London calling

A couple of business meetings on the old continent made the perfect excuse for a regressive trip: we wandered the Londonian Tube, wrote on restaurant tables, saw dinosaurs, had delicious sandwiches for lunch, admired a Lego Queen Elizabeth in the greatest toy store on earth, cried on the death of Simba's father and got excited at a few snowflakes...

The Tube

My favourite place to eat ever

Hamley's - One of my favourite shops in London

Lego Royal Family

Covent Garden

All restaurants should provide their customers with a paper table cloth and Crayolas!

Lyceum Theatre

The Lion King

Natural History Museum - Diplodocus

Natural History Museum - Whales

Natural History Museum - Kryptonite!

Snowy Germany

Büdesheim

And back to Saudi Arabia!

Should I stay or should I go

One of the things I love (and hate) about being an expat in the construction industry is how unpredictable life is all the time. You arrive at a place where you're supposed to stay for 6 months and end up still living there 4 years later; or you make plans for the next couple of years to come and from one day to another you're sent off to a different part of the world. In the last couple of years I've seen so many people go away, many of which were expecting to stay longer than I would at the time. 

After months of dancing back and forth, I was finally about to start packing - still not really convinced it would be necessary - when we got the news: instead of moving to Frankfurt, we are staying in Jubail for another year!

The only problem is, my mindset is very flexible but it needs some time to adjust, hence the necessity of knowing where I'm going. As I was getting ready to move to Germany, my mind focused on all the positive things the German way of life would bring us, and at the same time I looked at all the things I dislike about KSA, feeling relieved I would get rid of them, but now, surprise! I'm in for another year of crazy drivers, dirty old town, abbayas, prayer times and more!

Love in the time of denunciation

While the western world is celebrating love today (happy Valentine's day by the way!), in Saudi, young people still struggle in their attempt to get to know their opposite-sex peers. I think I have already mentioned the extensive use of Blutooth to contact nearby cell-connected people randomly, or the simple display of one's BB pin on their car. Those are the tricks used to "meet" someone. But then what happens when you want to get to know her, and go out with her?

Then you're up for some trouble... Like this young Panda (local supermarket) employee who was happily enjoying a coffee with a young lady during prayer time (that's a 45 minutes break 4 times a day, yippee! But that's another story...) when the mall security guard angrily pointed at him, asking him to come out of the coffee shop with him. Once outside, he was harshly and lengthily reminded by the guard that it is illegal to meet with a girl who is neither your sister nor your mum or aunt or fiancee or wife, and that the situation was not to happen again at that mall, otherwise the muttawa (the infamous religious police) would take action. The sermon ended on a handshake, and the boy was free to go. 

And what happened to the girl, you may ask? She hastily grabbed her bag, adjusted her niqab and walked off, back to the anonymity of a crowded mall, among hundreds of women looking just like her.

Last summer days

We couldn't leave the region without visiting the most recommended spot in the region: Salalah, Oman. Although we'd already been to Oman twice, we'd never managed to visit Salalah, situated 1060 km south from Muscat. 

Like the rest of the country, Salalah is a very hospitable place, with nice touristic infrastructures, but it's not very crowded and the beaches are very well preserved. 

We spent a wonderful weekend there, enjoying the warm temperatures (air: 27°C, sea: 24°), strolling along the never ending beaches, watching the sunrises and sunsets over the sea, bathing in the strong waves of the Indian Ocean, and we also went scuba-diving for the first time, swam with sea turtles and all kinds of colourful fish.

The place where we went diving

Diving equipment

Sunrise, sunrise

Palm and banana trees around Salalah

Sultan Qaboos Mosque, Salalah

Coconut and banana shop around Salalah

Sunset

Now we can start packing: we'll be moving to Frankfurt, Germany in just over 2 weeks!

Tiptoeing back...

It's really been a while since my last article, I don't even dare to check exactly how long it's been. Not that nothing has happened in our lives, just that I always found things dragging me away from the blogger website. I just didn't feel like writing... at all. Maybe because I became so used to life here that nothing surprises me anymore, nothing seems to be worth writing about anymore. And on top of that, my mood has shifted away from the beginner's excitment to the more experienced expat's weariness, especially since we are about to plan our farewells from the Gulf region.

Anyhow, I wanted to share a couple of pictures taken some months ago (!) in Bahrain, at the Bushido's Friday brunch. This is definitely one of our favourite restaurants in Bahrain: the inside decoration, the setting, the quality of the food, the service... This Japanese brunch lived up to our expectations!