40 percent of Saudis ‘have no respect for law

This was the title of an article in the Saudi Gazette a while back.  This is truly evident in how they drive here.  I thought the driving in Moscow was bad.  In Moscow the infrastructure is no way able to keep up, so it was almost always congested.  Accidents were usually fender benders or scrapes.  People were always in a hurry and if you left to much space between your car and the one in front of you, someone would pull in and fill that space.  They didn't do it to cut you off, just further their progression down the road.  I would take hours to go only a few miles, but you were pretty safe.

Okay back to Jeddah and the piss poor driving here.  Here they drive so carelessly it will drive you nuts.  I find myself getting angrier and angrier each time I drive.  And, I don't think I'm the only one.  Last week when I was leaving work, I pulled out onto the main road, 3 lanes on my side, and in my rear view mirror I see this silver car in the middle lane ramming the car on the right, then he decided to go for the vehicle in the left lane a couple of times, then the back to the right.  At that point, I was too far away to see how it ended.  Granted that was one of the more extreme examples.

More of an every day occurrence is the drift lane change. Just imagine someone wearing a Keffiyeh, ( the checkered head scarf that the men wear) and driving a car.  The keffiyeh comes forward so much that the wearer has zero peripheral vision and do not bother to turn their head and look over their shoulder.  To change lanes the don't signal they just start to ease over the line and gradually get over.  They believe that the space will open up so they just do glide on over.  Now this in itself is mind boggling but a great many driver don't drive between the lines, they ride down the road with one side just over the line taking up two lanes.  When I encounter this I do what any sane person would do, I lean on the horn as I move by them and encourage them to get back into their lane, all the time muttering explicatives under my breath.

So I stumbled upon a youtube video of one of these drivers, they display a lot of habits we see here. Based on the number of drivers, this looks to be filmed on a Friday morning so about a third of the traffic.  It's about 17 minutes long but the first few minutes you can see how he drives on the lines.

Okay now that I've got that off my chest, things here are going well.  The temperature is getting warmer and the humidity is climbing as well.  Work is going good, and I've been getting in some diving whenever I can.

I know it's been a while since the last posting, but I don't want to bore you with the day to day things that don't change.

Cheers!

Wreck Dive in Yanbu

This past weekend I went out with my dive instructor, her husband and five others from the consulate to Yanbu, a small town North of Jeddah.  After a 4am meet up we hit the road, 3 hours and 1 speeding ticket later (damn speed cameras), we met up with our contact who got us up to the marina.  The boat was much smaller than I anticipated, but we piled on board, stowed our gear and set off.  it was a nice 45 minute ride out to the site.  We did two dives on the wreck and then went to a different reef for our last dive.  The dives were great, the lunch sucked, but oh well.  Enough rambling, here are some of the pictures, the rest can be found here: YANBU DIVE PICS

 Couple of Lion Fish

A look inside reveals 1000s of small fish

Cheers!

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.

Boat Snorkel Trip

Well we finally have our HHE shipment.  We've spent several days unpacking and it is really nice to have our stuff again.  Even though my computer was dead, I was able to recover the hard drive and get all my data back, woohoo!

Okay back to the water.  On Columbus day holiday we went with about 20 other people from work on a boat trip about 17 miles off the coast to a couple of different reefs.  Here are a few shots heading out on our day of fun in the sun.

 Heading out the inlet there are several yachts, this was one of the smaller ones.

 Looking back toward shore

This was one of the reefs we snorkeled around

The first on was called Chicken Wreck, this is because a boat sunk there carrying frozen chicken bound for Jeddah.  The boat is in about 45 feet of water, since I was just snorkeling couldn't get close up pictures, but here is a shot as far down as I could get.

The reefs were absolutely awesome the water was so clear you could easily see 50 feet underwater.  There were so many fish and I saw a giant moray eel.  It was just cruising along below me, it was too quick for me to get a decent picture.

We have scheduled to start our dive training and we are all looking forward to getting certified so we can go deeper and see more.  On this trip about half of the group was diving and they always came up saying how cool it was and one guy was telling us about an octopus that played tug of war with him.

But I digress, so I have to say my new underwater camera does pretty good.  Still working on fine tuning the settings but here are a few of my favorite shots, and you can see the whole album here. SNORKEL PICS

These guys almost glow they are so bright.

I've only seen these little green fish in coral like this

 Boo diving down for a closer look.

 One of several highway like areas where fish seemed to follow a specific path

 There were several tunnel areas like this were you could swim through.

 And the colorful fish were all over.

 These fish were 18" - 24" inches long and were in water about a foot or two deep on top of the reef.

More little green fish in the coral

One of the bigger ones hiding out.

Well that's our update.  We are in the middle of a week long Hajj holiday.  Next week it's back to work, but in the mean time we are going to have some of the Marines over for dinner tonight.  With such a small American community, we try to do as much with others as we can, it makes this place just that much better.

Cheers!

Not Much Going On...

But I'm trying to stay on top of posting.  When things are slow, it makes it harder to get on here and post anything.  We aren't doing anything really exciting but we are making friends and getting out a bit.  About every other week the local employee association at the consulate puts on a party evening last day of the work week.  This past week was "Steak Night".  Medium done steak, real mashed potatoes and veggies with a garlic parmesan cheese topping; really good stuff.  Then after the dinner we went to the after party at the Marine's House.  We brought along some friends I met about a month ago, a few pilots that fly on contract bringing Hajj's (pilgrims) to visit Mecca.  There was two Americans and one Aussie that joined us for the evening.  This was the first time two of them had a chance to interact with Americans at the consulate, and drink.  Needless to say everyone had a great time.  As most of you know, pork products are illegal here so needless to say like alcohol the only way we can get it is through the Consulate commissary.   So yesterday we invited a couple of the pilots over for a ham dinner.  They were in heaven, ham, potatoes, green beans and beer.  It's nice to be able to help bring a little American culture to those here working far from home.

Still working on lining up SCUBA lessons, looking at the end of the month.  We are going out on a dive/scuba boat during the upcoming holiday.  From what I hear it's an all day thing and great for diving and snorkeling.  The boat anchors near the reef which is about 3' deep at some parts then drops off so the divers have their place to go too.  So I'll hopefully get some good pictures, it will be nice to get off shore and out into the open waters.

Well gonna run,
Ciao!

Beach and Balls

So today we made it out to the Silver Sands beach and it was just beautiful.  Two thumbs up for me.  Crystal said it was like paradise, a place where she could where her bikini.  Jolene and I think the beach is "Travel Magazine Ready"  Something like you will see in resort adds in travel magazine.  No for those of you that know the Silver Sands in NY, yeah this is much better.  Today is an American holiday, but not for the locals so it was a perfect time to go to the beach.  We pretty much had the place to ourselves, me Jolene, Boo and one of the Marines, which I think we are adopting.  Crystal will have another big brother.... I think we'll get one at each post to help keep an eye on her.

So here are the pictures that I took with my iPhone.  I'm sure Jolene will be uploading some to Facebook too.  We did swim out to the island and found a crab on the rocks.  It was perfectly intact but dead and all red.  Honestly it looks like it climbed out on the rock and cooked right there

So the other part of the title... Balls....I'm sure you're wondering where that is relevant.  Well a friend of a friend came back from Turkey and brought some gum back with them.  It is supposed to be extra sour, but I only thought it was fruity.  It was kinda like Double Bubble in that it was good for about 30 seconds then you are ready to spit it out.  So here is the gum...

I thought it was funny as hell.  So what else, we are settling into work, Jolene is trying to update things in her job, I'm cruising along and Crystal is off for yet one more week, but we will make a trip into the school sometime this week to get her new school uniforms.  Picture to be posted later.

We went to a dinner party with another consulate family and two families that live here, one from England and the other guy is from Chicago and his wife is from Iraq.  She made authentic Iraqi cuisine and it was awesome.  I don't even know the name of the dishes but they were great, and then she made this Turkish desert that was, well awesome too.  No idea what it was called, I know it have pine nuts in it and ice cream and sugar and something else that had a grainy texture.  No pictures of the dessert, but Jolene got pictures of the table before we ate so look for those on FB.

Cheers for now.

Time for another update from Jeddah

Well I just completed my first full week of work and settling in nicely.  Everyone at post is extremely friendly and have made us feel welcome.  Jolene starts work this Sunday and is really looking forward to it.  This week we went out with some others from work and had a sea food dinner Bedouin style... sitting on carpets and sharing several different plate.  Here's the spread...

We had sea bass, parrot fish, shrimp, and calamari.  Crystal and Jolene ate a little bit of everything.  They actually like it.   I handed Crystal one of the shrimp above and she said, "What do I do with it... It still has the head on it, Dad fix it for me...."  So I pealed her shrimp for her.  Needless to say everything tasted excellent. There was 15 of us for dinner and we had enough food for another 10 people.  But we made good use of the leftovers, bringing them to the Marines on duty and the security guards.

So this is the beach we went to today, it's called the La Plage. For those of you that know French, yes the beach is called "The Beach".  I know very original.  There is another beach that we will eventually make it to called "Silver Sands"  For you back in the USDA, I'll let you know how it compares to the Silver Sands in NY.

The water is quite warm, but a little cooler than the pool in our housing compound.  As you get out about 5 feet or so it gets quite comfortable.  The tent in the distance is where you can rent snorkel and dive equipment.  There is a reef that drops off where the divers head out, but the reef is awesome with a snorkel. One of the Marines that was with us today, had an underwater camera, so if his pictures turn out I'll get them uploaded here.  But until then, here's what it looked like...

Obviously we need to rush out and get our own fins and mask so we don't have to rent them, but we are really looking forward to learning how to dive and exploring further out.  I hear there are several ship wrecks that are great diving places.

Well that's it for now ...

مع السلامة
Sounds like ... Ma’a salama
Translations... Good Bye

A Week in Jeddah

Okay so we've been here a week today.  Let's recap:
After an 18 hour trip to get here we zipped through customs thanks to our great expediter, our luggage arrived all in tact an the cat made it though he was a bit grumpy.

We were welcomed by many of our colleagues that work at the consulate and they have all been great in helping us get settled in. We've gone to one dinner party to meet consulate people that live on the compound that we live on and today we had our second pool party with a large number of the consulate staff.  The first one was at the other compound that the consulate uses.... Quick side note, compound is just another word for a gated or in our case walled in community.  There are many Saudis, Americans, and many other nationalities that live here.

So the consulate is closed for a few more days because of Eid holiday. The work/school week here is Sunday - Thursday so that will take a little getting used to.

Lets see what else,.... We've been out to a couple of malls and grocery shopping.  The grocery store is like a super Wal-Mart or Target.  Things are a bit pricier but not to bad.

Back to our house, we've got a nice 3 bedroom 3.5 bath town house.  All tile floors so we will definitely be getting some rugs while we are here.  we've got a small back porch area, and when we sit back there, we are surrounded by stray kitties.  Yeah we were suckers and fed them...next thing we knew there were a dozen of them swarming us and meowing.  But only a couple of them have been brave enough to come close and let us pet them.  And yes we have started naming them.  Here is a couple pictures.

This is "Schrödinger"  Yeah I named her

We call this one "Oreo"

This little Siamese is called "Nutz" because well they are huge... 

Crystal has been working on here dives.  Here are a couple of action shots from one of her dives.

And she is straight with her toes pointed ... must be from the years of gymnastics training.

All in all it's been good week.  We are figuring things out and getting accustomed to the new culture, the new currency (Riyals), meeting our neighbors and co-workers, and all the nice kitties in the neighborhood.  (I'll gather them up for a group shot sometime... should be as easy as herding cats...)