Back from Gabon. My trip was good, pretty normal if you think driving in roads with potholes 3 times the size of your taxi, seeing a car accident on Monday and the vehicle in the same place 3 days later, being told that your flight will be here in 10 minutes and then not having it show up for an hour so you miss your connection back to Paris, and finally followed up with a little bribe (not me) given to a immigration employee to let my colleague out of the country because her visa expired when we missed our flight. Just a very typical Houston work week. Overall, the trip was pretty eye opening experience. You have large corporations extracting resources, primarily timber and oil, from a very poor country. Expat living is extremely expensive in Gabon ($7,000 - $10,000/month for apartment alone) but its local inhabitants make very modest livings. Infrastructure around Pt. Gentil is terrible, the roads and traffic make I-10 look like piece of cake. It is shame that the wealth is not at least distributed to public projects like roads. In reality, the government will ask oil companies to fund such projects. Kind of makes you wonder, where is the government revenue of 250,000 barrels/day of oil, which unfortunately is under $40/barrel, going when it can not afford to make decent roads for its whopping 1.5 million people? Alex, "African government corruption for $1,000 please."
I had put off doing laundry for as long as I could, but after the trip I had to do some or I would begin to blend in with some of my metro mates in terms of personal odor. I went to the store and I think I have bought laundry soap, but I can not tell if it is soap or some kind calcium deposit for your washer. This project has lead me to what is now my favorite word in French. Years ago, Jen and I were sitting around talking about obviously nothing and we both told each other our favorites words (totally normal right?) which has lead to lengthy conversations with various people about this specific subject quickly followed by these people then asking us to leave the party. My favorite word is Pythagorean theorem. First, you might say "This is not a word, but two words." I would then reply, "Yes, but the inventor of this game, me, allowed some leniency in this case." This word is awesome, but to someone that is weak in math (IE: me) it is not used in great abundance. However, I will use it whenever I can. For example, it can be used at your local deli:
"Excuse me, can you cut that sandwich into a right triangle."
"What? How could I measure this sandwich?"
"Oh, that would be by using the Pythagorean theorem where a^2 + b^2 = c^2."
"Oh right. Silly me."
Try it. It works wonders. Jen's favorite word is ubiquitous which she read in a WSJ article when we first got married. This is a great word (definitely top 5 for me) and it is actually is just one word, but trust me ubiquitous is no Pythagorean theorem. Mom's favorite word is godspeed, again another great word. You think that this is crazy, but playing this game is a great conversation piece and not far behind is "What is on your IPod?" and "If you had a music festival called "Your Name" Stock what 3 bands would you have play?"
Back to washing clothes. So my new favorite French word is "secher." Because living spaces are compact, the French have cleverly developed a washer/dryer combo to save space. Good idea in theory, but not so good in practice. Translated, secher means to dry. Effective today, I will begin a petition to change the meaning of secher to "To kind of dry or what I really mean is to leave extremely damp no matter how many times you try to dry." I think that they needed to fill the space on the washer/dryer so they decided to write this word, but I assure you that it does not mean to dry. So instead of smelling, I will be sneezing due to the pneumonia that I will have caught from wearing wet clothes everywhere when it is 0 Celsius (quite Euro of me to use Celsius) outside.
I go back to Houston this week to prepare for the actual launch of this mission. I am looking forward to seeing the woobies who now have there own email: abbyandgrey@yahoo.com. If they don't receive 10 message a week, no one and I mean no one gets Christmas presents next year.
I had put off doing laundry for as long as I could, but after the trip I had to do some or I would begin to blend in with some of my metro mates in terms of personal odor. I went to the store and I think I have bought laundry soap, but I can not tell if it is soap or some kind calcium deposit for your washer. This project has lead me to what is now my favorite word in French. Years ago, Jen and I were sitting around talking about obviously nothing and we both told each other our favorites words (totally normal right?) which has lead to lengthy conversations with various people about this specific subject quickly followed by these people then asking us to leave the party. My favorite word is Pythagorean theorem. First, you might say "This is not a word, but two words." I would then reply, "Yes, but the inventor of this game, me, allowed some leniency in this case." This word is awesome, but to someone that is weak in math (IE: me) it is not used in great abundance. However, I will use it whenever I can. For example, it can be used at your local deli:
"Excuse me, can you cut that sandwich into a right triangle."
"What? How could I measure this sandwich?"
"Oh, that would be by using the Pythagorean theorem where a^2 + b^2 = c^2."
"Oh right. Silly me."
Try it. It works wonders. Jen's favorite word is ubiquitous which she read in a WSJ article when we first got married. This is a great word (definitely top 5 for me) and it is actually is just one word, but trust me ubiquitous is no Pythagorean theorem. Mom's favorite word is godspeed, again another great word. You think that this is crazy, but playing this game is a great conversation piece and not far behind is "What is on your IPod?" and "If you had a music festival called "Your Name" Stock what 3 bands would you have play?"
Back to washing clothes. So my new favorite French word is "secher." Because living spaces are compact, the French have cleverly developed a washer/dryer combo to save space. Good idea in theory, but not so good in practice. Translated, secher means to dry. Effective today, I will begin a petition to change the meaning of secher to "To kind of dry or what I really mean is to leave extremely damp no matter how many times you try to dry." I think that they needed to fill the space on the washer/dryer so they decided to write this word, but I assure you that it does not mean to dry. So instead of smelling, I will be sneezing due to the pneumonia that I will have caught from wearing wet clothes everywhere when it is 0 Celsius (quite Euro of me to use Celsius) outside.
I go back to Houston this week to prepare for the actual launch of this mission. I am looking forward to seeing the woobies who now have there own email: abbyandgrey@yahoo.com. If they don't receive 10 message a week, no one and I mean no one gets Christmas presents next year.
1 comment:
Brett- you crack me up! I have been enjoying your blog and all your interesting adventures...like you are some kind of Indiana Jones!!! I've been inspired to start our own blog! It won't be as exciting rest assured! Looking forward to seeing you this weekend!
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