Wednesday, November 17, 2010

A Bit About the Base

Camp Lemonnier is an interesting creature. It's sprawled along the south side of the international airport and it's a collection of inherited buildings, newly erected buildings, and shipping containers masquerading as buildings. Pull it up on Google Maps and you'll see a huge area of neatly arranged, gleaming white containers. These are Containerized Living Units (CLU, pronounced 'clue') and most of them are shared by two people and have a shower/toilet CLU in the middle of the block. My rank gets me my own CLU with its own bathroom but the waiting list is a few months long.

The thing to get used to is that you have to walk everywhere to do anything. When you're in CLUville, that's a long walk. It takes some logistical planning to figure out what you're going to have in your hands at any given time as you make your way across base. The importance of this is that there's no bags of any kind allowed in the exchange and you can't leave bags unattended anywhere on base.

The chow hall is not quite big enough. A new facility is being built and should be open next summer but for now it's best to try to eat during the off peak times. The food is decent and you can eat as much as you want as often as you want. That can be dangerous. They also have a variety of snacks like cookies, granola bars, chips, etc. and you can grab a couple of those as you leave. There's been a problem with people filling backpacks so the snack items are now controlled a bit stricter but you can still get whatever you want.

Right now I'm still trying to figure out my daily routines but life is generally okey dokey.

No comments:

Post a Comment