January 2018 – The Hejhej blog

January 29, 2018January 28, 2018

Camel toe

Beauty doesn’t discriminate. Even the camels aren’t safe.

In the newspaper earlier this weeks we could read about the camel beauty festival (because..of course there is one!) in Saudi where several camels were disqualified because they had used Botox. Gosh, these camels…don’t they know that’s breaking the rules!

Well, since the prize money is almost 32 million USD I guess the competition is crucial… The judges are looking at size of the hump, of course..size of lips and jaw, size of head and color of the coat. It all sounds very horrible. Poor animals. Even a veterinarian was caught cheating as her performed plastic surgery on some camels.

Normally camels are a big deal in the Middle East. If you hit a camel with your car, as they do wonder of occasionally or wild ones comes too close to the road, you are in for a huge penalty from the police. Buying a camel can cost you several hundred thousands of USD.

And just a thought. If you were a camel, surely you would just bleach you teeth.

https://www.thenational.ae/world/gcc/saudi-camel-beauty-festival-12-entrants-disqualified-for-botox-use-1.698068

January 20, 2018January 20, 2018

A little bit of mooning

There are several interesting challenges with living in the ME. Some stuff are really interesting and some thing I would describe with a whole other set of adjectives. It all comes with the expat package. Getting used to sand everywhere is one thing and learning how to be extremely spontaneous is another one. When I tell people that we plan our vacations depending on the moon they usually don’t believe me but this is actually the reality.

After several years in the Middle East region I have learnt that the moon is my friend and that I have to patiently wait for him to show his face in a way that remind me of the beginning of a date night with my husband. Will he be ready to come out today? Or will it be tomorrow? Will he be full or half? Thankfully my husband always shows up in full.

Most planning looks like above. Doesn’t matter if it’s corporate or a school, you won’t know your holidays until a few days before. And you thought it was difficult to plan vacation every year? Try booking a trip over the Eid celebration (holidays after Ramadan) which is usually three days, when you don’t know when they will fall exactly. You might be lucky and you have booked your flight perfectly on the day you are off (the moon is on your side) but if you are not, you better hope you have vacation days left and that your boss will approve them.

The holidays are announced publicly online a day or two before they are suppose to start depending on the lunar sighting.

January 14, 2018January 14, 2018

Vomit on my foot and tell me that you love me

Happy weekend ya’all! Hope it’s relaxing and fun and whatever. Enjoy it while it last. I’m speaking from the future. Mine is already over as we work Sundays to Thursdays in this part of the world. Actually crazy Saudi Arabia has weekends on Thursdays and Fridays.

Yesterday I was hanging out with a little missy that vomited on my foot. It was warm and nice and I took a picture of course. The suspect is in the background. Parents take nice pictures and share. I guess the kind of pictures you sent to each other as couples change through the years. It’s used to be oh, hey look at my ass. Now it’s more Oh, my god babe, did you see this poop explosion she had in the mall. Must be a world record. What’s for dinner tonight? xx.

January 8, 2018

Golfing elephant?

My colleague told me she was hanging out with her nephews six and eight years old, during Christmas and they had some good conversations. This one was my favorite

Six year old comes running.

Child: listen.. LISTEN .. I got a joke to tell you.

Adult: Cool, tell me.. TELL me.

Child: WHY does the elephant wear two pairs of pants?

Adult: Hmm.. can it be because he has four legs..?

Child: Noooooooo! Its because he has a hole-in-one!

Adult: Ok.. Did you mean to say why does the GOLFER wear two pairs of pants?

Child: Aaah yeah, damn it.

The picture is of someone (ok me..) that felt like an elephant playing golf. I was four months pregnant and felt h u g e. Funny to look back at it now and think that I had no clue how good I looked there and elephant size was about to come. This was more like chubby little dog compared to a few months later.

January 5, 2018

Guess the lunch wasn’t that tasty

I considered myself a good cook until I had a child.

January 3, 2018January 6, 2018

Happy New (food) year

Happy New Year all! Did you learn anything 2017? No, probably not right. Nothing much more than everyone is stressing about ripples and bitcoin and what else I couldn’t care less about. Everyone is my office is running around like they got fire in their asses, yelling out random numbers, buy…sell… yo, shuv it up your….

I didn’t mean to sound negative but yeah, I did. And I just had a very bad lunch. I normally sit two hours before lunch and fantasize about how good it will be (how sad is this?) and then I ended up with a dry freakin sandwich which made me think it was made in the desert…. oh, wait…. it was.

A few of my colleagues are also comparing tattoos. They are all symbols of something meaningful like a dragon for some Chinese dude (yes, surprise right!), one has a tree that symbolize the state she is from and someone has their flag. I just feel that all tattoos are “taken” BUT if we are all inking symbols then I’m doing a Swedish meatball. Or mint ice cream.

Because food is everything.