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et something like this it is difficult to say whether the hassle cost and risk are all worth it in the end to see the world s most famous example of crown molding i happen to really like camels and it is a constant source of entertainment to watch bedouin kids come screaming by driving the heat stricken and overweight in horse carts from the site to the entrance i am serious about this have you ever seen a horse try to carry a three hundred pound women in shorts a hawaiian shirt and sun hat that folks is a real wonder verdict a trip to petra transportation food taxes and park fees will run you 250 dollars a person and could possibly kill you making it a similar experience to getting a hooker in vegas difficult to know which is more satisfying dan roberts august 2010 posted by dan roberts at 7 00 pm 3 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels bedouins chechnya eilat indiana jones israel jordan middle east nabataeans petra steven spielberg t e lawrence world zionist media conspiracy thursday september 30 2010 rescuing artifacts in foreign lands or how i learned to stop caring and stole from the house of saud desert outside jeddah saudi arabia i lived in a foreign country for three and a half years when i was 9 through 12 years old it was a fantastic experience i would never trade for anything and it allowed my family and i to travel extensively in europe and some of the adjoining countries of the middle east it also allowed me to pilfer artifacts from my host country in our post modern post colonial world of bs this activity is passé to put it mildly though i never bow in the direction of such non concerns i will offer one word in my defense before i explain some aspects of living in saudi arabia as an american ex patriot boy the saudis do not preserve their own historical sites and when asked if you can take their artifacts they merely shrug their shoulders and assent it is without doubt the best part of the country the country of saudi arabia only dates back to 1932 when the kingdom of the house of saud was proclaimed and recognized by other world governments though official independence probably dates back to the 1920s the country was neither unified nor recognized politically until 32 before that date the kingdom was like much of the rest of the region in the state of a quasi protectorate of great britain dating back to its liberation from the ottoman empire during world war i when i arrived two days before my ninth birthday in 1993 i knew none of this my experiences in saudi arabia and the world around it changed who i was from an annoying oblivious pain in the ass child to an annoying pretentious know it all teenager this story is a component part of that larger development the red sea entrepôt of jeddah is the main reception point of pilgrims on the hajj a city of over 3 million inhabitants in a country of roughly 27 million jeddah is ancient dating back to the sixth century bc the city today extends broadly in every direction leading from the original settlement lovingly referred to as old jeddah old jeddah s highlights include men doing their business on the sidewalks into specially designated holes that lead to some form of sewer system along with the omnipresent smell of the former activities and the occasional beating of some offender of the faith usually a woman by the officers of the saudi ministry of vice and virtue called mutawwas it s a lovely place the rest of the city is modern in the sense that it is covered by western fast food restaurants like burger king and kfc as well as traffic roundabouts displaying some sort of avant garde sculpture including closed fists 18 th 19 th century sailing vessels and just about everything else you can think of in sculpture form western ex patriots do not generally live in and amongst the city s population instead they live in compound enclaves with all of the other westerners including it must be added indians pakistanis lebanese and a host of other nationals not generally called western but who are also too afraid to live among the saudis and have more in common with the americans britishers french germans and other europeans ah colonialism everyone on these compounds employs a maid why just like in 19 th century america hiring domestic help is really cheap in saudi arabia and there are numerous immigrants from places like ethiopia and the philippines that the saudis allow to enter the country for this express purpose we had several such domestics when i lived in saudi arabia they were always afraid of our dog churchill a pug we brought with us from chicago that dog died one of the most traveled canines in history anyway i attended a british academy while i stayed in saudi arabia called continental where when we weren t learning to keep women locked in our hotel suites with offers of champagne we were always plotting nifty outdoor excursions into the saudi wilderness on one such trip particularly emblazoned on my memory we visited the old turkish railroads the ottomans built a rather extensive railroad from acaba in the modern day kingdom of jordan to jeddah and points beyond to move soldiers and supplies around more easily and to bypass bedouin tribesmen during the first world war the british sent in one of their most famous interlopers t e lawrence to stir up the locals with false promises of independence from the turks he succeeded brilliantly turning local bedouins into a rag tag legion that he used to disrupt turkish movements and destroy their rail system eventually capturing acaba and then moved on to damascus all thrillingly depicted in the david lean film lawrence of arabia on a side note that film was watched annually in a debauched bacchanalian festival at the british consulate in jeddah as a child i was not invited damn limey bastards the saudis being a country of bedouins and fishermen had no idea what to do with these railroads and for some reason no use for shuffling turkish soldiers around they never repaired them or stripped them for scrap iron they just sit there baking in the desert sun year after year after year much like the rest of the country when i visited them you could still see the remnants of lawrence s campaigns as sections of the track were obliterated and bits and pieces were scattered in all directions when i and some of my cosmopolitan collection of young friends began picking up these pieces we became aware that perhaps we weren t supposed to someone asked the local saudi guide if we could take them home as souvenirs and he indicated it didn t matter to him and the hunt was on all of us took several pieces and went home extremely satisfied and to this day some of my greatest souvenir show pieces from my world travels are rusted over shards of the rail roads lawrence destroyed in a campaign to take down a lame worthless empire built around putting your feet up old rusted turkish railroad stolen and transported over 8 000 miles across the globe to las vegas look at that high quality turkish craftsmanship if you d ever like to visit saudi arabia and the railroads you have to have a sponsor inside the country and some seemingly legitimate reason for doing so if you re not a muslim pilgrim since there never could be such a reason to visit such a place you cannot do so hundreds of seemingly worthwhile gentlemen seeking to stone their wives to death are turned away every year in the effort to rid themselves of horrendous nags the saudis are very discriminating even if you could get in i d prefer you didn t each additional person who absconds with pieces of the railroads makes my story less unique get your own damn stories based off reminiscenses circa 1995 for some great takes on the mideast see these enlightening books and david lean s epic masterpiece posted by alexander v marriott at 7 48 pm 0 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels acaba churchill the dog colonel sanders jeddah limeys middle east red sea saudi arabia stoning t e lawrence sunday september 26 2010 the last town on i 90 before south dakota gets interesting kadoka south dakota usa this piece of road art is so ugly it could be a modern art masterpiece at one point during the film armageddon bruce willis describes the locations of his crack oil drilling team this initiates a montage of men doing masculine working class things indicative of their general personality pitfalls in order to help us the audience familiarize ourselves with the characters this stroke of film making trickery allows us to learn in 5 seconds what would otherwise require a substantial period of narrative character construction kudos to michael bay for making this shallow device into a masterstroke of film tool that has created a series of two hour long beer commercials he mistakenly calls films all of which i love anyway bruce willis introduces us to the always huggable michael clarke duncan known in the film as bear by saying bear is the only black man on a big dog in kadoka south dakota now anyone who knows me is familiar with my bizarre obsession with this and all of jerry bruckheimer s films so when i saw on the map that i 90 runs right through kadoka i had to stop i mean seriously had to cause alex and i had been driving from chicago up to that point i had already had a run in with minnesota s finest and we had an episode of lost to watch so i called ahead to the america s best value inn and booked us a room kadoka s most positive and i suppose negative attribute is that it is the very last town before south dakota suddenly gets interesting if you re driving from the east that is if you re coming from the west then kadoka is the beginning of the end of anything interesting for hundreds of miles for those of you who have driven i 90 across south dakota you are aware that for the first three of the five hours it takes to get to the border of grassland national park one can maintain sanity by counting the wall drug signs and trying to remember which towns were featured in the national news after disastrous tornadoes those last two hours however are a grueling unendurable desert of boredom your mind starts to wander you pose absurd questions like who would win in a fight shatner or stewart who is a better sounding board data or spock how come it took me so long to lose my virginity free ice water are you serious south dakota is awesome compared to this wasteland of grass kadoka appeared to be an oasis of life giddy as a high school cheerleader invited to her first college fraternity party i peered out the window expecting a thriving mid western town with tractors and overalls and hot farmer s daughters unfortunately kadoka is one of a few places in the world i believe could be improved by a thriving meth lab while home to an airport the kadoka depot museum what the fuck is a depot museum and the jackson county clerks office it is also home to some scary racist guys who stared at alex and i while we enjoyed a meal of steak fingers at the only restaurant in town a rundown double wide turned bar dance club and restaurant affectionately known as club 87 it seems i was not the only one who had seen armageddon because the camouflage clad regulars at club 87 spent much of the evening regaling each other with stories of the last black man spotted in kadoka when you use the word colored to describe a black person in kadoka you re considered a radical progressive probably a communist alex overheard their conversation and quickly stepped in to prevent me from photographing my plate of steak fingers which as best i can tell is just a pre cut steak before i offended the local lack of color needless to say we burned out of kadoka pretty quick the next morning before the locals decided to rehash scenes from deliverance i suppose the moral of the story is that not all of south dakota east of grassland national park is boring there is a little town called kadoka that is also pretty fucking scary verdict never and i mean never stop in kadoka south dakota the town s claim to fame was a depot so important they made a museum out of it what the hell is a depot it sounds like the name of a map from nintendo 64 s goldeneye and what the hell is with club 87 what were the other 86 clubs blown away by successive tornadoes dan roberts may 2010 posted by dan roberts at 9 00 pm 4 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels armageddon bruce willis dan s virginity deliverance i 90 kadoka michael clarke duncan south dakota steak fingers thursday september 23 2010 when history both sucks and blows and falls over henry clay s ashland or a reasonable facsimile thereof lexington kentucky usa so when you re a professional historian historical sites become simultaneously both more exciting and more annoying exciting because you know what happened at the place and why it was significant who did what to whom how and when but nobody else including the docent has any damn idea or even when the docent seems to know what they re talking about the tour is geared toward the brain dead drones that seem to follow me to historic sights it s a real problem i m thinking of writing my congressman except that she s a brain dead drone par excellence on a research trip that had me driving from harrogate tennessee which is on the western end of the cumberland gap and right over the border from kentucky literally you drive across the border in you re in downtown harrogate with it s oddly placed colonel sanders funded lincoln memorial university and local shoney s anyway i was on my way to louisville and had plenty of time to stop off in lexington to visit henry clay s house ashland clay 1777 1852 is a very fascinating american figure oddly lionized for his curious ability to make deadly antagonists one of whom was mostly right and the other entirely wrong meet in the middle didn t the middle between wrong and mostly right used to be called still wrong anyway i wanted to check the place out so i get there a little early it opens at 10am and costs only 9 for adults and stroll around the grounds which includes the clay family gardens the stable and my personal favorite the clay family outhouse the lincoln memorial museum and library in harrogate tennessee this building was made possible by colonel sanders chicken money it s a powerful wondrous thing henry clay may have dropped a deuce here henry clay s ashland clay s column the sarcophagus of henry clay when the zombie apocalypse begins the henry clay zombie should be fairly well preserved the disabled stone monument i meander further afield and find a large stone tablet lying flat on the ground commemorating a small civil war skirmish that occurred on the grounds and won by the confederates the monument clearly looks broken unless some avant garde jerkface decided the newest thing in commemorative stone slabs was to just toss them on the ground and break them a possibility i had...