Hello everyone. Greetings from Saudi Arabia. I realized that I am terrible at relaying information to people, or remembering whom I have told what. Hopefully this blog will remedy all of that and give you all a taste of life in multi-billion dollar institution which is fenced in and heavily guarded to protect us from the ever-looming, seemingly endless expanse of sand which surrounds us in 3 out of 4 directions. On the other side we have a beautiful view of the red sea. Slightly disappointing is the fact that the beach is blocked by fences and barbed wire, but hopefully within the next few months construction will be completed, as will the massive beach cleanup and we will have open access to the beach and the many water sports they are planning to have. I definitely want to learn how to scuba dive- or at least snorkel. One kid here, Noah (a fellow oarsman from U of Miami) has done some diving in the great barrier reef of Australia and says that the coral reefs here can compete.
So after some rough goodbyes, I flew out of Los Angeles on August 16th. On my flight from LA to Frankfurt, Germany I got to sit next to several other American students. One- Eric Martin is a fun loving, california beach boy who went to UCSB. Quite the change going from UCSB to Saudi Arabia, but he I think he is enjoying himself. Another was a Malaysian girl, Julia, from UCLA, and an American-Korean girl who grew up in Korea town in Los Angeles, but went to college at Johns-Hopkins. I was definitely glad to get to fly out with some other students (It’s a long flight from LA to Germany). In the airport I decided it was only fitting to get some franks- partly cuz it was Frankfurt and partly because it was the last pork I would be able to have for a while (pork along with alcohol and several other things are strictly forbidden in this country). In the airport we walked past a group of about 50-100 people all decked out in white. The guys were basically garbed in two towels- one wrapped around there waist and one slung over there shoulder and tied at the hip. All the men had long beards. Soon they were all on the ground praying together. I was super curious where this group was heading so I walked past where they were sitting a couple of times but the terminal they were sitting next to did not seem to be going anywhere. On a side note we also ran into what i understood to be the japanese national softball team. Anyways in our terminal we ran into most of the rest of the american students- there are about 20 of us, which the u.s. consulate general told us was the biggest group of students that has ever come here. Also- I was pleased to see that the large group of people dressed in towels had migrated over to our terminal and was coming on our flight. From getting off my plane from LA to getting on this plane I think I went through 3 security lines. It was much easier for me to get through security than for all the white garbed folk who all got searched and had the extra hand held metal detector waived over them. I saw them take at least one giant knife off one guy who looked confused as to why they were taking it from him. On the plane it was quite the comic scene as a bunch of English/German speaking flight attendants tried to explain to all these people, who ended up being from Morocco and probably spoke arabic and a little french, that they had to sit in their assigned seats and not just in any seat. They kinda eventually gave up and apologized to people whose seats had been taken asking them just to take any seat they could find.
I’m realizing this is already getting pretty long and I’m not even to Saudi Arabia yet. I’ll try to make it more compact, and I probably won’t try to catch up to today in one blog.
Anyways, we arrived in Saudi Arabia late at night. As a nice gesture there was a KAUST booth set up at the airport, and we got KAUST help going through customs. Even with this it took us 3 hours to get out of the airport- I took a nap on top of some of the bags inside the airport while we waited, but soon enough we were all finger printed, photographed, etc. and through- free to enter. Okay, enough for now- more updates to come soon. Hope to hear from all of you. Love you guys.
