Cheese Times and Walking-Gym Times

Saturday 16th January 2010
Once again, as I sit down to write this blog entry, two things are happening. Firstly, I am wondering what to write since there seems to be little happening of interest (but after three pages THAT will be proved wrong), and secondly, it is far too LONG since my last blog entry.

Yes, sadly I seem to be setting aside less time to do this blog thing these days. Signs of what? Well, it ISN'T that I DON'T want to do it because I DO. It has become a great way to release all that I cannot through normal channels simply because there ARE no normal channels due to lack of community, social life etc. And secondly, I so often have other things that I do in the evenings. Weekends too I do seem to find things to do that need doing. Not trivial things, but REAL things needing doing. Weekend just gone was the turn of my 2008-2009 tax return for my last period of self-employed work in the UK which ended in September last year just before my return to Poland and subsequent move to here, Saudi Arabia. I also have a number of other websites beside the blog that I work on and tinker with every now and then either creating new ones or improving existing ones.

What I have started NOT doing these last few weekends is going into town. A couple of reasons for that. Firstly, there is no real need to except for food shopping. And food shopping is less necessary now as I go to the hospital cafeteria every day for lunch now – something I WISH I had done more of from the start. You just get a better lunch there, you get a hot meal and you get a nutritious meal. Not to say I don't feed myself at home, and also I am not saying that I did not have decent lunches before. But this semester with the heavier timetable the lunchtime period is shorter since I have to get on out for the afternoon lesson session which only gives me a swift 45 minutes lunch at home if I do it that way. Having tried that way of lunching, I decided that it was not worth the rush and went back to cafeteria ways.

So that gets me to the second reason for not going to town so often – the cost of food in the supermarkets there. I have touched on this before with reference to cheese prices. Funny thing to go on you might think, but I DO confess to being a great cheese eater. No, I don't have a gourmet taste in cheese – just a nice bit of Lancashire or Cheshire or Caerphilly cheese will do VERY nicely. Well even a nice bit of good old cheddar, but I find that the ones they do here are of the tasteless “yellow hard milk” variety. So I KNOW what I like. UNFORTUNATELY my tastes in cheese eating out here ARE expensive. I mentioned this some time ago, but a typical kilo of the above cheeses costs something like 10 UK pounds sterling or up to 15 UK pound sterling at worst.

Now, I know food prices are up everywhere. But I didn't actually do the conversion from Saudi royals to British pounds till very recently and WHAT A SHOCK IT WAS! My cheese eating accounted for, sometimes, half my weekly shopping bill. And I am only talking about a 1 kilo or 1.5 kilo piece of cheese which would last me about a week and a half. Sometimes too I tried Emmental cheese which was also delicious. So that meant two cheeses in my fridge in a given week. And I would happily sit there in the evenings just hacking bits off the cheese-of-the-night choice and eating that together with some tomatoes and peanuts or cashew nuts.

Ah, the nuts! A relatively NEW addition to my evening eating. Well I decided that after such a meal as in the hospital cafeteria every day, I would not need to eat much in the evenings. Just snacks and some orange juice and tea with milk or Earl Grey. Started this “nutty habit” quite some weeks ago now at Carrefour after a conversation with one other teacher on what he ate in the evenings. Must be two months or more since I started it. So now every time I go shopping I make sure to top up on my cashew nuts jar, peanuts jar AND my currents jar which go very nicely on top of the morning cereal. Well, I haven't used so many lately and they are rather neglected just now, but it is a good intention. A sort of DIY breakfast, and the closest to muesli that I come. But maybe I could try that too ….

No porridge here unfortunately as that involves cooking and using a saucepan and such things take up valuable time in the morning routine which comes before getting out the door to classes. Well, when you wake up most days at 6.00am there is NO WAY you want to push that back even FURTHER to wake up even EARLIER just because you need to boil yer milk for yer porridge! I am NOT losing sleep over porridge I tell you that NOW!

Ohh but I DO miss a nice bit of porridge …. with milk and sugar of course. NOT the masochistic version with water and salt. YUKKKKK!!

OK, now maybe after all that waffle it's time for some REAL news about what's been going on. Well, despite the fact that time is going nicely towards the Final Exit, things ARE still happening which DO still irritate me. You wouldn't think it possible to annoy a man who is ready to leave in just over a month's time, would you? Ahh well, so you do not know this country Saudi Arabia that I am living and working in! Never does it cease to throw up some new annoyance or irritation which drives me FURTHER into a state of AAGGHH! And never does it ever let you rest on any kind of secure routine for long before SOMETHING comes up to throw you off. Maybe it's like what riding a camel is like – seems steady for a while and then the ol' beast gets narky and refuses to budge and throws you off to the floor. Well, I've never ridden such a thing, and never intend to so it might be the smoothest ride you could have for all I know. But it's the best analogy I can come up with sitting here with a headache like I have now. Oh, and I keep looking at the clock because time is coming up to my walking and gym session which I like to do at 7pm.

Yes! I HAVE started all that again! Stopped some time ago when I had the last bout of flu and never got it started again till two weeks ago when I decided that I felt rough and that I HAD TO do something to get me out of my room and try to get fit for when I am out of here. Well, I don't go to the Recreation Centre as I did all those months ago, but I go to the other gym. It does not, you may recall, have its male time/female time restrictions as it is a male-only gym (sexist!??) but this does not mean I have to remember when the right times and days it is that I can go there. All I have to remember is that it is closed for Prayer Times (which may be a bigger irritation but at least it is predictable).

So now my 7pm routine is this:- first I go walk one circuit of the compound, next I go in the gym for 15-20 minutes and do a few machines, and lastly I go out and do one more walking circuit of the compound. This way I am not just doing the boring walking-only as before but now there is more variety. Don't ask me to name these machines, and don't ask me if it is a good gym or not. Having never been in a gym before in my LIFE before here, to me a gym is a gym.

I can describe the machines I go on. The first one I sit on and it has a stool which twists around. Both arms go over a T-stick which is the thing that pulls the weights up and down as you twist around. The stool stays still while you twist your body, and therefore it works nicely with the stomach muscles. You can adjust the chair to turn it around. So you are sitting there twisting to the left and then twisting to the right and counting as you go.

This is my favourite machine as it is the stomach area which needs most attention on me. Other machines are some kind of weight lifting machine where I sit down, put my arms over a cushioned bar, reach down and pull up and down on a bar which is attached to weights. THAT one is really hard and I can't do many of those. I always set it on something like 25kg or 32kg weights and can't manage more than ten lifts.

One more, also concentrating on arms and shoulders is where you sit down and have your arms and hands on two bars which you pull together in front of your face. Again I use the same weights as before and AGAIN this is a really hard one to do for long. The bars are initially around to your side but at head height and you pull them together and let them go back. This is a new machine in that gym.

What else? Ah, another one is a sit-down machine where you are essentially lifting a weight that is sort-of behind you. That is, you sit down and reach up and grasp the bars which are kind of at head height and slightly behind you. What you do then is, with a rocking motion, you pull the bars forwards and you with it. Therefore your arms and your back and whole is going in a kind of bowing motion forwards and back and you are sitting down. Again this is very good for stomach but is quite often in use by other people. The weights I set are more than before at something like 36kg but no more.

I used to go on the exercise bike but I found that to be too tiring. Yes, it burns up the calories but I don't particularly need leg exercise as my legs are fine as they are and it isn't the part to be exercised. The walking takes care of the legs.

Well, I was going to start on the teaching stuff in this blog entry but I think I'll stick that in its own section on its own. This part has taken up enough space.

And now it's time to go exercise. 7pm is here so see ya later!