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July 16, 2005

another shopping experience

i ventured out to score barf brand laundry detergent ("super active" "flower fragrance") today, which they only sold in mega-packets of sixteen boxes at a time (for ~€2,50 total) and i donated half to mark who loved it too but i still have so much barf that it's not funny (yet somehow it is). it was this shop where i probably looked like some improbable alien so i got a good amount of attention from sincere :O to some right nasty glares, and this maybe bangladeshi fellow at the counter who i paid to for the stuff took the money, bagged the stuff, and kept my barf hostage, drilling me with a somewhat quixotic if polite manner in minced and mangled english as to where i was from, what on earth finland even was (more precisely if it was close to new zealand and ireland) how i'd liked kuwait, like the traditional arab people, good? and i had to pull this black-belt level gesture on him where i said great talking to you, shook his hand, yanked, thus sufficiently disorienting the elderly immigrant, grabbed my barf bag and ran.

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July 15, 2005

gentlemen, safeguard your valuables

this one goes out to all the finns in the house. as i'm writing this the temperature outside is about 50°C.

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July 13, 2005

strange beings and diverse kinds of fish

so last night me and kalamazoo, michigan's very own mr mark (this guy) had the extraordinary pleasure of hanging out with, and rapping the glass of the tanks of, some seriously fascinating beautiful creatures at the aquarium of the kuwait scientific center. check these out:

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July 10, 2005

detour; gulf

for those who are just tuning in, lately i've actually been reduced to bitching about airlines, which well way meh yes but so check this huh:

the fuck! you know. so as per one expects, KLM got us (i'm travelling with a colleague) as far as amsterdam, which is always good, but not so much out of there, which wasn't too bad either. the fuckups kind of compounded and we followed the flow though so at about the time we were supposed to be in kuwait, we were accidentally in leiden. which turned out to be a tad "eeerrmm.." so we headed back to ams:

BUT. the hotel they placed us into for the night (it was a solid 24-hr delay) was called, romantically, the A4, which four-star establishment had the appeal of like madeira-sautéed toe funk. i won't dwell on that institute of decay any more than to say if you ever get stranded in amsterdam by KLM and they try to foist the whole A4 experience on you, run, don't walk, to a respectable establishment.

howsoever it's kuwait now and everything's all chill. in the sense of the word "chill" where the temperature hovered today at a pleasant 48°C (that's 120F) today and work is batshit nuts and fun. but as ever it's downright out of the ordinary all around like right now there are not one but two engineer type dudes in hotel uniforms who came up to my room in about 30 seconds flat from when i called front desk to ask why exactly--and if this is not the type of thing to complain about in a hotel, what is--the speaker in the bathroom from the TV is not working, because i want to be able to listen to fox news when i'm taking a dump because someone has to.

there's a poster in the hotel elevator saying "above and beyond--it's the marriott way." and this may sound like so much hyperbole but let me give you an example of how literal the exceeding-expectations business is at this joint: we checked in sometime after midnight a couple of days ago, and uncharacteristically one of the things i wanted to do before going to sleep was iron one of my shirts for the first workday. there's a, what do you call it, well an ironing iron i suppose, in the room that says AUTO SHUT-OFF on it. you think you know what that means but ooooh shit no, think "above and beyond": when you plug it in and it not only instantly shuts itself off, along with it go the power to your electronic devices, all the lights in the room. and the air conditioning. it's just the marriott way. (again, engineers scuttle in within seconds as soon as you call front desk about the sitch, fix the fuse, and as they leave they thank you emphatically.)

more reporting to come from kuwait i'm sure, and again, more photo material available at your nearest flickr.

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July 07, 2005

interlude

a little update to an earlier post: in about a week, i got a reply to my angry rant to KLM, and it begins:

Unfortunately we are not able to handle your request by
phone. In order to enroll into the program we kindly ask
you to contact the Flying Blue helpdesk by phone.

on that note, i'm taking off (on KLM natch) to kuwait again, more travel reporting to follow.

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July 04, 2005

teaser: cool viddy coming soon

the estimable tant lay shot a music video for the inestimable rebecca clamp this weekend, some of it using my flat as the set. take a look at the photos, you know you'll want to see this. stay tuned, i'll post it here as soon as tant's got it all put together.

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