My New Hotel Looks Good In Southern Tunisia

I was told last week that the hotel i will be going to was very good, and today i was given the name and i checked it out on the itnernet, it is a real palace, The Jugurtha Palace. It has 40 Hectares of gardens which is amazing, I am going to have a nice time in that hotel i think, check it out.

http://www.jugurthapalace.com/en/index.htm

Sbikha Tunisia Goodbye, hello Ferriana Tunsia

Well this site is finished and it has been a real challenge and we managed to endure and win, I have been very lucky that i have had a great bunch of guys here working with me and had some great extra training from a really experienced guy who knows these engines very well, the only thing I am going to miss is the two kittens that we have been fattening up for the winter and basically we saved them from starving to death, they were a couple of skinny boney miserable looking ill kittens that without all the extra food we gave them i am certain they would have perished. It has even been said that we should have let them die as who is going to look after them after we have left. Good point but i would have been heart broken if we had allowed them to die, so now we have two really lovely looking kittens who i think will be strong enought to start hunting for themselves and survive the winter, they have been getting so much food that they are going to be the biggest cats in the neighbourhood,

here are the little tigers that i will miss when i leave Sbikha





I am leaving for the next site on wednesday and it is quite remote by what others have said but at least we have another great hotel to stay in, this makes the whole job acceptable and not such a problem. Working long hours isnt a big deal but living in a crappy place with crap food is enought to make one quit and sell ice-cream on the beach back home in lovely Costa Rica, we'll see how it all goes.

Siberian Winter In Tunisia

Yesterday was the start of the winter in North Africa, it was blowing a gale, maybe 30mph all day long but it was the cold rainy biting nature of it which told me that the warm days of summer are now over and i needed to have my cold weather clothing on. we had a late start as it was sunday and when i left the restaurant at 9.30am i was startled by the manager shouting "your bag has arrived", this was the best news i could have heard, it is now nearly 4 weeks since i arrived here and my bag had taken this long to find me, it is full of the work clothing and cold weather jackets and socks and the essentials of travelling. I was as happy as a pig in shit, rooting through my huge bag of 59 pounds and pulling things out and ooohing and aaarghing at finding things that i could wear, it was like christmas all over again.

The job site is over the rushing about stage and we are now into testing the process part, testing valves and fire&gas systems, so things are now as slow as the customer wants to be, we achieved our contractual part of the project, being ready for the 18th and now it is down to the customer as to when he runs the units, everything should be good for them, I found out that i will be moving to the next station up the pipeline towards Algeria. it is a remote plant on the border and the roads towards it are dirt roads and the majority of drivers are gasoline runners, smuggling gasoline into southern algeria and probably other countries in that wild part of the world, our hotel is supposedly a very nice 5 star tourist about 50Km away and this is basically all that is that is important when working anywhere, nice food and a nice bed is that is all required.

My new computer is a Dell and to be honest it is crap compared to the HP i had been using for the last 3 years, the company has decided that Dell is cheaper so now we are all using Dells and they feel cheap and they are working OK but mine seems to have a heartbeat, i play music and it sounds like it is a record player that every record has a scratch on it, i have tried many thing to try and eliminate this irritating problem, i can transfer all my music to an Ipod and they all play perfect but on this piece of crap they sound rubbish, also this computer has decided it has 2 microphones, 1 internal and one rear mounted and the rear mounted one is the one it prefers, it has taken me 8 months to manage to find this out and be able to use Yahoo messenger, yahoo tells me that i am muted and this is not true, i am using it fine, but this goddam Dell machine is trying to kill me. Life with a cheapo machine is not a happy existence. but at least i can download music from the hotel with Limewire, my new piece of P2P software, i never new billy Idol produced so many tracks, 'in the midnight hour' was his finest piece or maybe white wedding.

Addendum To Storm

This morning as we walked in the dark to the car, it was a bit misty and the dew had settled on the car roof, from the local lights you could see the dents that the giant hailstones had created as they bombarded the area, my first ever giant hailstones, and tonight as we were driving home we were given front seats to a fantastic lightning show, amazing streaks that crossed huge distances, I am always amazed by the forces of nature and I feel so small and insignificant in comparison, I wonder why i am alive also, when you sometimes look up at the Milky Way and think about all the alien life that is looking down on the human race and laughing their asses off at us, why is it I am still having to work when I should be selling ice cream on the beaches of Costa Rica.

Rock The Kasbah, Literally

Well last night as we left the plant very early 7pm, we trying to avoid the giant thunderstorm that was tracking towards us, there was huge lightning strikes flashing across large parts of the sky, all very pretty, so we rushed back to our hotel called the Kasbah, as we were all sitting having dinner about 8pm we saw what looked like a water fountain display in the pool, large bubbling explosions was happening all over the pool, so we all jumped up to look out of the windows and saw what i can only describe as a wonder of nature, we had golf ball sized hail stones bouncing around the pool area and splashing in the pool, i would have taken a picture but it wouldn't have looked much in the dark. the storm rumbled on for a while longer then turned to a downpour of rain, i went to bed later on at 9pm and thought nothing of the storm until i got up next morning and saw it was still raining cats and dogs and the storm was still rumbling all around the town. When we went to the jobsite we tried to outrun it but it caught us this time and we were pounded all the way (50Km) to the site, luckily it dispersed as we got there so we had a dry sunny day but the site was all muddy, this did actually bring out the wildlife and we saw these little toads hopping about the place and to say this is a very dry country i was surprised. little things please little minds i suppose,

Work Work Work, I dont Like It

well this is my first proper job in about 4 years, I am actually working as the start up engineer on a revamp of 3 turbo-compressors in the central region of Tunisia, it is a real job working about 10 hours a day and a couple of hours driving and lunch, making a 13 hour day, so its dark when i leave and dark when i get home. This is not acceptable, i dont want to work for a living, I just want to mess about and point my finger at people, I have been spoiled this last couple of years and now i am working it is hard to accept the cold reality of real work.
Anyway, the hotel is nice and comfortable and the food is really nice and very different and even exotic, i havent had any problems with the food bowel wise and this is a massive bonus, as anyone who had worked overseas knows, trying to work when having the shits is no fun, plus it makes oyu feel miserable but here i am Ok apart from the lack of sleep, getting up so early is a killer.

I actually went out to a small town on the coast for a few beers on saturday night, i wasnt sure what to expect, but not hordes of middles aged German women, it looked more like downtown middlesboro, with all these large wrinklòy women probably looking for some north african stud to give them a good sorting out, we laughed a lot and drank the beers in happy hour and when we asked for more beer they arrived with a bucket of ice with a bottle of vodka and cans of red bull, telling us we had to pay 100 dinars, about $80, we told them to go and screw the local donkey, and left for the next bar across the road, which was OK and had more old european women in it and lots of young north african studs looking to score, not a site you would think of as Africa, we left and arrived home at 3.30 am, this was not good as we had to get up at 7 for a late start on the job on Sunday, i was beat but i again put in a good 6 hours work before i flagged and my brain felt spongy,

I only saw it at night but it looked like all the other placves here, lots of dogs and plastic bags in the gutter, cinder block houses with flat roofs and a miserable idea of what a good house looks like



We have a very tight schedule and all things have to be completed in 10 days time and they have 1 of the compressors apart and tons of things to do, we may eb ready we may not, but i know that when we are done i am going to another more remote station in the desert but again we have a nice hotel about 50 Km away, i can see nothing but work and more work ahead for the next 6-8 weeks, but i have to try and think about the money after the dollars fall and my small pay rise i have basically had a 20% rise this contract and that will go along way in Costa Rica, I shall have my little holiday to a nice Ecolodge Hotel when i get back at christmas