Fly Fishing in the Canal

Sorry I did not post yesterday...very tiring day and didn't get back to the tent until about 1 am. We had our briefing on Sat afternoon in the palace. it went well and we walked around the second floor of the palace. THe place is decked out in so much marble. THe bathrooms are huge...just the sink room is bigger than my livingroom. you walk in and there are a ton of sinks then you go through another doorway and there is a hallway full of individual little rooms which are all toilet rooms. the toilet rooms are about 6 feet by 10 feet and all have a bidet (mom, you would appreciate that). i think there's a rule in the military that no one is allowed to use bidet's because they just serve as a convenient place to store extra rolls of toilet paper. the toilet, sink, bidet are all porcelain or at least really nice ceramic. there are filigree gold flowers and designs decorating them all with the edges gilded in gold. so fancy.
speaking of fancy, i have never seen a chandelier as big as the one that's in the rotunda of he palace. huge, i'll upload a pic when i can. i keep on saying how huge the palace is, but i found out it was actually just a hunting lodge...a vacation home. can you believe it? apparently it was built in 1991 and cost $500 million to build. it has 3 lakes and various smaller lake houses all around the lakeshore, which just happen to not really be 'cabins,' but carved sandstone villas. Apparently they were for his friends and family to use. After leaving the palace we worked for a while in a building that used to house an outdoor pool. it's pretty neat how the building has been retrofitted. you walk in and it would take you a while to figure out that the "downstairs" full of cubicles is actually a tiled pool. The 'loft' is built over the pool.
In any case, Saturday night I did play ping pong, but it was just volleying it back and forth so no awesome winning point to tell you about. Saturday night it was sooooo windy, which normally can be loud if you are in a house, but think about how loud it is if you're in a vinyl tent. My goodness, the tent shook and was very loud until about 1 or 2 am. Do you know when you empty the garbage and you get a new plastic garbage bag and you shake it so it is open before you put it in the garbage can? Well, think of that noise, because that is what is sounds like when you are inside a tent in windy weather. Also, the walls were shaking so hard that it kept on bumping my mattress on my cot and scaring me. i survived the wind and then it started raining big rain drops. the good thing is i finally fell asleep. Sunday we started off with a hearty breakfast at the Coalition DFAC. The mud created from the heavy rain drops was the stickiest mud...it suctioned my boots onto it and it wasn't even deep at all. THere was so much mud everywhere...even covering the asphalt streets. There's no grass and the soil is pretty impervious so the mud just slides and spreads everywhere. You're supposed to clean and stomp and wipe your feet when you enter a building, but sometimes it's impossible to get it all and the floors are constantly being swept up to at least get the big pieces.
After breakfast we headed over to some meetings. I didn't go to the palace, which was kind of a bummer, but i did go to the Boathouse on Al Faw lake, which now serves as an administrative office building. It was only yesterday, but i don't remember too much about what i did other than being in meetings and in front of a computer. i guess it wasn't eventful enough to put in a blog. Oh...the DFACs opened at midnight for the superbowl pre-show and stayed open all night through breakfast. i didn't go watch it, because i figured if i had time to do that, i should be doing something else...especially sleeping. anyway, my coworker said he could hear the noise coming from the DFACs on his way to watch it at the boathouse. Oh, now i remember what else i did yesterday...i did go to the palace after all. in the lobby they have kind of a tourist trap. They have a huge ornate chair that apparently was saddam's chair. you can sit in it and have your picture taken. at first i didn't want to sit in it because it kind of creeped me out. then, my team wanted to have a picture of the 4 of us so i conceded. although, i somehow accidentally deleted the pics from my new camera right after i walked out of the palace. i was trying to look at them and pushed the wrong button. oh well, it was a creepy chair anyway. on our way back from the palace we have to walk over a bridge over a canal and we saw a Major and a Lt Col at the water's edge. THe MAJ was fly fishing!!! it was a pretty basic rod and he was still in his ACU's, but he said everyone has to stop and take breaks every once in a while when and where you can to be able to keep going in this environment. anyway, he asked if i wanted to try it. of course i did and he had me throw the line out a few times...i didn't catch anything, but now i can say the first time i went fly fishing was in iraq.
we started today (monday) off with a tour of some power generator farms which was kind of neat. we had meetings all day. we had one at the palace and measured the rotunda to be about 100 feet across. not much to report for the day, really. the nice thing is that every building you walk into has big bowls or boxes of candy everywhere. there are so many care packages received from the US that people just leave them out to share. i never mind having candy lying around. the weather was super nice today...sunny, clear, maybe 68 degrees. it helped dry out the mud, which was nice.
Tomorrow should be my last day at VBC and then we head on over to Kuwait to pick up the rest of our team members. hopefully all will go well getting on a flight tomorrow without too much of a wait.

signing off, erika