|
The best word to describe my situation is "eeeeeeeeeek"
I arrived in Baku on Sunday morning at about 2am and from there to my old staff house. Unfortunately some new person has stole my old room with an ensuite bathroom and now I am stuck sharing a bathroom !! Since I left Baku three months ago the only improvement is I now get 25 dollars a day for breakfast and dinner instead of 15. Since I got back I have been eating Indian takeaways and for the past two days shifted over to the classic sausage, pasta and beans combo as shown below. It is not the best looking dish I can create but its simple and all I have time to do at the moment. My week in Baku started fairly rushed. I have lots of things to do from submitting expenses to getting some repairs done to the staff house. Another thing which has been causing me problems is my mobile phone, when I arrived I discovered that my old pay as you go sim card has been disabled. Since then I have been on a mission to get a company sim card. Unfortunately the problem is that the one I was given is not enabled for international access; pretty smart giving an Expat a sim card limited to local numbers only.... Settling back into Baku has just been a series of annoying problems. The biggest problem is my separation from Ale; we had such a good time on holiday in Iceland, only to be thrown 9 time zones apart. Schlumberger brings lots of people together but then pulls them apart in the worst possible way, this is the real problem with life in the oilfield. This week at work I have been preparing for an offshore job with the guy who is to be running it. It has been a big rush to get everything together and checked, only to find that there have been rig problems and we wont be going until perhaps Tuesday or Wednesday the 23rd and 24th respectively. The rig in question is the smallest and by far the oldest of the BP platforms. I have been told that it is a real platform with classic technology, not all the automated stuff on the other new platforms. I have recently been experimenting with some image stitching software. I would use Adobe Photoshop but I don't have that in Baku so I have been testing out some open source applications. I have had some success but straight lines in the images seem to bend when stiched together. You get the jist of what Baku is like though. What you can see below are two stitched images of my bedroom and then the view from my bedroom window. From this I have also taken some closer up pictures illustrating the level of development in this city. The funny thing is that Schlumberger consider this a good location, a quick search on wikipedia shows quite the opposite.. someone must be wrong. Video showing a quick look around my new bedroom Video showing the View from my bedroom I really should convert these huge mpeg files to something smaller, but there just isnt the time to do anything these days. |