What's wrong with this picture?

I swear Onur, I didn't put one too many bags on the truck.

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It won't stop snowing

End of March and still snow

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More of our decent road

Got to love the mud and yes there is still snow out here

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More to the chicken story

  Apparently there is a backstory to the picture of the chicken in the back of the truck. It goes like this: one of the people on the day shift crew thought it was a great idea to put 4 buckets of chicken in the back of an open pickup truck. Our drive to work from the hotel is a pretty long one; taking anywhere from 35 minutes to an hour depending on traffic, weather, sliding big rig trucks or what have you. Its mostly freeway that goes through bumpy roads, up and down hills and switchback roads. So to me putting the chicken back there seemed like Iraq war planning but that's just my opinion.

  So on this day we had overlapping shifts, so they had two vehicles making the trip at the same time. We normal take our Chevy Captiva SUVs to work but if you seen our other post of the road going up the mountain to work, its really really bad and we've damaged just about everyone's SUV that's driven up. So now we're taking these pickup trucks that have a little bit more of a higher clearance from the road. Now since we're at work for atleast 12 hours, we all bring our backpacks with laptops/tablets, extra clothes because its still mid December at work and of course food. With the SUVs all the stuff can go in the back and its inside the vehicle but not so much with the pickups.

  So these gentlemen packed the pickup truck, the smart one put the 4 buckets of fried Popeye's chicken in bed of the truck and they took off for work. The pickup with the chicken was the lead vehicle for the day. Sometime along the drive, the driver of this truck started to notice white stuff flying out the back in his rearview mirror. He asked everyone in the truck what did they have in the back of the pickup. He than realized what he was seeing happened to be the napkins, forks and condements from the Popeye's bag. Since the smart one didn't cover the buckets, every thing went flying out. Shame. The poor guys in the second pickup not only had to avoid pot holes that look like ditches, non driving Americans/Turks who don't know what the lines in road are for, bus drivers who think they're driving race cars but also napkins and fried chicken. Needless to say they arrived at work with one half bucket and some left in the pickup bed....

(The names have been left out to protect the innocent and guilty)

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Chicken abuse

Someone call KFC

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Look how decent our road is

How roads can u do this on?

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Apartment Part II

So surprise surprise not moved in yet. I was supposed to be able to move in this last Saturday but that just didn't happen. The company agent was hiding from me or something. Who knows, I am being told this Thursday so I am excited about that. I signed the contract and look forward to having a place of my own. More to come on Saturday.

Shift "D" and our 24 hour (quarter the way through)

  We left our hotel last night with pretty much all of our management on the mezziane level singing Kara-oke and enjoying their night. This is the imagine we got to see as we headed to what was and going to be a 24 hour shift due to the popularity of us being out here. On the way to the SUV (that's another wonderful story) a Turkish? man stopped one of the hotel doorman and started asking him questions about the Americans living the hotel. Since my vehicle was parked in front, our co-worker Nas overheard the guy and approached him. Nas said the man spoke perfect english and was very straightforward about getting information from him. Nas quickly dismissed the man and we all got in the SUV and started off to the the mountain.

  Once we got here it was business as normal until the early morning and we've been restricted to our work area even though all the bathrooms are outside of the area... twice. Here are some of the nice things that we've been able to do with our time so far: 

Sleeping on our management's desk... classic

We have completed our 24 hours of slow torture.... I was planning on writing more but the lack of sleep has won

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Welcome to Shift "D"

  Hello everyone, this is Marcus. Vinai has finally granted me permission to write on this blog so I will give the other side your work experience but it will be the other night shift's view; we're the Thursay to Sunday shift. So sometimes it will be me writing or Dan Simkins but will try our best to keep you to date on the utter GA Yes that goes on here. I'll always be putting up some older pictures and videos from this wonderful time we're having here. Fun for the whole family... not.

  For starters we showed up to work on Thursday and there was no internet or good phone service. Vinai had said something about days earlier but we just thought it was the normal run of the mill stuff for why it's not working and being that we left work on Sunday afternoon and we saw the service provider out there working (and I use this term rather loosely) on it. So since no one could gives us a resonable answer to why the internet was still down. Dan and myself took a trip out to the internet site and discovered that there was no power. To be more accute the power cord to the unit was in the snow and there was no generator (yes, lol) to be found. After finding out this was going to be a simple fix, we ventured back to our work area and collected our Bobcat and found a generator to take out there. Append reaching our gate to leave the work area, we were met by the Army and told that we can't take generator out there. 

  Now I'll be leaving out some of the lameness because it hurts too much to write about it but we'll fast-forward to today. At the end of our shift I get a call from the military and they want Dan and I to come down and talk with them and the Internet/phone provider. We're sitting in this 'meeting' and the provider is telling us that reason that we don't have internet/phone is because his workers saw a 'wolf'. Nevermind the fact that we're over 5,000 ft up and the saw the wolf on the way UP the mountain while they still were in their car. Later talking with Dan we came to the conclusion that we were both sitting there thinking to ourselves did he just say wolf? We've been without internet and phone communication for about 6 days because you all seen one wolf on ur way up the mountain. O o o OK? (Even more frustrating is that this didn't become a big issue until we tried to take a generator out there, 3 days after the internet and phone lines went down)

 That was this afternoon and now I'm proud to say I'm at work (the beginning of a 24 hr shift, more GA Yes) typing this out because now we have internet and phone service... 

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New Apartment Part I

Things are starting to look up a bit since last I wrote. We finally got vehicles that we can use for our own personal use so I am excited for that. I can start exploring the town a bit more and see what there is to do. I have also found a place that has acceptable living conditions. For that I grateful, once I settled in I will take some pictures. I am moving in this weekend so hopefully I’ll get those pictures posted as soon as I can. And of course blog about it since I have been so bad about doing it.

Trip to Adona

A couple weeks back I went on a road trip to Adona. The varsity crew and our buddy Mike made the trip. I have uploaded the photographs from the entire trip. The ride was quite lovely and scenery was breathtaking. We stopped in a particular location to photographs of the water. Then we drove through a tunnel, normally driving through a tunnel would be no big deal but in this case the water was leaking through and ice sickles had formed in the tunnel. There is a video of the drive through, I tried to take photographs but the light was no good. And since it was highway tunnel lighting was not a very good option. As you can see from the slide show the road conditions were far from ideal. I guess they do not have a department of transportation here in Turkey. It took about four hours total to reach Adona from where we started at. I will add the videos a bit later since they are difficult to load on slow internet.
Once we got there we took the opportunity to explore the area, there was not much daylight but we did look around a little bit. The town was nice, we were able to find a nice park to walk through and around. There was also a large Mosk that I was able to take some photographs of. In the evening we hung out at the hotel and drank Mojitos and smoked a Monte Cristo. It was a glorious time off from the not so glorious work. I was grateful for the time of f and enjoyed it greatly. I can’t wait for May to come so I can start taking the weekends off and start traveling. Yay, for the summer time!

Another day in Paradise

I'm feeling the heat for not blogging so hear is something for my favorite folks out there.I’ll start with some silly work antics. Lately the weather has been atrocious. We have had near blizzard like conditions, tempest like winds, and twenty-four hour work days. Yes, you heard right twenty-four hour work days. I had thought that the days of working long and hard was over. I see that I was sadly mistaken and a good reminder of that I shouldn’t let my ego make me forget what it is to work hard. So the antics begin. About a month ago we had a 1088 nearly drive off the side of the hill. Which is a bit astounding considering the fact that there weather was as nice as can be. Sometime after the blizzard the boys went out and made a throne, a snow throne that is. What other kind throne could we build with so much snow? I don’t think I have mentioned this before but there is no pork in the location I am at. So when the opportunity arouses to get pork for the military base we went ahead and purchased it. So we made bacon and eggs at work because sometimes you just have to treat yourself. Enjoy the various photographs.