On Thursday I wake up just after 4am to go walking. I want to try and shock or mix-up my body so that I can sleep on the airplane and so that I have no jet lag. After walking and a shower I start the final laundry and clean up the last little things that I need to do before going on vacation. When the laundry is done I spend a bit of time trying to squeeze my clothes and gifts/souvenirs into a single piece of luggage and one carry-on bag. I manage to make it, but both bags are pretty full. The neighbor gives me a ride to the train station and each connection is just perfectly timed so that I don't wait more than 2 minutes. On the last train I see a co-worker and we talk and he says he slept in today and is very late, but at least we got to see each other. When I get to the airport I am somehow on a pre-TSA list and I keep moving to the head of every line (at TSA agent's request) and I don't even have to take my laptop out of the carry-on bag or even remove my shoes. How did this happen? As I wait for my plane I hear a notice "The flight to Chicago has been delayed" and I can just chuckle because I've been on that exact flight and in that exact situation to Chicago so many times.
My flights go smoothly. On the first leg from Los Angeles to Tokyo (Narita) I am out of my seat stretching when this Japanese lady and small child come walking around. This Japanese lady has the cutest, most sincere face! So I try to get out my seat regularly to catch glimpses of her face. There is no need for me to talk to her or anything - I just want to look. There is a very short line through Thai immigration and the hotel bus come quickly tonight. So I'm in my hotel room right near midnight on Friday night.
I sleep sufficiently well on Friday night and go for a walk near the hotel in the morning. When I get back to my hotel I find that I have forgotten my camera cable again. Last year I had to buy a new one in Myanmar and I may have to buy another new one now. I relax a bit and grab the hotel shuttle back to the airport in order to catch the train from the airport to the Skytrain and then the Skytrain to my next hotel. On the first train it is crowded and an older Thai man gets on the train and stands. As we're coming to the first stop he's shaky and almost loses his balance. So I push through the crowd and make him take my seat. He's grateful and he speaks some English so we talk just a bit in Thai and English. When he gets off the train at my stop, it looks like he's delaying and/or looking back as if he wants to continue talking or maybe just see if I am okay. But then I lose him in the crowd. At the new hotel I go out walking some more and note that other than a new shopping mall that has opened in the area, it looks about the same.
Karl gets in to the hotel near 5 pm and we go to dinner at the MBK center where he always wants to eat. After dinner we relax a bit and think about going to a club, but Karl can see that I am dropping off and we end up sleeping before midnight.
On Sunday both Karl and I get in hour long workouts before breakfast and my friend Tree comes to visit. We chat for a while but he has worked throughout the night. So Karl and I go off to make other flight reservations while Tree sleeps. We get our flights straightened out, say goodbye to Tree as he has to fly to Hat Yai for work, and then go do some more exploring. Eventually we check out of the hotel and head for the airport. Karl and I continue to make jokes about being the only white people or non-Pakistani people lining up for the flight, but we eventually see one other white guy. I just meet everyone's stares with a smile and an "assalamualaikum" which is Urdu for "peace be upon you". We get on the flight and have a relatively smooth flight to Lahore, Pakistan. The guy next to me does not speak English but wants to be involved in my reading of The Economist as well as grabbing two health reporting sheets out of my hand that the flight attendant has given to non-Pakistani citizens. The trip through immigration goes smoothly and we get our bags. Mine gets x-rayed on the way out of the airport and Karl's does not. The x-ray man insists on a secondary screening because he thinks that I have alcohol. (Probably a big no-no going into the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, don't you think?) But I open the suitcase and show everyone a spray bottle of mosquito spray and a bottle of mouthwash (which technically contains alcohol) but now I am free to go. Leaving the hotel is an exercise in pushing and shoving as the crowd of waiting people fills every nook and cranny. But I just keep pushing ahead with a smile and an Urdu greeting and we finally leave the airport. Our driver from the hotel gets us moving but soon we are stopped again by people with automatic weapons and a passport check ensues because we are near a military installation. But we are moving again and get to the hotel. We're dragged through the hotel hallways and hotel metal detector (Yes, a metal detector to enter the hotel.) and get checked in. Two other team members meet us at the hotel lobby and after Karl and I get our rooms, we go back down to the hotel lobby for juice and discussions with the team about work mission. We end up talking until almost 1 am and now it is finally time for sleep.
On Monday the team assembles in the lobby of the hotel at 7:30 am and we are told that there is a disturbance on the motorway to Islamabad and we will have to wait to go to the work sight. There are many calls throughout the morning and we end up spending a fair amount of time in the hotel dining area NOT talking about the workday (for obvious reasons). We learn of the source of the disturbance here and just wait around for it to clear. Eventually we get the 'all clear" and we start for the Islamabad area near 1pm. The motorway is very clean and clear and there are no hiccups. Until we get off the motorway past Islamabad to go the work facility. The road is blockaded by a shipping container that blocks the entire paved road and more. We stop and decide what to and eventually call the security detail at the work facility. Secrity comes down and tells us to drive over the shoulder and grass and mud and go around the blockade that we barely fit through. They then escort us to the work facility. Along the way we have to avoid dogs, birds, donkes, cows, and goats in the road. At one point the driver pulls to the right to pass (They drive on the left side in Pakistan, so passing on the right is correct.) a slower car and we're staring straight down a cow standing on the middle line of the road. With some heavy braking and a sharp pull back to the left we manage to avoid the cow...barely.
We drop our bags off at our barracks and go to the work site. The team assembles after 6pm on Monday to get started with the work. We make progress with sensors and instrumentation and signal processing and eventually quit for the night. We grab dinner at the on-site facility (I'm not going to call it a mess hall.) and as dinner is finishing there are some ping pong challenges laid down. So near 10 pm we're walking over to the recreational facility and setting up the ping pong table. One of the armed guards comes over, sets his rifle against the wall, and proceeds to clean the ping pong of dust and grime with his back to the rifle the entire time. The ping pong games get started but I let other people participate because I'm tired and I soon make my way back to my room. The security guard who laid down his rifle with his back to it is accompanying me and takes me all of he way back to the room and continues to stare at me and into the room until I say "Thank you. Shu-kree-ah" and close the door. (Shu-kree-ah is Urdu for thank you.) I should note that the barracks are sufficient for this trip except for no Internet, no hot water, the very loud Muslim prayer wake-up call every morning at 4:40 am, and the immovable bars on the windows (even for the second story room that I have). Are the bars present on the windows to keep people out or to keep people in?
On Tuesday the team assembles near 8:30 am. We have a difficult day walking back and forth between facilities and trying to get sensors to play properly and trying to understand the characteristics of the units. At one point I find myself explaining the coefficients of a proportional/integral/derivative (PID) controller and drawing a block diagram and explaining transfer functions and loop gains. Eventually the team gets things working the way we expect them to work and we should have the data needed to design the PID controllers on Wednesday. Later in the afternoon we make a change to the system and wait for the responses to be seen. Well before we expect to see responses there are suggestions to change this parameter or change tat parameter and I try to stop people and say we should only change one parameter at a time and at least wait to see the effects of that single changed parameter. I'm overruled. Many parameters are changed and everyone gets confused about the response. Finally a Pakistani guys stands up and emphatically says, "I think we should change one parameter at a time and wait to se its effects before changing others." There is unanimous agreement and everyone thinks the guy is a genius. We break from work after 6 pm and some of the team goes to a nearby village. I enjoy this village because here are fruit and textile markets, animals wandering the streets, people staring at "the big white guy with the never ending smile", and hordes of children who want to come and view a foreigner. At one point there is a small boy of about 6 standing 6 feet away and just staring at at me. I greet him with "Hello, assalamualaikum" and I'm met with no response. I give a big smile to the boy and get no response. I lift my fingers to my slips and stretch my smile bigger and say "Smile" to the boy and get no response. I try again and I finally see the boy's lips move, the ends start curling up, and I see a narrow smile with teeth showing. Mission accomplished! Later there is a little girl standing about 3 feet away from and she is staring and I greet her with a big smile and "Hello, assalamualaikum". She turns and runs about 12 feet to her father. I slowly approach her wth a smile on my face and stretch out my hand and say again, "Hello, assalamualaikum". The girl hides behind her father until the father pushes her out to come and shake my hand and she gets the biggest smile on her face. Of course I go greet the father with Hello, assalamualaikum" and a handshake and then I proceed to catch up to the group. We buy some fruit and I tell the team that we have to come back tomorrow because I didn't bring my camera today. By the end of the walk and fruit buying spree I have an entourage of 8 or 12 kids following me all the way through the market to the car. At one point the kids are walking and following me so intently that they are in the dirt road and I have to herd them back to the side to avoid being hit. When I get in the car and wave goodbye a couple of the kids put their faces to the window and keep looking in even as the car starts moving. Later I realize that some of these kids have probably never ridden in a car. We squeeze through the narrow streets of the village by car to get home to the barracks. But not before the security at the facility is mad at the driver and one Pakistani team member for taking the foreigners to the village without an armed escort. Nonetheless we have a nice dinner and I call it quits for the day while others go off to play more ping pong.
I expct a quiet hour or so but insead I get four visitors. Dr Chai (we call him that because he makes a super chia drink) comes to check up on me and because he wants sexual favors. I manage to get rid of him and then Samlong, our driver, comes to visit. Samlong speaks about 50 words of English, so in combination with my 3 words of Urdu, we don't get very far. But I find he has either two sons and two daughters or four daughters of ages 9, 6, 4, and 3. When I glance away from Samlong at my laptop he points at it and says, "Okay, I go now". And I see him to the door and say "We'll talk tomorrow". Just after I say this I realize how ironic and impossible that is. Soon Mr Tijuana (We call him that because his name sounds like the city of Tijuana) and an IT guy come to try to get me hooked up to the Internet, but they stay only 5 minutes and say they wll be back. A few minutes later Mr Tijuana and another guy come and try a few things but cannot get me connected to the Internet. Just as they are finishing up Karl comes back to the room but Mr Chai tags along also. So the 5 of us are in an 8 by 10 room and when Mr Chai brushed up against Karl and Karl moves away, I manage to position myself with Karl between me and Mr Chai. (I certainly hear an earfull about this move later from Karl!) But soon everyone is leaving and I deadbolt the door and turn in for sleep.
Oh boy are we in trouble on Wednesday morning! There is an armed security escort waiting for us at the exit of the barracks as we go to eat breakfast. There is a fair amount of loud talking and almost yelling back and forth in Urdu and finally we are told that we will have this armed escort with us the entire day to keep an eye on us. We go eat breakfast and decide to walk the 1 kilometer to the work site (all within the facility's secured grounds). So we're walking along to the work site with the armed escort driving behind us at 4 mph and another support vehicle following at 4 mph.
When we arrive at the work site our sensors and signals are producing clean and expected data and we are cautiously optimistic about the progress. Karl and I take pictures and get data to document the effort and we are told that a presentation has to be made to the higher ups (and lower downs). Karl makes the presentation in the early afternoon. Karl and other team members estimated that it ould be a 15 to 30 minute presentatin and I say it will be more than an hour. Nobody believes me but the presentation is made and it ends up more than an hour. After the presentation we head back to the control room and hope to close some control loops.
We've been told that we could use control variable A, such as the gas pedal on a car, to control the system. So we've focused all of Tuesday on changing control variable A and studying the system response. Now, at 3pm on Wednesday, we're told thay we will be using control variabe B, usch as a handbrake on a car, to control the system. We haven't studied the influence of control variable B on the system so how can we be expected to close conrol loops? Big surprise number 1 - change in control variable. So we do our best to close the control loop and have some success. The system is stable and we allow the operators to watch the system as we decide to leave the secure area and go to a nearby temple.
We've lost our armed security escort by now, but we're still in the secured area. When we get to the exit gate we are stopped and told that we will be having an armed escort for our little trip. There are three of us leaving the facility, one Pakistani and two US citizens, and we get a security vehicle and three armed security personnel following us. One has an Uzi, one has some sort of rifle, and one has a handgun. Okay, we're stuck with this ball and chain for our little outing.
We do the usual drive of avoiding dogs and cows and donkeys in the road and get to a very old Hindu temple. A vast majority of Pakistani's are muslim, but here we have a Hindu temple in the middle of the area. We walk around the temple complex and take pictures and draw many stares from others. As we're walking around there is a guy in tradional Pakistani dress follwing us around and taking video of us. He continues to follow us around and talks with the security gaurds and finally catches me by surpise by standing next to me, grabbing my hand to shake, and points to the security guards. The security guards have the guy's camera and are taking our picture. There is nothing to do now but smile, shake hands with the guy, and be recorded for posterity. There is an area in the Hindu temple compound that is locked, but soon some guy is coming over to unlock it. It turns out that they keep this area locked off to locals and only open it for foriegners. The keeper of the key cannot recall the last time that they had to unlock the area for a foriegner's visit.
We drive down towards the village with one stop along the way for photos. The security personnel step in front of the car and behind the car to block its travel as if they think we are going to make a run for it. But we get the photos and continue on to the village. It is a disappointment to not be allowed to get out of the car and walk around. As opposed to yesterday where you could feel like you were a villager even if you were a foreigner, today I am in the car and dettached from the experience. I take some pictures (which don't turn out well because we're in a moving car) and just accept the loss. We finally turn the car around and drive back to the facility with our armed securty escort in tow.
By the time that we finsh dinner we go back to the control room and all hell has broken loose. The system is responding poorly to every input and there have been more voltage loses from the Pakistani electrical grid. When we talk to the engineers and operators and ask what is going on, we get four different answers about how subsystems are connected to each other and controlled. Big surprise number 2 - everybody has a different idea of how the system architecture is.
It's after 9 pm, so we go walk over to the dinner hall (or mess hall) and have some dinner. We talk about the situation as well as other fun things.
Finally we go back to the control room at 10:30 at night and see more voltage changes from the Pakistani grid and erratic signals. There was also a single event upset that they had to go reset manually and we find that these single event upsets, which should be rare, usually happen about once a day. Big surprise number 3 - regular occurences of single event upsets that require manual intervention to correct. We just say to lower some gains and keep an eye on things throghout the night. After a long day the team is very tired, some have stomach/digestive problems, and all are frustrated about the hiding of information and we discover it on our own.
Everyone sleeps late on Thursday except me who is up at 6 am as always. We have a late breakfast and check in at the control room. We spend more time moving sensors around and re-calibrating and discussing processes with the team. And finally we have to leave. We say our goodbyes and we've exchanged gifts the day before - I brought Los Angeles-themed t-shirts and hats and Karl has brought Japanese-themed goodies. Two of the lead Pakistanis give both Karl and I a gift: very heavy candles made out of salt (because there is a large salt mine nearby). Each candle must weigh 10 pounds and Karl and I are wondering how we can carry this on the plane with us.
We drive back from the plant to Lahore, Pakistan. It is about a three hour drive with the first part on the road with donkeys and dogs and cow and goats. The second part is a very clean and modern motorway. When we get to lahore we meet up again with the boss and we do some shopping and finally have some dinner and enjoy each other's company and discuss future plans. And finally Karl and I are driven to the Lahore airport for a flight back to Thailand.
On Friday we arrive at Bangkok near 6 am. I slept enough on the plane to be energetic and enthusiastic. I've also exhancged email addresses with a flight attendant on the plane and look forward to new friendship. Karl, on the other hand, didn't seem to sleep on the plane and is hurting on Friday at the Suvarnabhumi airport as we wait an extended time for a flight to Chiang Mai. At one point I'm catching up on email and diary entries with some great house music playing and I'm fist pumping and shaking to the music. A Thai maintenatnce worker comes by and smiles and I can only smile back and greet her. I'm enthused about the effort in Pakistan and now it's vacation time.