Those that followed my deranged ramblings last year will be familiar with the comings and goings of my daily routine, which, despite the fact that I’ve changed companies and roles, hasn’t really changed that much whilst I’m here. I get up, make the most of the only decent internet access you get here all day, I have breakfast, do Sudoku, drink coffee, drive to Madinat Zayed, annoy people, have lunch (I had a falafel from my old shop yesterday, much to my new colleagues disgust……Arabs, you just can’t tell them !), annoy some more people and then I come back to the hotel. When I get here I try in vain to access the internet, then go to the gym or to the pool, then eat, then write my blog (cause I haven’t anything else to do with no internet) then bed.
Luckily, this time I’m only here for 3 nights, not 3 months, otherwise the internet thing would drive me bonkers. I think it’s worse because I’m in one of the back rooms, with wonderful view over the desert and the staff accommodation, but no direct access to the pool and I suspect the wifi transmitter thingy is in the centre of the hotel and therefore has more concrete to penetrate before it gets to me. I do have a signal of sorts but there’s a bandwidth problem here and it’s simply full up in the evenings and the weaker signals are simply dumped I suspect.
Nothing much has changed here. Some of the staff don’t seem to be around anymore, there’s new Bulgarian beauties singing (and playing the saxophone) in the bar. The food seems to have improved with more variety and they finally seem to have worked out how to cook meat. Breakfast is still a bit dire but I don’t think you can expect much from a breakfast without any dead pig in it (and they seem to have stopped doing peanut butter for some reason – I might have to bring my own next time)
The gym seems to have less tattooed Italian oil workers than when I left, or they’re different, or they go in at a different time or something……whatever, it’s a slightly more enjoyable experience at the moment. There are some down sides though. Today I got back early enough to go out and catch a few rays…….only they'd gone within 20 minutes of me getting there. You see when I left at the end of June, the sun disappeared over the back of the hotel at about 6.15, now it’s gone by 5.15, which is not helpful if you want an hours panic tanning at the end of the day without any cream on !
Around and about nothing much has changed really, a few building sites have progressed a little but the rest of Madinat Zayed (and some of the other places I visited in the last two days) seem to be stuck in a time warp – nothing wrong with that I guess. I even went to pay my respects to my old client here in MZ today, out of courtesy more than anything, and he was always a good source of information and gossip. Poor old boy was a bit under the weather – literally. He was full of cold like symptoms and said that he gets like this every year as the weather gets cooler…….. I can see his problem, the temperature has “plummeted” to chilly 35 degs during the day and a positively frosty 20 degs at night…… if it keeps going like this I may even have to look out some long trousers - the buggers don't know they've been born !
Last night I took advantage of the chilly weather to go for a run in the desert with Psycho, which was nice. What was really nice was that for the first time in living memory I beat her ! I have to say that she was slightly handicapped by getting off her bike after a 25k ride before discovering that she’d left her trainers at home and deciding to run in her work boots, but we’re going to ignore those trivial issues and get on with gloating that I beat her (I’m pretty sure that she hasn’t been reading the blog for a while, and almost certainly not the new one, so I might be safe from any retribution……… which would be nice !)
I got ticked off for not going to see her at work yesterday as I spent most of the afternoon (as I have for all the time I’ve been at work down here) inspecting the school that she works in. In my defense I’ve never been entirely comfortable in an all girls’ school, despite what people might think (me, the Third Duke of Wimborne, in an all girls’ dormitory, at three o’clock in the morning, with my reputation……?). Walking around these schools is made immeasurably worse by having to talk to the cloth. Most, if not all, of the staff completely cover themselves when they are in your company and it’s a little disconcerting to try and have a conversation with a talking black wall. Watching the “shy” school girls rushing to cover up is also quite amusing but we won’t go there ! Today I was way out in the sticks where I expected it to be even more traditional (I don’t know where you go from a fully covered face – shouting between rooms perhaps ?) but it was much more relaxed – the schools was still a badly maintained ancient shit hole, but then you can’t have everything.
It’s worth mentioning that I haven’t been in a school in the last few days, and I don’t think it will change for a while, that I wouldn’t have closed down in the UK……if the HSE hadn’t have got there before me. It’s also worth mentioning that with one exception (which felt like a borstal) they have all had a really nice friendly feeling about them – God only knows what some of the boys schools will be like ! One of them today hasn’t had a working fire alarm for 4 years ffs ! Things are going to change around here whether they like it or not ! When I suggest to the Principle of this particular school, that I could shut down her school for her on about 4 different counts and that the Department for Education would then have to sit up and listen to her needs, she was horrified and point blank refused to let me because it would damage her reputation – poor woman. My Arab colleague suggested in the car on the way back, that my European direct approach may not go down well here, and that a more soft approach might be a better way……… he did concede that 4 years of trying softly to get the fire alarm system working may not have worked either so we’re going to try and find some middle ground……. And I’m going to jump up and down on the subcontractors instead !
I’m off to bed now and I can’t be arsed to do anything about any kind of inventory (we’ve covered some of it already tonight) but be assured that you’re not missing anything really……TTFN
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