A Massive Week

Well its been a full on week! The above picture is of AJ n I on our delightful break from Saudi Arabia having a much needed drink and being slightly tipsy. I'll upload the rest when I get some more batteries for my camera.

Weather wize, the Shamal is in (cold cold sandy winds) so there's a layer of miscroscopically fine desert dust absolutely everywhere. You'll just wipe a surface and two minutes later it'll be dusty again. This has alternated with rainy thunderstorms which are pretty spectacular. Or would be if they didn't all happen at night! However we got our first taste of Saudi roads and driving after rain and its taking you life in your hands. There is no drainage here so even in camp the roads were covered in some places with up to a foot of water. My golf cart got drowned in one of them and I had to ask a really helpful eastern expat guy to push me out (he was smarter than me and wearing wellies). He is turn got to laugh the entire time at my sputtering little waterlogged cart parping off down the street.

That aside, I made the mistake last year of volunteering to be on the board of a coffee morning thing they do here and I've managed to greivously offend the lady whose been doing it for years and she is now not talking to me except for trying to snipe at me in public. I sent out an email that listed things I and the other new guys on the board might need to know about how to run this place (after checking it with one or two of the other guys to make sure it was as innocuous as possible) and she took it really badly. So it looks like I'm going to have to step down from this thing, take any abuse she hands out and just not go up that end of town for a while. She's a really nice lady, just older (62 or so) and used to doing this thing her way so wires crossed etc...she's out of the country for five weeks so I'm waiting to see if she's still all worked up when she gets back. (Welcome to the Ras Tanura Fishbowl)

So this leads me to the next thing thats going on...Anthony and I loved Bahrain so much I'm currently working out how to invest in a house there and how to move us in the next few months. Its actually slightly quicker for him to get to work from there and a hell of a lot cruizier. (So that's going to be my excuse for quiting this coffee thing not that I'd move to Bahrain to quit a coffee thing...Bahrain's for the food, the wine, the lack of living Aramco and the ability to drive safely)

Anthony has set me onto this whole bahrain thing because he doesn't want to know about it until we're in the moving truck and he knows what an obsessive bugger I am, so I'm enjoying the challenge.

In addition to all this I've restarted my PhD full force and its great. Since we get up at five and don't go to bed until about 10 its playing a major role in taking up my time and taking my mind off camp politics. Mind you, I am getting slightly housebound and am starting to look like a pretty scary hermit creature.

So thats about it for now. The food here is as dismal as ever and I did consider having a 'salad' analysed for alien life forms the other day.

Aisha, one of my friend's here, has just had her parents arrive from a trip to Pakistan (They from the UK). They were visiting a relative who lived right neer Bhutto's house and the descriptions of the wreckage after the riots was just plain scary. But more on that later...I have to go do some curtain twitching.