Thursday, October 23, 2008

When ingenuity goes horribly awry...

Ahmed and Abbas, our two maintenance men onsite at our housing complex are a plucky if somewhat haphazard team of handymen. They don't let their limited tools and skills impinge upon the hasty completion of any task, no matter how marginal the outcome. To their credit, they are always happy and upbeat. At least, their non-verbal clues lead me to that conclusion, because Ahmed especially speaks such a staccato patois of Nile Delta village Arabic, that even Michelle, who is nearly fluent in spoken Arabic, usually just gives up on conversations after a minute or so. I take a strange sort of encouragement from that.

Anyway, they can be pretty inventive in their solutions. A week or so ago, our washer/dryer combination (which really doesn't dry, it just somehow superheats our clothes into a steaming creased crumple - I've considered taking clothes out with tongs) suddenly stopped working. So I called Ahmed and Abbas over. After pulling off the top, checking the switches, the wall fuses, they pulled the unit out away from the wall and Abbas began to remove the wall plate. Not being particularly electrically literate, I figured maybe there was a fuse in the wall plate. I asked Ahmed what they were doing. The only phrases I caught were "lots of these" and "back in five minutes." I figured they would return with a new wall plate. Five minute later, they were at the door carrying in a new washer/dryer. They explained to Michelle that since it was the weekend and the appliance company was closed, they just took a unit from another apartment that was still empty. We were happy with their can-do attitude. Ten minutes later, we had a brand new washer/dryer. Brilliant.

Our next incident came up when Connie, our cleaning lady, ironed our front curtains and was kind enough to even put them back up. Unfortunately, Connie, for all her diminutive size, is a proverbial Cape Buffalo in the china shop. That evening, Michelle asked "why is our curtain rod hanging lower - it wasn't like that before, was it?" I, of course, hadn't noticed (I'm convinced I eventually would have).

So I went out to get Ahmed, who was soon up on our stepladder, pulling the right sconce of the rod out of the wall to reveal a much larger hole in the plaster than the plastic screw plug that had been holding the rod up. In the process, he also hadn't unscrewed the other sconce end of the rod completely, so as he twisted the rod to remove the curtains, he etched a nice corkscrew design in the left side of the curtain rod. At this point Michelle asked what his plan was. Ahmed explained calmly that he would just make a hole under the too-big hole that obviously hadn't been working. As a shower of plaster fell on the floor, Michelle tried to explain that having the curtain rod level was equally as important as having it stay in the wall.

Ahmed seemed nonplussed. The problem, of course, was that the curtain rod was going to fall; his solution promised to rectify the situation. The fact that our curtains would then be listing ten degrees to starboard was immaterial. At this point, Michelle retreated to the entry hallway, doing an excellent pantomime of pulling her hair out. Meanwhile, I had a perfect view of Ahmed simultaneously struggling for balance on the stepladder while he lost his grip on the curtain rod itself, which went swinging down like a pendulum (missing our iPod dock, luckily), and I thought to myself, they pay people good money to come up with this stuff for sitcoms, and I have it happening in my living room.

Eventually Ahmed's solution was to take three or four screws and put them in around the plastic plug. The curtain rod was actually just about level too. When he started to try and undo the tiebacks, I started fearing another catastrophe, and said don't worry we'll get that later - Michelle through in a few al-hamdullahs for good measure. We were all smiling, and then Ahmed decided that to allay any fears about the quality of his work, he'd tug on the curtains to prove how solid they were. And so we were back to ten degrees to starboard. We smiled and shooed him out of the house, and now, two weeks or so later, the curtain rod hasn't fallen. So far.

Saturday, October 18, 2008

When Green Mosques aren't green, and you see camels instead of sheep

Driving here is one part improvisation, one part planning, and one part faith. I recently had to drive to the edge of town to pay our fee for having our cat, Iris, relocated. I was given a map. It looked vaguely (but not comfortingly) like the kind of pirate map pointing cryptically to some buried treasure, or the maps drawn in the beginning of fantasy books.

In this case, my goals were a bit more prosaic, and my landmarks were, in order: a green mosque, speed bumps, the end of the road, and some kind of rectangular building labelled "sheep." First, the green mosque - which turned out to be a mostly white mosque with green trim. Close enough, and I made an educated guess/leap of faith and made my turn there. Next were speed bumps, which are pretty hard to miss, and did not provide any problems. The end of the road was easy enough, but considering that as soon as the road ends, you have open gravel and sand, and given any possibility of driving outside of driving lanes, Qataris will do so, given 180 degrees of freedom leads to a maze of tracks. So I followed the map, and wound around a couple derelict buildings. Now for the sheep - only problem was that the only livestock to be seen were camels, tended by Bedouins in dark goat-hair tents. So I headed for the only patch of irrigated green and trees, and of course called the owners of the pet relocating business, who pointed me to their place of business. Of course I didn't even bring up the lack of sheep issue; it would be a bit peevish, and just didn't seem tasteful on so many levels...

Monday, October 6, 2008

Finally, into the desert and gulf

After a couple weeks of moving madness (more on that later) we finally made it out to the desert proper on a daylong desert safari with Toyota Landcruisers. After about an hour heading south, past some pretty heavily protected and isolated oil fields and refineries, and a random camel now and then, and voila, we had run out of room in Qatar (kinda reminds me of Jersey) and were looking across an inlet to Saudi Arabia (no worries, that's as close as we got). 


Then it was back across the desert for some "dune bashing" which at times felt like being on choppy seas, and at times felt like the big drops at the rollercoaster. Except you could actually imagine the Land Cruiser flipping end over end, and there was no minimum height requirement - I always hated those;). 

Of course no such thing happened, and it was just good plain adrenaline. After which we headed over to a beach camp where we got to frolic in the Persian Gulf. It was nice to be back in warm (bathwater warm) ocean water, in early October no less. 

Hopefully we'll have a couple more months of this kind of weather, but everyone says it's going to get "cold" soon. I think that means 80 during the day and 55 at night, which actually will feel cold I think, since I barely notice 95 anymore. It's all relative I guess. Anyway, we'll be stocking up on space heaters (seriously) so as to not be caught burning our Kleenex for heat (not so seriously). Until then, I'm going to enjoy the weather as much as I can.


Saturday, October 4, 2008

Far from the Black Forest

I've stumbled across the pinnacle of all Anglicized names. While in a book store which also sold art supplies, I was shopping for an easel, and asked the nice Philipino man in the art section if the floor model I liked was the only one or if they had any others in stock (I'm quickly realizing that if you find something you like, buy it, or buy several, because you may never see them again). 

Then I looked at his name tag. Hansel Rivera. I fine Teutonic name for someone whose last name would go better with, say, Mariano, or even Geraldo. I had no idea that Brothers Grimm was so popular in the Far East. I never thought I'd ever meet someone named Hansel anyway, even travelling through Germany or Austria, but to have done it here... 

Now I almost feel compelled to search Qatar until I can find Gretel. It's possible. But it would be easier if all residents were all required to wear our ID in nametag format. And it would be more fun.