Will it Ever End

Today was the end of my second week in Florence and there is no sight in end to me being here, things have gone from hopeful to hopeless. Not that I am complaining, life here is not bad, had a football game and a night out with the guys from the office at an open air sort of eatery come bar thingy, it was in a spare room at the local modern art museum and it was not bad , as long as the weather is good of course, food was minimal and wine was acidic to the point of puking but here in Italy drinking is for just wetting the tongue and not getting drunk so we had two glasses of wine and a glass of vodka and orange. So my arrangements for travelling to Russia have ground to a halt and we cannot contact anyone as they are on holiday and we don’t know when we can get a meeting to press them for an invitation letter for the visa and I have only two weeks left before I have to go home for my rotation, things are getting close to the point that I will go home after achieving nothing and doing nothing other than copying and pasting a few docs into some other form and adding my project name to the front page. I have now run out of things to do and I am not sure how I am going to fill in 40 hours next week, the other thing is I am losing money on this as I normally work 84 hours a week and here I am only doing 40, I am working for half pay, crap really, but as I have found out that I can only work in Russia for no more than two rotations, as the company I work for doesn’t have an office there and I cannot therefore get a work visa but I can get a 2 entry business visa, this suits me fine as I don’t want to be there for the winter months. I did get to meet some bigwigs from Exxon with an old buddy from the project in Equatorial Guinea, he introduced me and I told them I was already working on an Exxon project and they was suitably impressed and I am sure I am going to get onto the giant Qatar project. It will be sometime about October or November and this seems perfect for a nice warm winter in the city of Doha. Maybe getting a house sorted out for some proper living for once in about 15 years of working in this contracting game. This weekend I am looking at going to Pisa and look at that crazy bell tower and maybe the weekend after that I will go to Venice and take a million pics , it is easy by train so I have been told. We will see what happens, as all field engineers know life is a bitch and then you die.