Burmese Dinner

Yesterday we were invited to one of the doctor's house for dinner in honor of her birthday. This couple is from Burma (a country currently known as Myanmar), and they live on Ebeye not far from the hospital. The food was amazing and there was way too much of it, so we got quite a few leftovers boxed for us, as the hosts wouldn't leave anything on the table. A younger woman on this picture is their neighbor.
She's also Burmese and her name is Ei Ei. On Ebeye residents of lagoon side and ocean side get electricity for 4 hour periods only and take turns. On this picture you can see how as soon as the light bulb starts shining, Ei Ei hurries inside her house to make the best use of the 6pm-10pm power window. During the World Cup, people here could watch the interrupted AFN (American Forces Network) signal from Kwaj. Due to the power situation, they would have to watch one half of the game at someone's lagoon side house, and then relocate to the neighbor's ocean side house for the second half.

3 am Soccer

After the last call yesterday, which was around 2am, we decided to go kick the ball around. The lights on the field are controlled by a regular on/off switch, like the one in any room. And the best part is, that switch is outside, so anyone can turn it on. The guy on the picture is our friend Josh (who claimed his arm was long enough to take this picture).

Barge Time

It's that time of the month, when a huge cargo barge comes into Kwajalein Atoll, unloads full Matson containers and picks up the empty ones. We wanted to go to Roi Namur this Saturday, but the whole trip was very ill planned, and since we din't make reservations at the airport, there weren't enough seats available on the airplane. So instead, I watched this barge being docked by two tug boats.
These Terexes are used to handle the containers, as well as other huge metal things, which are plentyful on this island. There's quite a variety of heavy machinery here used for cargo handling, construction, cleaning, discovering and blowing up ammo left from WWII. There's also army dogs that sniff people's bags at the airport in hopes of finding drugs and explosives.

Tough Week

This week started out with everything suspiciously working, and the trouble came as soon as Tuesday morning - when one by one most of the rooms would loose network connectivity. After tracing and testing cables and hubs, Conrad was finally able to pin point the broken ports and wires, and now it's all suspiciosly working again. With the help of our Hawaiian friends, I even fixed the wireless network, which is way too good to be true.
A few weeks ago there was a post with a picture of me and a puppy. I got a chance to see the puppy again last weekend, so there's another one. He got bigger, but he's still cute and stupid. He still can't bite the meat - he licks and nibbles:)

Hospital Network

The network here acts up on us like it's its job, which I suppose is true, but it gets really frustrating at times. Things break every day; they don't work in one office, but work in the other; cables and outlets break and get chewed up by rats; entire parts of the hospital get disconnected from the servers; cockroaches that live in power supplies get melted etc. That's in addition to 4-5 power outages a day, while there's not enough UPSs for as much as a quarter of the equipment, and most of them have pretty old batteries. When for some reason the network works properly, the issues with the satellite equipment come in, such as water in the dish motor, or simply bad signal for numerous possible reasons. We are obviously not having enough fun with all this, so we put good old cal9000 printer on the network. Since BUTTERS on Computer24 is less reliable, cal9000 is now our default...

Signs on Kwaj

The airport takes up most of the island's area with the air strip stretching for about two miles. It goes by the golf course (yes, there's a golf course), so that people have to stop playing when some occasional aircraft is landing or taking off. I was obviously not allowed on the strip, as I do not own a secured hat.
This sign gives a rough idea of how far this place is from everything else. Not sure what the reference selection was based on, but now I can safely say that I'm about 2645 unindicated units (miles I'm guessing) from Petropavlovsk, a whooping 7156 uus from D.C., mere 3325 uus from Kodiak (no clue where that is) etc.

Gugeegue Camp

Quite a few members of the hospital staff are managing some sort of a kids camp this weekend, which is at the Gugeegue island a few islands north of us. They invited us to come over, and we ended up hanging out with people from Fiji, Solomons etc. and had a soccer game going on while the food was cooking. I'm not in this picture of cooling down during the break, since no one could figure out how to work my camera...
There I finally managed to picture a more or less decent image of the amazing sunset they get here. The island is a lot more narrow than the ones we're used to, and both the lagoon and the ocean side can be seen from anywhere, unless the palm trees block the view. I wish I had some more camera skills. Or at least more than 32 MB of memory in my camera.

Free Jughed!

There was a mission that terminated in Kwajalein Atoll yesterday which I went to see, but none of the pictures came out. Missions here are pretty much just bright flashes in the sky and a lot of warnings throughout the week all over the island. This picture however makes up for the bad mission ones - it's Jughe'a'd, a 750 pound Bronx Zoo grizzly bear! I guess they spelled it with an 'a' in order to avoid the confusion. This one is kind of an old picture, but one could still see the resemblance. I am wearing my Free Jughed t-shirt btw.

Fishing

This past weekend was once again full of water related activities for me. Besides the usual hanging out at the beach and going sailing, I also had a chance to go fishing with one of the doctors who is known for going quite a bit and winning the fishing tournaments and such. This is the boat we went on - it's much like a water taxi with two 115 Yamaha engines and it can definitely haul!

So when I wasn't busy being seasick or daydreaming I actually participated in catching these two. We also caught a shark, but let it go. That's probably a good thing since there wasn't any place for it to go inside the boat but right next to me and it probably wouldn't die from just clubbing it on the head...

Here's What Happened...

Since I don't have any new exciting pictures of anything, I thought this could as well go up on the blog. There's just too much controversy about this, which is best resolved by a video replay:)

Action Shots

So now that the World Cup is over, the sleep schedule is back to normal (in order to fight back against those who call without bothering to think of a time difference I just unplug the phone for the night). And no matter what they say, the final match wasn't all that dull.

And this is the picture of President Путин kissing some little boy during the visit to Kremlin. I guess it has recently made it to the news due to all the attention Russia gets because of the G-8 summit. Either way, it's pretty funny.

Weekend Entertainment

During the weekend there was a band playing in one of the bars here, which was a huge social event on the island and everyone showed up to listen to some poor covers of most popular American hits. You know how these random cover bands are... It was good time though:-)

Phi Bar

Many people have asked me what this important component of any properly aged Sigma Nu's life lookes like in Marshall Islands. Here it is, in all its beauty. It's called "Ocean View Club" or "Snake Pit" as locals like to call it. Its most striking feature is that it's on the ocean shore of the island, so if it's light outside you can see the ocean, which is sweet. If it's dark you can hear it, but imagining it is usually easy at this point as well.

And this is just a reminder I guess. Do not forget to go to the PHI BAR BEFORE THE FINAL if you haven't already. You only have under 24 hours to do so as of now. FORZA ITALIA!!!

And that's me on an elephant. There're also camels and some other really weird looking things, that may or may not be turtles and perhaps something else. Unfortunately, in addition to geckos and flies this is all there is to wildlife in Kwaj.

Finally, nice weather

After having lots of rain and grey skies, we finally got some sun. As the semi-finals were thoughtfully scheduled so that we still get up early, but miss the last boat, we took water taxis again this week. This is what the world looks like from the back of the parked water taxi. Exciting, I know.

July 4th

After having fun in the sun with our server last Saturday, we had a great 3-day weekend due to the Independence Day celebrations. We were invited to a party at one of the bubble-looking domes on Kwaj, where there was lots of food, drinks, and guitar playing.


Sometime in the midst of it, we discovered a bag of gummy bears! And furthermore, it turned out that pretty much everyone there hates gummy bears. Oh well. I did get the clear ones:)


On July 4th there were various activities, most of which we have successfully slept through as they were happening pretty early in the day and we had a fun night the night before. It rained quite a bit too, but luckily there was still a rain-free window for fireworks, although it did start pouring immidiately after that.