Hajj / Eid

Very recently was the Hajj which is the Muslim annual pilgrimage to Mecca, which all Muslims are expected to make at least once in their lifetime.  If you are interested in more information about Hajj, Wikipedia has some good info http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hajj.  We are currently located about an hour north of Jeddah and Mecca is a little east of Jeddah.  Due to the Hajj and the corresponding Eid holiday, Mark and the kids had the week off of work and school.  Since we arrived early in October, we really didn't have time to plan a trip during the holiday so we stayed on campus.  Most people left on vacation for the week which I'm sure we'll do next year.  It was very quiet here on campus during the week - even quieter than normal.

Our sea shipment arrived on the Monday of our holiday week so that was nice since we got the kids bikes and a lot of their other belongings.  We still haven't unpacked everything but I don't have bookshelves or very many places to store things here.  I'm glad to finally have my kitchen equipment though (tupperware mostly).  Since Rachel's bike didn't get shipped over, we decided to head into Jeddah to get here a bike.  Just Mark and I and the girls went since we needed to have room to put the bike in the car.  So off we went about 5:00 in the evening.  You don't go in during the day when it's a holiday because most stores don't open.  The shops and malls are packed and traffic is crazy in the evening with all the visitors to the city.  As we were driving into Jeddah, it became prayer time (Muslims are commanded to pray 5 times a day and the times are very specific).  One of the most interesting things that we saw was the people that would pull over to the side of the road, get out their prayer mat and say their prayers on the side of the road.  Since we're driving through the desert and there aren't a lot of places to stop, you often seen men stopped on the side of the road "using the restroom" also :-) 

So we went to the Roshon mall (one of the many malls in Jeddah) because it has a Toys R Us.  Before we looked for a bike though, we spotted a Chili's and craving something American, we went in to have dinner.  If there weren't women dressed in Abayas, you would have thought you were in the states.  The menus were in English - no arabic to be found - and the food was pretty much the same.  There was also a Fuddrucker's right next to it.  Here's a picture of me and the girls in front of Chili's - Megan and I are wearing our abayas.  Mine pretty much looks like a black graduation robe but I've included a picture of the back of it so you'll see that it's not so plain.  A lot of abayas are decorated with designs and stones and they now have white abayas that are becoming popular in Jeddah.  I think I've said this before, but Jeddah is more liberal than other cities in KSA, such as Riyadh.  We still do see women with their faces partially covered (you can see just their eyes) and some even with a full veil where you cannot see any of their face.

We also looked for a dishwashwer that same night.  The dishwasher that is provided in the home is really just pathetic.  If you talk to pretty much anyone on campus, noone uses it.  Now, doing dishes by hand, is probably my least favorite chore in the whole world.  And there are 7 of us, so there are a lot of dishes and cups.  I think I told Mark that if I didn't have a good dishwasher, I was going to go back to the states :-)  So the next night, we went again to Jeddah to look for a dishwasher.  This time we took everyone but Spencer - he's not a shopping fan!  We were looking for a few other electronic things also - a transformer (convert 220 to 120 so we can use our American applicances) and a mouse for Spencer's MacBook.  We did a little shopping and then prayer time started.  At this particular store, we did not have to leave, but they dim the lights, you can still shop, but you can't check out during prayer time.  We needed to talk to someone about the dishwasher so we waited through prayer time and then got my new Bosch dishwasher!!!  Yeah!  It even fit well in the car with all of us so we could take it home that night.

After we did that, we headed to the attached mall to get some dinner.  We ate in the food court at a place called Al Baik (pronounced al bake I think) - it is a chicken place - comparable to KFC but not really the same.  Mark likes to call it "al beak" because it's serves chicken - hahahaha.  After dinner we went in search of an iPhone for Megan.  We still have yet to track one down - the iPhone 4 is still new here and kind of hard to find.  We made one last stop at a place called Ice Land.  I was hoping that it would have a nice rink and possibly someone that could work with the girls for skating.  I was pretty disappointed - it's another mall type place with an ice rink in the middle - it's not very big and not even as nice as some of the other malls.  So I don't think we'll take them there to skate.  There are other malls that are closer that have rinks for the girls to try out. 

On the drive home, we stopped at what would loosely be called a rest stop near the secuity checkpoint outside of Jeddah.  It is really like a shopping area with little restaurants and shops - some open air and some in buildings.  I do not like driving past this rest stop in general because there are no on and off ramps for it. You just pull off and on directly from the freeway and when it is crowded, it is absolutely nuts.  Well at Ice Land, we had gotten the kids a treat for the ride home and they were all thirsty and I had no water in the car (which I should have all the time).  So Mark stopped at this area to get some water bottles.  He pulled up to this area that looked like a parking area - there are no lines for parking and people just park anywhere but there were 4 or 5 cars in a line so it looks like a parking spot.  We stayed in the car while he got the water.  In front of us there was a lane for cars that were leaving to get through.  This guy pulls up in front of us in this lane, stops, puts his car in park and gets out of his car to shop, effectively blocking the 2 or 3 cars behind him that were leaving.  They all started honking and this guy just totally ignored them.  I was just cracking up but what's funny is that kind of behavior doesn't seem to be out of place.  Anyways, I could tell tons of driving stories (they have way too many round-abouts here) but I won't bore you with them.  In general, if I never had to be in a car in Jeddah, I think I would never miss it.

One morning during the break, Mark got up early and headed out on the road to Madina because he heard that there were baboons out that way and he wanted to get some pictures.  Lizzie wasn't feeling well and I didn't want to get her up early and the other kids didn't want to get up early either - although later Spencer said he would have gone - oh well.  So here are some of the pictures. 

Someone in another car had given this baboon a bag of potato chips.  He liked them and was not going to share with the other baboon. 

Momma and baby

A baboon crossing sign

Another morning of the holiday, we took a breakfast cruise on the Red Sea from the KAUST marina.  We didn't go very far, but it was nice to be out on the water and we got a nice view of the campus and neighboring Thuwal from the boat.  I was surprised at how shallow the sea was so far from shore.  The boat had to be very careful to go on a specific route to avoid all the sand bars that were in the water.

 The KAUST Beacon

A view of our beach

A silly picture of Spencer (he doesn't like to have his picture taken and

he'll probably be mad that I posted this one) 

 KAUST Campus

The marina building - there is a good restaurant here too!

I think that catches you up on our life over the past month.  The kids are back to school and Mark is back to work.  We're looking forward to spending our Christmas in Athens, Greece.  I am excited to see all the history in that city.  Thanks for reading!!

Where to start???

It's been quite a while since I last posted.  I've been extremely busy with work (it's our busy time of year) and I think I'm having a hard time getting adjusted to living here.  I'm feeling a bit frustrated with how difficult it is to get things done and to get things I need for the house.  The house is another bit of contention as it is way too small for 7 people and we're waiting to move to a bigger home somewhere on campus.  No one can give us any idea how long it will be before one is ready and we may be able to move.  So I wait patiently (or not so patiently).

But even though there are difficulties, there are some wonderful and interesting things here also.  So I will try to share some of our experiences over the last month.

Let's start with Halloween...Halloween is not normally celebrated here in KSA but here at KAUST, there was an organized Halloween party and trick-or-treating for the kids.  It's mostly for the younger kids so Spencer and Megan didn't really participate.  It's funny because the kids kept asking when we could go "get" their costumes and I had to keep reminding them that there was nowhere to "get" a costume and that we had to be creative.  The girls had their skating outfits so they were pretty easy.  Alex couldn't think of anything so I suggested he be "static cling".  He wasn't really happy about it but it was different and easy so that's what he did.  He ended up winning the prize for most creative costume in his age group...I told him that his mom doesn't always make dumb suggestions :-)

One morning I received an email from one of the triplet's teachers requesting parents to help out on a field trip to the KAUST Museum.  Since I've never had kids in school before and been on a "real" field trip I offered to go with them.  I didn't have high expectations for this museum because the university is so new and still pretty small.  I walked away though being highly impressed.  It's a small museum that covers the history of Science and Technology in Islam and was very interesting and put together nicely.  There were a lot of hands on exhibits and an interesting interactive movie also.  Lizzie was in my group with one other little girl named Aya and we walked around and found answers to the questions that the teachers had put together for the kids.  It was a very enjoyable morning!

On the day of the field trip, Spencer and Megan had parent/teacher conferences and acutally had the day off.  Mark and I headed over to the school that afternoon and got to meet all (or most) of their teachers.  They both seem to be adjusting well and are catching up with what they missed at the beginning of the school year.

One of the biggest things that we did this past month was to buy a car - finally!  Buying a car here is really an experience.  Mark and I had gone down to Jeddah and we visited a couple of dealerships and finally decided to buy a GMC Acadia.  We had considered a Suburban but since it was more money, I didn't really want to drive a big huge car around campus and we won't be taking many major road trips.  It's interesting because the dealerships here are not run on commission so no one is in a huge hurry to sell you a car.  We spoke with a salesperson to find the price and then we left.  You can do financing through some dealerships but it is not the norm and you usually bring cash or a check before they will order the vehicle.  So deciding how to get the money here was difficult - we had thought about transferring money from the states and then when we found out that that took 5-10 business days we thought that was too long and Mark went to the bank here to get a loan.  We didn't need to finance a whole lot because we had quite a bit of the amount we needed but we thought, let's get the loan and just pay off in a couple months.   Well getting the loan took almost 2 weeks :-)  Like I said - nothing is fast here.  Finally we had cash in hand and headed to the dealership.  We arrived there on Thursday (think Sat) at about 1 pm - right when they close for the afternoon.  I was not happy!  There were some people still there shopping and talking to salesmen so we waited a little bit and then headed out.  As we got into our car, a salesman came out and asked if we needed help!  Yeah!!!  So we went back in and paid for the car, registration, window tinting and insurance (all to the same person).  We walked away with a paper saying that we would have our car on Monday - en shallah (God willing).  God must have been willing because Mark went down to Jeddah to pick up our new car on Monday evening!!! 

That same evening, Mark decided he wanted to get us some food from this Pakastani restaurant called Zim Zam in the city of Thuwal which is the closest city (if you can call it that) to KAUST.  He has gone to this restaurant many times with his coworkers and had really enjoyed it so he wanted to have us try it.  We couldn't go to the restaurant because it is not a family restaurant (meaning no women).  So he went there to order "take away" (this is what they say for carry out).  This place is pretty much a dive and I don't think I would want to eat there anyways - yikes!  Note the backhoe at the front of the restaurant which Mark said drove away before they left :-)

We invited our friends David and Belky and their little girls over to eat with us.  The bread was incredible when it was warm - not as great after it cools down.  The food was really good - I'm not sure exactly what the spices were but it was rice, chicken and lentils mostly.  It was very greasy though and I woke up in the middle of the night with heartburn and couldn't sleep.  So even though it was tasty, I'm not sure I'll be eating that again or maybe just the yummy bread!  Here's a picture of Victoria with the bread that's almost as big as she is!

This is getting long so I'm going to continue on in another post.  If you're still reading, I hope you're enjoying because it is fun for me to write and document our experiences on this adventure!