Homesick
Our equipment hasn’t come in yet. Who knew importing near-military grade GPS equipment to Saudi Arabia would be problematic?
We’ve been twiddling our thumbs 8,000 miles from home for 3 days. Our hosts are great, the food is excellent, the accommodations very nice. It still sucks to be just sitting here.
285 cable channels, 15 in English. There’s nothing on. Though there is the Mecca channel… all Mecca all the time, with these long slow pans of the place. And there’s like 150 channels of religious singing, 60 channels of unintelligible (to me) talking heads with headdresses…
I really need a portable mouse. The trackpad on my laptop is getting old.
I’m not getting over jetlag nearly as fast as I would if I weren’t sitting around all day. Ugh, a 10 hour time difference!
High points so far
- the Saudi style dinner we had 2 nights ago was quite an experience!
- walking part of Riyadh and going to the top of Kingdom Tower.
If you care to, email or comment on this post to allay my homesickness. Please don’t call my cell, it’s $2.50/min whether I pick up or not. But I can call you via Skype when I have wifi…
Stay safe…and happy halloween. I miss your face!
:-(
Saudi-style (really, just Saudi) dinner sounds yummy! Do tell and make me drool over your access to food that doesn’t exist on this island…
Also, is there more to see walking or taxiing about? Seems like exploration is a possibility, or no? I’d appreciate the non-island culture report. :-)
And, haha re: the Mecca channel. PillarOfIslam 2.0 :-)
Now, imagine you’re on an island.
Miss you, too!
Hope things are well over there…tensions are a tad high due to some issues here dealing with a Saudi who is supposedly in Yemen, so just be vigilante…
Did your equipment ever arrive? I am not surprised it was delayed…that kind of equipment heading into a ME nation, carried by innocuous seeming Americans! They tend to be a bit over the top suspicious and don’t even get me going on the non-gvt folks and their suspicions!
Wish I could visit there, all my background in ME politics and never even been there…
Thanks everyone for leaving supportive comments! It really did help. We had to twiddle our thumbs for 4 days. Boy are my thumbs tired! In the last 2 days of our visit, our equipment finally arrived and we got everything we needed to do completed. It was a crazy 2 days!