Today was a really good day. Not only is it the weekend tomorrow (TGIW), but today was a really fun day too. For the first time while here, I conducted two 45-minute training sessions. As Andy Oman will tell you, give a trainer a stage and you give him (or her) the world. I have to admit that I was a bit nervous standing in front of a group of Saudis talking about “Preparing for Feedback” but it went very well. I felt like I was connecting with them and they were engaged. I know I was! After a long time [View Full Entry]

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I have no idea whether this will work or not because I've never tried to upload a video before, so let's see what happens. This is a video of the jelly fish I saw in Khobar on April 23. Enjoy! [View Full Entry]

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I’ve been asked quite a few times why I’ve abandoned my food descriptions and photos, so this entry will try to make up a bit for lost time. Here are a few meals worth of photos from the last couple of days at the SAC Center. By the way, if you haven’t read my Dammam entry from yesterday, please take a look because that was a really interesting place to visit. So have a look! I’m also including a photos of a few of the participants from today. As you can see, there is a mix of western and Saudi dress. [View Full Entry]

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Did you know that if you double click on any photo, you can see an enlarged view? Also, when you do this at the top there is a navigation gizmo, so you can scroll through all of the photos at a larger size. And as if that wasn't enough, there is also a slide show icon on the right side of the screen. [View Full Entry]

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Today was a great day! I went to the city of Dammam for the very first time. There weren’t any Aramco buses that travel on Saturday (today is an Aramco holiday), so I chartered a van for six of us (Bob, Glyn, Adrian, Eric, Don and me). This was a great way to do it because it cost each of us less than $4 each way. Transportation is pretty inexpensive here. The van driver was going to wait for three hours for us to do our thing in Dammam, but we convinced him to come back and meet us at 12:30 [View Full Entry]

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I don’t want you to think that my time here is a day at the beach. Well, actually I did spend today at the beach! This morning Pat and I went to the “Hobby Farm” for breakfast. That’s in the Aramco compound, about 15 minutes away. Actually it always takes Pat about 45 minutes because he gets lost every time. And since we didn’t know how we came, getting back was a challenge too. Fortunately I had brought my beach stuff with me and we got to the bus with about two seconds to spare. Pat dropped me off, I boarded [View Full Entry]

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I'm willing to bet that I'm the only person who has a blog title like that! Last night we went to the a place here at Aramco that has amateur singers. It was like being in a small bar in Bemidji, Minnesota but without the cigarette smoke and without the drinks. Pretty cheesy stuff. But one song they sang was called "You're an Aramcon" sung to the tune of Secret Agent Man. Pretty funny. Today was a day off since it’s our weekend. In fact, we have three days off because Saturday is an Aramco holiday. So it was time to [View Full Entry]

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I’m sorry I’m getting a bit spotty about doing these blogs. My days have been really long and I was afraid that if I stayed up any longer, I’d have to wake up before I went to sleep. Doing all-nighters may be OK when you are 19 but when you are let’s say considerably older than 19 it’s not such a good idea. Falling asleep when you are doing a briefing or snoring during a presentation is somewhat frowned upon. Go figure. Despite some software and procedural issues, I really am enjoying myself. I’ve already had some interesting conversations with the [View Full Entry]

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I’ve survived the very first day of the very first session. There are six sessions in total over a three week period, as well as “coaching days” between the two weekly sessions. Considering how our pre-game preparation went yesterday, today was relatively smooth. So in hindsight, it’s certainly better to have problems before, rather than during the real thing. I did have a wrestling match with a copy machine at the end of the day. All I wanted was to make one copy. Is that too much to ask? Obviously yes. When I put paper in the tray and tried to [View Full Entry]

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Today was a day for meeting people. Before I left and before I knew I was returning to Saudi, I received an email from a guy who lives in Seattle who had stumbled across my blog. It turns out that his boss asked him in a meeting if you would be willing to go to Saudi Arabia on an assignment at Aramco. Bob thought his boss was putting him on. He wasn’t. Does any of this sound familiar? Bob had never traveled outside of the US, except to Vancouver, Canada and that hardly counts as out of the US (apologies to [View Full Entry]

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