What Is An Expat?

I got to looking at some stuff and realized there were a few gaps in the Ozymandias information. Sometimes I wonder if I should spin that off into something of it’s own but for now I was content with just adding some stuff. I used to have another page on the old website, so long ago, with information on some of the pretend-Ozymandias folks on the net at the time. There were a whole lot less back then. Check out The Other Ozymandias with some details on what’s out there now, some of which is fairly surprising.

I suppose that some of you who didn’t know me from the online gaming days, or know about the Oz character from that time, The Unreal Ozymandias might enlighten you. It might also concern you, but there it is.

Ack! I just noticed that some of these pages are a lil’ off in Internet Explorer. I hate IE sometimes, on account of it sucks. I pretty much stick with Firefox, as it’s a much better browser.  I’ll try and work on cleaning that up here before too long.

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7085597.stm

A bridge under construction has collapsed in Dubai, killing seven workers and injuring 15, police said.

The bridge was being built in Dubai Marina, a new development in the United Arab Emirates city which is a regional business and tourism hub.

A large number of ambulances were driving to the scene of the accident.

Dubai’s economy has boomed in recent years, fuelled largely by a construction industry reliant on low-paid workers, many from South Asia.

More than 40 labourers were working on the bridge at the time of the collapse, police said.

This is a shame. You have sooo much construction going on in Dubai and such poor standards that things like this happen far too often. Add in the fact that the workers often get paid late or not at all, and precious little in the first place while paying an agent an exorbitant fee to get them a visa and a job in the first place. Then they find that they don’t get paid what they were told and owe a hefty sum while the contractor holds their passport, so even if they could scrape up the money they couldn’t leave.

Dubai has many things going for it, but humane treatment of the workers building it sure isn’t one of them.

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Apparently I never wrote this one first. Oops.

Sitting in the chow hall the other day — ok, it was well over a month ago. Probably close to two. Anyway, I’m sitting there minding my own business and enjoying the tasty, delicious food that the serving guys just can not give you reasonable portions of, and by that I mean you’ll get 2-3 times what you want unless you’re an absolute pig, idly watching people come through the door, as I do, when in walks a dude who looks awful familiar. And he did, because Jason is an old friend from both the high school and college days! Hell, he was even a Bushido Brother with me and Matt.

That was pretty neat, because while you run into people in those various kinds of work fairly often, particularly ones you’ve met IN that line of work, but it’s the first time something so unexpected happened. It was really cool catching back up. Jason mentioned that he’d looked for me recently, but hadn’t found anything. I guess it didn’t help that I moved a lot further out from home than most folks usually do. I’m a lot harder to find, being way over here instead.

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Yesterday at lunch we ended up sitting near some Army folk who struck up a conversation. As it turns out, the SFC was from Tifton GA. That’s not too far from “home” but even more interesting was that the captain doing most of the talking was from Martinez GA, quite literally down the street from where I did most of my growing up in Augusta. We pointed out several locations of mutual interest, and it turns out we’d both moved north of Atlanta — I moved to Roswell my senior year, he moved to Alpharetta sometime before that. It’s really the same area, since I’d lived way up at the very edge of town, where Alpharetta (I always hated that name) was just across the street from our subdivision. We both graduated from the same high school, good ol’ Milton. Of course he followed me by 9 years (!) so we didn’t play the “did you know sosandso?” game. Of course, since I moved my senior year and was bound and determined to hate it, I didn’t really know so many people in the first place. I definitely threw that whole year away instead of capitalizing on it.

It’s not quite the same as seeing an old high school and college friend walk up (did I post about that?) but it’s still unusual.

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We get some decent sandstorms here.  Not quite like that “Wall O’ Dust” you’ve probably seen pictures of, but impressive in their own right.

The sun looks pretty odd, too.

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