Day 100 has come and gone

With only 280 or so to go… Well, it seemed like a big milestone at the time…  The Q tip box is getting emptier, but there is still a long long way to go.  On the upside, I have a good shot at getting back home for a few days later in the summer, so life is good.

My newest friends – the ‘mad dogs’ of Bahrain.  Actually, they only bark when you approach them – and I just generally bark back and keep walking on my way.

Am well past the halfway point - in my stay in Bahrain.  Have made a bunch of new friends, including the neighborhood wild dogs.  There are open fields all around my complex (by fields I mean sand and rock  – not grass)  and the dogs hang out there once in awhile.  The first time I saw them, it was still dark as I was trudging to work to catch a 6am flight to Iraq, so it was a bit spooky…  Now I know they are there and as long as you do not get too close to them, they ignore you. 

 Just protecting the mama…

Still cannot get over how much construction there is here.  The part of Bahrain I live in is a suburb of Manama called ‘Juffair’.  The land around where I live was reclaimed from the sea (i.e. they dumped a lot of sand and rock on the ocean floor to make new land), and it is CRAZY how much construction is going on here.  There are at least eight cranes / new buildings going up within a block of my place, and pretty much everywhere you look there are several cranes.  Of course, I hope this place is not near a fault line, as the combo of reclaimed land and local construction practices would lead to a lot of piles of rubble with even a mild earthquake (just my opinion….).  Not much OSHA here, for sure – the sidewalk I take to work has been ripped up for construction for the better part of a month, and there are no barriers or anything.  I also walk by a construction site – a new 15 story building being built next to the sidewalk – and there is nothing protecting people on the ground from falling debris / tools / work materials.  Needless to say, my head is on a swivel walking by…  Finally, one of the many construction sites had a little accident – they poured the second floor concrete slab and later that night it collapsed.  Luckily, nobody was injured, but could have been a mess had it happened during the day.

But, that’s about it for me.  I have one more post on my last Iraq trip, and then things will be quiet for a while as my July Iraq trip was cancelled (boss needed to be elsewhere) and my life is pretty much in ‘Groundhog Day’ mode.   I’m just keeping busy between the job, working out, reading, school (Arabic class and a graduate class at Naval Postgrad School about space / satellites) and a bit of social life.  Nothing blogworthy…