*Chirp, Chirp* *Chirp, Chirp* *Chirp, Chirp*
By the time our heads hit the pillow it was after 4am. It must have been closer to 5 o’clock because I remember the sun beginning to rise. At this point our rooms did not even have blinds so I decided to wear my eye mask and ear plugs that we had received on one of our flights (shout out to Turkish Airlines) in order to combat the brightness and ever present floor cricket. I fell asleep relatively easily and mostly due to exhaustion.
*CHIRP, CHIRP* *CHIRP, CHIRP* *CHIRP, CHIRP*
Sometime later, maybe an hour or two, I awoke to the feeling that I had lost an ear plug. I can honestly say that in all my twenty four years I never thought I would experience that feeling, and I grew up in a house where snoring some nights must seem like a competition.
*CHIRP, CHIRP* *CHIRP, CHIRP* *CHIRP, CHIRP*
I felt a foam type of substance graze my elbow and quickly recovered my lost item. The sun was now up and the floor cricket continued unabated. I rolled over and attempted to get comfortable, blocking out thoughts of how utterly ridiculous the situation of having what now sounded like a cricket with a megaphone in my apartment room floor. After another fifteen minutes of restlessness and frustration about the stupidity of how loud this cricket was I got out of bed and headed toward the bathroom.
*CHIRP, CHIRP* *CHIRP, CH*
No, that was not a typo. As I got halfway to the bathroom the noise stopped. Not only did it stop, but he cut himself off mid chirp. I stopped and savoured the quietness.
*chirp* *chirp* *chirp*
“No!” I said quietly, but firmly, as if the cricket was testing to see if I was listening.
*chirp*........ *chir*
As I took one more step closer to the bathroom door he cut himself off again. By this point my body instructed me that, due to my proximity to the bathroom and the time of day that it was, it would like to pee. Stumbling still half awake in my sandals I walked into the bathroom, lifted the lid, and began to pee. My body usually takes it from there, so I began to take stock of the room which had been the swing vote in my decision to take this accursed room. To my right was the bathtub, and it was filthy. It also had some type of plastic film on the bottom of it. As of this writing, most of that plastic film is still present along the bottom of my bath tub.
Interlude: (I feel like this is a good time to inform the reader that there was much made about the lack of cleanliness of our apartment building and lack of preparation that had been done to accommodate our arrival. This was a bone of contention with many of our original team members, as it probably should have been. For starters the units were filthy, we were assigned what seemed like a random collection of dishes and our stoves did not work. We had no washing machines and no couch.
In my particular unit I had more chairs than plates (2), bowls (1), or pots and pans (1 of each). I had the same amount of televisions as I had spatulas and 100% more blenders, microwaves and other advanced appliances than I had basic amenities (towels, soap, shower rod, garbage bin, ironing board.)
While this was no doubt frustrating I was really not all that bothered by it. I was not expecting to have to “move in” to the residency here, but felt as though I had enough to get by for now and that these problems would be rectified in the immediate future (after some controversy and accusations of the group creating a union many of these problems were, in fact, solved).
Sure my hot water heater in my attached bathroom didn’t work, and the stove did not light, but my one night stand of a roommate didn’t have a bed in his room, so he was forced to stay in my other room. My proof reader was also sans a bed, having to sleep on her mattress on the floor the first night. Overall I felt as if these problems were frustrating, but fixable.) End of interlude.
To my left was the sink. No surprises there, just a sink. Above the sink was a mirror in which I made eye contact with myself and corrected my posture (turns out I hunch my shoulders a lot when I pee.) Finally my eyes settled on the plastic drain cover in the floor.
“Stupid, Jiminy.” I mumbled in the direction of the floor. I chuckled at my own insanity for naming my floor cricket after the popular Pinocchio character, finished my business, put the lid down and turned to wash my hands.
“Eff!” I said out loud, no soap.
“Whatever.” I thought and rinsed my hands and headed out of the bathroom.
I returned to my bed, sat on the edge and stared through the bathroom wall to where I knew the drain cover to be. Exhaustion started to take over again as I laid down and tried to count how many hours of sleep I had in the last few days.
*chirp*............. *chirp* ......................... *chirp*.......................
“Are you funking kidding me!?” I thought to myself. I was stunned.
“This flipping cricket was silent for the whole time I was on the other side of the room, took a pee, rambled about how many more chairs I had then forks... and as soon as I lay down he starts chirping again.”
*Chirp, Chirp* *Chirp, Chirp* *Chirp, Chirp*
“Damn it!”
The thoughts that were going through my tired brain at this point were many: “Am I ever going to sleep again? Never should have taken this stupid room! I wonder if you can hear him in the other room. This is a stupid funking problem to have........He has GOT to be in the floor.”
There were more, but I have kept the blog clean so far and will try to do the same for the foreseeable future.
*Chirp, Chirp* *Chirp, Chirp* *Chirp, Chirp*
I was so frustrated I jumped out of bed, rummaged around in my backpack until I found my headphones and my Ipod, turned up the music and lay back down on my right side fuming. I had my eye mask pulled over my eyes, ear plug in the right ear, music ear bud in the left and tried to get the chirping sound out of my head. (Jiminy made sure to stop chirping as I made my way to his half of the room by the way. So not only am I dealing with a cricket in my floor, he is also kind of a ninja.)
********************************************
*Knock, Knock, Knock*
“ERRRGGHHHMMM” I gargled as a half response to my roommate knocking on my door.
“It’s open” I finally managed to say.
Roommate: “Yo. I am gonna head over to the store just down the street to get some little things. Water, snacks, that stuff. You wanna come?”
Me: “What time is it?”
Roommate: “10:30.”
Me: “We only slept for 5 hours!?”
Roommate: “Ya man, it is good to get up now, that way you can sleep good tonight.”
In truth I wanted to throw something at him, tell him to wake me when we had to go somewhere as a group and that I would rather sleep now and then all through the night anyways, but no. I was happy he had gone to the extent to include me in his plans and wasn’t sure if he should go somewhere alone in our strange new home.
Me: “Ya, alright. I don’t have any money, but I will come for a walk.”
Roommate: “I’ll buy you something.”
Me: “Thanks, you hear that effing cricket last night?
Roommate: “hooooo, DID I!”
Me: (laughing) “I’m telling you man he is in the floor.”
I dragged myself out of bed, found a pair of shorts, shirt, my hat, sunglasses, and sandals. I grabbed the key to the room and locked the door behind us. He headed for the elevator.
“Meet you downstairs.” I called to him as I headed to the stairwell.
“You’re taking the stairs!?” he asked.
Me: “Ya, man. I always take the stairs, hate elevators.”
Roommate: (laughs) “Alright, suit yourself, meetcha down there.”
I start my descent from the fifth floor, which is really the sixth floor in our building because the numbering of our apartments starts on the second floor. As I descend the stairs I begin to get an idea of how warm it is outside and have broken into a sweat by the time I reach the ground floor. I get to the bottom just after the elevator and we turn to head outside.
Have you ever stepped outside in the middle of a Canadian winter and it is so cold it takes your breath away? Maybe it was a late night and you try to yawn? This would happen to me quite often as I sauntered to morning class in University. It would be a cold day and I would try to yawn but because the air is so cold and dry it hit me right in the back of the throat and always prevents me from finishing my yawn. Occasionally I have had this happen to me four or five times in a row. I think most Canadians are familiar with the cold air’s ability to completely “take your breath away”.
(Sidenote: I’m willing to bet 90% of you just yawned as you were reading the word twice in the last paragraph. I yawned every time I wrote or read the word myself. Apparently yawning really IS contagious... yawn. Anyways back to the other random story.)
Turns out this act of “taking breath away” happens at both temperature extremes. It was unbelievable. My friend and I walk out the door and turn to go around the corner at the front of the building, removing our sunglasses from our face because they had fogged up after going from air conditioned to desert temperatures, and a blast of heat hit me like a foam finger right in the teeth. For half a second it was if I couldn’t breathe, the heat was that strong. It was wild, and never something that I would have expected as a purebred Canadian boy.
The cold store was about one football field away from the residency building and by the time we reached the store I felt sweaty enough to have played the entire game. We walked in, were greeted by the clerk by the door and proceeded to look around. Water was mostly in large packages on the floor by the counter. There were small aisles that contained various items from biscuits and digestive cookies to spices and local snack mixes. An open refrigerator in the back left contained milk and juice. The place was basically a small grocery convenience store. There was even fruit and vegetables along the far right hand wall, but none of them looked particularly appealing to me.
My roommate grabbed a package of 6 tall waters (1.5L bottles) and two apples. We were the only ones in the store at this time and we walked up to the small counter with the clerk that we had passed on our way in. Much to my amusement the clerk pulled a large calculator out from underneath the counter and totaled up my roommates items. My roommate removed his wallet from his shorts pocket and prepared for the damage.
“Six hundred forty,” the gentleman said.
“How much?” my roommate responded.
“Six hundred forty,” the gentleman said a second time. I wasn’t too sure whether to shit or scream.
(sidebar: I had been struggling with the conversion since we had discussed it in one of the airports during our journey over. I was unsure mathematically which way I needed to multiply in order to convert to dollars. It turns out that the Canadian dollar is about 0.26 Omani rials. Essentially, someone told me, just multiply the Omani price by three and you should be pretty close.)
My soon to be very broke friend sifted through his wallet to try to figure out how to pay the man. Thoughts raced through my mind.
“640 for water and two apples!? Jesus that is like 900 dollars! I am so dead. I am going to be broke in a week and die of hunger before the school year even starts. How do people even live here if things are so expensive? Does that mean that Omani people would be billionaires in Canada!? Maybe the conversion goes the other way. Even then we are at like 100 dollars and I still won’t see September.”
One thing I admire about my friend is how calm and collected he always seems to be. Yet again he appeared not to be rattled as he stared bankruptcy in the face and very simply showed the man the money he had inside his wallet saying,
“I’m not sure how much that is. Could you help me?” The man smiled and took one red bill out of my friend’s wallet.
I was stunned. If I ever thought of doing that at home I would assume the 13 yr old taking my order at MacDonalds would either point and laugh at me or take whatever money I had and run, especially if I looked as out of place as two white guys in a cold store in the Middle East. At the time I had no idea if the man was ripping us off or not, but he gave my friend some change so I figured that was a good start.
(In the interest of full disclosure I was completely stupid when it came to this particular transaction. Naturally it was not even close to that much money, in fact just the opposite, it was cheap. You see I had failed to understand the fact that, just as we have cents in Canada, Omani currency also has a step down from the rial (or dollar). Their cents are called “beiza” and essentially my friend’s tab was 600 something beiza. The clerk removed one rial from my friends wallet, thus the reason that he received change. 1 Canadian dollar is 0.26 of a rial, or 260 beiza. Therefore my friend paid just under 3 dollars for 6 large bottles of water and his two apples. Not bad really.)
The whole walk back to the residency building was a sweaty conversation about how much we actually just paid for water and a snack. We concluded that it could not possibly have been that expensive.
When I got back to the apartment I was sticky from both the heat and trying to figure out if I was going to be able to eat or not in the next few months. I noticed that Jiminy was not awake and figured he must sleep during the day. It wasn’t until the end of the week that our grand battle would come to a merciless end.
By the time our heads hit the pillow it was after 4am. It must have been closer to 5 o’clock because I remember the sun beginning to rise. At this point our rooms did not even have blinds so I decided to wear my eye mask and ear plugs that we had received on one of our flights (shout out to Turkish Airlines) in order to combat the brightness and ever present floor cricket. I fell asleep relatively easily and mostly due to exhaustion.
*CHIRP, CHIRP* *CHIRP, CHIRP* *CHIRP, CHIRP*
Sometime later, maybe an hour or two, I awoke to the feeling that I had lost an ear plug. I can honestly say that in all my twenty four years I never thought I would experience that feeling, and I grew up in a house where snoring some nights must seem like a competition.
*CHIRP, CHIRP* *CHIRP, CHIRP* *CHIRP, CHIRP*
I felt a foam type of substance graze my elbow and quickly recovered my lost item. The sun was now up and the floor cricket continued unabated. I rolled over and attempted to get comfortable, blocking out thoughts of how utterly ridiculous the situation of having what now sounded like a cricket with a megaphone in my apartment room floor. After another fifteen minutes of restlessness and frustration about the stupidity of how loud this cricket was I got out of bed and headed toward the bathroom.
*CHIRP, CHIRP* *CHIRP, CH*
No, that was not a typo. As I got halfway to the bathroom the noise stopped. Not only did it stop, but he cut himself off mid chirp. I stopped and savoured the quietness.
*chirp* *chirp* *chirp*
“No!” I said quietly, but firmly, as if the cricket was testing to see if I was listening.
*chirp*........ *chir*
As I took one more step closer to the bathroom door he cut himself off again. By this point my body instructed me that, due to my proximity to the bathroom and the time of day that it was, it would like to pee. Stumbling still half awake in my sandals I walked into the bathroom, lifted the lid, and began to pee. My body usually takes it from there, so I began to take stock of the room which had been the swing vote in my decision to take this accursed room. To my right was the bathtub, and it was filthy. It also had some type of plastic film on the bottom of it. As of this writing, most of that plastic film is still present along the bottom of my bath tub.
Interlude: (I feel like this is a good time to inform the reader that there was much made about the lack of cleanliness of our apartment building and lack of preparation that had been done to accommodate our arrival. This was a bone of contention with many of our original team members, as it probably should have been. For starters the units were filthy, we were assigned what seemed like a random collection of dishes and our stoves did not work. We had no washing machines and no couch.
In my particular unit I had more chairs than plates (2), bowls (1), or pots and pans (1 of each). I had the same amount of televisions as I had spatulas and 100% more blenders, microwaves and other advanced appliances than I had basic amenities (towels, soap, shower rod, garbage bin, ironing board.)
While this was no doubt frustrating I was really not all that bothered by it. I was not expecting to have to “move in” to the residency here, but felt as though I had enough to get by for now and that these problems would be rectified in the immediate future (after some controversy and accusations of the group creating a union many of these problems were, in fact, solved).
Sure my hot water heater in my attached bathroom didn’t work, and the stove did not light, but my one night stand of a roommate didn’t have a bed in his room, so he was forced to stay in my other room. My proof reader was also sans a bed, having to sleep on her mattress on the floor the first night. Overall I felt as if these problems were frustrating, but fixable.) End of interlude.
To my left was the sink. No surprises there, just a sink. Above the sink was a mirror in which I made eye contact with myself and corrected my posture (turns out I hunch my shoulders a lot when I pee.) Finally my eyes settled on the plastic drain cover in the floor.
“Stupid, Jiminy.” I mumbled in the direction of the floor. I chuckled at my own insanity for naming my floor cricket after the popular Pinocchio character, finished my business, put the lid down and turned to wash my hands.
“Eff!” I said out loud, no soap.
“Whatever.” I thought and rinsed my hands and headed out of the bathroom.
I returned to my bed, sat on the edge and stared through the bathroom wall to where I knew the drain cover to be. Exhaustion started to take over again as I laid down and tried to count how many hours of sleep I had in the last few days.
*chirp*............. *chirp* ......................... *chirp*.......................
“Are you funking kidding me!?” I thought to myself. I was stunned.
“This flipping cricket was silent for the whole time I was on the other side of the room, took a pee, rambled about how many more chairs I had then forks... and as soon as I lay down he starts chirping again.”
*Chirp, Chirp* *Chirp, Chirp* *Chirp, Chirp*
“Damn it!”
The thoughts that were going through my tired brain at this point were many: “Am I ever going to sleep again? Never should have taken this stupid room! I wonder if you can hear him in the other room. This is a stupid funking problem to have........He has GOT to be in the floor.”
There were more, but I have kept the blog clean so far and will try to do the same for the foreseeable future.
*Chirp, Chirp* *Chirp, Chirp* *Chirp, Chirp*
I was so frustrated I jumped out of bed, rummaged around in my backpack until I found my headphones and my Ipod, turned up the music and lay back down on my right side fuming. I had my eye mask pulled over my eyes, ear plug in the right ear, music ear bud in the left and tried to get the chirping sound out of my head. (Jiminy made sure to stop chirping as I made my way to his half of the room by the way. So not only am I dealing with a cricket in my floor, he is also kind of a ninja.)
********************************************
*Knock, Knock, Knock*
“ERRRGGHHHMMM” I gargled as a half response to my roommate knocking on my door.
“It’s open” I finally managed to say.
Roommate: “Yo. I am gonna head over to the store just down the street to get some little things. Water, snacks, that stuff. You wanna come?”
Me: “What time is it?”
Roommate: “10:30.”
Me: “We only slept for 5 hours!?”
Roommate: “Ya man, it is good to get up now, that way you can sleep good tonight.”
In truth I wanted to throw something at him, tell him to wake me when we had to go somewhere as a group and that I would rather sleep now and then all through the night anyways, but no. I was happy he had gone to the extent to include me in his plans and wasn’t sure if he should go somewhere alone in our strange new home.
Me: “Ya, alright. I don’t have any money, but I will come for a walk.”
Roommate: “I’ll buy you something.”
Me: “Thanks, you hear that effing cricket last night?
Roommate: “hooooo, DID I!”
Me: (laughing) “I’m telling you man he is in the floor.”
I dragged myself out of bed, found a pair of shorts, shirt, my hat, sunglasses, and sandals. I grabbed the key to the room and locked the door behind us. He headed for the elevator.
“Meet you downstairs.” I called to him as I headed to the stairwell.
“You’re taking the stairs!?” he asked.
Me: “Ya, man. I always take the stairs, hate elevators.”
Roommate: (laughs) “Alright, suit yourself, meetcha down there.”
I start my descent from the fifth floor, which is really the sixth floor in our building because the numbering of our apartments starts on the second floor. As I descend the stairs I begin to get an idea of how warm it is outside and have broken into a sweat by the time I reach the ground floor. I get to the bottom just after the elevator and we turn to head outside.
Have you ever stepped outside in the middle of a Canadian winter and it is so cold it takes your breath away? Maybe it was a late night and you try to yawn? This would happen to me quite often as I sauntered to morning class in University. It would be a cold day and I would try to yawn but because the air is so cold and dry it hit me right in the back of the throat and always prevents me from finishing my yawn. Occasionally I have had this happen to me four or five times in a row. I think most Canadians are familiar with the cold air’s ability to completely “take your breath away”.
(Sidenote: I’m willing to bet 90% of you just yawned as you were reading the word twice in the last paragraph. I yawned every time I wrote or read the word myself. Apparently yawning really IS contagious... yawn. Anyways back to the other random story.)
Turns out this act of “taking breath away” happens at both temperature extremes. It was unbelievable. My friend and I walk out the door and turn to go around the corner at the front of the building, removing our sunglasses from our face because they had fogged up after going from air conditioned to desert temperatures, and a blast of heat hit me like a foam finger right in the teeth. For half a second it was if I couldn’t breathe, the heat was that strong. It was wild, and never something that I would have expected as a purebred Canadian boy.
The cold store was about one football field away from the residency building and by the time we reached the store I felt sweaty enough to have played the entire game. We walked in, were greeted by the clerk by the door and proceeded to look around. Water was mostly in large packages on the floor by the counter. There were small aisles that contained various items from biscuits and digestive cookies to spices and local snack mixes. An open refrigerator in the back left contained milk and juice. The place was basically a small grocery convenience store. There was even fruit and vegetables along the far right hand wall, but none of them looked particularly appealing to me.
My roommate grabbed a package of 6 tall waters (1.5L bottles) and two apples. We were the only ones in the store at this time and we walked up to the small counter with the clerk that we had passed on our way in. Much to my amusement the clerk pulled a large calculator out from underneath the counter and totaled up my roommates items. My roommate removed his wallet from his shorts pocket and prepared for the damage.
“Six hundred forty,” the gentleman said.
“How much?” my roommate responded.
“Six hundred forty,” the gentleman said a second time. I wasn’t too sure whether to shit or scream.
(sidebar: I had been struggling with the conversion since we had discussed it in one of the airports during our journey over. I was unsure mathematically which way I needed to multiply in order to convert to dollars. It turns out that the Canadian dollar is about 0.26 Omani rials. Essentially, someone told me, just multiply the Omani price by three and you should be pretty close.)
My soon to be very broke friend sifted through his wallet to try to figure out how to pay the man. Thoughts raced through my mind.
“640 for water and two apples!? Jesus that is like 900 dollars! I am so dead. I am going to be broke in a week and die of hunger before the school year even starts. How do people even live here if things are so expensive? Does that mean that Omani people would be billionaires in Canada!? Maybe the conversion goes the other way. Even then we are at like 100 dollars and I still won’t see September.”
One thing I admire about my friend is how calm and collected he always seems to be. Yet again he appeared not to be rattled as he stared bankruptcy in the face and very simply showed the man the money he had inside his wallet saying,
“I’m not sure how much that is. Could you help me?” The man smiled and took one red bill out of my friend’s wallet.
I was stunned. If I ever thought of doing that at home I would assume the 13 yr old taking my order at MacDonalds would either point and laugh at me or take whatever money I had and run, especially if I looked as out of place as two white guys in a cold store in the Middle East. At the time I had no idea if the man was ripping us off or not, but he gave my friend some change so I figured that was a good start.
(In the interest of full disclosure I was completely stupid when it came to this particular transaction. Naturally it was not even close to that much money, in fact just the opposite, it was cheap. You see I had failed to understand the fact that, just as we have cents in Canada, Omani currency also has a step down from the rial (or dollar). Their cents are called “beiza” and essentially my friend’s tab was 600 something beiza. The clerk removed one rial from my friends wallet, thus the reason that he received change. 1 Canadian dollar is 0.26 of a rial, or 260 beiza. Therefore my friend paid just under 3 dollars for 6 large bottles of water and his two apples. Not bad really.)
The whole walk back to the residency building was a sweaty conversation about how much we actually just paid for water and a snack. We concluded that it could not possibly have been that expensive.
When I got back to the apartment I was sticky from both the heat and trying to figure out if I was going to be able to eat or not in the next few months. I noticed that Jiminy was not awake and figured he must sleep during the day. It wasn’t until the end of the week that our grand battle would come to a merciless end.