Saturday, August 06, 2005

Back in the 'S-t-a-n

I arrived last night, safe and sound, after a longish day of traveling, and now I’m trying to figure out if there’s actually anything substantive I can do in the few days I have here. Besides do work for the Vietnam project, that is. The first thing I’m going to do is the legal framework for our resettlement plan in Vietnam, because that has to be done soon. But in terms of what to do for this project, my local counterpart hasn’t returned a single e-mail of mine, so since she’s been so incommunicado, I don’t quite know what to do. Plus, I’m back on a project where I’m “unofficial”, so basically I can’t do anything here without some guidance. But that’s okay, I’ll figure something out.

Mostly, I feel like I’m here to pack up my stuff and say goodbye. Which is actually okay, to be honest. I’ve got a lot of personal errands to run today, like taking pictures of the hospital my dad built, going to the supermarket so I have food for the next few days (sadly, mango season is over), going to the tailor to see if they can copy my favorite pair of pants in the next three days with the fabric I bought in Vietnam (kind of low on the priority list, but I still want to try), and assorted stuff like that, so it feels like it could be a long afternoon. But I’m going out to dinner with Lois tonight, which will be fun.

My journey here from Vietnam was fairly uneventful, I checked out of the hotel and made it to the airport in plenty of time. The plane from Ho Chi Minh City to Bangkok was really full, owing to the presence of, not one, not two, but three tour groups on my flight. This was obvious for several reasons. First of all, they were all wearing matching shirts and baseball caps. Second of all, the all moved as one solid mass of people. And third of all, they all moved as one solid mass, following a very loud guy carrying a flag that matched the shirts and baseball caps. I also saw a few other tour groups over the course of my five hour layover in Bangkok International Airport. It’s actually quite a nice airport, but the only place where I could obtain reading material was in the duty free shops. It was a new experience, having to show someone my passport and sign three different forms just to buy some chick magazines and a Kinder Bueno. (Mmm…Kinder Bueno…) But for long layovers, you can get dayrooms in the airport (presumably it’s like a hotel room where you can chill out in something other than a plastic chair), you can get a massage or go to a beauty salon, all kinds of stuff. And as a tip, I really like both Thai Airlines and Cathay Pacific – the food is good (Thai serves…well, Thai food. Although, to quote Friends, they probably just call it “food”), there’s a decent amount of leg room, and the service is really good. I’ve actually had decent luck with airlines on this trip in general, which has been nice, because I’ve been on some long hauls.

So, uh…I pulled a muscle right near my shoulder blade (deltoid? Trapezius? I’m not sure.) trying to heft my carry-on into the overhead bin on my first flight, because it was just that heavy To be honest, since it still really hurts, I don’t find it to be all that amusing at the moment, but I will soon enough. A preliminary attempt to start packing up last night and this morning indicates that I might actually be able to get everything back with me – although I need to buy another luggage lock, since I have an extra bag. So that was a very unexpected surprise! I’m still chucking stuff I don’t want to bring back, but it’s mostly clothes that I brought with me that I should have chucked a long time ago anyway. In essence, I’m just starting to clean out my closets a little early, that’s all.

I’ve noticed something – it’s really easy for me to tell when Hamid has absolutely no clue what I’m saying to him. I’ll ask him a question, and he’ll just quietly say “ohh…”, and fade off into silence. It’s the only time that he speaks where I can’t hear the exclamation mark at the end of his sentences. I still don’t think he’s quite clear on the fact that I’ve been in Vietnam for the last six weeks, but that’s okay, I guess he doesn’t have to be.

So now I’m sitting here in my salwar kameez, distracted in much the same way I was on my last day in Vietnam, thankful that today is only a half day in the office. I’m really excited to think that I’ll be home in 11 days, and I’m also really excited that I’ll be in LONDON in only four days! These things are not helping me to concentrate. The lack of any kind of guidance as to what I should do here in these couple days is also a contributing factor. The only thing my colleague (who isn’t here at the moment) told me to do was something that I’d done a couple of months ago and sent to her for feedback. Well, I never got any feedback from her, and now I know why, I suppose. Hard to give feedback on something you haven’t read. Grr…

Okay, Darth has officially irritated the crap out of me. I just got an e-mail he sent to my boss, among others, talking about a workshop we’re trying to set up in Vietnam. Mind you, he was gone for the last day I was there, and was generally in his own little world, so he didn’t have a really clear idea of what I was doing, despite me telling him many times. But he wrote that, now that the senior experts are there, things were starting to progress. Never mind the fact that D and I, junior though we are, were working really hard with no available data for the last few weeks, that we both actually managed to get a lot done, and that the old PM was essentially no help in doing anything technical because he knew he was leaving. Darth may not have even thought about how it sounded, but to downplay what D and I were doing and any progress we made on our own feels like such a slap in the face. Why, oh why, do people suck so much? But there’s no way for me to say anything about it over e-mail without sounding petulant. I suppose I’ll just have to talk to my boss when we’re both back at the same time. (End of the month, maybe?)

I have determined the benchmark for when it’s time for me to look into a career change. I was talking to one of my colleagues in Vietnam and said something about seeing other parts of the country or exploring the city or something like that, and hoping that I could make more time for it if I came back. He indicated that he wasn’t very interested in those things and said “well, after a while, you just want to go there, get the job done, and go home.” Now, one of the biggest perks of this job is getting the see the world as part of your work. There are things about the travel, like the logistics of it, like being away from home for long periods of time, that are really hard – but it’s still a totally amazing opportunity. So, if you no longer appreciate the opportunity for which you’re making all these sacrifices, doesn’t something seem wrong with that picture? Maybe it’s just me.


Thursday, August 04, 2005

Umm...

I just finished packing. Mostly.

I really should have brought a bigger bag.

It's fortunate that I was willing to part with some of the clothes I brought with me originally.

It's the Final Countdown

We had two people arrive, one is an economist from my office who is French, and the other is an Indian economist from our Delhi office. It’s been fun, actually, because it’s only natural for him and D to speak to each other in French, and since I’ve been spending the morning with the two of them, it has provided ample opportunities for me to practice my language skills. I’m actually kind of happy with how much I’ve been able to follow. My spoken French is still lacking, mostly for things like vocabulary and verb conjugation, mais j’espere que, si j’avias les occasions pour pratiquer, je souvien beaucoups des mots! Plus, I have always wanted to be fluent in more than one language, and since I have so much French under my belt, I think it’s a good place for me to start. N’est-ce pas?

I went running last night, and after watching some TV with D (it’s so sad, but we’re both hooked on that “Rockstar: INXS” show, *cringe, cringe*), I went for a swim, which was great – very much a fan of the swimming at night thing. I woke up with a start at 6 am today, when, in the middle of some random dream, the phrase “I’m leaving tomorrow!” popped into my head. All of a sudden, my head was just abuzz with everything. My attempts to go back to sleep were fruitless, so I gave up after about 30 minutes. I’ve got a list of things I have to do before I leave today, and I have a feeling that it will fly by. P, the French economist, and I are probably going to grab some dinner tonight, but since he got in at 4 am, it’s not likely to be a late evening, which gives me plenty of time to pack. Ever since the countdown started in my head, things have been moving faster and faster, it seems.

I e-mailed Lois to tell her when I’d be back in Karachi, and she promptly made dinner reservations for the following evening, and we’re going to a cricket game on Sunday, after some leisurely time spent lounging by the pool – I can’t wait! I have to say, were I to go back to Pakistan, the one really good thing would be getting to hang out with people like Lois and Faruq and Samina, they’re so much fun to spend time with. I’m also going to make some time to see Faruq and Samina, while I’m there. So hurrah for that! But since I haven’t been putting in my time by the pool nearly so much since I’ve been here, my tan has faded considerably, and I might, once again, be “practically blue.” (Although I prefer the description “clear” to “blue”.) Well, it’s not exactly something about which I’m going to get overly concerned. I’m sure that I’ve done enough sun damage to my skin over the last 29 years, no need to heap more on.

I never watched “Starsky and Hutch” when I was a kid – in fact, I don’t even know when it was on, so I can’t tell if I never watched it because we were in another country, or because I was too young. Or not born yet, which would, I suppose, constitute being way too young. In any event, because I never watched it, I know nothing about the characters, except possibly their names. I know that there was a character called Huggy Bear – yes? Well, from what I understand, he was always coming up with clever ideas. The reason I can conclude this is because D’s friends apparently call her this sometimes. But what is funny is when she’ll have a good thought and I’ll say something to that effect, she says “You see? ‘Uggy Bear!” and then says something in French. Never fails to make me laugh.

Today is a weird day – in some ways I’m super focused on the things I need to get done. And in other ways, I am totally in my own little world, with my brain in about 44 different places. Part of it is daydreaming, part of it is worrying about this project, part of it is hoping that all of my travels are as uneventful as possible, and part of it is looking out at the lovely view I have from my window.

I did, however, manage to check off everything on my “to do” list for today. I’m quite impressed with that, to be honest. Hurrah!

I went for a swim tonight, and now it’s time to pack everything up. I’m trying to figure out how to fit everything in my bags…wish me luck!!!

Wednesday, August 03, 2005

Two Days???

Tuesday, August 02, 2005

Oh Sure, *Now* It Picks Up

Now that I have three days left here, things are really getting busy, and I feel like I’ve got more stuff to do than time in which to do it. I have a feeling that my office time in Karachi will be spent working on this project, because I still have no idea what, if anything, I’ll be doing there, and I’ve got plenty to keep me busy here.

The new PM (whose name bears a striking resemblance to Darth Vader, so I’ll just call him Darth) is…well, he’s very nice, but he’s also kind of a human Quaalude. We were having a team meeting yesterday and he kept telling me and the resettlement expert what we needed to include in our section for the inception report. Well, I had written my section, including all of those things, two or three weeks ago. I also gave him what I had written when he arrived last Monday. He said he read it, but couldn’t possibly have really read it, or he would have known that a) I’ve been busting my rear end on this and b) what he wanted to include in this report had already been included. It got really frustrating, to be honest. I also had to explain to him at least three times that I’d been waiting for a week and a half for a translated letter and hadn’t gotten it. I’m sure Darth is very good at his job, and like I said, he’s a very nice guy, but man does he do things differently than I do.

A bunch of us went out to dinner last night and the Senior VP kept making digs at D and I for not wanting to decide on the spot to move to halfway around the world for a job we weren’t interested in. If nothing else, my experience with him yesterday has me not wanting to work directly for him ever. He just has a really different philosophy than I do, and fortunately for me, my boss doesn’t really share it. But the continuing guilt trip was getting irritating. The Sultan joined us for dinner and drinks, and then took us out to another watering hole – one that D had seen in a guidebook called Lost in Saigon. What the guidebook didn’t tell her was that it was a gay bar. I honestly wouldn’t have known, because there weren’t many people there to begin with, and the ones that were there were a mix of male-female couples, groups of people just hanging out – I actually don’t think I noticed any gay couples, come to think of it. Nonetheless, it was kind of funny. The Sultan once again gave us a lift home, which was very nice of him. We’re all getting together for dinner tonight because one of the Senior VPs from DC, who I know very well, is in town. This could mean that the Sultan will miss dart night tonight, and that I, by extension, will miss dart night.

*sigh*

Well, I’ll just have to come back, then. It’s been ages since I’ve played darts, I have a feeling that my game is going to be a little rusty. Ho Chi Minh City, or Saigon, or HCMC, or whatever you want to call it, really is a fun place, I wouldn’t mind spending more time here. I have a feeling that I’ll have that opportunity, about which I’m really kind of pleased. But I also have a feeling that I won’t know about whether or not I’ll be back here until shortly before I have to leave. Well, at least I’ll know what I’m getting into next time!

Next time I’m about to leave to go abroad, I’d appreciate it if you all could do me a big favor, and clearly repeat the following sentence to me: DO NOT BUY PAINTINGS OR ANYTHING THAT DOESN’T FIT IN YOUR LUGGAGE. D and I just had a 90 minute odyssey trying to ship two paintings I bought – one large-ish, and one on the small side. At first, I was just going to go to the post office, but then I wondered if they would really be reliable. Maybe, I thought, I should see if I can go to UPS or something. Well, we found the UPS place, not far from the office, and she informed me that it would cost $240 to ship. And they didn’t take credit cards. And that price was ridiculous. (Well, she didn’t inform me of that part, I concluded that independently.) So I decided to try the post office. The reason I was doing this at all is because they’re canvases that are already stretched and framed, and the framing here cost a teeny, tiny fraction of what it would cost in the US. So, even if I’d forked out $240 for shipping, which I wasn’t going to do, it still would have been cheaper than getting the canvases and having them stretched and framed at home. That would have easily been close to $1000. I got to the post office, and they said that it would cost a little over $100 to ship them by air – at which point I said that was fine. It was more than I’d spent on the paintings, including the frames, but it was fine. Grr… But the lovely people at the post office then proceeded to custom-make a box for me that fit both paintings, cut Styrofoam packing to fit the box and make sure they’d be protected, and taped that puppy up within an inch of its life. Looking at the enormity of the box that I was shipping, I started to think that, perhaps, $113 to ship it from Saigon to Washington, DC wasn’t so unreasonable after all. (But $240 was definitely still ridiculous.) The more time I spent at the post office, the more my confidence grew, so I’m hoping that, in a few weeks, they’ll arrive at my parents’ house, safe and sound. (It’s Air Mail, but it’s still coming from Vietnam, so I’m not expecting it any time really soon. Packages to Pakistan from the US took a few weeks, after all.) But after all that, I bought D lunch, as a thank you for her patience!

So, lesson learned. I am never doing that again. The smaller painting is a really beautiful original painting by a young painter who works in the art gallery downstairs, the larger one is a copy of something (I’m pretty sure that it’s not famous) by the same guy, but he did a really beautiful job with it. And although I am incredibly grateful that they are now out of my hands, and I’m sure I’ll be glad to have them home, I really don’t want to have to deal with that again! Although, the post office here actually did make it relatively painless, it just took a while.

At the moment, as a bunch of people from the office are off on a trip out to the field, and D and I are working away (even though I’m taking a writing break), Darth is calmly sitting at his desk, leafing through a magazine. He’s supposed to give a presentation in Hanoi the day after tomorrow about the project, which is about a month behind. He knows that there are things that are just plain ol’ not done. And…he’s calmly reading a magazine about highways or something. This is one of the other ways in which he and I do things differently, I suppose. I can procrastinate with the best of them, just ask anyone who lived with me in college – it was always obvious when I had a big test or paper coming up, because my room would be spotless, as cleaning was one of my prime procrastination tools. HOWEVER, I always reached that “fish or cut bait” point, where stuff just had to get done, so it did. Maybe Darth has a different FOCB threshold than I do, I don’t know. But it’s definitely crunch time, so you’d think he’d want to focus on things that were, oh, I don’t know, useful. I know – maybe I’m being unfair. Maybe it’s a really good article.

Darth just made dinner reservations for the group tonight. He said that we’re going to a Vietnamese place, where you can get snake, dog, and everything else you could ever want. Can’t tell ya how excited I am about that. I’m hoping that, included on the list of everything else I could ever want are vegetables. I actually quite like Vietnamese veggie food, and I’m sure that there will be plenty of it. Here’s hoping!

I’ll be home two weeks from tomorrow, which means I’ll be in London one week from tomorrow. It’s going to be so very nice, I can’t wait! After being away so long, I can’t believe that my return home is finally almost here!!

Monday, August 01, 2005

Another Momentary Panic...

I woke up this morning, and went to retrieve my passport and plane tickets from the safe in my room, since I had a feeling that our travel service from home hadn’t changed my return flights to Karachi from today to Friday, as I had requested. I keyed in my little code, the green light went on, and then…the handle wouldn’t turn. I tried it again, thinking maybe I had tried to turn the handle too soon, or not soon enough, and nothing. So I called down to the front desk and said that my safe was stuck, and I needed someone to come and help me open it. “No problem, Miss. I send someone right away!”

A few minutes later, a guy showed up with a handful of batteries, and apparently no English skills, since my attempt at a polite “good morning” was greeted with silence. He plopped down in front of the safe, jimmied off a little panel in the front, and pulled out the four AA batteries in the safe, and put new ones in their place. Then got up, said “fixed”, and went to leave. I asked him to stay to make sure that I could get the safe open, and he looked a little exasperated, but stayed in the doorway nonetheless. The safe then popped open, and my passport and tickets were staring back at me from the inside. The maintenance guy departed silently, and I continued about my morning routine.

We arrived at the office, and after getting settled and speaking with the new resettlement person, I went over to the Thai Airlines office to make sure that my ticket had been changed. My ticket, it turns out, had not been changed, so I’m glad I went in to check. They confirmed a seat for me on Friday, and I then trotted over to the Cathay Pacific office to make sure that they could do the same. After having secured a seat on both flights for Friday, I made my way back to the office, after almost 90 minutes of running around, taking care of something the travel office could have taken care of in about 15 minutes or less, if they’d done it when I asked them to, five days ago. Ah well – no harm done; it was nice to get some air, and it makes the morning go by faster. Now it’s back to more data entry and analysis, and legal research. In light of my whole “not sleeping well for the past few weeks” thing, staying alert today could prove to be a little rough. It’s only 10:30 right now, and it’s not looking good…if only I could tolerate caffeine.

I’m going through more numbers in the government’s statistical yearbook, and they’re still off, which is frustrating. Again, I’m just using my own numbers so that someone looking at my charts and spreadsheets won’t question whether or not I’m new to the wonderful world of addition.

I just had an interesting conversation with the Senior VP for Asia – out of nowhere, he asked me if I would be willing to relocate to Delhi, Bangkok, or Hanoi, and actually expected an answer on the spot. I told him that I didn’t think so, but I’d have to think about it, then asked him what the work would be. After some hemming and hawing, it turns out that the position he has in mind is essentially someone to crank out proposals and occasionally fill in on project work. D was also part of this conversation and said that there was no way she’d do it. He then was saying something about how Asian people respond better to these kinds of requests because they don’t have the same “baggage” that Americans and Europeans of our age tend to have, they feel it’s their duty to do what their employer says. By “baggage”, he clearly meant “desire to have a life”, because that was the primary reason cited by both D and me as to why we wouldn’t want to do it – I have a life in DC that I like very much, and she has a life in Paris. And I don’t know that it’s necessarily an accurate way to characterize Asian people as well – but clearly he was using a broad brush. I wouldn’t rule out relocating one day, and maybe one day not all that far in the future, but it’s not time for me to leave yet. I feel like I’ve finally started to put down some of my own roots somewhere, and it’s a nice feeling. Now, if this had been some great career opportunity, that would be one thing, and I might seriously feel like I had a dilemma on my hands. However, for me to leave my life behind, even if it was only for a few years, for a position that my current boss wouldn’t hire me for because I was overqualified, would just be dumb. (When I first interviewed with the company, it was for the position of proposal coordinator, and in the interview, my boss basically said that I was way overqualified. He did, however, hang onto my resume and call me a few months later for the job I have now.) I’ll have plenty of opportunities to travel and see places like Delhi, Bangkok, and Hanoi, but to go for something that would be a step down, professionally speaking, just wouldn’t make sense. And it was funny to hear it dressed up as a great opportunity, and then to have my reluctance to say that I would do it as a snap decision be chalked up to a culturally-ingrained character flaw.

He also said not to mention to my boss that he’d asked me. Well, *no kidding*. I don’t want to get anywhere near that hornet’s nest. If they’ve got issues with each other, they can sort those out without me.

Well, it’s nearing 7 pm and we’re all still glued to our desks, having arrived at 8 am. My eyes are going to give out soon, so I think I’ll have to bail, regardless of whether or not anyone else is with me. It would be nice to have some company, but it’s hardly essential. I don’t want to go grocery shopping for only three more days worth of food, so the pantry at the temporary Casa del Mandy is looking a little bare and scary. But I’ve made it a lot farther through that 5 kg bag of rice I bought than I initially thought I would. (It was the smallest size I could find in the mini-mart.)

Sunday, July 31, 2005

I Stand Corrected

After working until about 7 pm yesterday, we met up with another guy who works for my company on another project, and who has been here for six years. He’s a very nice guy, born in Pakistan, raised in the UK. I’d actually heard about him from one of my co-workers in DC, who calls him “The Sultan”. The Sultan is one of the founding members of the Saigon dart league, and is familiar with just about every watering hole in the city. We started out at a place called Ice Blue, where he’s good friends with the owner, Mr. Dung (pronounced “Young”), who is another founding member of the dart league, as well as a sponsor – I’m popping in on Tuesday, dart night, to hang out. We were treated to our choice of “welcome drink”, D and I selected a B-52 (Kaluha, Bailey’s, and vodka), which they set on fire, and we had to drink with a straw before the straw melted or caught on fire. After successfully sucking the shots down, with D’s straw catching fire and needing to be replaced, Mr. Dung cheerfully announced that we were no longer “fresh meat”.

Just what I had always been wanting to hear.

Mr. Dung is also quite the artist, and has caricatures that he’s drawn of various patrons on the wall, although the Sultan’s image isn’t among them. I noticed that there were no women represented, and he said he didn’t want to do a drawing of a woman in case she got offended and never came back. They had an Australia-South Africa football match on the TV, which had a very enthusiastic audience. After a few drinks at Ice Blue, we headed over to a place called Sheridan’s, which is an authentic Irish pub in the middle of Saigon – not far from my office, in fact. The Sultan also knew the owner, an Irishman who was performing with his band when we walked in. They have live music every night, and it was a little unexpected to see a group of Vietnamese musicians performing Irish music, but they were doing an excellent job. There was one singer who had an amazing, lovely, and pure voice, despite the fact that her gender wasn’t obvious to the group. I said she was a woman, but there was a contingent who thought she was a man with a very feminine voice – we finally asked one of the bartenders who had to ask a different bartender before confirming that I was, in fact, correct-o-mundo, and that she was a she. And as I said – lovely voice. There was an interesting mix of people, folks of every description, Vietnamese and expats. The guy playing the bodhran (Irish drum – the name of which I’ve probably misspelled), was from Brittany, a part of France, and he got up to sing a song from his homeland. As the bar owner passed by our group, he stopped to talk to the Sultan, and mentioned that he’d never heard a cheerful Bretagne song, as the drummer sang his lovely, but decidedly downbeat, song. Apparently in Brittany (or Bretagne, if you’re French), they speak more of a dialect, so D and I couldn’t make out the majority of the words to his song. The fact that I couldn’t doesn’t necessarily mean anything, but when D couldn’t, that was more indicative.

After a few drinks at Sheridan’s, the group decided to move on. I was somewhat reluctant, as the clientele at Sheridan’s were proving interesting, but the group wanted to carry on, so we picked up and headed to the Seventeen Saloon. Seventeen also has live music, although only on Saturday nights. When we got there, it was clear that this place had a very strong Western theme going on – as in, the wild west. Swinging doors on the front entrance, and a staff forced to wear cowboy boots and cowboy hats. One of many things I didn’t expect to see in Vietnam. It was also very popular, as evidenced by the interesting time we had finding a seat. The band started up, and it was a complete flashback to my days in Long Island, including the choice of music. When I lived in Long Island, I knew a lot of musicians who were in cover bands, so more often than not, we’d go to clubs or bars to see their bands play. And five years later, in Vietnam, I was watching another cover band, and listening to the same songs, like “Need to Know” by Marc Anthony, “If You Had My Love” by Jennifer Lopez, and “La Vida Loca” by Ricky Martin – apparently the Latin music craze is just hitting the cover band scene here.

After the first cover band did their set, a different band came up to the stage, and the Sultan informed me that these guys performed rock music and would take requests. The band launched into what was, actually, a very good cover of “Sweet Child of Mine”, but it was a little surreal to see a short Vietnamese guy with a perm and a pseudo-mullet wearing a white, semi-see-through shirt belting out Guns ‘N Roses. But the best part, the part which was so good that we had to leave immediately afterward because nothing could top it, was when they busted out “The Final Countdown”. I don’t even remember who it’s by, one of those 80s metal bands with a continent name (Asia? Europe?), but it’s just so ridiculous, so sublimely absurd and pretentious, that I can’t help but laugh whenever I hear it – which isn’t that often anymore. As we sailed out of Seventeen, D and I couldn’t help but pay tribute by singing it ourselves. I have a feeling that we weren’t what you would call “good”, but we sure were cracking ourselves up. It’s just too bad that the only part we both knew was “it’s the final countdown!”

The next place we headed to was a bar called Apocalypse Now. I think that, as the night progressed, our choice of venue became seedier and seedier. Nothing truly bad, but it was interesting. This place is quite the hotspot, and there’s one in Hanoi as well, and it was packed. We were ushered over to a table where they brought over the little plastic chairs that we see everywhere here – in casual restaurants, by sidewalk cafes, by street vendors, everywhere. We had a good opportunity to people watch, and the population of “working girls” was evident. Every so often, a woman would trip by, wearing Lucite heels, a skirt the size of a band-aid, and a shirt that looked as though it had been shrink-wrapped to her body, and it was clear that whatever she might spend on drinks or cover charges could probably be written off as a business expense, since she was clearly on the job. Interesting. I knew that it wasn’t uncommon here at all, but I hadn’t noticed it before, I guess.

Our final stop of the night, fortunately, was a place called Sahara. It’s allegedly a coffee shop, and as we pulled up, I thought it was closed, because the metal storefront door was partially closed. It was, however, wide open, and we walked in and got a table. It wasn’t terribly packed, because we were early – it usually fills up later, after all the other bars close up at midnight, and it was about 11:30. We settled in, our eyes adjusted to the low lights, our ears adjusted to the loud music, and once again we took note of the large proportion of working girls. It wasn’t a particularly bad place, it’s just that prostitution is that common, which wasn’t exactly surprising, but still made me sad. As we chatted and munched on a plate of fries, all of the lights came on. I was a little surprised and asked the Sultan if he knew what the story was. He calmly said that they turned the lights on because the police were coming, and popped a french fry with chili sauce into his mouth. I must have looked a little puzzled and/or startled, and he explained that the police will occasionally patrol the nightclub scene, and apparently if this place has all its lights on, then it’s more believable that it’s really a coffee shop, and that’s all anyone is there for. I’m still a little confused as to what that’s all about, since serving alcohol is legal, but I didn’t want to really push the issue – it felt like a good time for me to smile and nod, so I did. After about 15 minutes, they turned all the lights off again, and the Sultan said that the police must have passed and made it far enough down the road for the all-clear sign. After we finished our drinks at Sahara, we decided it was time to retire for the evening. For my part, I had a feeling that I was a bit past my limit, and that further drinking wouldn’t be advisable, unless that drink was water. The Sultan had his driver take all of us home, and I walked up the four flights of stairs to my apartment, and flopped into bed, grateful to be home. I’d had so much fun, but when my body decides that it’s bedtime, that’s pretty much all there is to it, and I could barely stay awake on the drive back to the apartment.

I’m bummed out that I didn’t meet the Sultan a while ago, because I wish I’d known about all these fun places a month ago, when I arrived here. However, better late than never, and I’ll know them if I get to come back. And as it is, I’m heading to Ice Blue on Tuesday night, and possibly to Sheridan’s tomorrow after work. D and I spent time walking around today, she did her final shopping, and we had a nice, mellow time. We bought a few DVDs, so I watched “Sideways” tonight, and I have “The Motorcycle Diaries” and “Vanity Fair” for later. However, I think it’s time for me to turn in, as it’s back to the office tomorrow, and gearing up for a very busy week – and my last days here.

Now that I know how close it’s getting to my return, I have to admit that I’ve been a lot more schmonely for home – I guess I wouldn’t let myself feel that way before because I knew I had a long haul still ahead of me. But I’ll be there two weeks from Wednesday, and I can’t wait!