It is a guy telling me to go to Mozambique. I was supposed to go to Brazil in the middle of January. I have no idea who I am talking.

Turns out, I have a new boss. I need to be in Pemba, Mozambique on the 30th.

So Margo and I make plans to go spend Christmas in Dallas, drive home and I hop on a plane. After we get there, I get a call and I need to leave the day after Christmas. So we do our Christmas stuff on Christmas eve and we spend Christmas day driving from Dallas to Atlanta.

Right wing blogs claim Obama has an army of millions of Muslims ready to vote for him to usher in his second presidency. I have no idea where they are, but it isn’t running gas stations and restaurants along I-20.

My flights were Atlanta to Johannesburg and later take a charter flight to Pemba. The flight was pretty uneventful. I got an email telling me what to expect when I arrived in South Africa and later, Pemba.

As usual, this was wrong.

I was told to report to the international counter for a 3 am check in. The counter didn’t open until 4:30. I was told that when I landed in Pemba to have exact change for my visa. The price was either 78, 82, 88 or around 86 dollars. I didn’t have to pay for a visa.

Our driver did meet us there, which was a change. They tend to forget you/get bored and wander off. Or not have a sign and expect you to know who you are looking for.

The staff house here is the Pemba Beach Resort. It is shockingly nice. No internet and The restaurant takes forever, but overall pretty nice. It is walking distance to our shop.

We did go a few times into town to eat at some restaurants there, but the there isn’t much in Pemba at the time.

It usually just hosts Europeans on vacation. I’m not sure where the town will end up, but the sudden influx of oilfield money and oilfield workers is going to change it. Hopefully, it happens quick. There may be more work for us in the area and right now it is a logistical nightmare.

Or the hotel that had no internet. The only internet was in the common area and it was down. The guy that knew how to reboot the modem was on vacation. You would think there is a joke there, but there isn’t. There wasn’t a single person in the employ of the Pemba Beach resort that knew how to reboot the modem.

So, I’ve sort of been working on this in my head and will post them over the next few hours/days. Actual details may vary, but the gist will be there. I could also explain why I didn’t say anything more about Qatar and UPS throwing my Christmas present in a bucket of water, but I’m going to blame that one on SOPA.

My webpage went dark in protest before it was cool.

They put us up in a nearby hotel. I would only give it four stars because it doesn’t have a swimming pool or gym

The rooms are on the small side but they still manage to squeeze up to four people per room. That sort of efficiency you just don’t get in the USA. Sure the light switch was just a pair of bare wires you had to connect together and the bed was made out of pallets, but I like the rustic charm it gives

It does have running water, that I managed to catch a sample of in my soap dish:

And a restaurant on the grounds that serves goats, chickens and pigs

It is next to a thriving downtown filled with little boutique shops like this one that sells fish, chicken and sim cards.

This is the bar I’ve been going to with my drinking buddy Jesus. It is unique in that it has the TV and the beer is cool. There is no electricity. Anything that has power has it by generators, and the only places that have generators are places that gouge foreigners by charging $1.60 for 770 milliliters of beer. And I’ve sampled such wonderful beer as Nkoyi, Primus, Mutzig, and Skol, ranging from 5.2 to 6% alcohol content.

And our work facility is top notch. We have a bench grinder:

and an overhead crane certified to 2 tons:

I didn’t take a picture or video of the air compressor next to because quite frankly I was too scared. The flywheel was really unbalanced and looked like it would fly apart at any moment. I have no idea why the last crew that was here all came down sick the day before the flight.

And this cool looking moth:

A security guard frisked me because the metal detector was broken. I went through that and went over to the machine and started to gather my belongings. The guy in front of me grabbed my laptop and tried to put it in his bag. I grabbed a hold on my laptop and held on to it. He gave it a pull and looked at me. I held it and looked at him. He let go and apologized saying he thought it was his.

Which would be a little more believable if he would have had a laptop to start with.

Last night, we went a place we call Blue Bar because it is painted a bright blue. I’m not really sure what the actual name is.

We had curried rice, grilled fish and fried plantains. We chatted for a little bit and left.

I told you it wasn’t exciting.

Next to the blue bar is a massage place. They have a menu. A Number One is a regular massage, a Number Two is a massage with a happy ending and a Number Three is a massage with a happier ending.

I’ve never been, but two of the guys went there and got their Number One’s. While they were doing that, the manager came in and said “Your friend wants an upgrade and said you would pay for it”. They both paid an extra 20,000 CFA and only later did they find out that neither had asked for an upgrade and the manager had scammed them.

From there, we went to a few different Reggae bars and met some members of the French Foreign Legion, who don’t think jokes about getting shanghaied into the Foreign Legion while drunk are very funny at all.

Rastafarian Robocop said he knew of a better place because it was too early for Parker Place to really get going. So we went to what turned out to be a strip bar with a few Legionnaires. Some of the girls didn’t bother getting dressed and just walked around naked. Oddly, the girls weren’t as predatory as they are in not-strip clubs. This is the reason a few companies hold their Friday meetings there.

Around 11, I went back to the hotel. I was mostly doing it to be social and as things broke up and got drunker, I lost interest, and snuck away. A few guys took parting gifts from the strip club and moved on to other places. X-man went in the alley with a girl and Rastafarian Robocop toked up with a few police men and we left them in the parking lot shooting bottles off the top of the police car.

The conversation got turned to local animals and they started talking about how dangerous and aggressive hippos are. One of the locals says that hippos are the number one killer in Africa.

I say “I thought it was AIDS”. The nationals didn’t laugh. The expats with national girlfriends didn’t laugh. Everybody else did.

After that, we went to a bar named Jimmy’s. It was expensive as fuck. At a local bar, beer costs about 800 CFA. At the hotel and bars expats go to, about 2,000 to 2,500 CFA. At Jimmy’s they are 4,000. So I had a beer before discreetly leaving.

Or tried to. Since two of my coworkers spent or lost all their per diem in one day, I offered to buy them a drink and bought the drink of Miriam, the girl that latched on to me.

For those that don’t frequent developing world bars, Normally there are several local girls there and they will latch on to any foreigner that walks into the door. You can either be nice to them, buy them a drink, and put up with their “I love you!” games, or you can be a jackass and call them whores, treat them like shit and yell at them.

You can either buy one girl a beer and she will keep the other girls away, or be an ass and fight off girls the whole night.

Miriam was very pretty. I’m not normally into black girls(RACEST!), but this one was hot.

She asked if I wanted a girlfriend. I told her no. When she asked why, I showed her my wedding leash and said I don’t do that. Which she told me was a very good thing because lots of married men come to Ivory Coast and get girlfriends.

I told her that I know that and I’m not that sort. But she still kept trying. She offered to go dance for me. While she was dancing, I left.

But as I watched the other expats, I realized why these places are popular. Most of these guys are divorced or on wife number two or three. Middle aged or older and when you come to one of these places you have hot young women throwing themselves at you. It allows these guys a little bit of escapism and a chance to reclaim the ideal of their youth.

Like Disneyland, but with more STD’s.

But this is neat. It makes it easy to ship clinics to parts of the world that may not get them and could be used for rapid deployment to refugee camps.

I was supposed to go be in Colombia on the 14th.  But the job moved up and they wanted me there on the 9th. I wouldn’t have made it. So the boss said I may go to either Saudi Arabia or Azerbaijan. But he isn’t sure when. I hope he makes a decision soon. I will need more pages in my passport  pretty soon.

Unrelated, but since the staffhouse has skelton keys, I tried the old Movie trick of pushing the Skeleton key out with a bit of paper. It doesn’t appear to work on this lock. Once the key gets past a certain point, it binds up and gets stuck.