A "normal" day

A routine, of sorts, has settled in.  I awake at 5AM so that, by 5:30AM, I can talk to my family.  (It's 9:30PM the previous evening in Michigan).  We either Skype with video or I simply dial home using a local number with my Vonage internet phone.  My family sees "Walled Lake" on callerid.  This is so cool!  We talk about the day just past (I've had a night to sleep on it).  At 6AM I got to breakfast.  At 6:35AM the bus leaves the hotel for KAUST.  At 7:45AM or so, we arrive at KAUST.  There is an interesting checkpoint on the hightway just north of Jeddah.  Everyone slows down to a crawl as we pass through narrowed lanes where there are Police? Guards? Military.  I'm not sure.  They just watch the vehicles pass and we haven't actually stopped yet.

Once we reach the entrance to KAUST, however, it's a different story.  We go through three checkpoints within about a mile.   Usually at two of the three, a guard boards the bus and walks the aisle looking at ID badges.  The checkpoints are a bit unnerving because of the discreet but visible automatic weapons and, at one stop, truck-mounted machine gun.  I suppose it will just fade into the scenery eventually.  I certainly have not experienced an ounce of fear or trepidation since I have been in Saudi Arabia.  I think it's just a precaution because one never knows who might take exception to our presence.

Once on the KAUST camput, there are visible guards here and there but no visible weapons.  It looks pretty much like any other campus except everyone has an ID badge.  It reminds me of a corporate campus in many respects.  There are just more "throbes" and "abayas" than you typically see at Michigan State or UM.  :-)  Below is a stock image; this is not KAUST.   The men wear throbes and the women wear abayas.   This dress is very common everywhere I've been.

At work there is much to do.  The computing clusters on which I work were ordered by Saudi Aramco (who built KAUST) before there was a "Research Computing" department (which is where I work).  Now there is a single manager and 3 staff members out of 18 projected.  What's installed is not what any of us would have purchased and much of it does not work according to the requirements that had been given to Saudi Aramco.  As a result, not much works at all.  This is resulting in long days which are made even longer by the roughly 3 hours per day I spend on a bus.

Speaking of the bus, moving to the KAUST campus is a dream for many.  Some have been in hotels in Jeddah for up to 6 months.  Last week a note was sent to a number of people currently in hotels telling them to get ready to move!  They have not heard a single thing since then.  Apparently these "false starts" are not uncommon albeit very frustrating for the long term commuters.  As a result, I am planning for a long stay at the "Habitat" hotel.  On the bright side, I've been supplied with a new KAUST-supplied MacBook Pro and, until a new shipment of iPhones arrive, a loaner Nokia mobile phone.  My desk phone has been installed but I can't call off campus yet.  There's a new form that the administrative assistant didn't know about that must be filled out to allow such calls.  This is a fully modern and high-tech University but it is manned by people who are still married to the paper age.  Thus they go through reams and reams of paper creating forms for every requirement.  To exacerbate the problem, they don't use check boxes to indicate options.  Each option seems to have its own form.  This is a small issue in the light of all that has been accomplished here, though.