Part II: Houston
Houston, Houston means that I’m one day farther from you…
Dec 2 – Monday:
I finish the frenzied preparations, mad packing and leave for Houston. I’d only had about a week from offer to depart date. As we are flying down, I look out the window onto the clouds below. Seeing the shadow of the plane against the clouds, I notice there is a halo of sunlight reflected against the cloudbank. I’ve never seen anything like that before. As we descended into the cloudbank, our shadow gets bigger and bigger, closer and closer to the clouds, but the halo stayed in the same spot and the same size.
So we landed, the Houston airport and all the roads are under massive construction, and we had lengthy briefings that evening, but none of that is really interesting, now is it?
Dec 3-4, Tuesday and Wednesday:
Briefings, Medical (tests, 3 shots, x-rays, hearing – either I have great hearing, or great imagination), getting IDs made…see the aforementioned not really interesting.
Dec 5-6, Thursday and Friday:
Hanging out, waiting for a plane. We were originally set to leave Saturday but some sort of unpleasantness in Turkey put the kibosh on that. Another batch of guys is heading for Djibouti on Saturday. It is a place that maybe half of them can say. Ok, that may not be true. Isn’t it more fun to say you’re going to Da Booty than Jee-booty? J It’s hard to say if it’s a joke or real, and I find that a lot of people really want to ignore that Z in Uzbekistan.
At any rate, as it always happens, the thought of heading off to a foreign land without one last glance at perty Amurrican wimmens is just too much to bear…
Forgot to mention that I got to see some of the better areas of Houston. Halliburton’s medical processing area is in what I generally refer to as the ghetto. Lots of houses were just plain broken down and abandoned. Several looked like the foundation had shifted to the side and everything slipped off at an angle. I remember being very surprised to see amidst all these hovels a two-story shack: it was about as big as a single car garage, and simply had two levels. There’s certainly a disparity of some sort when you have multi-thousand foot square homes, and houses (if I may use the term) that are probably 600-700 square feet total. I’ll take a bigger house, please. Gimme about three years. 