Elections

I'm definitely ready for the elections to be over. Our little FOB as been a little crazy for the past couple of days. Everything is fine, but hopefully everything will settle down after the elections.

Anyway, I finished a book called State of Fear, by Michael Crichton. It's his usual storyline, this time a group of environmentalists try to create catastrophies. They want to make this catastrophies look like global warming so they can further their agenda. Even though it is fiction, Chrichton has some good info about the whole idea.

Not much else happening; I'll try and put up some pictures later.

Camel Spider

Here is the infamous camel spider. Not that exciting, right? There seem be many legends and myths that surround this creature.

In both Iraq and here in Afghanistan I've never seen any that are much bigger than this. No, I've never seen one eat a person. Yes, they do "follow" you, because they like shade and for most of the day people have a shadow. They're actually not a spider, but closely related to a scorpion. They don't have the tail or the pinchers, though. But they do have these really large claw things in front. Camel spiders aren't poisonous, but they're pretty aggressive and will bite you.

Hopefully that clears up some of the myths. I know there's been a picture circulating around the internet forever of a guy holding up a camel spider as big as he is. I'm pretty sure it was photoshop'd. At least I hope so...

Same Old Stuff

Not much new going on. Pretty much just counting down the days, although there are still a lot left. I was able to see a little bit of the meteor shower the other day. Since we're a blackout FOB, there's really no lights on at all, so you can see the sky really well. It's about as dark as it is on the border in New Mexico.

The elections are coming up in a few days, so it's really going to be slow for us. Apparently they don't need very many engineers guarding the polling sites. I doubt too much will change with these elections, it seems like the current president Karzai will probably be elected again. Not too much else going on, I'll try and post some more pictures later.

Afghan?

All I need is a flying carpet and I'll be good to go. By the way, I hear they are thinking of making this the new Army uniform.

Recession

It looks like I'll be at O/E for a while. It's nice to be in one place instead of being a gypsy. Of all the FOB's in Afghanistan I've been to, this is probably the best one. Baghram is cool because it has a bunch of stuff, like Pizza Hut, Burger King, and a big PX. But everyone that I know there spends way too much money. You can't really spend too much here at O/E.

Speaking of money, everytime I check Yahoo news, there's something about the recession. I posted this picture because I think the recession hit harder here. I think more people should come here and see how the hadjis live, and maybe they'd appreciate what they have. Just because you have to order off the dollar menu at McDonalds doesn't mean it's that bad.

Town

Here's a picture of a typical town in Afghanistan. There are a ton of kids that go right up to the vehicle asking for stuff. They also use water bottles to put fuel and oil in them. That's about it for now. It looks a lot like Iraq, except much more poor, if that's possible.

Back at OE

Well, in a turn of events I returned to Orgun-E. It was a lot quicker than getting there that's for sure. We took a chinook helicopter from Warrior to Sharana, then some civilian helicopter (centurion?) from Sharana to OE. It was over a 30 hour convoy to get to Warrior. It took maybe 45 minutes total to fly from Warrior to OE. Crazy.

I learned that I hate flying in a chinook. It was almost like a rollercoaster that kept going for like half an hour. They also kept the back open so I could see exactly how far we were from the ground and how much we kept swinging. Glad they did that....

Anyway, it's going pretty good here, I'll be back to my old job tomorrow. Food is a lot better here, but there's a lot more people too.

I posted a picture of some of the many camels that are in Afghanistan.