Living almost Normally

Well life here is a stark change from the jungle camp in Peru, the food is pretty good and what I would call normal food, not peasant food. There are vegetables and fruits and gravy and ice-cream, plenty of fries and most important of all there is a clubhouse with a pool and a bar with cheap beer. This let's you do something after work, you can chat and let your hair down and make conversation, and for me some chance to talk in English. I was very isolated in Peru and that was almost depressing. But here I can mix and practice my Spanish at my leisure, there so many nationalities here, covering all the world basically, with the main contractor pulling all the best people from all over the world. So this weekend was quite entertaining, I went over to the Marathon clubhouse Friday night and met all my old buddies and as it was happy hour 7-9pm, strange happy 2 hours actually. We drank many beers and joked and told silly stories until late into the night. Only problem was that I had to walk back to the other camp along the lonely road at night, whilst staggering, good thing it wasn’t raining and there is not many robbers inside the camp.
The work onsite is pretty interesting, this is my first Liquid Natural Gas project and is a very impressive plant,

the compressor station with 6 gas turbine air inlets



the compressors are pretty enormous and I feel quite proud to be working for the company that is producing them.

the huge methane gas compressors




We are here as supervisory staff only so I am observing only, I like this and could get used to it. The most fantastic item on the plant is the huge pipe-bridge and it is very long maybe 300-400 meters.

the giant pipe-bridge to the tanker loading station




It just shows you how much money is being spent here and how much money is going to be made out of the international LNG market.

here is my small Frame 5 Turbine Generator set



I am still lost on how long I am going to be at this site and when I am going to Russia. It is going to be great on my Airmiles. I spent Saturday doing some office work but mostly getting my bird book up to date and making some other minor changes to the layout and inserting the latest pictures I have. I never realised how long it was all going to take. I thought I had found a company to make all the CD’s for me but they have not replied, I checked out their website and it looked from the pictures that they were working out of somebody’s house, complete with iron railings outside, all very funny.
Sunday was spent just chilling and relaxing and an early start at drinking, and I drank and chatted all afternoon until the evening, and then after dinner more drinking, I was pretty drunk and I got a light headache that never left me all night and when I got up this morning it was still there a little but after 1 litre of water it has mellowed to almost knighting thankfully, I am not sure that having access to cheap beer has many benefits other than giving me a laugh while drinking. We will see what the rest of the week brings, the project manager keeps banging on about how I need to produce a plan with all necessary steps on it, he doesn’t want to know if we think we will keep to the schedule just these goddam steps he needs to tell his boss, all so pointless and a waste of my time. This is how all main contractors talk these days, how to appoint blame for delays and how can they claim money back from the vendors for being late.