Scuba in the Red Sea

Thats right, we've finally started our open water dives; we completed the first two this past weekend.  But Friday night Jolene was the control officer at a party so we knew it was going to be a late night and didn't want to get up early on Saturday, next weekend is out because the girls think they have to leave the country and visit Dubai so we will finish up in a couple of weeks.

On these dives we went down to about 40-45 feet, visability was okay, definiatley better out further from the coast.  I'm already lining up a dive about 3 hours north of Jeddah off the coast of Yanbu, Saudi Arabia, to visit an WW I Turkish troop transport wreck.  There are a half dozen of us from the consulate planning on diving the wreck.  So here are a few pictures from our dive.

Here is Crystal and the student dive master Christian.

And a selfie of me

Some coral, have to work out good settings on the camera for deeper water than snorkeling.

 




Christian again

And me

Crystal and her flowing red hair

Our Finish instructor Anu. She's been awesome!

And Jolene sporting the Shortie wet suit.











And yes we will be spending a few days in Dubai.  We are looking forward to getting away for a bit and it will be really nice for the girls since they can dress like Westerners there and can forget the abaya for a while. We'll post pics and tell you all about it when we get back.

Cheers!

Rainy Season

For the first time since we've been here it is now actually raining.  We did get sprinkled on our first day here but the ground never really got wet.  Now schools are closing, people are worried and traffic will be 10 fold worse than usual.  We are enterning the rainy season here in Jeddah and on average it falls 25....  mm for the month of November, but that number climbs all the way up to 30 mm for December.  The problem is, it rains here so in frequently, that storm sewers were never put into place so there were areas that flooded.  One in particular was an underpass that in 2010 flooded and several people drowned in their cars.

When we moved here a lot of the roads were tore up and storm sewers were/are being installed.  But in the mean time it was very nice to go outside and feel the rain on my skin, hear the thunder rolling across the sky and listen to all the sirens off in the distance.

Not much else to report for now so I'll leave you with this picture, it's not much anywhere else, but amazing for this place.