What Is An Expat?

Well, it’s time to be off again! In a few hours we’ll go wheels up on our next vacation plans. The destination (I guess the title was kind of a spoiler, huh?) will be Japan. We’ll be based in Tokyo for a few days, seeing the town and surrounding areas, then head to see Mt. Fuji. From there we’ll move on down to Kyoto and use that as our hub for a few days, checking that area out as well as passing through Hiroshima. We might be slightly too late for the turning of the autumn leaves, but maybe we can still catch it photogenically. It’s great to be able to travel.

View Larger Map

Yes, I dredged up some older posts from another board. I started to get a little confused on which had been posted where, and didn’t want to leave stories untold, or worse yet told twice. I’m getting short and need to clear out the story queue before I go, because that will become an adventure too.

In a nutshell: I start out of here 1 January. Will spend a few days in Dubai with friends, doing a dive or a few, and a little bit o’ networking if I can. I’ll come back to that. (more…)

I’m at what you might refer to as a low point right now. I was supposed to be leaving for Dubai to spend a few days with the love of my life, but they have some new idiotic visa rule that prevents that. So we changed plans to try Turkey instead. Some other visa problem rears it’s ugly head so they have to get them in advance instead of gratuitous visa on arrival. It all boils down to needing several extra days and / or significant cost increase. So in the end I just aborted this trip. It sucks because I was already in motion, and had spent some effort, not to mention some money, on the Turkey option in a brilliant masterstroke of making do. I’m going to go back to the Palace now. This really sucks. But I’m down to about only 7 weeks before giving up on this for my long break anyway. I’m still pretty heavily weighted down by disappointment.

These people are hopeless. They can’t “provide” travel except from Dubai. This project is very poorly run and the staff is not helpful. I find it’s best to distance yourself from relying on other people where possible. Nobody is going to look out for your interests like you are, and they may not bother to look out for you at all. Lucky for me I am resourceful. If I understood the hyper-fast speaking Indian (?) guy at the Uzbekistan Airways counter I called, I just show up and I got me a ticket. Gonna be a busy trip, but a good one. I go Mosul Palace back to Mosul Airfield, fly down to Baghdad, then later on to Dubai where I take custody of myself, arrange a few things and then on to Tashkent I go…

One week, and I am there!

Sigh…here’s the latest travel fiasco they’ve hit me with.

I put in for R&R with a departure from Sharjah (an airport in the UAE) to Tashkent. They have a direct flight from there 2 days a week, at a fare of somewhere around $600. I think the one I looked at left around noon, and arrived about 3PM.

The proposed itinerary I got has me leaving from Dubai (still in the UAE) at 2:50AM with a 4ish hour flight to Istanbul, where I wait 12 hours, and take a 3-4 hour flight to Tashkent, which arrives at 1:15AM. Add in a couple hours each side and you have a hell of a long day. This ticket is almost $1200. I advised them this was not an acceptable option.

Somebody’s a schmuck…just don’t know who. Just not gonna let it be me.