The New Nokia Touchscreen 5800 XpressMusic is… (Part II)

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…my new toy. Heehee.

About eight months ago, I wrote that I wanted to have the first of the touchscreens of the Nokia brand. I was so egged on to get one back then that I frequented the malls back home just to see if the phone was already available to the public. Early first quarter of this year, it reached the shores of the Philippines, but as I was preparing my documents to work abroad, which involved shelling out money from my own pocket, this was put on hold. My birthday, by the way, just passed a few days back (a belated greeting is fine hehe), and I usually get myself something to toy with during this special day. I was torn between an iPod 120 GB classic (with the Genius feature) and a new phone. I was mulling over the latter because I needed a spare for my two roaming numbers, SIM cards which I only get to open once in a blue moon. The XpressMusic comes with a so-so 8 GB, still enough for playing music on the road, and had a wider screen weighed against the iPod Classic (it’s comparable to the iPod Touch). Plus, this was bagsak presyo in the Middle East, so getting one was like hitting three birds with one stone (music, video, and a phone) and I also got to save P3,000 compared to having bought one back home.

I must say the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic lived up to my expectations on being a beefed-up media phone. The video feature is fantabulous, 3.2-inch wide screen with zoom and stretch options. This, however, only plays formats in MP4, so unless you have a converter for your favorite desktop movies you would not really unleash the optimal feature of this one. The music player is comparable to other phones, like the N95, which I now have as my roaming phone (heehee), but I am still not quite satisfied with the sound. I have a Samsung MP3 player with the DNSe technology and the XpressMusic pales in comparison to the audio it produces. I was hoping that they tweaked with the equalizer, because this changes the quality by a mile, but no new changes there. One other thing that I’m drooling over the Nokia 5800 is how fast and good its Internet is. Unlike my N95 where it takes quite a time for a particular page to upload, this one can do so in seconds and in PC-like quality. Literally, the same page you see in a computer pops up right before your very eyes. You can also zoom in on a page by tapping on the monitor or by pressing the control on the lower leftmost part of the screen. A slider then appears where you can zoom in and out as you like. But having the whole page on a mobile phone has its foibles, money foibles that is. It eats more kilobytes thus eating more of your celphone credits. It’s good for wi-fi, but for surfing within the network it’s best to get one of those mobile browsers.


I have been using Opera Mini for my N95 since time immemorial. I had it installed on my Nokia 5800, because of its webpage compression, but to no avail. I learned from visiting the Opera site that it had a bug and they are fixing it. They recently released an updated version solely for the XpressMusic and Blackberry, 4.2.1337. I had it downloaded and installed a number of times but it still doesn’t work. This left me with no other option but to surf via the Web browser installed on the Nokia 5800, the one that displays the whole page at a higher cost, so I just do away with the images at times. I also frequently visit a page via a wap-based mobile browser that displays Websites like Opera does, Mowser in particular, and this also helps save on celphone loads.

After having exhausted this phone from my meticulous scrutiny, I still say this gets your money’s worth. It’s not THE iPhone killer as Nokia would like you believe, but it will be the first for this brand to dip its feet on a market of touchscreens firmly held by Jobs and company. For a first-timer, not bad. The XpressMusic is flashy and techie, what with those icons that you just press with your finger, stylus, or the plectrum. This is especially good for watching movies on the road, all the more convenient for me where I spend about two hours daily on the bus from work to my accommodation. It provides the entertainment that you need, when you need it the most, right at the palm of your hands, all in just a touch of a fingertip. Blah, blah, blah, but I’m still getting the iPod. (lol)

The Accommodation (Part I)

It was another 30-minute ride to get to my accommodation, my home for the next year, or two years if I feel like finishing my contract (up until this point I am still having thoughts). If you have been following this blog, you would have agreed with me in saying “Alas! Sleep!” Well, I did finally get some minutes’ rest (not sleep sadly), but a displeasing dilemma would be facing me once I get to the camp, and it would go on for at least two weeks.

We got to a building situated in a fairly new strip of Jubail City. I was told that the land where our accommodation now stood was once part of the sea. They just covered it with earth, much like what the Arab Emirates did with their exclusive Palm Islands or The World, albeit this pales in comparison. Because the area is fairly new, there were numerous vacant lots that littered the place and those that happened to be occupied had ongoing construction on them. This is a problem that I see up until this day because we have difficulty buying foodstuff and other things we need on a daily basis. God, how you just miss the luxury you have with the sari-sari stores back home. The location of our accommodation is as yet unheard of that taxis do not even ply the area. But this is not the "displeasing dilemma" I was talking about.

I was brought to my room, on the second level, only to find the door locked. What a way to welcome me to my first day in the Middle East, huh? The security guard did not even have a spare key so they just left me staring blankly at the door. I was to share this room with two nurses, one assigned in the hospital’s ER department and another subcontracted by those massive oil refinery plants as a company nurse. These roommates were currently in their respective shifts so there was nothing to do but wait. Good thing another nurse had the heart to offer his room for the time being so I could have my lunch, change my now sweat-dried clothes, and take a few minutes of rest. The next shift would be starting at 4:00pm with the coaster leaving for the hospital at 3:30pm. So even if I wanted to sleep, I was pressed for time. I laid down on his bed, had the thought of finally working in a foreign country sink in, looked back at my experiences so far, and tried closing my eyes. After a few minutes, it would be off to the hospital to meet new colleagues (who would soon become friends) in the PT department and the I-don’t-give-a-shit-about-you roommate whom I would be seeing in the days to come.

To be continued…

The Hospital

I have been to hospitals before, medical institutions where I once had my clinical internship and ones where I volunteered my services as a physical therapist after getting my license to practice the same. I am familiar with the everyday hustle and bustle that makes up the hospital framework and the usual his and hellos one gives to other allied medical professionals. However, in some baffling way, the hospital that situated itself before me was poles apart; it would be a baptism of fire once the thick steel doors were opened for me.


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The first thing I noticed were the natives, Saudis garbed in their traditional national dresses, with the men all in white and their headdress punctiliously put in place. The women were the exact opposite--all black with only their eyes seen by the outside world. Some of the Saudi women who work for the hospital were clad in their uniforms--blue, maroon, or beige, depending on the department they belong to--and they too had their head covers on. Then there were the Indians who make a sizeable hospital populace, from nurses to office employees to transport services (the foreign-looking person who actually picked me up at the airport was an Indian national). There were also expatriates of different races: Egyptians, who are mostly doctors, Jordanians, Syrians, Sudanese, Burmese, Nepalis, and not surprisingly the Filipinos. A hospital in the Middle East is half a hospital without Filipinos as health staff.

There was no difficulty singling out a Filipino from the other expatriates. It is as if we have internal sensors of our own that are once activated, with the resultant customary nod, when we see or meet a kababayan. Surely enough, I would befriend some of them as the days progressed, but just when you thought a countryman of your own would be there to lend a hand, sadly there would be some who simply don’t give a shit about you (a particular roommate would prove this case in a future entry). After two months of work here, I came to know that the Filipinos make up most of the workforce behind the hospital’s various departments--nursing, radtech, medtech, NAs, and even physical therapy, the department I proudly belong to (in fact, all of the PT staff are Filipinos).

Hastily ambling the hospital hallways because my usher was walking in the same manner, we then reached Employee Services where I was welcomed with a quick new-hire orientation. It was a relief that the Saudis there spoke good English so I did not have a problem communicating with them. While inside, they also issued a temporary Iqama for me, a residential permit that a foreign national should bring with him/her wherever s/he goes. The Iqama is an important document that in instances where you will be asked by a police officer to reproduce it and you cannot, it usually ends up you being in jail. And boy, you will never know when and where those checkpoints will be.

After everything was checked and in place, I was told that I could now go to my accommodation. I pondered where we would be heading and how long to get there. Remember that I have not slept yet for more than 24 hours. Even if my mind was on a roll of its own, my body was just dog-tired that I had never wanted rest so bad. Clutching my bag and a plastic full of free meal a new hire customarily gets for the next three days, we came out the same thick steel doors and I left the hospital with the baptismal fire still ablaze even as the doors were slowly closing behind me.

The Hospital: Prologue

We got off the van and headed to a building situated adjacent to the hospital. Walking under the high-noon heat, I was mulling over what was and whom I would be meeting inside. Could it be a physical therapist who will be orienting me on what to expect on my first day at work? Could this building be the rehabilitation department that would mold a better health professional out of me? Well, it turned out to be one of the admin personnel, from Support Services, who belatedly welcomed me and asked for an apology as to why they made it to the airport at such late a time. He also tweaked with his computer and typed something, which turned out to be instructions to my accommodation (a problem that I will talk about in a separate entry), and had somebody escorted me to Employee Services, an extension of the Admin offices found inside the hospital.

We would come in by way of the employee entrance at the leftmost part of the 3-storey edifice that house a 90-bed capacity tertiary medical institution. Somehow I felt that I was ready for the experience that awaited me as soon as I get to set my foot on the hospital’s premises. Having been an office employee for the last three years would have made me feel otherwise, but I guess this insatiable craving to work my profession has overshadowed the disquiet a newcomer often feels in an unchartered territory. Clutching a bag with personal belongings that I just could not leave on the van, the foreign-looking person who met me at the airport opened the thick steel doors for me, ushering me to an experience I was hankering over for years.

To be continued...

Twenty-Three More Months to Go

Yesterday marked my first month living and working in the Middle East. It may seem like short a time, but the experiences I had were beyond measure: sociaizing with people of different races, learning a new language that is the heart of our religion, attending various lectures on hospital/departmental safety and infection control, training for BCLS/CPR, preparing for the hospital’s JCI accreditation, handling irate patients and being accused of not knowing anything (Arabic: mafi mallum) or having your integrity questioned over documentation to mention some.

I have soon acclimatized myself to the people and the environment and do not feel homesickness that much; I have lived on my own in Metro Manila for almost three years. Initially my plan was to work here for only a year then I would pack my bags and leave for home, not finishing the two-year contract to which I affixed the calligraphic doodle I call my signature. Well, that of course would mean me paying for my airfare and any other finances due to the hospital, but I have already planned for that and would not mind shelling some dinero from my own pocket. If it is the other way around, that is me finishing the contract, then today, April the 18th, jumpstarts the countdown to the 23 months remaining of my stay here. Let’s just pray I come home in one piece. LOL.

To Kah Mai and Yang

Kah Mai and Mom
Yang
I would like to take a break from writing about my Middle East adventures and take a space off this blog to extend my heartfelt congratulations to two special women in my life, Mai and Yang, my sisters. Both of them graduated just a few weeks back and I hope, before long, they would be esteemed professionals in their own respective fields; one is a soon-to-be lawyer and the other a nurse. How I wished that I were able to attend both of their graduations--last March 26 in Jolo and April 6 in Zamboanga—but my coming to work in the Far East was rather urgent that I only had a week to prepare and to bid my adieus to loved ones and friends. To Kah Mai and Yang, congratulations! See you soon, Inshaallah.

En Route to Jubail

I asked the driver where we were heading and how long it would take us to get there. “Whoa” was the only thing I could say when he replied it would take about an hour to get to the hospital in Jubail. I thought they would be bringing me to my accommodation first to at least have a few hours of sleep after all that travelling; at this time, I had been a walking zombie for 32 hours. For weird reasons, I did not feel as heavy-eyed as I should be having been awake that long, maybe because I was so anxious to crash head on with what was in store for me on the way to my new work place. I took this, though, as an opportunity to sightsee what Dammam-Jubail had to offer, and sightsee these easternmost cities of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia I did.

I had never seen vastness like the outskirts en route to Jubail. It is not desert-like, mind you, but you just visually take in this great expanse of untenanted land--okay, maybe a few structures here and there--on both sides of the roads. The streets were wide, about four, six lanes that the drive was smooth and unadulterated by traffic. Exiting Dammam and then entering Jubail, passing by this long stretch of road the name of which fails me now, on a windswept Tuesday morning, was where I got to experience my first sandstorm.

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To the left of my peripheral vision formed this cloud of dust that was slowly heading our direction. I have seen sandstorms from “The Mummy” movies so I knew how it looked like and had a fair grasp of what to expect, but the one I encountered was not as cinematically grandiose, you know, with the monstrosity that was the face of Imhotep. What I saw were fine tads of earth being swept by the gusts of winds and the roads almost zero-vision brought upon by its mishmash with the fog. No wonder why cars here are grubby and houses architecturally built to reduce the likelihood of these dusts from wreaking havoc inside their homes. Straight ahead and after turning a corner, we then crossed the threshold to the town proper of the Industrial City of Jubail.

You would have expected that with the word “industrial” in the name of a city to see skyscrapers or big establishments or shopping centers or any of the sorts. On the contrary, Jubail has neither apart from a big expanse of land solely for the use of a massive oil refinery plant. It is so huge that it is twice or triple the size of Makati City. The oil they are amassing may have been unimaginable. When everybody the world over was troubled by the rising pump prices that goes on to have a domino effect on everything economics, underneath the earth we were passing lay an immeasurable amount of wealth, wealth that keeps the Middle Eastern economy afloat and natives banking on their government for livelihood. This is the most likely reason I see why most people who do the work for or with them are expatriates, foreign nationals like me, simply because they have the money to pay.

It was past 11:00 A.M. when we reached and turned another bend. We were now at an exclusive compound because the lawns were scrupulously manicured and the houses mansion-like, albeit only two stories. At this point, I prayed that we were closer to our rendezvous point because my stomach was already complaining. But after turning yet another corner, passing through an entryway and moving past light posts that littered the parking lot at every curve, my prayer was finally heeded for there right smack in the middle, laved under the high-noon sunbeams and breezy Middle Eastern winter winds, stood my new workplace for the next two years...


...the hospital.

To be continued…

The Middle East Adventure Continues…

I already exchanged numbers with Harold when we were about to leave the Philippines. Being on my own at a foreign airport, I tried reaching him to ask where in the world they could be and why they left me behind. The least they could have done was wait for me and relay the next steps that I needed to undertake. I was clueless with what to do next that I went outside the airport to see if they happened to be there waiting for me. I was approached by an Arab and asked what I was doing there. I was fraught and sleepless that I did something stupid: get out of the airport premises. I replied that I was just waiting for somebody and decided it was better to wait inside, which the Arab agreed was the best thing to do, expressed in broken English and hand gestures. Harold’s message came some minutes later. It said that somebody came by to pick them up and that my name was not on the list of new hires the driver was to bring to the hospital in Dammam. I was dumbfounded; this was not something I signed up for. There was no heads-up that this was supposed to happen. I was left hanging, in the Middle East of all places.

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I waited for hours in the airport for somebody to pick me up. I was groggy, so wanted to take a bath, and famished. I only had 100 Saudi Riyals in my pocket (about P1,200), money I had forex’ed way back in NAIA. I decided to get celphone credits to contact the agency that deployed me and tell them about what happened, to update my family that I am already in KSA, and call relatives that are working here. I also bought a can of soft drink because my voice had gotten hoarse from dryness and settled myself in the cafeteria waiting for eternity. I befriended two other Filipinos at the airport who had the same situation I was in. It really helps ease the anxiety when you see kababayans around. We waited until morning, without sleep, for our respective sundos. As the hours passed, the two Filipinos I exchanged stories with were each picked by their designated drivers, leaving me alone again. Around 9:00 A.M., I asked the agency to forward the number of the hospital’s contact here. It was only when I called the HR officer that I learned I was to be assigned in another branch of the hospital, in Jubail.

It was already 10:00 A.M. when a foreign-looking person approached me in the cafeteria where I just finished munching on some sandwich, my breakfast for the day. He was carrying a rectangular piece of cardboard with the name of the hospital printed on it. He inquired if I was the person he was meeting, with the cardboard sign pointed at me. YES, I said out of spite. Finally, after 10 hours of flight from Manila to Doha, three hours waiting in Qatar for our 30-minute connecting flight to Dammam, from 2:00 A.M. to 10:00 A.M. in King Fahad Airport I was going to have my so badly needed rest. Boy, I was wrong.

To be continued…