Summer at the beach

The weather is now becoming full-blown heat, but that was expected.  What has been interesting is all the stuff that comes along with the heat, like the flies.  They were also expected, but what is a surprise is just how aggressive the darn things are.  Of course we have flies in the U.S., and I have seen flies all over the world (one memorable time we were approaching Alexandria, Egypt and a horde of flies descended on the ship when we were about a mile from the port and blanketed everything) but these appear to be a particularly nasty and persistent sort of fly.  They have no problem landing on your face and coming back for more when you wave them away, something that I don’t remember being the case in ‘Murica.  Maybe Big Flypaper has genetically engineered a particularly docile sort of fly for us so we don’t get too anxious and just blanket the countryside with pesticides to eliminate the pests, because that is what I want to do here.  There are these bee/fly looking hybrids as well.  If you know me you are aware that I am not a fan of bees, so a bee with the agility of an aggressive fly is pretty close to my worst nightmare, but these seem to be pretty harmless.

The coming heat also means the camping season in the desert has officially come to an end.  The “tents” ran the gamut from true Bedouin-looking tents to palaces with blowup slides, generators, huge outdoor TVs, ATV trailers and massive water tanks, and they started coming down about 2 weeks ago.  There was a pretty sizable camp not far from the main gate to the base, and I have enjoyed seeing people out and about for the past few months.  They would start arriving on Thursday nights (that is when the Kuwaiti weekend starts) and what I imagine was a large extended family would hang out and have a good time through Saturday night.  Anyway, it started to get disassembled not too long ago and now it is all gone, with a few exceptions.  Apparently it is just fine to leave all your junk behind – there are at least 4-5 couches sitting in the sand (and we have had a couple of rain showers, so they are trashed now), along with some rugs and large piles of trash that slowly get pushed around the desert by the shifting winds.

I have been spending more time at Kuwaiti Naval Base lately; there are some operational reasons and some personal preference reasons.  It has the only Dunkins I am able to go to, as I have mentioned before, and it is (by definition I suppose) on the water and this is just about the perfect time of year to be on the coast.  The base is right around the corner from a smallish Kuwait resort area and has a very nice manmade harbor with a small beach area.  If you go down on the beach you can see what is known as the “Wall of Death”.  The story goes that when Iraq overran Kuwait (it took only a few hours to take the country with the exception of Ali al Salem airbase which held out for a day, the whole Kuwaiti blindness to the looming invasion is very curious) they destroyed much of the Kuwaiti Navy.  The occupying army then took the surviving Kuwaiti officers at the Naval Base, lined them up against this wall and executed them.  The problem is that you never know with these sorts of stories, the wall certainly exists and there are lots of pockmarks (especially head-high) that could have been created by bullets and sections of the wall that DON'T have the pockmarks.  I tried doing some research on the internet and dug up mostly American references to the wall and the story is consistent no matter what American sailor I talk to, but there is a certain probability this is an urban legend and the wall was just used as target practice.

Finally, this is the last day for the burden on my upper lip.  I can’t wait to get rid of it.

What are you looking at?  Get back to work.