Thomas journals

Thanksgiving in Saudi -- ironically, as Thursday is the start of the Saudi weekend, taking off Thursday is what we do every week, so Thanksgiving is by definition a holiday.  We had long ago planned to attend the St.Andrew's Scottish Gala with colleagues -- 8 teacher-couples all told from our school and Cole's school booked hotel rooms in Bahrain for Thursday night.  We drove over to Bahrain mid-day, went to (fancy) beauty parlor and (Pakistani) barber shop, then got our hotel minivans to drive us out to the party, on a remote British compound.  Very Scottish, indeed...lots of kilts, including the UK ambassador who spoke of his Scottish roots.  After speeches and a surprisingly good dinner, a ceilidh band played and all danced for several hours.  What great fun...and the hotel van took us home.   The next day was easy with some shopping on the way back to Saudi. We were a bit hesitant about Bahrain, as news of demonstrations is troubling.  We saw seve...

We watched the sun set behind the winterline tonight -- the line of temperature inversion at around 6000 feet, where the dust and fog and smoke from ground level is trapped, forming a very distinct curtain behind which the sun's light completely disappears. We are now at 7500 feet, at the Rokeby Guest House in Landour Cantonment, Mussoorie. The guest house is a luxury renovation of Christopher's old school dormitory, so it is a special treat for us to stay a night here. We are visiting Woodstock School for a nostalgic return to the mountains and the campus, and particularly so that Coleman can meet up with his classmates before they all graduate from high school -- he will not be able to attend their graduation here, as he will be preparing for his own graduation in Dhahran next June. Our Eid-al-Adha holiday week allows just a few days in the mountains, given the lengthy travel time and the fact that Air India preponed our return flight by a day. It has been a marvelous ...

Sons Coleman and Chris attended a great summer camp one year -- it's title was SB2W, or Summer's Best 2 Weeks. They agreed with the title, and still talk about some of the good times and people there. So it is with our just-ended summer holiday visiting friends and family around the U.S.: An organized family reunion of Barb's maternal relatives, on the Oregon coast. Our planned reunion with families from two different countries who happened to have connections in Duluth. Our 40th high-school reunion in Beavercreek Ohio -- noting that neither Barb nor I actually graduated from there, but we attended those schools for many years and still have dear friends among our classmates [ link to photos ]. We attended the church that Barb's father founded in Beavercreek, now preparing their own 50th anniversary celebration. We enjoyed time with son Christopher, more physically fit and mature than ever, working two jobs to gain Texas state residency [ link to photos ]. ...

One of the lightning rods of dissent in the Kingdom is the government's refusal to permit women to drive. We know of no other nation with this ban; and to compound the confusion, there is apparently no explicit law banning it, just a reference to a decree in 1991. Like the other irritating restriction of the niqab veil, it also has no basis in the Koran, and therefore is not easily upheld in Sharia law. Recently the first name "Manal" has become a symbolic name, as the divorced Aramco IT expert -- she received awards for her expertise a few years ago -- drove a car near Coleman's high school last month and published the feat on YouTube. The deliberately banal video inflamed the sensibilities of the Saudi police, who detained Manal in the women's reformatory for 10 days. Her lawyer carefully pointed out that there was no law against her driving, and further she carefully avoided any reference to the Facebook group urging women to all drive on June 17th. St...

The Saudi government recently announced new regulations on Media coverage -- criticism of official religious figures is forbidden.  We suppose this applies to criticism from any direction -- from those who say the official imam is too liberal, and from those who criticize the official stance as too conservative.   However, our American bias toward openness is uncomfortable with such a directive, and we worry about the consequences of stifling debate.   There are several dimensions to such debates here:  regarding basic interpretations of Islam, regarding attitudes toward different Islamic sects, regarding women's role in society, and the very role of religion in society, all particularly complicated when the society is clearly established as an Islamic state (they finesse the point of what sort of sectarian state it is, claiming simple hegemony over the holy sites:  we are constantly reminded that the King's primary title is Custodian of the Two Holy M...

Click on this link to our photo album , with captions, to review at your leisure. Or view this slideshow

Zahle morning walk until a taxi comes along to take us 10km south to Ksara Winery, a well-kept beautiful operation where several staff are waiting to show tourists through the real limestone caves where the wine is aged. Then a sparkling new tasting room -- all good-tasting wine (but maybe my tastebuds are out of practice) and gift shoppe. We walk a few minutes out to the main highway and rapidly flag down a shared "service" minivan. We realize that our earlier ride to Baalbek on a nice new minivan was an anomaly -- this one is a smoky rattletrap (the smoke emanated mostly from the driver and passengers) that careened down the mountain, regularly squealing to a stop in hopes of gathering new paying passengers. At one point the driver held on to a lady's package in order to keep her from getting out of the van to take a competitor's ride. Although he tried to get us to pay double for a ride directly to our hotel, he dropped us at the Kuwaiti embassy where we got ...