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Mideast tour: off to Djibouti at 5am!

August 30, 2007

Gotta go!

We leave for Djibouti in a few hours. Might be a few days before I can post all the videos and photos I’ve shot.

Djibouti is the hottest place on Earth, and guys tonight have been telling me it’s a hellhole all around. Of course, armed men in a hellhole need jokes.

xo
Jen

Mideast tour: I have been sleeping in a tent in Qatar

August 30, 2007

Staying in a hotel in Kuwait spoiled us. We had showers connected to our very bedrooms! We had internet access and carpet and could go to the bathroom in the middle of the night without stumbling thirty yards or more across toasty-hot rocks and sand.

I haven’t posted in thirty-six hours or so, but for good reason.

Here was my yesterday:

Our security detail gave us a 3am call time for a 7am flight to Bahrain. We meet in the lobby, settle our hotel bill, and are ushered into a dark SUV. For the first time, I notice our friendly security guy Steve using a mirror on a stick to check under our car for bombs.

We drive to the “military side” of Kuwait International Airport. That meant driving through lots of concrete barriers to a big open tarmac with lots of security signs and one special sign warning not only against taking photographs, but also against “drawing or any graphical representation.” No sketching!

There’s a waiting room that, like the majority of buildings on base, is basically an air-conditioned, bathroomless trailer; a 130 degree walk is required to get to the latrines, which means you never see yourself in a mirror except when you’re sweaty and pissed off. We wait. We are treated very nicely by the staff. We learn that we are going to Qatar, not Bahrain. We also learn that our 7am plane arrived at 3:30am, dropped off four passengers, thus making room for us — and then promptly took off at 4am. No one knows why. We wait around for options. Lots of people call lots of people. Our security says, “Welcome to military organization.”

Turns out we’ve missed the only flight to Qatar that morning. We all got up around 2am, so we’re exhausted; security takes us back to Camp Arafjan in Kuwait, where we check into the barracks, sign out sets of linens, and sleep on bunk beds in a giant open bay where the military women have strung blankets from bunk to bunk to create a bit of privacy.

We are woken up a few hours later and told we have a flight. We head back to the same airport (NO DRAWING!), get our luggage scanned, and are driven across the tarmac to a tiny, tiny plane. It was about 127 degrees out; standing directly next to an airplane with the engine on, it must’ve been 150. My entire Jen is burning. I urgently need to get on the plane, or I will cry. I start hopping back and forth like I have to go to the bathroom, which is apparently what I do when I feel like I’m in a microwave, about to explode.

Our pilots introduce themselves. Our plane is a Lear jet! And we are the only passengers! How the hell much did the government spend to deliver some jokes to our troops in Qatar?

We fly across the Persian Gulf and land in Qatar. We’ve left behind our handlers in Kuwait, and we have no idea who will be meeting us or where we’ll be going from there. A driver arrives and we’re loaded onto an ancient buses — perhaps those actually used to take the Beatles on tour in the early sixties and kept unrepaired for authenticity’s sake. They are the same buses that cart in Indian laborers to the bases two dozen at a time, a result of the privatization of war and the fact that Kuwaitis (and Qataris), in the words of our security, “don’t work.” Nearly everyone in these countries who ever sells you something or cleans the bathrooms you use is Indian. The Kuwaitis and Qataris are, as a result of the grand accident of nature that gave them oil, repellently arrogant.

We’re taken to the Immigration station at Al Udeid Airbase, where we have to leave our luggage outside and sit for a long time in a large open bay with chairs arranged in neat rows. A plane of airmen has just come in, some of them a bit sexy in their flight suits, and they are in line ahead of us. I notice a few large posters and wall hangings — one of them even made of a bedsheet — with messages like “MADISON JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL SUPPORTS OUR TROOPS,” and scribbled signatures all around. I think how snide I’ve been in the past — I may have been party to such a project in elementary school, and what an obvious and sentimental thing to make, and who would want it? I’d never put such a thing in my house. But in a cold, open metal bay, dust in the air, the whole base a speck in the middle of a painfully uninhabitable desert, a bedsheet full of children’s signatures is the sweetest thing imaginable.

I fall asleep in a chair and am woken by an Air Force woman who informs me that I need to cover my arms: “It’s Qatari law.” I stumble outside to my suitcase for a jacket. When we finally sign our immigration paperwork, I see that among the items prohibited by Qatari law is “Pornography (including swimsuit, muscle, and fitness magazines).” I think of the chiseled abs of the model on the cover of the Muscle & Fitness Hers in my backpack. My luggage goes through Customs without incident. We’re on Al Udeid Airbase.

We’d originally been told we wouldn’t have to do shows on the same day as our travel, but sometime on that day before we boarded the Lear jet, someone asked “Hey, would you do a show tonight at 20:30?” Of course! we replied. Later I remarked that, if you’d told us we had to do a show on zero sleep after being jerked around on flights, we’d have complained; if you ask us, though, we immediately step up to the call of duty. We’re easily swayed!

The show was our first indoor show. We arrived just in time — the audience was already seated and applauded as we entered the auditorium and ran up the side stairs, carrying backpacks, to backstage. After the show, we just sat down on the edge of the stage to sign photos. It was informal and felt organic.

We were shown to our tent. After Kuwait, we were itching for a more “military” experience, but this was the worst night of sleep of my life.

More soon — I’ve just done my second show in Qatar at As Sayliyah Army base, I’ve been blogging from backstage, and it’s time for a meet & greet.

Mideast tour: feeling nostalgic for black dudes

August 30, 2007

We had a day off in between Kuwait and Qatar, and we were forbidden to leave the hotel “complex,” meaning the hotel and the attached shopping mall.

After seeing a multitude of men in dishdashas and women in burqas, I was on the down escalator and spotted, on the up escalator, a totally normal black guy wearing a baseball cap and Bluetooth earpiece!

I gave him this look like “Hi!!!! Don’t I know you from … America?“

Mideast tour: Four Comedians See Some Camels

August 28, 2007

A candid video featuring fellow comics Laura Rosenberg, Christina Lopez, and Chris Freeman.

Mideast tour: scenes from a mall

August 28, 2007

Attached to the Kuwait Swiss-Belhotel is a shopping mall. This morning, that shopping mall was mostly full of Indian and East Asian vendors. This evening, it is totally full of women in burqas.

I really wanted to take a picture of a woman in a burqa buying something from Burger King, but I’m not sure my camera’s 2 GB memory card has enough space for an entire human soul.

Literally half of the stores in the mall are shoe stores, and twenty-five percent of those shoes are metallic. Because if you wear a burqa all day, what’s the most important part of your outfit? That’s right. Gold hooker shoes!

Mideast tour: a related note from Molly Crabapple, who wandered around Morocco alone as a teenager

August 28, 2007

“In Arabic, the word for alone is the same as the word for lonely. Fatima Mernissi, a Moroccan feminist writer, said that freedom seemed synonymous with the nuclear family, which removed women from the dictatorship of their mothers-in-law and allowed romance between spouses. I wonder what Western feminists would make of that.”

Mideast tour: A Brief List

August 27, 2007

Items I have been asked by members of the US military to autograph:

• several camo Army hats
• one t-shirt
• two guitars
• one fresh tattoo
• one Marine pectoral muscle

Mideast tour: Camp Buehring, Kuwait

August 26, 2007

We’ve been seeing a lot of this.

These are the result of a government contract. They are not as popular as McDonald’s. Soldiers who sleep in tents and have to relieve themselves in porta-potties nevertheless have access to Chicken McNuggets and Frappucinos. Those are some strange priorities.

Autograph and photo session after the show.

More of the same. Soldiers who are just passing through often don’t have a place to put their guns, and are thus required to carry them at all times. Including to comedy shows, and chow. The dining halls have signs about where to point your muzzle when you sit down to eat.

Signing hats! Wrote lots of “Stay safe!”

Someone had me sign an Iranian bill. The guy was sending autographed foreign money to his kids, kind of a 2-for-1 souvenir. Kid Rock had come through and signed an Iraqi bill for him.

We shot M-16s in a simulation exercise.

You really do have to reload these things all the freaking time. You might kind of think that the most powerful military in the world would magically have shoot-’em-up guns like in the movies, guns that never have to be reloaded unless it’s a crucial plot moment for the hero, but real guns don’t work that way. You have to carry lots of magazine clips and people shoot at you while you are reloading and the gun is really heavy after the first five minutes.

I really try not to be the kind of person who worries about how her ass looks when trying to shoot simulated terrorists.

Here’s an example of the targets at which we were shooting. This was one of the live-action simulations that also tested you on ethics, as opposed to the video-game style ones in which you are supposed to shoot anything that moves.

Anthony is a Naval dentist who was helping out with the tour. He took the shooting photos above.
As comics, it’s important to keep in mind the mood of our audience; sometimes it’s a holiday show, or it’s a Friday night and people are happy to be chilling after work, or it’s a blizzard outside and the few people there really, really wanted to be at the show. Or whatever.

Some of the camps in Kuwait are used primarily for training, and some as waystations and supply stations on the way to and from Iraq. Buehring has few permanent troops; for most soldiers, it’s a first stop in the Mideast before being shipped off to one’s real destination.

In brief: an audience leaving for Iraq in the morning laughs less.

Mideast tour: video from a Kuwaiti Starbucks

August 26, 2007

Mideast tour: you do not know the meaning of "hot"

August 26, 2007

I’m online right now in the USO tent at Camp Virginia, Kuwait. I’ll post more photos when I get back to my own computer, but you might be interested in Chris Freeman’s tour coverage here.

We’ve been averaging 600-700 people per show, and 126 degrees during the day. I have been given a Marine hat, which I’m totally wearing all the time when I get back to Williamsburg.

All of the bases have either a Starbucks or a Cool Beans coffee, which seems lovely and comforting. Except that they are in trailers, air-conditioned to about 97 degrees, which when you first step in seems like a humane temperature — fully 20-30 degrees cooler than outside — until you sit down with your coffee and realize that you probably shouldn’t be drinking caffeine in 97 degree heat, much less 125 degree heat.

One Lieutenant Commander described the heat as “like putting your head in an oven and getting a bucket of sand thrown in your face.”

I would describe it like this: You know the uncomfortable feeling of blow-drying your hair on a hot summer day? Now imagine blow-drying your entire body, for perhaps 20 minutes solid. Imagine the skin on your face tightening and drying up. You think you’re not sweating, but then you realize that you think that because every inch of skin on your entire body is sweating at once, so you haven’t noticed. Yesterday, it was 126, and Laura and I had our jewelry melt onto our skin.

Next time you blowdry, point that thing into your face, and then your armpits, and think of me. Or, you know, of the troops. Obviously.

Mideast tour: my powers of inference know no match!

August 26, 2007

Had a great show at Camp Ali Al-Salem, but they’ve kept us too busy for me to have much time to post. Here’s a little something for now:

This is a sticker on my hotel room nightstand.
I’m pretty sure this is to tell you which way to pray.
Interestingly, the toilet also faces in the direction of Mecca, which I always thought was a no-no.

today’s top photos: M-16 edition!

August 25, 2007

An M-16 shooting simulation at Camp Buehring, Kuwait. You have to reload those things every damn minute.

The Charlie’s Angels of comedy? My bitches are awesome.

Mideast tour: serious things, and vegetable things, and another 120 degree day on which I could feel my lips sunburning through my lipstick

August 25, 2007

For new readers: I am currently on an Armed Forces Entertainment tour of the Middle East, beginning in Kuwait, with three other comics.

Camp Beuhring, 15 miles south of the Iraqi border, is many tents and some number of utterly flat, mostly bathroomless buildings in the absolute middle of nowhere, an hour’s drive through terribly empty desert. The idea of being stranded there — either literally, through some roadside accident, or simply in the sense of being stationed there for some months — was terrifying. All the water is trucked in; the very fact of having water and being able to survive on such a patch of land seemed obviously unnatural.

Beuhring is a training camp, mostly — a waystation for new troops on their way to Iraq. The audience was a little quiet; afterwards, an officer explained that most of the guys in the audience are shipping off to Iraq tomorrow, and “20-30 of them are going to get blown up just getting there. Their minds are elsewhere.” There’s nothing to say to that. As alcohol is illegal in Kuwait, our audience was sober in both senses of the word.

We were treated to a tour of a tent-based clinic in which we observed materials for the treatment of both scorpion bites and chlamydia, a dental office, and most enjoyably the shooting range, in which we shot M-16s in simulation exercises. A Naval dentist named Anthony took charge of my camera and took many photos while I shot baddies in video-game-like desert and then night-vision exercises, and then in a vert differnt exercise called “SHOOT OR DON’T SHOOT,” in which you watch a narrated scenario in which live actors portray a situation in which you, the shooter, are at risk of shooting innocent people, or inappropriately shooting a bad guy before he has drawn a weapon. When you do such a thing — shoot someone who has merely punched someone else, or yelled in Arabic — the exercise stops and flashes the words “DEFEND YOUR ACTIONS.”

After the show, we went right back to the airport (three nights in a row there!) to finally get Christina’s luggage. And we saw a corn stand! Some months ago, the Intrepid Young Journalist had happened to mention that, during his time in Lebanon, corn was impossible to avoid. “The Lebanese will put it on anything — pizza, sandwiches, hamburgers. You have to specify: NO CORN.” It seems the phenomenon extends to Kuwait. We each bought a cup of corn. It was really just corn. It had butter, salt and pepper, and lemon juice, but seriously, people were lining up for corn. At a place called … “Mr. Corn.” The Mr. Corn stand also sold nachos (i.e., corn chips) and “corn smoothies,” but everyone just seemed to be getting corn. Laura said she’d line up for really any “single-vegetable stand.”

One of our security guys loosened up and started telling us that lots of Kuwaiti guys have gay sex but are married to women and don’t think of themselves as gay. I pointed out that — from ancient Greece to modern-day South America — that actually is pretty much the global norm. Christina saw men holding hands and kissing, even there at the airport (which isn’t always indicative of a sexual relationship, but clearly sometimes is).

Also on the sociocultural front, I’ve been talking about Christopher Hitchens fairly well nonstop, as things he’s said about Islam keep coming up, and Christina just mentioned she saw Hitchens’ new book “god is Not Great” on sale at the PX, which makes me happy, as it balances out the giant wall of religious pamphlets provided in Beuhring’s recreation room. Sure, that makes religion free and atheism a thing that must be paid for, but then again, people more appreciate things that cost. Which makes this post come kind of full-circle.

Kuwaiti fun facts

August 24, 2007

Gas in Kuwait costs sixty cents per gallon.

Paper money comes in “1/2 dinar” and “1/3 dinar” increments.

Camels also come in white and black. Not just “camel.”

I’m in Virginia’s Daily Press

August 24, 2007

Check it out:

Local comedian heads overseas to entertain troops

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