Survival

As I sat there in the orange life boat with my seat belts fastened staring out into the waters of Bohai Bay my immediate thoughts were far far away. In the one week that I have spent in the place I should be calling my home, I have thought a lot. These thoughts bang around internally not because there is a lot of empty space up there, but because they are flooding up, struggling to get out and be spoken.
We were doing survival training for going offshore, two chinese oilfield workers, two Sri Lankan cooks who were going offshore to cook for rig crew, the Chinese instructor, the short changing chinese-english translator
and myself. He was short changing because for every ten words in chinese we received one in english.

The two streams of thought that battled around in my head were like this:
Who would have thought I would be able to go offshore on a rig in the middle of the bohai bay, not too far from north korea and ride on a helicopter to get there. Sounds James Bond like..yes?
But the question was, did I really wish to be Mr. Bond?( ok im exaggerating..what the hell). Stuck in the middle of nowhere. Stop your life. Take away everyone you know, everyone you've been with. Put yourself in a new place, a place you never thought in your wildest dreams you would be in. A place where the only thing you can do to keep sane is work. Was this some kind of weird experiment? Was this really where I wanted to be?

That question is hard to answer, because it kinda hard to look at yourself and understand where you are at?
I hated being in Canada when I was there, and now that im here I wish I was there. Perhaps someday when I leave here Ill miss this place too. So I give this place some time, some time to grow on me. Perhaps Ill grow used to it, perhaps ill grow to like it.

Anyway, from now on any long duration disappearances from the face of the earth by me will be attributed to being in the middle of nowhere.