1-Year Lockdown

Food Martyrs

Since most of us can’t leave the compound, we love to complain about the food. Even more, we love to complain about the people who complain that the food is too expensive. Sure, $2.50 is so much to pay for breakfast when they have to bring it all in under sanitary conditions and hire Filipinos so that Osama bin Laden isn’t cooking for us. Sometimes, the mess hall shows sparks of greatness. Everyone remembers the day they had rainbow trout with garlic butter. But mostly, it is what a friend calls “food martyring”.

Food martyring is basically this: You go to the mess hall and look everything over. You don’t want to eat any of it, but at the same time there is no other option, and you have to eat. So you order the grilled cheese sandwich with purple Gatorade… again.

This being a government compound, we also love our acronyms. My current favorite is CAFÉ, also known as Hoochville. CAFÉ stands for Compound Across From the Embassy. I don’t know if I’m more tickled that they felt they needed an acronym for “across the street” or that they added the accent aigu.

Gurkha Porn

So I’m sitting here in my shipping container home (lovingly referred to as a hooch), and the internet is out so this will get posted later. I’ve got my Wii, but I’m stuck on the water temple in Zelda and I need to get to the walkthrough, which requires the Internet. I keep getting 10 copies of each text message that comes in but I can’t turn off the phone because the hooch has no other alarm clock. I’m eating a can of salted cashews I bought yesterday because the PX is closed for inventory, even though the sign on the door says the stock check was supposed to be tomorrow. Somehow, I broke my iPod in transit.

But this is all whinging. The hooch has AC, hot water, and a refrigerator. There might be only two places to eat, but they are cheap and have a decent selection for Kabul. I’ve got a small TV with Discovery, the History channel, and AFN even if the DVD player is missing and so is the remote. As someone said this morning, “at least it’s a nice prison.”

So while I hardly ever mention my job in these posts, it’s all I have here. I can’t leave the compound. Tomorrow, I’ll have some pictures of my hooch. But on to the topic of the day: Gurkha porn. As you can tell, Kabul is one of those places without much to do. We (or rather our contractor) hire Gurkha guards, and they are great at their jobs. But they are also smart enough to figure that our filtering software can’t recognize Nepali. But we do get reports at who is using the most bandwidth, and we go after those people because our links are slow enough as it is. HoochNet, which is our Internet-only network for the residences, has no such restrictions. So my day consisted of cleaning workstations that had illicit downloads.

Fished Out

I went diving on Green Island in February 2006 and was struck by the lack of sealife. I assumed that in the summer things would be better. I can now say definitively that it is not. The only fish left in Taiwan are those small enough to swim through a net. It's disappointing to see overfishing on this scale, and I'm not convinced anyone will wake up in time to save what is left.

Lanyu (Orchid Island) is the larger but lesser-known of the two inhabited islands off the Southeast coast of Taiwan. Six of us went down for a three-day weekend to see what it was all about. There are no direct flights into either Green Island or Orchid Island. One must fly to Taitung and then either take a 25 minute flight on a turboprop or a ferry. It is a 1.5 hour ferry ride to Green Island and 3 hours to Orchid Island. We took the flight, arriving at 1:30 on Saturday. It was too late to schedule any diving, so we had lunch and rode scooters around the island. The island itself is beautiful, with lush green mountains and a rocky coast. That same rocky coast makes for great visibility when diving, with little silt or runoff to cloud the water.

The first dive we did on Sunday morning was a shore dive with a nice swim-though cavern. I bought a new underwater camera housing and flash so I took pictures of almost anything trying to get it dialed in. The other four members of our group are not certified and did an introductory dive, with varying results. Sunny and her boyfriend Pity went first, with Pity being a natural. Michelle had problems equalizing, and Iris took a while to get comfortable. We went back to the guest house for lunch and Vera and I got ready for our afternoon boat dives, during which I got thoroughly sunburned.

The dive sites themselves were fantastic. Nice hard and soft corals, interesting geography, a good combination of pinnacles, walls, and a few wrecks although we didn't have time to do any wreck diving. Unfortunately, the sea life is so depleted that there isn't much to see other than small reef fish, and I think my photos demonstrate that. Taiwan really needs to set up a massive no fishing zone around Green Island and Orchid Island if they ever want to attract foreign tourists. With no fishing, it will still take 10-15 years to recover. Even if they did, who knows if they would enforce a ban? As we returned to port, a local fishing boat was returning. They had caught maybe a dozen fish big enough to sell, and 2 dozen that were undersized. Rather than throw the small fish back, they kept them to eat themselves. No wonder.

Weird Justice

There is much that can be said about the fairness of Taiwan's justice system, but this story just made me smile. The president's son-in-law was convicted of insider trading and was sentenced to six years in jail. He appealed the sentence, and the appeals court agreed the sentence was improper. They ruled he has most likely profited even more than previously thought, and so increased his sentence by a year.

I can't see that ever happening in the U.S., but it still made me smile.   

Filipino Beer

A quick review of the beers of the Philippines ranked in descending order from the mediocre to the terrible. I am sensitive to preservatives and fusel alcohols, and they give me a wicked headache without the drunk. Some of this has to be due to the heat here, which I think affects fermentation temperatures. That, and I always see it being transported from the brewery on the back of flatbed trucks in the mid-day sun.

San Miguel Pilsner (or SMB): The Filipino classic. It's your basic macrobrew pilsner. Nothing about it really stands out, and I guess they designed it that way. Not content as a brewer, SM is involved in everything from mining to fabrics. Their focus on quality is evident.

San Mig Light (SML): The light version of San Miguel tastes like nearly every light beer you've had, except with more preservatives or fusel alcohol. I need about six of these to get a good hangover from whatever is in it. I also need to take a Zantac before my first beer.

Lone Star: "Very warm, robust...with just a buttery high-note of all-weather coolant... and there we go. Darkness." The Texas original, only not. Made under license by the same brewery that makes Colt 45 and Beer Na Beer.

Red Horse: One of the cheapest local beers, the taste drove me to try balut. I don't know if it is any worse than Lone Star. Both taste more like a batch of mixed chemicals than beer.

Not Yet Tried
Colt 45: This veteran of parties beneath a highway overpass is produced under license by the same brewery that licenses Lone Star.
Beer Na Beer: Perfect beer for the Wednesday night cock fights.

So to sum up, your best options will likely be your only options: SMB or SML. If you are really on a budget, skip beer and buy a bottle of Tanduay Rhum.

The Best of TV

Filipino TV has amazed me once again. I've had a bit of a cold this week so I've been spending all my time after work in the hotel. Mostly I try and sleep it off while drinking loads of tea and studying for a certification exam, but when I get a break it is time to catch up on my TV watching.

And the winner this time? Televised cock fights.

They didn't have cock fighting in the part of Georgia I grew up in (so far as I know), so this was all new to me. I don't really see the allure of it, so I guess it isn't for everyone.

Back to Manila

This is my favorite restaurant sign at the Taipei airport. As Gene said, "I don't know how else you would translate it. Gruel is pretty close. But I guess, little girls eat porridge, prisoners eat gruel." It actually translates to congee.

I'm back in Manila for some training, but today is Election Day in the Philippines and everything is closed, so I'm staying in and doing some work from the hotel. Speaking of training, I saw an advertisement for a flight training school where I could get licensed to fly the Airbus A320. It was out of the former Clark Air Base in Angeles City. Regardless of how good the program is, would you ever want to get on a plane with a pilot that learned to fly in Angeles? I know for me, that answer is "Hell no", unless my option is a pilot trained in China, where commercial pilots are those that were forced out of the military flight program and a good landing is anything you can walk away from.

OK, back to uploading pictures. Balut pictures are up, diving pictures are being uploaded, and I'll have Vietnam pictures as soon as I get Vera's memory card.

Embrace the Shame

We were humiliated this weekend in the annual ICRT charity golf tournament. Our foursome shot a 90 in a Texas Scramble (best ball) tournament. I don't even know how that was possible.

That's right. 17 over.

Most of us figure we could shoot in the 90s alone on a good day. I mean, we trailed the field by 10 strokes. I guess our problem was that we didn't have any "A" players. At least we won a dozen balls each for being last.

Update

Vera and I just got back from Vietnam this Sunday after doing the whole Halong Bay, Hanoi, Perfume Pagoda thing. I'm still trying to recover from the kind of scratchy throat that only comes from developing country air pollution. If you don't know it, it can sneak up on you like this one did to me, or it can hit hard in a Shenzhen kind of way. Vietnam didn't get me until the last day, and I still felt pretty good even if my voice is as scratchy as Harvey Fierstein's.

Hopefully I'll have some pictures up soon, but since I have some catching up to do, answer me this:

• Should I post photos from the Philippines?
• If so, should I post the photos/video of me eating Balut?
• If you Googled "balut" because you didn't know what it is, do you regret it?

Good Times

Always a favorite topic of mine, it seems we have two new statue proposals for the former Yugoslavia. Mostar's Bruce Lee statue is old news. We have two new contenders.

First, Zitiste wants to rid itself of bad luck by erecting a statue of Rocky Balboa. Medja thought that was a great idea, so they are planning a statue of Johnny Weissmuller (Tarzan). I think Zitiste could get a discount on Philidelphia's original Rocky statue since the officials at the Museum of Art detest it so much. Apparently it's in storage.

And as a warning for those who believe Internet polling is a good way to judge public sentiment, I give you Budapest's Chuck Norris bridge.