Back in the Desert (sigh)

I'm a lucky guy, no doubt, and I am thankful for it every day. Why? I got to meet my lovely wife in London two weeks ago for a holiday! And we met, and traveled, and saw things we'd always wanted to see, and had fun, and enjoyed each others' company, and just all in all had a fabulous time. The only thing we didn't seem to do was rest or relax. We moved, we did, we went, we saw, and just breathed it all in. Next trip we'll relax - too much to do this time!!

But more on all that later, along with some terrific photos we captured along the way. Sadly, the trip had to end with Dana going home to green hills, nice temperatures, and knee-high grass from all the rain at the house while she was away. I went the opposite way back to Saudi Arabia, where the temperature is about the same as when I left, but the wind shifted when I wasn't looking. Most of the year the wind blows from the west or north, bringing in dry desert air - it's very hot, but tolerable.

Every summer the wind shifts to come in from the east for several months, which blows heavy moist air right in off the Arabian Gulf. So the temp may still be 110 F, but with 30% humidity the heat index skyrockets. In a way, it's even worse after sunset, because the breeze dies down and the moisture just sits. Night before last I went to the gym while it was hot and sticky. I came out after sunset and it was like walking through sauna. When I got back to my room and checked the conditions it was 95 degrees and 71% humidity for a heat index of 127.

You can actually see it - the moisture makes a visible sheen in the air, just like the dust most of the year. At night the dust makes a halo around any light source, and drastically reduces visibility. Today, with a clear afternoon sky I could barely see a mile through the haze. Oh well, another adventure to deal with! :)

Last week when Dana and I were headed to London's Heathrow airport I saw, for the first time with my own eyes, the Concorde supersonic transport. I was amazed how small it was, although intellectually I knew it to be so. Still, in the age of giant airplanes carrying masses of people it was a surprise to see it. We were on a bus on our way to the international terminal and we drove a few hundred yards away from it. It was very sad to see it there, unmarked, unprotected, and seemingly forgotten - such a historic aircraft left out in the rain.

Later, taxiing to the runway for takeoff, I happened to glance out my window as the lovely form appeared below my airplanes wing. I turned my iPhone back on and managed to catch a shot before it disappeared out of view. I hope British Airways will put this jet on display somehow in the near future before all the paint is gone. Yesterday I happened across this article on the BBC website, so it's appropriate to share it with this photo!

In the aviation world British Airways, for many years the sole operator of Concorde, stood out due to their company call sign.  It didn't matter if the BA plane was a small propjet or a monstrous 747, the call sign was "Speed Bird" in honor of the fastest commercial jet in history!  I really can't explain why, but it always gave me a little thrill to hear that in the cockpit!

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20130529-concorde-on-a-different-plane

Postcard from London

Hello all, Dana and I are having a wonderful trip. We spent 5 days in London with fantastic weather - first day was HOT and clear, 3 days were cool and clear and lovely, and the 5th day it rained off and on, so we got to walk in the rain and share an umbrella to visit the British Museum. I LOVED the rain after 4 months of zero rain.

Have taken lots of iPhone pix that just never quite do it for me, and don't want to take trip time to process the hundreds we've taken with Dana's 5D MkIII, but here is one shot of Westminster Abbey that I like and didn't take any work. More to come!!

A Sunset Stroll in the Desert

A few weeks ago I went out for a walk late in the afternoon, hoping to get a nice sunset shot. I've only seen one here that was even close to what I'd see at home, and I didn't have a camera with me, so I've decided to just get what's there and make the best of it!

This day wasn't bad, and the sun didn't disappear into the haze and dust as early as it usually does. Even so, it was still a very brown sunset. We saw that in Fayetteville one day last fall when a dust storm had blown across Oklahoma - it was a wild sky at the end of an engagement shoot. So here are two sunset shots from Saudi Arabia.

         
When the sun had disappeared about 20 minutes before official sunset, there was enough light to go for a walk around the old sand golf course that hasn't been used for about 15 years - you never know what you might come across, and that was the case today.

Among things I came across was an old course marker still standing. More surprising was a boat hull laying out in the sand and brush - quite a surprise. I asked a guy who has been here for 20 years (yep, and there are more of them than you'd expect!) and who'd played the course. Since they were playing golf in the desert, as if there weren't enough challenges, they added a "water hazard" on a par three link, and the boat was placed to represent the water they had to shoot over!

"Beached" 

"Harbor Lights" 

On the way back up the hill in another portion of the old course, I was walking along in the near dark watching where I was stepping, and stopped to look up and realized there was a pretty nice photo right in front of me. These poles were very nicely maintained, with three lines on each, but the lines terminated at the fourth pole down. Don't know if these were put in for future use or left over, but they made a nice shot with the rosy sunset glow!

I'll get another post up later this week, and then will be away for a few weeks. Dana and I are going to meet in London for our first vacation in several years, and our first ever trip to London. In two weeks we'll visit London, Edinburgh, Amsterdam, and Paris before she heads for home and I return to fun and sun! Right now she and Darby are in Montreal visiting Dana, and they are enjoying a comedy festival. Wish I could be there with them!!

A meal just like home!

This won't be long, but would love to share it, and several pictures. I went to the mall today to find some good sandals. I found them at the Ecco store in the Mall of Dhahran and I look forward to wearing them out. Then I went for a stroll to find some lunch. Lots of food available in this place, which is like walking around inside a giant donut - shops all the way around, and an amusement park in the center!

So I found a great place which was also a favorite at home, and it was a terrific meal! Tasted just like home, which is the first time I can say that here!!  The spicy chicken and fries were perfect. The biscuit looked a little odd but tasted great. The only "wrong" part was drinking a diet Pepsi, because they were out of water.

So thanks Popeye's, I really enjoyed it!! I ate too much, and nutritionally it was probably the worse meal I've had in the last three months, AND it was the first soft drink I've had in that time. But it was soooo good!!  :)  All together I walked around the mall twice, which is a pretty good distance. I rewarded myself with a nice dessert, after bypassing multiple donut shops, three or four Cinnabon stores, pastry shops, and a dozen coffee shops with pastries, and had a delightful gelato (and no, the servers didn't look or sound Italian!!).

A few weeks ago I took some shots on my trip to Bahrain and haven't had a chance to load them, so I'm gonna toss them in here now.The first shot is of what I am told is the Bahrain World Trade Center, and yes there are three propellers between the towers! They are wind turbines that apparently aren't very productive because the building does not align with the prevailing wind.  Still, a very striking structure - would love to get a closer view!

 This was the view from my hotel, of the Prime Minister's palace. This place was several city blocks in size, beautifully landscaped and immaculately maintained.  If I'm ever Prime Minister I want one just like it!

 In the City Centre Mall in Bahrain they had, as always, some cool places to eat. This is a family favorite at home, so I thought my ladies would get a kick out of this! (no, didn't eat there; maybe next time!)

 This is purely for fun and extravagance. A Ferrari Store. If you click on the picture to see it larger, you will see a Formula 1 race car on the right side, and it looked and smelled like the real thing. There's just something cool about having a race car in your foyer, don't you think?

Noon flowers

I read an article a few weeks ago that taking a short walk, 10 to 15 minutes, after a meal was a beneficial thing to do, as good or better than a single, aggressive 45-minute workout, and would do nice things like keep your sugar levels even. I was pretty pleased to read this, taking it as confirmation that my decision to take a short walk every day after lunch was good for me.

There are several eating options here on camp at midday, and I usually finish and stroll around the campus after eating. Yesterday flowers started popping out at me so I just took advantage of the camera build into my iPhone and captured a few of them.  This first image caught my eye almost immediately - the flowers are tiny, less than half an inch across, and a delicate shade of pink, not very well captured in the brilliant noon sun, but here they are anyway!

 A little further on was a bush about head high, and these blooms were right at the top. This was just next to a building built in the mid-1940s as an admin building, of classic stone architecture, and which is still in use.  It's a handsome building, and I'm told it was build by WWII POWs, but I haven't been able to verify it. I'd take a picture to show you, but they do frown on that.

These pretty flowers were next to the main, brand new Aramco headquarters building, and are probably better cared for than most people's houses. They have a small army of gardeners and caretakers that they bring in from Indonesia, the Philippines, India, and all over the world to maintain the grounds, and these guys do a great job.

Last shot, this bunch was right next to a beautiful fountain behind the old admin building, which has been condemned and remodeled multiple times, and is still in use pending destruction. These guys were right in the spray area from the fountain (most days are windy!) and they seem to like it there!

Just for reference, it was right at noon, and the sun was directly overhead with a temperature of 110F! All these were taken within ten minutes of each other.  Here is a shot to demonstrate the position of the sun at noon - notice the almost centered shadow from the overhead sun.

Two Trips to Bahrain

Last weekend a group of us from the office got a taxi and went to Bahrain for the day. It was a nice outing, my first trip away from Aramco since I got here ten weeks ago.  We started at an American restaurant called Rick’s Kountry Kitchen, which bills itself as the best American food in the Middle East!  For my group, the important thing was breakfast with bacon, and Rick’s delivered!  Eggs, fried potatoes, biscuit and gravy, and a big pile of bacon made a terrific breakfast! (yes, sorry, the picture is sideways - haven't quite mastered how iPhone codes picture direction!)

After breakfast we went across a large sand lot, and across a busy street to the Grand Mosque, the largest in Bahrain and one of the largest in the world! It is a modern building in the classic style – the dome is fiberglass, and the largest of its kind. The architecture is impressive, with loads of open space – a wonderful place to be still. Here are a few shots, scattered below; there are more on my Facebook page (www.facebook.com/mark.gieringer ).

Yesterday I came back to Bahrain to get a new Saudi visa. The visa process is a little peculiar in Saudi Arabia – they seem very careful about who they give a visa to, but also totally inconsistent on how long the visa may be.  My initial 90-day visa expires on Monday, so I had to leave the country before then or be deported – and they are very serious about that. Many consultants came here with a 90-day, then went home to reapply and got a 5-year visa! 

 For some reason, though, this year they stopped giving long visas, opting for 6 months instead. So we come to Bahrain, and a local agent takes passport and official invitation letter to the Saudi consulate here and comes back with a new visa and I’m good for 6 months.  Except I will have to come back to Bahrain (or somewhere out of the country) every 30-days and come back in to Saudi.

It’s been a quiet trip after a rough start. Yesterday a taxi was supposed to pick me up at 0600 to bring me here, but they didn’t show up. I spent the next two and a half hours scrambling to find another taxi, but it is a holiday weekend and they were all booked.  I ended up at my office after a half-mile hike with loaded backpack, 95˚F temp at 0730, and a badly bruised right foot from a photo shoot two nights before (more on that in another post!!).

After quite a few phone calls and the assistance of several staff members, at 0820 I was finally in another taxi on my way to Bahrain, which lies across a 20-mile causeway from KSA.  In the center is a customs and immigration station, which normally takes an hour to get through, often takes 2-3 hours to get through, but today we hit the traffic perfectly and it took 10 minutes!  I was able to call the visa agent and he met me at my hotel to collect my passport, and then all I had to do was wait. BTW, I’m at the Ramada Hotel in Bahrain – very nice!!

So here I am, in a beautiful city, with many opportunities to explore and adventure and shop and see movies and eat! Sorry to disappoint, but no big stories here. I mostly stayed in my room.  Remember my bruised foot? By the time I got here it was swelled so big I couldn’t stand to keep a shoe on it and had to hobble to walk. I just couldn’t convince myself that traipsing around the mall or a fortress would be of any value or pleasure to me in that condition, so I stayed in with my foot elevated! I couldn’t find any ice, so I just had to rely on my good healing properties to get me past this.  I worked on some pictures, read part of a good book, did some work on a project for a client at home, and just took it easy. Enjoyed a lovely meal in the pub downstairs, and got a one-hour sports massage in the parlor by the pool – my big extravagance for the trip, which cost $32 U.S. – something I’d hoped to find in KSA but it just isn’t available there. I have regular massage at home for neck and shoulder problems, so this was a lovely surprise. Got to watch a great soccer match (Brazil v Uraguay, and topped off the day with a short but sweet talk with Dana (God bless the guys who came up with Skype!!). 

This morning almost all the swelling is out of my foot and I can wiggle my toes again! I made it downstairs and enjoyed an omelet, bacon, juice and coffee at the free breakfast buffet.  I will stay barefoot as much as I can and continue the stay-off-it therapy while waiting until this afternoon when I expect to get my passport back, then will taxi back to Dhahran for the rest of a three day weekend. It wasn’t planned to be, but last week the King decided it was time to change the work week from Sat-Wed, to Sun-Thu, starting next week, bringing KSA in line with the rest of the Gulf state’s business week.  It’s a good change, but will wreak havoc on a lot of travel plans this summer!

More soon on a some other architecture in Bahrain, and couple of recent, terrific photo shoots!

A morning at the beach

A few weeks ago I spent a few hours at the beach. Aramco has locations all over Saudi Arabia, and one of them is on the coast of the Gulf of Arabia, called Ras Tanura. Part of the site is a private beach, probably a mile long, just for employees.

I went over to meet a guy who was selling me a printer and monitor. I need the monitor, and my friend needed the printer so it worked out very well.  Aramco provides a fleet of buses that go all over the region, and one of them goes back and forth to RT several times a day. So I loaded a camera and my backpack and hat and took the mid-morning bus for an hour-long drive.

Not much to report on the drive - hot, dry, desolate. Everything is made of concrete, so even the buildings that are painted tend to blend into the background. I noticed several communities well off the highway that most people wouldn't have noticed, just because I was really looking and happened to see something stick up above the horizon that didn't below there.

The beach was lovely. I do love big water. It calls to me just like mountains do and I could spend way too much time in, on, or near either and be very happy doing it. But this beach was all mine. No one was there until a lifeguard showed up 30 minutes later, climbed into his tower, and tried to get comfortable.

The water was turquoise and much cooler than I expected, but relatively calm.  I don't think they get much tidal action here, and the waves are driven by the wind which was howling. Not quite a gale but way beyond a stiff wind! The visibility was surprisingly low - the haze that always hangs on the desert was here too - just a brown smudge always across the horizon.

And it was hot - 100+ at 10 a.m.  But I wore my hat and stayed mostly in the shade. I didn't want to swim, mostly I just wanted to see and hear the water, and I enjoyed doing that for about an hour.

 I had nice lunch at a small cafe right off the beach, and it was pleasant to sit under an umbrella outside and still enjoy the sight and sound while eating. Then it was time to call my contact, who was going to meet me with the gear so I could get on the 1 p.m. bus back to Dhahran. Turns out he had typed his number wrong when he emailed it to me, so I couldn't call him! Sadly, he ignored the very thorough plan I sent him of where I would be at what time and even what color shirt I would be wearing (I figured orange would stand out easily enough!)  He didn't call me until I was back on camp and walking into my room!

Oh well, I had a nice morning, saw a new place I'd wanted to see, and we ended up meeting last week to get the stuff.  Not a perfect day according to plan, but all in all it worked out just fine!