Tuesday, May 29, 2007

JJ's--the best place in town to find drunk navy guys... and a damn good ham sandwich


These are a couple shots of JJ's, an Irish bar that we frequent after work on Thursday (our Friday). It's a cool joint in that it's authentic--all brought in from Ireland and reassembled. Kinda like that place on 5th Ave in Columbus. But this is more authentic, because it's filled with drunk British and Irish guys, not full of preppy fucks like back home. However, prior to a security guard getting shot by a mysterious person (some say Saudi, some say royal family, some say American Navy because guns are not available here) this place used to be full of drunk navy assholes. But since the shooting (which actually happened next door at a different bar) it's been off-limits to them and has been extremely nice for me. As we all know I can't stand navy guys so the place is full now of mostly British and eastern Europeans, which is fine with me. The main reason we go here is not for the beer (I know what you're saying 'yeah, right') but for the ham and cheese baguette. This is one of the only places on the island that you can get pork products off of a menu, and it's damn good. Damn good.


I was lucky to get these shots (which don't do the place justice) because for whatever reason you're not allowed to take pictures in most bars on the island. I'm not sure why that is. I have a feeling it's because there are Muslims drinking (which is a huge no-no) in some of them and they don't want any photographic evidence. But JJ's won't allow anybody in the bar who's wearing any type of Muslim get-up (man-dresses, etc), and quite honestly I rarely see Arabs in there. Back home, I hate discrimination. Here--well, sometimes it's not so bad being a non-Arab:)

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Cargo port


These are some cargo lifters (or whatever they're called) near one of the ports that I saw the other week and thought would make a good photo. You can see how tall those things actually are by looking at that car barely visible to the left of the palm tree. Those bad boys are how I'm getting my Clio to the states...

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Who reads signs anyway...


This one is for dad. Poor sign maintenance exists all over the world...

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Middle Eastern Security System




I don't know if I've posted about walls like this before, but here ya go again. I took this photo near the school--I wouldn't want to try and climb this wall, that's for damn sure. That's a pretty fuckin' mean wall--and cheap to build to boot...

And by the way, I'm home in less than a month. WHOOOOOOOOO HOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

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Sunday, May 20, 2007

The best Filipino cover band in town

Is now gone. These photos were taken at F1, which is a club that has a Filipino cover band called Big Night Out. At first, I laughed my ass off because it was really amusing me to see a bunch of Asians rock out to Nirvana. But soon I learned my options were limited as far as live music is concerned, so I grew to enjoy watching these guys. But as is the case with all expats on the island, contracts are limited. In the case of these guys they were only here for 6 months. They will be missed.
Pop (the lead singer) rockin' out. I have some bad ass video of these guys, but for whatever reason youtube is being a bitch. You'll just have to wait until I come home to see it.
Another good shot of Pop and AJ (the girl.)
Jenn and AJ--of the two, Jenn (the one with the mic) was the better singer, but AJ was there for the boys to look at (if you know what I mean.)

And me an' Pop.

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Saturday, May 19, 2007

You can show all the blood and gore you want, but don't show a woman's ass...

Oh no. Hell no. Not here. Check this out--I went to one of the malls last weekend, and they were having a world press photo exhibit. There were all these posters just like the one above scattered across the mall with award-winning photos from news photographers all over the world like the New York Times, Time Magazine, etc. All was well and good until I ran across this set of photographs. They didn't look out of the ordinary until this (below) caught my eye...
Someone had taken paper and blocked out this woman's bikini-clad ass. And when someone pulled that off, someone else apparently used a marker to attempt to black it out. Amazing. And what amazed me even more was that many of these photos were extremely gory, to the point of making one ill--but no one blocked those out with a black magic marker. Let me show you a few...
Here's a nice collage of death and smoke...
And better yet how about a dead baby in a casket?

And if that wasn't enough how about a guy whose arm has been blown off?

It's amazing. Arabs don't give two shits about bad language or about blood and gore. What they do care about is sex, and any hint of it. The photo of that woman was anything but sexual, but yet these narrow minded fucks saw just that--sex.

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I live at 6167 Shaikh Abdulla Bin Khalid Al-Khalifa Ave.


And I'm not joking about that road name. Here's proof. Either the streets here are numbered (i.e. Road 2834) or have insanely long names like this. Try saying this name every time you order food...

And FYI, "Bin" means "son of." And since last names are very important to these people, they always keep an important family name. In this case literally this guy's name is Shaikh (which is a royal title, like King but lesser) Abdulla, son of Khalid who was an Al-Khalifa (the ruling family.)

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Romeo and Juliet, a la 4th grade Arabic kids style

The 4th grade (my homeroom) went on the field trip on one day (see next post) and the other day the 5th graders went. And since I teach both grades, on the off day we had a self contained class because our schedules are intertwined. Did you catch that? Anyway, Rachel and Laurie came up with the idea to do plays with the kids. So after a week of practicing, it was show time. This is me acting with some of Rachel's kids because one of the kids in the play didn't show up. I have a great video of this, but since the internet's so fucking slow you don't get to see it. We were doing a knock-off of the Emperor's New Clothes, but instead of being naked he's bald--hence the green swim cap. Nice.
Here are all the 4th graders in the gym waving at me taking a picture, with Rachel playing crowd control in the back.
And me in full-on action playing my famous geography game after the plays were over.
I like this shot because it shows three different color hijabs--blue, white, and orange.

And finally Laurie helping one of her kids with his lines. Nice TV, Ahmed.

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Field Trips Suck, But Not As Bad As A Normal School Day. Let's Go On A Fieldtrip!!


We took the kids the other week to the King Tut exhibit at the Bahrain National Museum. This is the first time that this exhibit (showing shit from his tomb) has been outside of Egypt, and Bahrain is the only slated stop in the Middle East. So I was fairly excited to go, but not too excited. I have learned that Arabs can really let you down, so in order not to get pissed that the exhibit would be too small or shitty I tried to keep my excitement to a minimum. And lo and behold, the exhibit pretty much sucked. They had enough artifacts to fill about one room, but managed to fill up about 5 by creating a maze that you had to navigate through to get to the next artifact. A royal waste of time, if you ask me. At least I can say I've seen it, though.
This is Rachel's class, at the entrance to the exhibit. They wouldn't allow photography, so I didn't get many pictures. Just inside of this entrance is a guard with an AK-47 that one of my kids thought would be funny to grab as we walked in. I got this look of terror on my face when I saw my kid do it, but to my surprise the guard just laughed. Thank god. That could have been ugly.
After the King Tut bit, we decided to take the kids to a park so they could play some football or whatever on real grass (which is a rarity here.) Luckily, I had the job of going to get the food for them at McDonalds, so I didn't have to ride in one of these cramped busses. Rachel did, though, and got this shot of some of the kids.
Here's the park where we took the kids. You can see a shitload of them off in the distance. And here's me, hot and tired camped out on the ground. I was supposed to be securing the perimeter, but in reality I was just securing my water bottle and entertaining the girls.

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When that veil is really crampin' your eatin'


You can head behind one of these curtained booths, just for that very purpose! This picture was taken at Johnny Carino's, an American Italian joint. Many of the restaurants have these booths that the veiled women can go into to take it off and eat without other wicked, non-family member men seeing them. This lady didn't have the curtain closed, but the booth next to her which was across the isle from us did. I didn't think that this lady was a ninja, but when they got up to leave she put on her veil. Interesting. I don't know why she didn't close the curtain. Maybe she's only a half-ninja. Also, something I didn't catch until I posted this picture is that there is a window into the next booth--so maybe the general population can't see you eat with the curtain closed, but your neighbor in the next booth most certainly can. I just shake my head sometimes...

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A Shitter, A Shower, A Sink--All In A port-a-potty!

You'll see what I'm talking about in a minute. Josh had a get together the other weekend at my old place so I decided to stop by for a bit. This is a photo of Beth, Kate, and Josh (flipping me the bird) on his couch.
And of course, my favorite Indian friend Shamsu was there. The one thing I really miss about that place is him, so it was good to shoot the shit in broken English for a few hours with him. He had this little lighted ball that he was playing with and I manged to get this (what I consider) great picture of him.
And then one of the roommates, past and present. Doug (present), Shamsu and Josh (past). Another great photo, if I do say so myself.
Josh took me up to the roof to show me his satellite dish that flew off the roof a week prior during a sandstorm. Scott and Josh managed to salvage it and put it back up on the roof (notice the huge dent) and amazingly it still works.

So when I lived in the building Shamsu, who lives in what is basically the elevator access room, took shits and showers in whatever flat happened to be empty. But now that the flats are all full, Adel put this little contraption on the roof for him. Basically it's a port-a-potty with a hole in the floor, a shower head, and a sink. Shit, shower, and shave in a 3ftx3ft box! Oh yeah, check out the electrical connection--remember, that's 220 they use here. Unbelievable....
And finally this is what we encountered as we were leaving the party. That greenish Focus is Kates (who drove), and it happened to be blocked in by a guy who abandoned his car with the 4 ways on and a scooter (that had the spare tire tied on). I love this country.

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Adding chaos to a clusterfuck


So I'm going to try a new way of posting . Get this--instead of me telling you about the photos way AFTER I post it, I'll tell you directly underneath the picture!! What a novel concept! So here we go. The other week some asshole from the Khalifa ruling family was supposedly going to visit the school on some sort of "ruling family connect with the common people" pledge. Lovely. Anyway, the guy that was going to show up was a dude named Shaikh Nasser, who is the son of the King or something to that effect. A far cousin, a bastard son, a son from a tenth wife, I don't know who the hell he was (or really give a shit). Can you tell I'm pissed about this? Arabs are all about show, and show we did. The higher ups in the school spent a week hanging fresh new Bahrain flags everywhere, repainting walls, basically candy-coating the school for this dude. Really they were just shy of actually sucking his dick. Our part in this whole get up was to have the 4th and 5th grade kids line up in a tunnel for him to walk through, reminiscent of the one I used to do in band in high school for the football team at the Friday night game. And if this whole ass kissing wasn't enough, the high school was having it's "global village" at the time. This "global village" really was just a bunch of booths set up that the high schoolers had food and various cultural doo dads from various countries. Basically it added chaos to a clusterfuck. This is that dude who's dick the school was sucking. I really like the fact that he's got a satchel made of bullets in a country where guns are illegal. Amusing. That corridor directly ahead is where we were to line up the kids.
The police presence was amazing, the day before this little shebang they came through and inspected the area for sniper points. Nice.


Rachel with some of her girls in the "tunnel."
Laurie with some of her hellions again in the "tunnel."
A good shot of the tunnel. The stairs I'm standing on to take this photo was in the flightpath for this Shaikh dude on the way to the auditorium. The kids in this photo were lucky because they were in the shade, a good majority of them were actually outside in the 90 degree plus heat. And if that wasn't bad enough, they brought us over here to stand over an hour before the scheduled visit time. And if experience has taught me anything over here it's that Arabs ARE NOT punctual people. True to form, this cocksucker was over 25 minutes late. By the time he actually walked through this tunnel, we had 3 girls pass out. And I'm talking THUMP on the concrete pass out--like a sack of potatoes. I was freaking out. I don't know what the hell to do with a passed out 9 year old! One of them Rachel picked up and rushed over to the administrators office to get her water and help--and get this---THEY WOULDN'T LET HER IN EVEN WITH A PASSED OUT CHILD IN HER ARMS!!! Fuckers!! Arabs are all fuckers. Every last one of them. They are so concerned with their goddamn image that they denied an unconscious child access to water and help (because that's were they were preparing the food and whatnot for this cocksucker). Luckily the doctor saw Rachel and was able to help her, but that is still one of the most fucked up things I've seen out here. Now you would assume that the first kid that passed out would have been an indicator to wrap things up and get these kids back into the AC and some water--but no, we stood outside the whole time. Kids were in tears because their friends were passing out left and right. Amazing.
Ok. Calm down Byron. This is our friend Kate in her China get-up. She was helping some of her students with the China booth in the global village and decided to look the part. Little fan and all.
A shot of the global village sign before I assembled the poor souls (kids) in the tunnel.
I'm not. Fuck you, Shaikh Nasser. I don't give a shit who you are, especially if you think you're shit doesn't stink because you were lucky enough to be born into a rich ruling family that made themselves that way by force. (And thank God this blog is private:)
The stage that someone (I don't know who) was planning on dancing on.


This is Naiim, a 5th grade language teacher from South Africa. He's a good guy and is loaded with cool stories--athough I find his accent extremely heavy and hard to understand sometimes, his stories (what I can understand of them) are bad ass.
Here are the administrators and owners of the school getting their panties in a bunch because this dude is finally here (25 minutes late, did I mention that?)
And here he his. Whoopdie fucking doo.
This is Shaikh Nasser and his posse going up the stairs. I took this picture namely because you can see all the different types of thobes (all of which are ceremonial except for the standard white one.)
There's that stage in action, after the Shaikh passed. Something interesting that I didn't catch until I was loading this photo was the banner that said "Welcome to Bahrain" at the top of the stage. Isn't this fucker FROM Bahrain? Last I checked, he was part of the ruling family of Bahrain--why the hell would you welcome him to a country that his family rules? Arabs, besides being full of themselves, are sometimes not the brightest people around either.
This guy emerged from the admin office where Rachel tried to take the passed out little girl. This Indian was hauling ass through the crowd, I'm glad this picture came out. You can see how pretentious this whole fucking thing was.
This is on the way back, you can see the security associated with this dickwad. I like how one is talking to Khalid towards the back of the line.
And the final picture was taken after I finally got my kids back to my room. It was supposed to be reading time, but they were so worn out that Mona and Noora were passed out right in front of me. I totally understood.

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