My Hopeless Spanish and Flu

I had a slow relaxing rest of the week waiting for permission to fly on the Monday which never came and I started just enjoying what I had left of my break at home, Monday morning arrived and I had a crappy nights sleep thinking I was going to miss the taxi as always and got to the airport with loads of time to spare, I landed in Lima only 10 minutes late and I was surprised to find the airport basically on the beach. I assumed it was up in the Andes somewhere like Quito, I got off the plane and found not a cold wintery place as I was told by several people but a sunny and very pleasant place, I went to customs with my brand new visa and he was put to attention by it and didn’t even bother looking through the rest of the passport he stamped it and I was waived on my way far better than the corrupt thievery of Malabo airport. I was met at departure by a very helpful guy who assumed I spoke Spanish as everyone did and I had to ask him to slow down his talking as it was just rambling to me. He guided me away from the nasty pirate white wrecks of taxis in the rank and was calling someone on the radio, mine turned up a larger ramshackle Kia with a throbbing exhaust. He was pleasant and didn’t smell, he tried talking in English which made me feel ashamed that I could hardly string 3 words together for him, we laughed a few times and it killed the 30 minutes to get to the hotel in central Lima, I was shocked again by how big the country was and how developed it was, quite unlike I was expecting, they even obeyed the red traffic lights and there was traffic police everywhere. Very civilised I thought, no signs of abject poverty, just shops and houses like any big city but they did have bars on the windows like San Jose. The hotel I went to was pretty large 7 floors and it was more like small apartments , but with a bath in the living room which I thought was very silly, I had wireless LAN and meant I could surf in bed, I checked mail and was summoned to go to the main office of the company here and it was in the huge tower block next door , which was the BBVR bank offices, very impressive I had to show all my Vaccinations and I picked up my Medical Pass which is actually my travel document for the Malvinas site. I went back and went for a sandwich on the rooftop restaurant. It was great but they took so long and I was starting to go past the hunger. I ate a huge Bacon lettuce and tomato along with a fried egg and tons of cheese on it, why it was so big I don’t know I felt stuffed. I went back to my room and somehow felt really strange, I started shivering even though it was still warm but as soon as the sun went down I felt really cold the sun was deceiving and it was a winter’s day after all. By 9 o’clock came around I was stone cold and shivering and couldn’t get warm , I went to bed fully dressed and pulled all the blankets and covers up onto me , it took me maybe 30 minutes to get to sleep even though I was dead tired from having so little sleep the previous week. I woke up when it was still dark and felt refreshed , I looked at my clock and it gave me the wrong answer, 12.30pm, I had only had a couple of hours sleep but I was past sleep already, I hooked up the laptop and got on the wireless LAN again and did all my mail, telling everybody that I had arrived and the hotel was OK , the place was very dusty and it looked like this part of South America has very little rain , and in fact the Attacama desert is around here somewhere. I did a few things, I was hoping to find out how to copy a windows XP installation disk and get it to work properly, and I found out from reading a few selected items that I already had the necessary software but I didn’t know how to work them correctly as usual, so I tried to memorise the stuff and failed to copy things to my laptop, it has been acting a little funny since I cleared out what I considered lots of old installation junk from the initial setup but I did damage the office setup, it kept asking for the installation disk but would work if you cancelled it often enough, so I did learn how to create a boot CD in the we hours of the morning, I finally decided to take a valium as I could see this turning into an all night waking thing and I really needed some sleep, I did wake up really sweating from all the clothes I was wearing and I had slowly thrown them all off, I went back to sleep for about 3 hours with a full valium inside me, I woke up feeling like shit as normal and went for a breakfast but I felt dreadful and aching all over I had picked up the virus my stepson had at home and I was travelling to a site where I thought I had read that they would refuse to accept me if I was showing symptoms of illness, so not as to possibly expose the local native Indians to some strange virus that could wipe out the entire village like the Spanish did 500 years ago. So had fruit juice for breakfast in the freezing roof terrace and waiting in my room for the taxi at 9, I got to the airport, a rather large new one and was ushered to the queue and showed my travel pass and was given a bus ticket, that is what it looked like anyhow, we boarded at 11 and was told it was a 1.5 hour flight , when we took off all I could see was low level fog and as we went further inland the mountains started to appear and it was all dry and barren , the only thing visible was the few trees existing in the river valleys. We got higher and higher and started seeing some white capped mountains but nothing worth taking pictures of, those were as I flew into Lima. So I took a few as we were about to land and of the huge river that passes our site.
I was totally unaware of what I was coming to when I asked for the job in Peru , only that it was day shift and it was a lot closer to fly to, so when I got off the short charter flight that landed on the jungle strip easily seen from the Aerial photo I have added, I was surprised to find the temperature very pleasant, something like an English summer day, we got a bus to the camp and I was met by my back to back, he showed me the office, and my accommodation, and yes I am being treated like a professional and I have a better quality room and I am treated like a professional and not a goddam peasant as I was by Marathon oil. The camp is very clean and the food is very nice but typical Peruvian, lots of rice and beans and chicken every meal if you want , even rice soup for breakfast which I like as it is the only thing I fancy eating while I am feeling like shit with this flu. My introduction to the plant was very nice, I was told I go and do training several times a week and only go to the main control room to take data for the office back in Florence and when they have problems. This is purely a supervisory position and I feel very happy with it, the only big stumbling block is my lack of any tangible Spanish language. From the first conversation I was lost like an overboard sailor, bobbing in the turbulent see. I knew I had to learn quickly but this is shocking for me. I can understand what they are basically saying but for me to string a few words together is impossible, and they probably are laughing there ass off at me but not to my face yet, once things have settled down and they open up to me then things will change. I have several contacts who I will deal with all the time and one has excellent English as he studied in Portsmouth. Small world isn’t it. So I am garbling rubbish to everyone and using my tried and time tested few phrases to ask for everything. I have been twice to the docs and trying to explain what I am suffering from is so difficult, I have been referring to the translator program a lot since I got here. My back to back was with me 2 days to hand over everything and he comes back on the wrong day so this means I have to change my flights already. When I got up this morning after another terribly wrestles night with coughing and barking all night long probably keeping all my neighbours awake, I felt like death and had been feeling cold all night long and when I got out of the accommodation I realised why, it was freezing outside, that is a relative freezing, maybe down to 55 or even 50, I was shocked, I had to go back inside and put on a vest, I was shivering all the way to the canteen, soup again. The units have been tripping since I got here and I have had to attend several meetings to address the problems , I thought I would change tactics on the issue, I said we need to have a trip reduction plan, to look at all software options to see if we can eliminate all sources that are unnecessary and perhaps give me an easy life. I got the impression that I was talking exactly what they wanted. They loved the idea of being able to avoid lots of problems without doing hardly anything. so I have got them eating out of my hand and I have only had 2 meetings and cannot speak Spanish, just what I wanted. This project is going to be a great one for me I can tell apart from me feeling like death with the flu and not sleeping yet. Print Article
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