A Wet Christmas

For those of you back in the Midwest, it seems to be a white Christmas.  Over here, it has been a wet Christmas.  It has rained five out of the last seven days on us.  Streets and walkways are covered in water.  It has been nice having a higher vehicle for driving through about five inches of water on one street downtown.  It really makes us appreciate the lengths that cities go to at home to set up water drainage.  In Saudi though, I'm not surprised the drainage is less than adequate for a heavy rain since it doesn't happen all that often.  It's like states in the south that don't deploy plows when it snows because it will melt quickly.

Keeping on the rainy theme, if you didn't already know, I (Jamie) like keeping my car clean.  It was getting a little dirty and when the rain hit I figured it would at least wash some of the dirt away.  I was quite surprised to see that it was making my car even dirtier!  It was turning black!  I was then informed that the rain over all the industry can be quite dirty.  All this junk sits up in the air (you've seen the burning torch picture) and then when it rains, it all comes crashing down.  How disappointed was I?  It is supposed to rain tomorrow, but I went ahead and washed the car today anyways because it wasn't raining and I could.  I'll keep my fingers crossed.

On a more normal note, we have a Christmas tree!  A real life fake Christmas tree!  You can't find them in Saudi and sometimes they will take them away from you at the Bahrain border if you are trying to bring one over, but we have one nonetheless.  We bought a used 7'10'' tree from someone selling one at work (they got a new one from Bahrain).  We were able to find lights downtown.   We even saw lights that played carols, but for our sanity we passed on those ones.  Our tree even has eight ornaments on it.  My mom sent a couple (without knowing we had a tree) and we were able to find some others at a very western, middle eastern, home decor store in Al-Khobar.  We saw our superintendent there and she bought us an ornament too when we told her we had a tree.  It was very nice of her and very much like her to do.

This is also our last week of school and then we have three weeks off.  We are finalizing our plans for our visit to Jordon at the end of the month this week.  At school, we are finishing up our secret santa gifts as well.  All in all, the Christmas season has been quite different over here, but there has been enough little pieces of normal (i.e. Christmas music in our home) that still make it feel a bit like Christmas.

Enjoy our tree picture!

Jamie

Oh Christmas Tree, oh Christmas Tree, how lovely are thy branches!