More hockey in Jeddah

Well, another day of hockey in Jeddah. I have now played hockey 4 times in the kingdom and it's just as surreal now as it was the first time. It was awesome. This rink is located on the second floor of a shopping mall. The store below the rink resembles a Best Buy or Circuit City. Real boards around the rink, but so is the glass!!! (At least where there is glass!) There is an eatery with tables and chairs sitting right next to the ice. Talk about spectators must be aware!
Anyway, this is the entire gang that drives down from KAUST. KAUST and this group is where we play street hockey once in a while on Monday evenings. KAUST is an amazing campus.

The KAUST crew

 The crew is working on some jerseys for us. They will likely have the following logo. We are calling ourselves the Red Sea Sabres. Anyway, we will have jerseys with our last names on the back in Arabic! Pretty cool... I can say with confidence, not many people will have one of these...

Pretty much all the updates for now. More from the desert later.

Another night in Al Balad

Leslie and I went to Al Balad with my coworkers Steve and James. Steve provided yet another informative tour of the old town area again and took us to an awesome Moroccan food joint. Steve speaks the Moroccan dialect of Arabic and the guys who work there were so happy to see him and talk in their native dialect. That was cool to see the power of language. 

We had some laughs while on our walking tour, learned a lot and saw things most folks will never see. All in all, we had a great time.  

Leslie had me fitted and bought me a thobe with all the trimmings as a souvenir. I will put it on and have Les take a picture to post. I can't wear it anywhere else here. It would be considered rude. But it does look pretty cool.

On the way back to the car, we came across the truck in the following picture. I have to say, never saw a Wingle before. Google tells me that it's a Chinese brand built by the Great Wall car company in China. Have you driven your Wingle today?

Wingle Man

Needless to say, the Wingle jokes were flying on the way home to the point of laughter to tears. Good times indeed.

Jazz Concert at the American Counselate this evening...

We traveled to the US Counselate in Jeddah this evening for a concert by vocalist CoCo York and jazz pianist Mike Del Ferro. Wow!
They were amazing. Smooth American jazz to be sure. They performed a rather short set, but it was an amazing set none the less.
Del Ferro used every key on the old piano provided by the counselate and CoCo displayed a vocal range nothing short of amazing... from a deep bass that could vibrate your soul, to highs that reached the heights of heaven, where her voice must surely have come from. What a night. The only down side was the counselate provided a cheezy old upright piano and an even cheezier sound system, but in spite of that, these two performers made it sound like a million bucks.

Thanks once again to my coworker Steve for the invite and for navigating Jeddah traffic there and back... A concert that Leslie and I will remember for some time to be sure.

Go figure, we had to move to Jeddah and travel 6000 miles to attend an American Jazz concert...

www.cocoyork.com/index1.htm

Another weekend in the books...

  Had a great weekend with Leslie. We had a few projects we wanted to get done around the house, all of which we did. Our house hold goods came in earlier this week and we have slowly been organizing and putting things away. That too is now complete. We did some shopping in the area (again) and ate some great meals both at home and in the city.

  This morning I made some espresso from the Italian espresso beans we bought yesterday at a previously unexplored local grocery store. Leslie was impressed with the espresso. I have to admit, it did taste very good. We then went for a run, then had a free breakfast after that. See Leslie's blog at www.lincolngreatadventure.blogspot.com for details about the run and breakfast.

  This evening had dinner out with our friend Lou. Lou lives here on the compound and is a very nice guy from Arkansas. We like his down home nature and laid back attitude. He arrived here a couple weeks ago but it is not his first time here. He has been all over the world and intends to work about three more years, then retire. Good luck Lou!

  Now enjoying some down time watching TV. I installed a free-to-air satellite dish we scrounged from here on the compound. We bought a receiver at the local Panda store for about $18. What a deal! I can get about 200 plus free channels per satellite. So far, I have maxed out the receiver memory by scanning channels on just four of the 12 or so satellites... Of those channels, I have deleted all but a couple dozen channels and kept only those that contain European or US style programming. I really do not know Arabic or any of the other myriad of languages spoken on those other channels. Well, I know a little bit of Arabic now... I can speak it well enough for greetings or to ask simple questions, but I need a LOT more work at it to be good at it. That will come along soon enough.

  Not much more than that. Work is good, settling into a nice routine and enjoying our adventure in Saudi. More as life goes on!!!