On the road again

Hello there,

this is me, in Asia again. I traveled to Hong Kong, through Zurich. Booked a Swiss flight. Got onto an Austrian Airline machine. Interesting. Before, when i had booked AUA, i never got AUA, so Swiss is the key... anyways, just about an hour to Zurich. With a small little Do&Co meal, nice, so that's the remains of Laudaair in Austrian Arrows.

Zurich. I like that airport. Somehow futuristic. I especially like the underground train without a driver, i.e., driven by fuzzy control. Took some pictures again.
They added some screens on the side of the track, but i couldn't follow too much of that because i was just to fascinated by the front screen, i mean, the windshield. Sitting first row without a driver. Here's a video i made so you can join the excitement :-P


Flight to HK was okay. Swiss A340. Everyone's got her/his own entertainment system, a small screen and a cable remote that looks like a crossing between a SNES controller and a mobile phone. I tried one of the games and crashed the system. Hung up. And still ten hours of flight in front of me. Well, the nice flight attendants could reboot my machine without stopping all others, too.
Fortunately. So i could watch some of the movies:
Harry Potter 5: i had missed it in cinemas thanks to living in the KSA where there are no cinemas. What can i say. Still happy i didn't read any of the books. I know, the story will be better/deeper there, but still. It's so random, unconnected, feels like only kids won't notice. But still, the movies are fun. You can see that there's a lot of money put into them. They look polished and are entertaining. The end battle with loads of wizards and the camera flying around them - well, that's something i would have preferred to see on the silver screen instead of that little LCD 20cm in front of my nose in the plane. But well, at least i managed to see the movie. Airplane movies are good for catching up on what you've missed.
Then i watched the Simpsons Movie again. Niiice. Looking forward to the DVD. Till then i'll watch the season six and nine DVDs i got with me.
In the end i started watching Live free or Die Hard. Thought there was enough time. But after the first 20 minutes they cut off the entertainment system, too close to HK already. Guess i'll get the DVD of that one. Hehe, my first Die Hard DVD that might be. Maybe i'll wait for a nice box set, if that'll ever happen (there were some problems with different distributers in Europe for the first three, hence no set so far).

Anyways, arrival in Hong Kong.

This is HK airport. First person i talked to here was a nice lady who asked me to remove my baseball cap. Because they scan the temperature of your head before you go through customs. Interesting.
One of the first things i have noticed was that they drive 'on the wrong side', i.e., on the left. Heritage of being a UK colony... i'll see if that is different on Chinese mainland. But left or right, got to my hotel safe and sound.

Yet another hotel room. 21st floor, no impressive view.
Well, the lobby.
My first meal in Hong Kong. Soy and regular milk, tea and water. Interesting sizes, like 278ml packages and so forth.
Did a night walk before i went to sleep.
Now that's a skyline! My hotel is on the opposite side of Hong Kong Island.
The thing on the left looks like a concert hall. Kinda reminded me of the Sydney opera, the way it is put there in the harbour. One minute later they turned of the lights.
Street lights.
Chinese...
Hong Kong dollars. On the smalles coin you can find Elisabeth II :-)
Continental breakfast.

That's all, folks!

Dia de los Muertos

It has been said that the Viennese people have a special relationship to death. A lot of songs, "a scheene Leich" etc., come see for yourself.
What is better know in the world might be the "Dia de los Muertos" which is celebrated by Mexicans and other Latin Americans. I didn't get to see those celebrations yet. This year i wasn't even close to Latin America, but sitting in the middle of Europe. Just was at an exhibition that showed several pieces of art, all related to death in Latin America. Kinda interesting. I don't know any south americans here in Vienna, but i was invited to a morbid costume party. Some fresh(-ly rotten) impressions for you.

A dead clown. Nice.
[edited]
[edited]

Murder at the buffet. Fresh heart.

[edited]

A puking pumpkin. Marvellous decorations.
[edited]
I have been told the liquid was vodka. Mainly vodka.
[edited]

Cheers
CGA

Status update

Hello my dear readers,

long time no blog again. Well, i was busy enjoying. Vacations in
mighty, mighty Europe. Visiting friends and family, having a great
time.

So first a little explanation for the last blog entry: yes, i am
moving to China. When i wrote that blog entry i was still sitting in
the KSA and had just learned that i would transfer to China. The
feeling of leaving that forsaken place was a great feeling of freedom.
So far i only experienced a similar thing when i left the army after
eight months of 'doing time' there. Just think of Braveheart, in the
end, when he shouts "Freeeedom!". With the difference that i didn't
die in the next moment :-) and also, that feeling of freedom was
overwhelming when leaving the army. Leaving that country a month ago
wasn't so special - i was there because i had decided to, and would
have been able to quit any time. Nevertheless, really good getting out
of there.

So, what have i been up to in the last month, my second vacation since
i started working? I started in the same way as the first vacation, by
getting back to my old hometown, Vienna. Visiting family and friends,
and finally relaxing a bit after more than three months of stress -
not a single free day, industrial noise most of the time etc.etc.

I got home in midday after more or less no sleep in 48 hours (or no
proper sleep in three months :-P). One might think that i used the
opportunity of having a nice little house in a garden in the west of
Vienna for getting some serious sleep. I did not. I was amazed to
realize that my parents had installed satellite TV. Not that special a
thing, i know. But i never had lived in a household with cabel or
satellite TV, and was happy to see two consecutive Simpsons episodes
on Pro7 in my own home. Hehe. The Simpsons.
I was lucky with the movie. It was still playing in original
version(OV), even though i was almost two months late. Couldn't make
it to the showing on my arrival day, but of course i went on the next
day. A thursday, so chances were that they'd change their schedules
and this might've been the last OV screening. It wasn't, but i felt
theatrical anyways. Of course the morons in Artis Kino had to forget
to change the lens after the ads - you know, from TV formats to
cinemascope or whatever it is called - so the showing was slightly
distorted for the whole show. We protested but apparently nobody was
actually taking care of the showing. Some jokes were hidden by that,
e.g. Schwarzenegger's name didn't show but i knew that from the
trailer anyways. And i was happy to see the movie, really enjoyed it.
Speaking of culture. I went to the cinema seven or eight times in the
last month here in Europe, in Vienna, Frankfurt and Darmstadt. Niiice.
Been to a couple of museums - if they hadn't just closed "to be
reopened in about 2011" like the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt.

And of course i enjoyed the marvellous beer culture here. Have i
bothered you already with the story of my father being born in a
brewery? Had some wine and real nice food as well. Yummy.

So in short, i travelled through Austria, Germany, the Netherlands and
Hungary. Had a grrreat time, including some chance meetings. More will
follow. Happy that this is online, finally. Now i gotta go to another
exhibition here in Vienna, was recommended to me by a friend. Chance
encounter last saturday, he actually lives in London right now. And i
will move to China soon, both just passing through.
More will follow.

And by the way, i have no idea how this blog will turn out, it's
blogged via email. Kind of a test for China, since i have heard all
kind of blogging is blocked there. Hope it'll work like this, at
least.

--
Cheers
CGA

Around the world

Hello friends. This is a very interesting time for me. To give you a teaser i made that small rebus for you. Saw it once in my childhood, not too hard to decipher.

Anyways, to everyone who's in Europe, be aware, i might pop by in the next couple of days.
Weee-ha, what a wild ride.
Life, that is, soon for me.

Cheers.
Cheers!
Back to beer!

Picture update.

Hello there,

just realized that there hasn't been a blog update in a while. Not much has happened since i got back to the middle east in June. In most of the places here it is illegal to take photos, and life is not not that exiting anyways. Still, i am who i am so i took some pictures. Enjoy.
I got new toys. A toolbox. And a white hardhat. So the people on the rig won't think i'm a rookie anymore. And everyone's gonna wake me up when the shit hits the fan.

Me and my Bolivian friends, waiting for our Visa in Bahrain. Last beer in months, and it's a crappy imported bottle, smaller than a beer should be. Anyways.

A decorative sign in that same bar. Was the hotel bar, decorated in Western style. A funny sign in a peninsula without pork.

Birthday ice-cream. Some friends back home wrote me that, well, they can't drink a beer with me or for me knowing that i might drink one here, but for sure i could get some ice-cream. And so i did. Was on the day after my birthday here. I was in town, but no one else there. Except me and the ice-cream. In the 'bachelor-eating-section' of a shopping mall. Pathetic, innit?

Another product from my home country that i've found in the local Carrefour: "Austrian Processed Cheese" from the Woerle Company. For a moment i was tempted to buy and try it. But just for a very short moment. Igittigittigitt.

Homer: "One of my all-time-favourites: Honey-roasted peanuts." Had to try. Not that special. Well, i also don't eat pork chops. I DO like beer, though :-)

I went to eat some Thai food. Yummy. This also was the first time that i sat in the 'family' section of a restaurant. Without being arrested, even though i didn't bring my wife and the kids.

I didn't go eat alone - it was the idea of a Colombian friend of mine. We were lucky enough to be in town at the same time, for once. Again i have to say the food was really nice. And surprisingly it was more than rice and chicken, which is what we get in the desert.

The classics, the classics. Had to take a picture. As close as i get to being in a museum :-)
This is in the mini-supermarket in my new compound. Which is a nice shop, one can survive with it, not like the "three products on a shelf and never open" shop we had in the last compound.

Dr.Pepper Cherry Vanilla - if you don't puke on that, well, ... you sure do like a lot of sugar.

Don't let the crocodile get your hands! At first, stickers like those were kind of confusing. Got them on nearly every door on our base. Apparently there were some finger-crushing incidents...
Btw, that's a safety door, holds back a couple of bullets from the bad guys.

Fresh dates? I am not sure. Were offered to me by a driver. Spoke only Arabic, of course. Some of them rotten, but that's part of the deal. To get them sweet. Having traveled quite a bit i didn't want to try unwashed fruit. I'm not the biggest fan of diarrhea, you know.

Some more pictures from inside the new compound. All the streets have Dutch names, for reasons unknown. This is the main road in the middle where the reception is, and the supermarket mentioned above, and behind it the pool. Went swimming when i was in town, at night, even though the water is a bit too warm.

Me in front of my house. Well, it's in the back of the one you see. But looks the same. Four people with separate bathrooms, a shared kitchen/living room. Quite okay. Picture taken in the morning, when i was heading for the bus to take me to the base. Company-organized bus of course, there is no public transport here.

Dates growing on the palm tree in front of my house.

I just had to take that picture :-)
(zoom in on the sign)

The Last Supper: we happened to be in town at the same time, luckily. More than a month after that Thai dinner shown above. We went to Friday's. And the next day, we went to the rig.

Toilet shot.One of the few places where it feels relatively safe to take a picture. If you're alone.

And that was taken on our way to the rig where i am right now. Just before we arrived. We passed a herd of camels. Humans included.

That's all, folks.

X hoch X

Sooooooo... what have i been up to lately. After school in Abu Dhabi i spent a one-month holiday (first one after half a year of working) in my home, Europe. Meeting family and friends. Fine. More will be blogged later. Gotta sort through the many photos i took first.

Then i got back to Bahrain for visa stuff, took only two days. Back to the sand. Driving over the bridge i saw a thermometer that was built in the car: 43 degrees. Not that much. The most i've seen so far was 48 degrees. Celsius. It's around 50 degrees in midday. And i had to physically work outside a couple of times at midday. Well, hot. Drink enough water. What can i say, the desert is still the desert.
After arriving here in the late afternoon i just learned from my boss that i'd go to the rig the next morning. Nothing unexpected there, same procedure as before. Was in the desert 26 days, two rigs. With good people, teaching me stuff. Then i got a whole of seven days in the city - new record! - before going to the rig again. But just for six days, replacing someone and then back to town for a couple of days. Then to the rig for two weeks.

That first 26 days in the desert i was doing the night shift, from 18 to 6, so for about a month my motto was:

Sunset - that is when my shift starts here.
Sunrise - that is when my shift is about to end.

I got back to town on 7/11 - damn, gotta get to an American 7/11 sooner or later on that day. To get my free squishee. Here in town there is literally nothing to do. Except getting some rest without engine noise, at least. I went to a shopping center. There at the food court i saw McDonald's poster with a Shrek3 promo and "Only in Cinemas" written around it. Hahaha, that translates to "not in this country".
Anyways, now is the most probably last time that my age is x to the power of x, x being an integer. Thanks for all the nice greetings, i try to answer them all, still working on it. Not that it was that many, but being busy here kept me from writing emails - i like to write long ones, if you haven't noticed... Got some great e-cards as well. Two with the always entertaining Hoops&Yoyo, hehe. One with a little green man wielding his lightsaber. Truly knows me :-)
But "den Vogel abgeschossen" has one with a sheep that brought me a parcel which exploded and had a living pig in side. Just a pig for luck, i guess. But sitting here in a country where it is impossible and illegal to get some pork that thing is getting a whole new dimension...
All in all i got greetings from Austria, Hungary, Germany, Spain, Croatia, France, Saudi, Oman (well, if you consider people's nationalities also from Bolivia, Sudan/Egypt and Lebanon), United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Belgium, Poland, Ireland in no particular order. Ain't the internet a nice thing. Thanks a lot.

Two days after that day a friend of mine also came back to town. We went to eat Thai food. Nice place, nice food. First time i sat in the "family section" of a restaurant here. Guess that white face's good for something, haha. In town i got the evenings for me - during the day i'm at the base. No weekends. Not much to do, anyways.

What else? Merely eight months after i got here i finally have a room in the place i was supposed to stay since the beginning. Ain't that great. It's almost as if they actually wanted me to stay now. Not too convinced, though. So here's my room.


What's so special about this picture? The wall! It's a real building, bricks, wall, and all, not sleeping in a container in town anymore. And i don't have to check out each time i go to the rig anymore. Wow... as i've said, took them only eight months more than in every other location i've heard of.

More will follow hopefully soon, got some pics - not many, mind you, don't want to get arrested and not much to see here, anyways - we'll see.

A question that came to my mind in the desert:

Are grasshoppers still called grasshoppers when they have no grass to hopp upon? I mean, what's the official name for those around here? Sandhoppers or deserthoppers would be more appropriate, i guess.

Drink a beer for me.
Cheers.

Pain

Today is sunday, August 5th, 2007. Says my calendar. So i am in pain now for ten days. Why? Does 7/27/07 mean anything to you? No? I'll give you a hint:

If that wasn't clear enough, here it comes in plain words: The Simpsons Movie has finally been released! Eighteen years in the making etc. I've watched the Simpsons ever since they were on TV, since i was about ten. I still got some newspaper articles in a box from back then. Even got the first Simpsons sticker album back in '90 or '91, complete collection with all stickers. Try that when you're eleven. And i've read the comic books since '97... not to forget, San Diego Comic Con 2004 where i met Matt Groening and all the other guys you so far had only known from the DVD audio commentaries (and various other interesting people like Stan Lee or Will Eisner, and was part of the 6500 people present when the title of Episode III was officially announced to the world...). So, yes, i was waiting for this movies from long before the first rumors were circulating that it'd finally be done - when Matt Groening stopped saying they would only make a movie once the series stopps being produced for TV. It got kinda official when Fox registered the simpsonsmovie.com URL. And sooner or later Simpsons people started talking about it and then the first teaser,...

Anyways, why pain? Because i am in a country without cinemas! And don't give me that "just download it" or "you can watch it later on DVD" bullshit. Of course i will purchase the DVD once it's here, but it's The Simpsons MOVIE, for fuck's sake! We've had the Simpsons on TV screens for almost two decades but this is meant to be seen on the silver screen. Noone who says watching a movie on a laptop is just as good will ever understand me... oh my, this forsaken country.
The only thing i could do on the 27th was head over to the official page and take a look around. I don't want no spoilers, but i had to get something. So i watched all the trailers again, even if they give away some of the good jokes. I also created myself as a Simpson character, quite a funny feature. The link they sent me didn't work but i took a screenshot in a familiar environment:

Familiar yes, even though i've never been to that place right down the block, where you can drink your misery away... but now i have. Gotta admit, i might have a bit less hair now and i'm no longer so slim, but the yellow recreation of myself is accurate enough. Try it out, it's a fun feature.

So i'm left with the hope that the movie will still be playing in cinemas once i get back to cinemas.

Cheers
CGA

• "How did the pig tracks get onto the ceiling?"
• See Our Family. And Feel Better About Yours.
• A Hard Place.

...all i got here is the two seasons (got only the first episode of Who Shot Mr.Burns?, luckily i know the adorable person whodunit...) i found on DVD on my last visit to Madrid - hence i can watch them in English original version or in Spanish - and the background of the angry mob that i have on my laptop now...

Blood is thicker than water

#this should've been blogged about two months ago

So, not too long ago my aunt from New Zealand dropped by in Dubai. As it was on the weekend i could happily join them for a day of family reunion. How nice! And how typical for this kind of lifestyle. One lives here, one lives there, you meet in the middle - of the world. Hehe.

It was also the first time since November that i've talked German again. Obviously it was no big deal getting into it again. But during the day it happened to me three or four times that i caught myself saying a sentence in German and then realizing that i took an English one in my head and just translated it word-by-word. Thinking in English, weird. But i guess that was also when i was explaining my job for the first time in German. I don't know most of those technical/engineering terms in German, and i've just learned them them in English!

Oh well, too much text already. I'll give you some pics now.

The road to Dubai. Bloody cab driver tried to ripp me off.

My swiss unlce. Hehe. We get along well.
The classic "excuse me, could you take a picture of us, please?" shot.
And here's my aunt :-)
Le cool.

Gotta find that shot of the three of us wearing old-school sunglasses back in Murau, taken on their last visit to Europe.

Dubai tourism.
Swiss Burge ;-)
Happy face in the fake fort.
Pictures of people taking pictures. Hah, i was faster! Also take a look at the classic - read: non-digital - camera.
Asian lunch.
YAPS.
(yet another postcard shot)
Beautiful light. The way to the 360 bar at sunset.
Auntie&uncle in the infamous 360 bar. They liked it, too.

Family shot.
Mall bin.
Ski dubai. Indoor skiing. Top fakeness.
Fake St.Moritz. Real Swiss man.
Not related to the rest - this picture was taken in a Japanese "Alles 20 Schilling"-shop in Abu Dhabi. Just liked the weirdness there. And of course i bought some stuff. The chain is real Japanese, according to the Japan-loving friend of mine who brought me there.

So much for that, blogged long time after it happened. To explain the title, i'll tell you what a Bolivian friend of mine told us, just before he got into the car that took him to the airport to go back to Bolivia:
"Never forget, your family comes first!"
But then again, the last thing he said was "Maybe i'll never meet anyone of you again, so i'll see you in hell!". Good man.

Cheers.

Do What You Do

Hello-lo,

so, as promised, a blog with a little bit about what it actually is that i do here all this time in the desert. I mean, my work.

I help people drill a hole. That's it. Drill it to wherever they want to drill it. And tell them what's down there (yes, we only drill down into the ground). If you want to read on, i will go a little more into details.

To start you might want to familiarize yourself a bit with what's the situation on a rig. A good overview can be found in the book "A Primer to Oilwell Drilling" - a standard issue by some American oil organization, you might find it in your local library. A nice'n'easy read, a good introduction to what's going on at the rig. Kind of a standard work. You can read it, i actually had to, as part of my training.

And to those of you who've sent me seasonal greetings last december - it's already more than ten years that i don't care about "happy Julfest" anymore, but anyways, thanks for thinking of me :-) - it might cheer you up that my job is basically about setting up christmas trees.
Well, if our job is done they put a christmas tree on top of it and yeeehah they start producing, most of the time. Each time i go to/leave the rig i pass by some of them on the road. And no, i still don't care about Julfest.

For all animal lovers: Ain't it some funny place, a rig. We got a mousehole, sometimes also a rathole, a doghouse and a monkeyboard - next to the fingerboard.

But back to my job. They drill a hole, using a bit and after that some 'tools', so some pipes with more sophisticated stuff in them. That's where we come in. We, me: I am an MWD, in short. Or an LWD. Full job title might be MWD/LWD engineer. MWD refers to the drilling parameters, LWD to formation parameters. In other words, MWD data tell them where they are drilling to and how it's going so far, and LWD data helps to see what's down there.

We bring our own container, the 'logging unit', to the rig. Our own little room. Before we put our tools in the hole, they gotta be programmed. So we connect a cable from the PC in the container to tools through a hole in the outer pipe. And programm into the tool what we want it to do. In some tools we have to load lithium batteries which is quite a physical task, screwing them in with a, how to say, 1.5m long screwdriver-thingie... when we're ready preparing we're ready for pick-up. Which means the 'bottom-hole-assembly' will be screwed together on the rigfloor. Since most of that is our tools we are there to tell them how and make sure everything's allright. And we check how they screwed it together to get some more parameters. Depending on the job we also might have to put our radioactive source into our tools (yup, i'm a radiation worker now, with a fancy - well, not quite - badge on my chest measuring how much i'm taking. Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Neutron, keep'em coming...)
Then they run-in-hole, i.e. they keep on screwing more drillpipe on top of our tools etc. and push it into the hole until they reach bottom. Not much to do for us whilst running in hole, but as soon as they reach bottom they start drilling, hence our job really starts. We're getting data.
So how do we get data? Our tools are sending a signal through the mud in the drillpipe, using pressure waves. On surface we got sensors to get the signal into our logging unit, into the computers there.
So most of the time we sit in our logging unit, monitoring the data and giving them to the client. Sitting in front of three monitors. As a friend of mine said "So, it's a totally Dilbert job!". Well, as long as everything is fine, yes, i guess so. Doing or twelve hour shifts - two MWDs at the rig.
But if something goes wrong, the signal is bad, you gotta do something. And each hour, more or less, depending on how fast they drill, you have to interact with the rig crew, get them to do what you need. Call them, and oftentimes go up to the rigfloor and talk to them (shouting, if things go bad). So much for that.

When they finish drilling they POOH! (pull-out-of-hole), so our tools come up again, we have to be there to supervise. And check our tools. After they've been laid down - keep in mind, heavy pipes, all done by crane etc. - we connect our computers again to get all the data that have been recorded downhole - more than what was sent up through the mud waves. In general, we produce logs from all data we acquire. Long vertical displays with some funny curves on them. Very important data for our clients.

Part of our job is also installing and de-installing all our sensors on the rig, deal with the rig crew, get the forklift driver, ...

Some words about my ten weeks here in Abu Dhabi: That was school, so university-like training but from the company. Getting up early five or six days a week, taking a one hour bus to our training center, classes and practicals from about 8:30 to 16:30, then going back. And about two or three exams each week. But fun. We were a class of 23 students, one or two instructors, good instructors. I've had fun. And now i successfully completed school.

Actually, right now i just came from the beach :-) ehehe.

Cheers
CGA