I moved to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in Feb. 1998 and both live and work in the main Lucent compound. A few weeks ago, I bought a Sony Mavica camera, which takes pictures in JPG format and stores them on a floppy -- perfect for web pages!.
And here's a few pictures of Riyadh -- these are just a start. I'm still not too sure how people react to a camera, but these guys didn't seem to mind...
This is the football, er, soccer stadium in Riyadh. I'm not a big fan of Riyadh's architecture in general, but I like the stadium.
This is a more typical small business street.
Riyadh is a conservative place. Women have to wear an abaya (black cloak) in public and they can't drive. Prayer takes place 5 times a day and all shops are closed for 30 minutes during prayer -- see...
I took a few pictures at night of Riyadh.
Yeah, they have palm trees here -- date palms specifically. Saudi Arabia exports the most dates in the world, as I recall.
But in the mean time I took some pictures out at Diriyah, which is roughly 18th century Riyadh. All I can say is that things have certainly improved since then...
(Yep mud and straw hold up for 200 years here. It's really that dry -- doesn't rain for about 8 mos. out of 12.)
Here are a couple of pictures of the palace in the 18th century. Note this is before they found oil near Dharhan, so the current king lives in a little nicer place than this...
They're doing some excavation at the edge of the site in a valley. I like to watch the birds fly in the valley and somehow the site is peaceful in a way that I can't quite explain. Guess it's because it's as close as looking down on aforested valley (palm trees on one side) as there is in Riyadh. Gonna have to take a trip to Abha to see the mountains one of these days.
Stay tuned for better pix -- especially better than this one -- just to show the folks at home I'm still alive enough to get out of the shower.
Oh, yeah, we took a trip to Jeddah --see!
Tom Loos
My home page at IU. (PS -- I couldn't look at this after I put it up at IU. Let me know if it looks OK.)