August 01, 2005

r.i.p. ravi kanodia

it was so not your turn to go, man.

shit. as if there's words.

NOTE: Unfortunately I have had to close comments on this site, despite the amazingly warm words people have left on this page in Lav's (Ravi's) memory. Please contact me directly at the email address keltanen [at] gmail [dot] com if you wish to add a few words to others' here. -m

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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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June 19, 2005

travel report, a touch belated

picture a mid-sized to large swath of low, unassuming, matter-of-fact concrete buildings¹ worn out by sand and heat to a jaded desert camo, standing en guard between the supersalinized, desaturated-turquoise gulf water and sand² blanketing by most modern estimates five and a half thousand googolplex bananamillion barrels of crude. to this vista beam from high orbit a collection of gleaming modernist structures in a kind of "playing simcity while high" style zoning plan, as well as a striking seaside installation of three trinkety orbs unevenly skewered two and a half decades ago on as many overlarge sis. add the amir’s disappointingly unadorned, if mind-bogglingly expansive, palatial situation, guard posts at every gate actually armed with unambiguously no-bullshit tripod-mounted machine guns, emphatically not inviting one to—to pick an example at random—walk up and point out "if photography is illegal, how do you justify all those security cameras?" and random maniacally western stuff like doghouse-sized subway sandwich kiosks, marble-glass-and-steel built speckless halogenic post-malls & cet ad n.

welcome to kuwait. please observe, as we trust you have, there is no photography allowed, nor gambling, alcohol or performances of non-arabic music, but also no:
- way you’ll stay alive outside in the sun for two hours. in fact we would like to dare you. sir;
- sense of social solidarity between classes or indeed any ideal of equality³;
- chance you can get anything like a decent connection on your mobile⁴.

on the way outstanding side of the scale, kuwaitis⁵ can put together a mean hotel (..if ours was at all representative), people we worked with at our client company tended to range from cool in my book to nothing short of absolutely wonderful (shouts to gwen, rimi and ravi for pretty much everything, extracurricular assistance in cultural affairs and mind-bending hospitality⁶, respectively), and food (especially indian and lebanese) is on the whole copious, outstanding and often dirt cheap.

i totally want to go back.

¹ about every three blocks one of the lower buildings would be a beautifully ornate (if externally indistinct color-wise) mosque, bafflingly to a western its minaret often pimped out on bright green neon lights. you sense these towers, usually the equivalent height of a small number of imaginary stories were probably the conspicuous skyline landmarks of a time before the teleportation in of the much larger, moneyed, dwarfing hulks of now. also, the muezzins' prayers freak the unaccustomed foreigner straight out by just being so damn stirring and for the record, some of us more soulless europeans don't like performances in public space that straight up grab you by the heart and go "listen up man, this is serious", thank you very much.

² re sand think frank herbert, except the country is like what, 0.1% the size of russia.

³ for a european brought up in state-sponsored warm fuzz, specifically one from a country of little if any serious old money, absolutely no unstoppable influx of fractional-native-wage immigrant labor or other class distinction contrast boosters, all the hardcore segregation shit is startlingly apparent and imbues one with a subtle insecurity as to what, historically, kuwait is smoking.

⁴ –an extra noodle-boggle in context of how big kuwaitis seem to be on their mobiles

⁵ "kuwaitis" here means, retardedly, "people of questionable nationality and intent, obviously physically stationed at the time in kuwait" but regarding a country where the groups "people" and "citizens" are something like polar opposites, i would like to assume requisite leeway, plead "foreign tool" and get on with it.

⁶ right, hospitality deserves a special mention. it's cool enough to be invited by a resident to go fishing in the weekend, but when it's "bonsai sea-murderer on line one, please hold" and you were by the way swimming there five minutes ago, it's like getting a full set of the fantods for christmas.

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June 07, 2005

kuwait pics

btw i'm uploading at least the majority of my kuwait pics to flickr, you can see them here. i'll reserve this space for anecdotes and flickr links.

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that's roughly what i'm talking about

i'm working from my hotel room today. i'm on the 4th floor; the building has maybe 40 floors. 21 of them are for hotel rooms, anything above that is inaccessible for mortals.

i strolled down to reception and asked if, you know, i they'd have any rooms available higher up in the building that i could, essentially, upgrade to, pref at no cost natch. and fuck if they didn't: i'm moving to the 21st floor as soon as they clean my new pad. "but it's a two-bed room. is that ok with you?"

update: pictures below

room:

lost the sheik size bed--damn!

view from window:

the minibar, however, is still the saddest i've ever seen.

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June 05, 2005

hit the deck motherfucker! orange juice, sir?

i have this big "to do" list in life, of which i just crossed out "cause one of those 'is there a doctor on board?' situations".

i thought i was so well rehearsed in hungover travel i'd be impervious to the ill effects of flying after getting absolutely shitfaced and not sleeping. oh but no.

i was half asleep on the plane, started to get all sweaty and woozy. i was too out of it to realize what was happening, i just had a general "shit what is this i've been here before and i just know this sucks" kind of feeling. i got up because i have no idea why, and basically dropped dead there. i was given hindu cow oxygen and basically a full medical: there were tons of eager doctors on board who were brutally elbowing each other to access me to run tests, any tests. over-enthusiastic doctor lady #1 who was seated nearby started by checking my pulse, which was great because i, not being a medical professional, would never have thought that maybe, just maybe, the cause of my fainting was death. turned out my blood pressure is like sixty over five and the german 70's leftover blutglucose hobby kit (something wicked this way comes!) pegged my blood "trocken".

in an unmistakable airline syllogism, because i was suspected of being not alive, me and co-travelling colleague xavier were bumped up to business class. of which he thanked me by asking me to faint before lunch on the next flight.

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June 02, 2005

here. you throw this away

i got a couple of these flyers with this heart-rending message on them:

"We Seek God's Assistance
Central Bank of Kuwait"

so God, if you read this: you may not know this (oh, actually you probably would. but still), but the central bank of kuwait is so far up shit creek without a paddle that you're the only one who can help them. thanks bye

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