Bikes, a Fish Dinner and Pets

Since I do not have a car, I have to plan my grocery trips.
The bicycle trip to the store takes about 10 minutes and I have to go often because I can only fit so much into my backpack which is the same one I wear each day to the office. I used to carry a briefcase, now I have become a back-packer. During my bike rides around the campus, I find I am always riding into the wind. Since I live on the coast there is a constant gentle breeze in the morning coming off the land towards the sea (against the direction I go to work) and in the evening a much stronger breeze originates off the water and blows onto the land from the North West and the grocery store is to the North. I am riding predominantly towards the sea on the way home with a full backpack and one or two full grocery bags hung off the handlebars. Sad thing though, I think I bring home more calories in those bags than I burn off riding there and back.

Last week I traveled to Jeddah by taxi again.
This time to get some shoes and a few other essentials that are not available on campus. Guess who we got again? We got "Smiley the 180 km kamakazi taxi driver guy!" He is not able to speak a single word of English and yet we requested specifically and were assured that we would get an English speaking driver, but I guess what is ‘intended and promised’ is not actually reality or what you are guaranteed to get here. I would like to know what the driver calls all the other drivers when he yells at them in Arabic as he madly swerves around them. You know the kind, It is the other guy that is always at fault!

Arindam and family were with me in Jeddah and one of the things we intended to do was have a nice dinner out during our trip. This became my first formal dinner since I have been here. We went to the ‘Fish Restaurant’ where you pay by weight. You walk down this counter and look at all the fish just like you were at a wharf. Each different collection of fish had a different price flag beside them so you can shop by color, by price or by reputation or even shape. I chose the rock snapper-like fish which is supposed to be the best fish from the Red Sea. Arindam and family had lobster in cheese sause. Nice music and nice place! A nice get-away.

During the evening, we stopped at a number of stores and one was a Pet Mart store with real stuffed cinnamon bear, two huge pelicans in the window and a few antelope heads stuffed and hanging on the walls, all with price tags hanging off them. Also, in the main window were two ‘real’ stuffed Indian tigers – full body mounts. I looked, there were no price tags, as these are endangered and sales would be internationally and locally illegal. In the store were mice, turtles, green lizards, (the fast running kind with long back legs), rabbits, cats and dogs. The more exotic animals were meerkat, small primates that were possibly 10 inches head to tail and their heads about the size of a walnut with tufts of hair from their cheeks and ears. These little guys were eating bananas. Also in the store were tropical fish, the kind I see swimming free among the reefs when I dive.

I have been doing quality of IT services surveys
of faculty last week and this week. While walking round the university, I am always impressed with the names on the labs that are being set up in the buildings. It makes me feel like I am living in a science fiction novel. These labs are in the Biophysics Building: Bioactive Molecules Lab, Nanophysics Lab, Bimolecular Lab, Integrative Systems Biology Lab, Nanobiophysics Lab, Plant Stress Genomics Technologies Lab, Proteomics Lab and Genomics Lab are a few of them.

This weekend will be spent here on campus
but come Sunday, I will be in the air flying to London and then by train to a city called Swansea in Wales. I will be there for the week attending and presenting at a Blackboard conference. I hope to meet up with George K who I met in Jordan when I was there. He is now laboring in London and I hope to be able to spend half a day before I catch my flight back to Saudi.