I suppose that every new school has some sort of ceremony when it opens. We had two. Two big ones. On September 4th, the night before our classes started, we had what they called a “soft opening.” The soft opening began with having all the students, faculty and everyone else walk around what will soon be our rec center. There was a long circular hallway that had a booth set up for each country represented by our student body (meaning 60-70 booths). Each of these booths had some posters about the country, travel brochures, maybe some nuts or something from the country. They also had a volunteer dressed as if they were from the country they were supposed to represent. At first I thought these people were actually from the countries they represented, but it soon became apparent that they were all Saudis.
Then we were directed through a series of air-conditioned tents to one giant tent. It looked spectacular upon entrance. There was a room large enough for thousands of people, filled with white couches and lit by all sorts of colorful lights. From where I was sitting I couldn’t actually hear much of what went on during that ceremony, but our school’s president gave a speech along with some other probably influential, inspirational people. I snuck back to enjoy the first tent- especially the booths with food at them. I went back in for the end of the ceremony which was supposed to conclude with a countdown to midnight, and hence a countdown to the opening of our school (or beginning of a new era of scientific discovery, as they prefer to call it). Our presidents speech went a little long, so I think the countdown was actually a couple minutes after midnight, but none the less, they flashed numbers on a giant screen with a hollywood movie trailer voice counting down and saying something about KAUST (imagine that in the deepest most overdramatic voice you could think of).
After that we had an amazing dinner (you’re probably thinking isn’t this at like 1am? of course). Among the guests for all this was Ali Al-Naimi, the Saudi oil minister- I think his official title is “his majesty”. Basically he’s the head of OPEC - meaning he’s the man who decides how much your gas costs (for those of you back in the states where gas isn’t still well under a dollar a gallon).
Naturally, being the first class at KAUST we realized that it was our duty to start some sort of wild tradition that every other class must follow- so we had our first annual fountain run. About 50 of us ran through all these fountains on campus ending up all together in one giant fountain. It was sooo much fun.
The first day of class was crazy. If you’ve never tried to study with people constantly taking pictures of you, it’s harder than it looks. The entire first week, whether in the library or the classroom, the norm was that someone was taking a picture. It was one of those cool reminders that what we are doing is ground breaking. That night our president gave another speech as did Al-Naimi, and we all feasted together again. After the feast some people were dancing around, including a couple of my teachers, but mostly people who were hired to put on this feast. Someone took a seemingly insignificant video of this and posted it on the web. Someone else posted this on youtube and within a day there were about 60,000 hits from Saudi’s who were shocked that such things as guys and girls dancing in the same room was taking place in their country. I wish I could have understood all of those comments, but they were all in Arabic. I would give the link to that video here, but it has since been removed from the web. It turns out that though the Los Angeles Times had a front page article about KAUST more than a year ago, detailing the controversy that KAUST would be, it was pretty well kept from the Saudi people that this would be a coed school until a couple of weeks before it opened. We are kept pretty isolated from any of the controversy since our school is in an isolated compound an hours drive from the nearest city. From what my Saudi friends tell me though, a lot of people are pretty upset about KAUST. I saw on the front page of the ARAB NEWS that some high up cleric was fired on degree by the king for questioning whether what was going on was permissible by Saudi law.
Anyways, all of this was just a warm up for the party that everyone knew was coming- the real opening. The opening that was truly fit for kings. More about this to come…
