Here!

Hellooooo ya'll.

I am officially in the Middle East for the first time in my life! It is warmer than I thought it would be. However, it is slightly better than Saudi Arabia, which I have heard gets up to 55 C with regularity. The airport has been the most odd part of the experience so far. As I was waiting for my driver to show up (which took about an hour) I got to watch the passengers streaming through the exit gate and I felt so..foreign, I guess, for the first time in my life. It was kind of cool, actually. Also odd, as I have never seen so many women completely covered before (maybe one or two, but that's it). Most either had a slit for their eyes, or were so covered that they looked like flowing black masses of material. There were also some whose faces were exposed, and they had a barrier thing over their mouth,which I had never seen before. I need to look it up and see what that is called!

After being picked up by the driver, along with 2 other Americans named Tyler and Josh, a Frenchman named Jonathon, and a Russian (the only one at orientation) named Nikolai, we headed towards MLC. MLC is the new complex Schlumberger built for teaching and training employees working in the Middle East and Asia. It is so huge!!!!!!!!! The building I am in has 3 floors and it is new and techie looking with bean bag chairs and fun looking places to hang out. There are juice bars, libraries, and game rooms of all kinds. I will definitely be able to work out in the evenings, hooray! I haven't worked out yet due to wonderful jetlag. I am kind of exhausted. Last night I fell asleep at 9 pm, got up at 4:19 am. The evening before I went to bed after midnight, and woke up promptly a little after 5 in the morning.  Hopefully tonight I will stay up until a reasonable hour, so I can sleep in until at least 5 am tomorrow.

Why am I getting up at 5? Well, I am going to skype with my parents (hopefully!!) and boyfriend most probably. I am pretty excited about both! This facility does not have wireless, so it took me awhile to get an ethernet cord in order to have a connection to the internet. Also, as I don't have a cell phone at the moment it is doubly nice to have  to have this it of connection to the outside world.

TV here is pretty awesome, btw. Most of the channels aren’t in English but that’s ok. I have one English news channel (technically British), and a movie channel that played The Interpreter with Arabic subtitles. For the record, Arabic subtitles are relatively distracting on a TV, but I think this is only because they are flowy and pretty.


Ok. First day of OFS-1 is over!! It officially lasted from 8 am to 6:30 pm. I mean, we did get an hour for lunch, but still, it was kind of a long time. Most of it was relatively unexciting (history, overview, harassment policies), but there were a couple pretty cool parts. The first was that our first instructor named Denni made us go through the entire class (over 90 people) and everyone had to introduce themselves, giving information like name, future location, past oilfield experience, and college graduated from. We have people from sooooo many different countries! It was like going through all the colors of the rainbow and listening to an amazing array of possible accents. My two favorite to listen to were those from Papua New Guinea and Russia. The most surprising accent was that of the Middle Eastern guys (especially those from Saudi Arabia). All of them have awesome and flowery sounding names, but when they say anything else it comes out sounding incredibly…American, as they mostly studied for their entire college career in America.

Orientation has been very much like I thought it would be so far. Most of it is review, but it's not too bad. It would be slightly more helpful if I wasn't jeglagged. I am staying at MLC (which has some name I am not remembering) currently. MLC is a huge training facility in Abu Dhabi for Schlumberger. Its one of the few places in the world where all the employees from different segments can train at the same place. The layout of the living quarters is pretty sweet in a beehive-ish sort of way. All the rooms are one person and everyone has their own bathroom, with all the furniture looking vaguely techy and IKEA-like. Everything is very comfortable so I have no complaints there!
 
Well, that is a brief overview for now! I will add more detail tomorrow.
 
The tired engineer,
 
Becca