Rick Beeman

Tough Day--this is freakin' long...so feel free to skip.... Woke up this morning and finally found a good place for a fast food breakfast...Dairy Queen. Its my ritual in the morning that i do my Bible reading over hashbrowns and Diet Coke. Speaking of Bible reading since i don't have a lot friends here yet, i take my Bible everywhere i go so i never have to eat alone. Fortunately Im in 1 Samuel right now...the story and David and Saul reads more like a novel...im just glad i made it through Leviticus unscathed lol.... Today (Friday) is the weekend in Bahrain..at least Fri-Sat. Most of the Middle East observes the weekend-Days off on Thu-Fri. That is weird to get adjusted to. Bahrain recently switched because it is such an international banking country, Thu-Fri only gives you 3 working days with the rest of the business world so the extra day helps. I wanted to go with the crew to cover an event today. I wanted to see them in action so i could evaluate their talent. The...

Dinner with an Iraqi When I lived in Saudi Arabia previously in 2005, one of my best friends was an Iraqi...named Barraq. Great guy, he considered himself a non-practicing muslim. He grew up in the faith but saw so many inconsistencies in the religion he just couldn't follow. We had many late nights over coffee discussing Islam, Christianity, and true faith. It was quite enlightening. i learned so much about Islam what is right and what is wrong about it. Islam funny thing is very very similar to Judaism. The funny thing is so much of history and modern day conflict is the struggle between Jews and Arabs...when essentially they are the same religion. I think it all comes down to the biggest sibling rivalry in world history...Dad liked me best (Ishmael and Isaac). So the conflict is so hard to understand since the religions are so similar to each other. They both believe in the Garden of Eden, Noah, Abraham, they even believe in Christ. They also agree that Christ was mer...

Lunch with a South African We have a shoot in Abu Dhabi on Sunday. Its a big client and should be loads of fun. But getting the crew over there turned out to be quite a headache. The Sales manager, whose name is Ahmad is a great guy. He's Jordanian, young, and very very bright. I enjoy working with him a lot. His wife recently got homesick and returned to Jordan. He had only been married for two months, but his wife left her family and couldn't find work readily available in the banking industry so she sat home and got lonely. She's scheduled to come back at the end of the month enshala (God Willing) That is the a little window into some of the Arab culture. The children are somewhat sheltered, yet when they get married they are thrust into a new lifestyle. Dating in the Middle East is a lot different than dating in U.S. In fact, one of my Saudi friends, when he got married had never seen (via in person, photo or video) nor spoken to his bride. Can you imagine th...

More whining from the Rich (realtively speaking) American guy. What an interesting day. I think I'm beginning to like sitting behind a big desk. Im so used to being project oriented. I was the worker bee, got consumed on a project and didn't rest til it was finished. Now, I have others that I can throw deadlines on. Its really different. We were going to do a Demo Reel for KSDI and I was about to get started on it and I thought wait!!! I have an editing staff that can do that. i can be a supervisor...woo-hoo for that. I feel like Im not really working, just delegating to others to have them work. Maybe that is what management is all about. I could get used to this. Its late in the office right now. We just had a late night meeting. We are going to do a shoot on Sunday in Abu Dhabi, which is one hour from Dubai. Its a pretty prestigious party at the Royal Palace. Its going to have, flame throwers, Fireworks, Cirque De Soleil type acrobats. I'm going to go with...

Let me preface this that in my motel the only place i can get internet access is the lobby. So i write these blogs in there. The night before I noticed quite a few Saudi's going into what looked like a club. You can tell they were Saudi's because their gutra (headpiece) was red checkered, which is distinctive in only Saudi Arabia. All others wear white...with the exception of maybe Palestine where they are black checked (think Yasser Arafat). So I was curious. So tonight when I was writing in the Blog, there was a Bahranian also in the lobby smoking, drinking, and talking loudly on his cell phone. Arabs are standoffish at first, but once you make the first move in terms of communication they are extremely friendly and hospitable. But again, you have to initiate the conversation. So asked what was the deal with all the Saudi's. He went onto explain that the Saudi's come to the club and drink and drink and drink. He said they drink beer and whisky like water. P...

Day 4 but let me start a little bit of the end of Day 3. I was eating room service, and trying to entertain myself. The options on TV...not an exaggeration were 300+ Arabic channels which can best be likened to Cable Access for Muslims or 3 english speaking channels. One was a re-run of Oprah, the other Spiderman and the third American Gladiators. The depressing part about it...i watched the entire Gladiator episode once i got into it...I had to see it to the finish to see who prevailed. I finally forced myself to sleep around 1a and woke up about 3 hours later completely awake on a hard bed. I guess i hadn't gotten over my jet lag yet. Then a curious thing happened as I woke up. I had a dream that I had reconciled with my former spouse. What made this strange is that since my divorce i had only dreamt about her 3 maybe 4 times in four years. Then last night it was two consecutive nights of dreaming about her. Reconciliation is an impossibility since she remarried so t...

Ok..Went in for my first day of work and it certainly was a mixed experience.  All the employees, mainly a mix of Filipinos, Indiansm Sri Lankans and a South African thrown into round out the group seemed genuinely excited to have me aboard.  There is just a lot to do, and I have to learn a whole new medium (digital still photography).  Photography is the bread and butter of the company so i just need to learn how to be a project manager.  i guess you could say...im a officially a "suit" although i will cling to my creative roots.  Ultimately we will produce more video, I just need to learn how to manage the financial base so we can flourish into other higher risk/reward projects.   Ok here's where the culture shock comes in.  They moved my hotel to another longer term facility.  I think they are trying to encourage me to find housing more quickly...and believe me...im certainly motivated now.  The new place im staying at resembles something out of 1940.  But the crazy pa...

It's 12:30 AM on Sunday morning i think...and i have tons of energy...go figure.  This is actually the first day of the work week so i start at the company today.  They do the weekends over herein the Middle East on Thursday and Friday, but Bahrain is more progressive they do their weekends on Friday and Saturday.   A little about Bahrain..its much more progressive than Saudi Arabia.  In Saudi women can't drive, (some might argue if that is a good or bad thing) you can't drink alcohol (again see aforementioned reference) you can't have any pork product, no movies, if you talk to a woman that is not your wife you could get arrested and/or deported and they have calls to prayer 5 times a day where everything stops, stores and restaurants close and life comes to a halt for the 30-45 min. that prayer lasts.  The difficult thing is that its hard to plan your day around the prayer schedule as each day its a little different...the prayers are scheduled on the lunar cycle.  In ...

Friday..or is Saturday??? Oct. 23 I got on the plane at 10 am leaving from SFO.  Had to go to Houston, said my goodbyes to the children, well at least the boys...my daughter (14) has a hard time finding reasons to talk to me...but that is for a later post.  I haven't seen her since July, even though I have pleaded with her to do so.  Wait...that is a painful tangent...i'll talk about that later. I get to Houston and the computers were down...they had to manually check everyone in by hand...all 500 or so of us.  It was like the dark ages.  Finally I get my seat.  They flew me out Business class.  The plane was delayed for 3 hours leaving because all the manual check in...they had to manually match the baggage as well.  It could have been a 12 hour delay...i didn't care...In business class on a flight like that...its so luxurious.  I certainly felt pampered and spoiled.  The plane finally took off and I felt like i was on vacation.  I had hundreds of movies and television sho...