Ottawa – 5:37pm October 19th

Ho ho ho! Merry Christmas. By the time you actually read this, it will of course be late on boxing day, but I have a good excuse for being a bit behind. I’m in the magical Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and have better things to be doing than blogging all the time. However, I can’t seem to help myself. When everyone else has gone to bed, or whenever I can steal a few minutes, I try to fire up the old computer machine and try to dash off a few lines, which brings me to this post. I wanted to get this fired up and online before we left for some internal trips for the next week. We’ll be away from Riyadh, and I’ll be unable to do any blogging while on the road. So this post will have to keep you entertained until we get back here to the Diplomatic Quarters. However, I can assure you that this will be a great little post, as we did some pretty unique things on Christmas day over here. Last year, I found myself at an all day cricket test in Auckland, NZ, and this year, I have a similar experience to share with you all, but you’ll have to read on to find out exactly what it is. You might also want to just check out the pictures on flickr that were put up from the day!

Greetings, and Happy New Year to one and all. This blog post of course is a little after the new year, but what can I say, I’m still playing catch up. Believe me when I say that everyone near and dear to me was in my thoughts as the clock struck midnight on New Year’s eve, in spite of the fact that I couldn’t be with everyone to celebrate. However, this did mark yet another year where I would be ringing in the new year in another far off land. Last year saw me turning the calendar over in one of the earliest areas to change years, New Zealand, and this year, I was spending that time with family in another part of the globe, Saudi Arabia, and specifically, Jeddah. How cool is that? I think I should make this a new tradition if at all possible. Although I do like to be close to friends on this most auspicious of days, it’s also pretty cool to be able to experience a new place. However, I’ll have to admit that Saudi Arabia may not be the most ideal of places for New Years. For starters, they don’t follow the Gregorian calendar, which means that they don’t consider that date New Years. Secondly, as a very strict Muslim country, There is absolutely no alcohol to be found or consumed. Besides those minor details though, it’s a great place to be 🙂 Read on if you’d like to hear a little more about how we celebrated.

My final excursion while in the Dominican Republic was a full day Catamaran excursion. Possibly the best part about this excursion was the fact that it departed from my resort’s beach, so I really didn’t have to displace myself too much in order to make it there on time at 8am. This was a good thing, because I was a little bit worn out from the Tuesday night activities. What were those activities you ask? Well, that was the night I met up with Penelope and Melissa at the beachside grill a la carte restaurant, after which I went to the casino night with Go Travel direct. That turned out to be pretty lame, so I ended up going back to the resort for the nightly show, which ended up being the light-bulb eating dude! That was a good call, and put me in the mood to have a few drinks while I watched. Anyway, long story short, I was definitely ready to hit the ocean the next morning, but not in the mood to join the ‘party’ aspect of the day. Yup, as might be expected, this was no ordinary catamaran. This was the party catamaran! Open bar all day long. However, I didn’t touch a drop till we were actually anchored back at our starting point late in the afternoon. I just couldn’t justify drinking all day. That and the fact that I didn’t know a single soul on the boat, since none of the people I’d met were on this excursion. However, it was still pretty cool. Read on for more.