Thursday is like Friday for Djiboutians. That being said, Thursday night is party night. We went downtown to eat at a very good pizza place and then proceeded to a nightclub.
I'm pretty sure this was the first time I've observed, firsthand, prostitutes openly seeking business. I would liken it to being an attractive girl in a bar full of men. As soon as our group got inside we were swarmed. The French Foreign Legion was there in uniform and several of them were leaving with women as we were coming in. I would imagine the legion has its fair share of STDs from Djibouti. When we left downtown we discovered someone had thrown dirt all over the car's windshield because we didn't pay a homeless person to "guard" our vehicle while we were inside.
Friday night we went to a party on a Korean Navy ship. There was plenty of very good food and a lot of people to talk to. A Korean officer behind me spoke fluent English without an accent so I asked him where he was from. He said he grew up in the US, went to college at Virginia Military Institute, then did OCS for the Korean Navy.
There was a French officer behind me the second time I was in line for food so I asked him a question in French and he was happy to talk to me. We talked about the French units in Djibouti and how long deployments are them. Accompanied tours are two years and unaccompanied tours are four months. He also said when you deploy with the French military you get double salary. After dinner the Korean Sailors put on a show with music and dancing. It was a lot of fun.
Sing it, Korean Sailor!
Korean Navy Dance Party
On Sunday one of the guys in the office and I went on a crazy adventure. He had found a beach on Google Maps that looked nice so we decided to find it. The satellite image didn't show how the path to the beach included several hundred feet of elevation change and roads barely passable to goats. I'm amazed that we did not: flip over, get a flat tire, or get stuck. One situation was pretty bad and we had to take water jugs out of the back of the SUV and put them on the hood to get enough traction to get out of the hole we were in. It was nerve racking but we made it out safe.
For some reason there were people every now and then just wandering around in dried up river beds or down huge hills. Who knows why they were there.
We drove down into that.
The point we almost got stuck.
Nice scenery.
Forgive me, but where's the beach?
ReplyDeleteThe Legionaires are all the same! I used to hang out with them in Rwanda before the genocide and I always wondered how many kids they fathered before their dicks fell off from some hideous disease! Great to hear from you!
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