Been a few days...

Sunday night (Dec 23) was our christmas dinner. Somewhat fancy seafood restaurant, all of us there plus a bunch of the locals we work with here and some of their family. Sounds like it was really expensive, but having good relations with business partners is valuable. Also good to see how we all mingled fairly well, not just each group sticking to itself. Mustafa and I had chosen the table with the couple younger ladies.

Monday was a mega wasted day. Did some work in the morning, holy crap does it get hot working in an enclosed area in hot humid weather with semi-formal clothes! Once it was done our FBO contact invited us for a drink. That was around noon. The pitchers came and were consumed, then more came and were consumed, then more, then more and more and more. I can't imagine how many. Noone wanted anymore, but still they came. People wanted to leave, but still the drinks came. So we mostly stayed, don't want to offend our host. I wasn't even drinking so I was especially bored. There was karaoke and a coworker was doing lots of crazy drunken singing. I got pressured into singing a couple. At least noone else was around, and the system was such that you couldn't tell how bad you were. It's kindof fun to try to sing bahasa malaysia songs. Played a bit of pool where I demonstrated my total lack of skill. A girl who works at the FBO joined us, and at one point she asked that I sit next to her! Of course, that's only cause a more inebriated coworker was acting a bit inappropriately and making her uncomfortable. Anyways, we were there from noon till well into the evening, the longest I've ever stayed at a bar. And I was especially annoyed cause I'd wanted to go home and then go to the Hyatt again to try again talking to the singers I mentioned previously. I actually was going to just leave, but got encouraged to stay. Later on there was some weird stuff which left me kindof confused and with mixed feelings.

Tuesday was pretty tired all day. And really unhappy for much of it too actually though that mostly cleared up. I'm sure I did some work sometime, didn't go out and have fun. Had to go to bed early, cause wednesday we start flying. Didn't feel like Christmas at all. A couple coworkers had their indonesian wives over for christmas (yeah I'm the weird one here who isn't in a serious relationship with an indonesian met on a work rotation, but I guess I'm still pretty new) but I still had Christmas dinner with a coworker. At an indian restaurant.

He's really a good guy, it's too bad that he's one of the ones who's job was eliminated.

Wednesday, first flight taking off at 6AM, meaning leave hotel 5AM meaning wake up and prep 4AM. Right away had some problems, but luckily it was a failure of a backup system that shouldn't matter. On the flight everything worked pretty well. Interesting here we talk to ATC when taking off, then we pretty much do our whole mission and start talking again as we're coming back. Back in the US, were notifying ATC of every single turn, and switching between controllers as we changed regions, etc. Too bad flightaware doesn't track outside north america, I'd have liked to see our flight path, we did a couple loops and stuff. Hit some turbulence that almost threw me out of my seat, was kindof exciting. Big commercial planes would probably barely have felt it... like in WW2 when the Queen Mary ran over the Curacoa and the passengers didn't even notice. Anyways, when it's smooth, somehow feels really 'floaty', moreso than it did on the jet, not sure why.

Landed, second flight went, then back to the hotel where it seemed there was continuous work to do, on and on, except for a few minutes to call calgary to say merry christmas. Went back to the airport in the evening when the second flight landed, to do a short simple task which of course took much longer than expected, and then we got mega-rained on.

Got to bed finally about 11:30pm, with the usual 4am wakeup. Writing this blog post on the flight.

Obviously still haven't gotten back to talk to my singers. (yeah that's right, MY singers!)