Al Faisaliah, A Rosewood Hotel Riyadh

I wake up from an hour and half nap, after roughly two days of no sleeping, anxious and discombobulated. It's 5:00 am and there's a thunderstorm downpour outside. I need to make it over to Beth's apartment to swap gear (give her back the backpack she lent me for my trip to China and get my laptop bag back and a bag with all of my bank account info in Korea.) Hailed a taxi after trudging through the rain with three huge suitcases. All of my things are ...

... 020 ft). It is also host to the highest mosque in the world. The Tower Contains a total of 43 floors excluding the 4 levels of basement. The Kingdom Centre is owned by Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, a prince of the Saudi royal family. It is also the headquarters of his holding company: Kingdom Holding Company. The total cost of the project was US$ 1 billion and the contract was taken by Saudi Arabian Al-Saif and The Italian Impregilo.<br>

... it was extremely easy. A big baggage scanner processed about 30 bags a minute and the bored operator wasn&#8217;t always even looking at his screen. Some people didn&#8217;t even put through back-packs. If I had known all this then I would have brought my Bible and Our Daily Bread but as soon as I can get my internet sorted then this won&#8217;t really be a problem.<br><br>Once I entered the Arrivals area then I was greeted by a crowd of very brown faces. My driver, Farj ...

28th...bought an abaya in Dubai. The young woman at the shop showed me how to put on the sheelah (the head scarf)...an hour later i asked another nice young Saudi lady in the waiting area to show me again, because i took it off and couldn't get it back on properly...there is a knack to it. Met her family while waiting...really lovely people. Her mother said not to worry about putting on the ...

... passed through Mina and Muzdalifah, which if you're familiar with the annual Hajj rites, is where the large tent city is that the Hajjis stay in. Looking at the tent city, it is easy to see how perilous it could be if people try to have open fires, and while regretting the tent city fire a few years ago, one can only wonder that there haven't been more accidents. The scope of the public services necessary for accommodate the millions who come for ...

When you are entering Riyadh from the east, you pass a lot of agricultural spots -- date farms, dairy farms, fields with modern irrigation equipment. Leaving the city heading west it's as if you have come to the edge of a vast cliff and are now headed down into an enormous valley. Our ears ...

... small barrier to the families' entrance, and back in again. I shared a small chuckle with the staff as they were the same people, they had just shifted down the counter a bit. I was also the only customer in the store, on either side. <br><br>Large mocha chip Frappucino in hand I felt ready to face the next ten hours or so of drive time. We drove quickly along the city highway, not much traffic but still considerable winds and a lot of sand blowing around.

... ventilated, do go straight to ICU, but often we look after ICU "stepdown" patients in recovery before sending them on. I've seen some pretty interesting stuff already - a few MVA's and a partial liver donor this week. Its just taking some getting used to, with all the damn paperwork (so, so much paperwork!) and also their way of doing things. You can't even do the simplest thing such as apply oxygen without a doctor's order! Patients who have a motor block ...

... and sand is totally worth it :p We went on a city tour as part of our orientation... Which wasn't so much of a tour as a trip to kingdom tower, which was fabulous anyway. I was soooooooooooooooooooooooooo bummed that I didn't have the camera on me! It was amazing. The tower is almost 300mt tall, and has 99 floors. The elevator went up at 120km/hr! The view was spectaular. The city of Riyadh is so much bigger than I had imagined... And it looked even more surreal because you couldn't ...

... it was a lot harder to get around. Finally we followed a paved road down beside a microwave tower where we ran into two expat vehicles (Hi, Ross from Riyadh!). They were, as you might have guessed, also out after sand roses so we lowered the pressure in our tires from 36 to 15 and headed out in 4 wheel drive LOW to hunt for the roses. It didn't take us long - about ten minutes through deep sand and scruffy shale shelves - to get to the low-lying darker sand patches that ...