All right blog, it's me and you

I've been slacking, and I'm going to make up for it. Here I go.

So I went to Kuwait for the weekend a couple weeks ago, and it pretty much wasn't that fun. It's not that Kuwait sucks, which it kind of does, but rather our host sucked (see next post for that rant). Rachel, Krisvell, and myself scored some ultra-cheap tickets on promotion from Jazira Airways (more on them in a minute) and decided to go visit Susan, a teacher that was at MKS last year that Rachel knew. What an adventure that was.

Up until then, I had not left Bahrain via the airport (or any other way, for that matter) and was shocked to find the absolute lack of security at the airport. The only thing that even resembled an airport back home was the x-ray machine for the luggage which was manned by a couple of Bahrainis more interested in their cigarettes and conversations with each other than the contents of the bags. Anyway, after you throw the bags on the conveyor, you walk through a metal detector--which by the way I've seen more secure and modern metal detectors at high schools back home--and that's it. No shoe checks, no pat downs, nothing. So then we got our tickets and hauled ass to the terminal because we were late. When we got to the terminal, I was fully expecting to see our plane loaded and ready to take off. Instead, I found a shuttle bus which took us out to the waiting plane which was in the tarmac area that we had to board via mobile steps. Nice.

So we get on the plane, get our seats, and I almost immediately came to the realization that we were the ONLY white people on the plane. The entire plane was full of thobes and ninjas. If you were some hillbilly back in America and boarded a plane full of people like this at Nashville International Airport you'd most likely shit your pants. I, on the other hand, was rather relaxed. A far cry from the Byron I was before I came out here, that's for sure. Coming out here to Bahrain, I sat next to a Muslim wearing a thobe from Columbus to Minneapolis and about shit my pants. Now I still take notice of people dressed like that, but am far from scared or intimidated. Anyway, the little TV screens dropped down and began to show the Muslim travel prayer, in Arabic of course. I guess you should expect that when you are flying with an Arab company. I wanted to get a picture of that, but figured it would probably piss someone off on the plane, and since I was in the far minority I instead managed to snag a picture of the flight path on the TV which is in all Arabic--no help to us English speakers. They occasionally had a translation in English, but it is very different to hear instructions and whatnot in Arabic with English being the secondary language. 90% of the time, English is first and Spanish, French, whatever follow.

Rachel scored a nice pic of the sunset over the clouds taken at cruising altitude which I included above. She's lucky to have gotten that shot because the entire flight was only 45 minutes long which meant we were at cruising altitude for a whopping 1o minutes or so.

The third picture is of some water towers in Kuwait which were the first thing I saw after we got out of the airport. There were about five of these things which at night resembled giant martini glasses. Too bad my picture is shitty--that's what you get taking a picture out of a moving vehicle late at night.