by side on the 500 track.

I have also been thinking about setting up a franchise for Church Brothers over here. The amount of damaged sheet metal on nearly every car around here would make me a very wealthy man.

Speaking of wealth......it looks like nearly all of the stores in Benghazi are dollar stores.

I do not know how many things I have bought while here that every item is usually one dinar. My shirts at the laundry were one dinar each to clean and press. My jeans were one dinar. You can actually get two Cokes for one dinar. Libya is pretty much an all cash society. Very few places take credit cards. Maybe that is a good thing in the long run.

I see the elections are over now in the USA.....maybe things will pick up in the architectural design world. Maybe everyone was waiting to see how the elections panned out. Just have to wait and see what happens now........

Neck and neck

I just had to share this with you....this morning I had a few extra minutes to eat my cereal and watch the news a little bit before heading off to work. I was flipping thru the channels and saw a channel called Dubai Racing. I thought, great, maybe they will have some car racing that I can catch up on......no, it was camel racing.

They have an oval track and about 30 camels lined up behind a screen. They have robot jockeys sitting on the back section of the camel. The owner of the camel is sitting in his Mercedes four wheel drive waiting for the start of the race. As soon as the camels take off the owners drive their cars around the track on the outside of the camel track. It is a dirt track. The cars are equipped with radio controlled devices to tell the jockey when to strike the hind quarter of the camel. These camels are flying down the track the owners are swerving their cars around on the other track and the little robot is flipping a little whip up and down on the camel.

It was quite the sight. When a camel wins in a neck and neck race it has a whole new meaning.

Social Butterfly

It has been awhile since I last added a new chapter to my blog. I have been quite the social butterfly this week. I got to meet two of the Intercontinental upper management guys that will be working on our project. One was from the Intercontinental in Tripoli and the other was a regional director from Dubai. They both had some interesting ideas on how to make our Benghazi hotel a deluxe hotel.

Then on Friday I had dinner with one of the fellow ex-pat bloggers that I have been chatting with for the past couple of weeks. Turns out he is an American that is going to medical school in Libya. His father is Libyan and so his medical school tuition is free for children of Libyans. He plans to finish up school here and then go back to the USA to take his medical exams and be a surgeon in the US.

I mentioned that my apartment is so large that I will probably need a maid. Well I hired one on Saturday. She is going to come in once a week and take care of the place.

Turns out she is the maid for my American neighbors across the street. One of the first things she asked me during my interview with her was “Are you a Christian....”. I said YES and she informed me that my American neighbors are also and that they have a Bible study on Sunday evenings.

After she left I got a phone call from Alex my American neighbor inviting me to Bible study on Sunday night. So I just got back from the Bible study and decided to send out this blog to let you know how things went. Had a great time....met some more Americans and my new neighbors are very nice. They have lived in Benghazi for about two years. It will be nice to have some new folks to possibly hang out with. We are scheduled to have another Bible study next Sunday night.

Who would have thought that God would find a Christian maid for me and new Christian neighbor right across the street. HE is an Awesome God.

I will let you know what HE does for me this week..........talk to you soon.

English Tutor

Just to let everyone know.....the sand storm only lasted the one day. There was a fine reddish dust over everything the next day. God cleaned up the mess the best way He knows how....we had a good rain storm today to wash everything off.
I think another reason that I was given this job as assistant project manager for the Benghazi five star hotel was my mastery of the English language....yeah right. All of the documentation for the hotel project is to be in English. So another task that I have to do each day is review all of the daily, weekly and monthly reports, check all of the meeting minutes for our vast array of meetings that we have and review memos that go to the client and the general contractor.
Sometimes the phonetic spelling of my co-workers as they put together their draft copy for my review is quite amusing. For example we wanted to talk about the new concrete curb. They put "kerb". Technically they are right, since that is the British English spelling. They have a little trouble when to use "is" and "was". I noticed today that the taxi cabs have a sign on the top of their car "TAKSI". Today on the menu it had "milk sheik"....
So I guess I should have paid more attention in English class. You never know when other subjects from high school and college will pop up and be necessary (did I spell that right?? N.E.C.E.S.S.A.R.Y)

Oh, Mr. Sandman

Well we had a first for me at the job site today. We had a snow day at the job site.

Not really a snow day, more like a sandstorm day. The wind really started picking up today about 9 or 9:30.....pieces of sheet metal were flying around here and there and the metal fence near the job trailer was banging and clanging. The general contractor told all of the stone masons to stay off of the scaffolding so there would not be any accidents. By 12:30 the very fine sand was still blowing harder and thicker.

We shut the job site down about 1:00. On the drive home you could not see the Mediterranean Sea from the hotel it was that foggy/sandy. It was sort of like the movie, “The Fog” as we were driving past the harbor.

Good thing I had gone to the grocery store yesterday to pick up some butter and bread and some more canned drinks. One of the guys at the office said that October is known for sandstorms and sometimes they can last two or three days. Glad my internet and satellite dish are working in case I get sanded in.

I will let you know how long I am stuck in the apartment.

First Friday

Well today was my first Friday (my only day off) at the new apartment. Got to sleep in until 10 a.m. None of the businesses are open until around 4:00 p.m. because of the Holy Day. So it was a relaxing day until I started hearing the chant of the local mosque. I probably should have checked that out before I rented the apartment. You need to know where the local mosque is in case you are in direct line with the mosque speaker system.

I had a late breakfast and I will inform you that boxed milk is not too bad. One cannot compare it to good old fashioned, ice cold, Marsh 2% the kind you have with a slice of French Silk pie from Perkins......yummmmmm.....but it made my sugar Smacks taste pretty good.

I spent the morning putting a little sketch together of my apartment. I do not have Autocad on my Mac, but my Sketchup software did OK in a pinch. I knew my apartment is large, but when I did a quick calculation of the rough dimensions, we are talking a little over 1600 square feet for one person. I need a maid.......

Speaking of maids, my landlord’s wife is going to look into having someone take care of the place once a week. I think the going rate is about $35 a day for maid service.

Now I just need to find a laundry service close by and I will be all set.

The satellite TV is my next project. I currently get 705 channels. 28 of those are in English, of those 28 we have 10 news channels, 6 Christian channels like 700 Club, one old US movie channels, and 10 QVC channels, one tennis station. Glad I brought some DVDs from home. I am looking into another satellite system for the roof. If I buy Showtime, it is $50 a month, if I get a different satellite dish, it is $150 total cost. I will do some more research on this other satellite deal.

Thanks for checking out my blog and sending comments......enjoy your two day weekend.

The Cable Guy

It is good to have a landlord right downstairs. I got a call around 9:00 p.m. and my landlord wanted to know if it was OK to bring the satellite dish guy to the apartment.

I said “sure, what day would he like to come,” he said “no, he is with me now”. So sure enough my landlord and the cable guy popped in and within about a half hour had me up and running. About 500 channels and about 12 of them are in English. No ESPN or movie channels, I am looking into that this week. While the cable guy was fixing stuff, I asked my landlord where I could get a microwave. “Don’t buy one” he said, “I will give you mine...we never use it”. So sure enough he calls me and tells me to come and get it from his apartment.

So I am all set. TV is almost ready and now I can microwave popcorn when I find some movie channels in English. I watched the Wild Wild West with Will Smith in French. It did not have the same rough tough cowboy feel in French.

I noticed today that having worked a six day work week and only getting Fridays off for the past month, my mind is playing tricks on me. We have meetings every other day with the owner and contractor, and today it felt like I was in the movie “Groundhog Day.” We have the same meetings and the same people at the meetings, it is like I just did this yesterday. Let me know if my blogs are the same as the previous posting. I will try not to do that.