Life in Riyadh

I like it here. I have a vision of myself in early retirement.

Let me show you the compound where I am living. The compound is a ghost town with only staff members populating the public buildings, and a few cats around. What's with these cats???

Here is our bowling alley (I don't bowl, but I could):


And here is our gym (I don't work out, but I could):


Here is the pool in the middle of the compound - very nice at night:


And here are some stores that I have seen at the mall. You might recognize some of these shops. There's a saudi woman in my shot who would probably not have liked being in a picture but I had my flash off so neener neener! you're in my picture and you didn't even notice!


These are the people who yelled at me from across the food court. At first I thought I had been caught unknowingly doing something illegal and was preparing to apologize and feign helplessness. But then I realized they only wanted me to take a picture of them. Actually the asians didn't want to be in the picture - but the guy in the red shirt was very enthusiastic about the photo-op and pulled Mr. Yellow shirt into the picture before he could run away. That's why he has that unamused look on his face:


These are a part of the Doritos section of the grocery store, Carrefour, where we did our grocery shopping. It's like a warehouse inside and reminds me of Walmart. It has most of the things we have back home, though of course, no pork products. And though they had an enormous selection of spices set up in a kind of a souk, I couldn't find Basil. We hope to find Montreal Steak Spice soon. The beef was all shipped in from Brazil at this grocery store. And the chicken tastes different - it's a little tougher and more stringy than back home.


And finally a picture of my man walking through the DQ of Riyadh at night. That's DQ for "Diplomatic Quarter" not "Dairy Queen". You have to be careful here not to get too excited when someone mentions DQ because they are usually (sadly) not referring to ice cream. Baskin Robbins is thriving here in the Middle East, but so far I haven't seen a Dairy Queen at all. No Peanut Buster Parfaits for me for a while! We were at a party last night at the U.S. Embassy, so that's what we were doing wandering around there at night and I would have posted pictures except they took our phones and cameras at the door!