Every Thursday morning I would be on the Aramco bus to Khobar like clockwork. Even the bus was an adventure because you would meet people from all over the world -- Azerbaijan, Lebanon, Malaysia-- and could strike up an immediate and fascinating conversation.
Here’s a bit of good news for young girls the world over who collect unicorn dolls and whose favorite T-shirts and sweatshirts and pajamas all feature colorful images of the mythical creature: Unicorns have reportedly been spotted in the deserts of Saudi Arabia. Really, but not really. Almost, though.
Responsibility for the Great Aramcon Assault on the Euphrates River of 1979 rests squarely on the shoulders of Charlie Franck, American ExPat teacher working in Abqaiq at the time for Saudi Aramco, and Richard Bangs...
No professional Investment Adviser would invest his or her personal money in a target date fund, so why should you? Target date funds are an option to start investing but are too objective in a subjective world. What they do offer is simplicity and instant diversification, something investors just starting to save need access to.
With so many things to do at the just-completed reunion in Dhahran, it would have helped if I had been able to clone myself in order to take everything in. Trying to decide which options to choose was perhaps the most difficult task...
I’ll call him Clark Randall. At 18, he volunteered for the Army. In early 1945, he went through basic training and was sent to Ft. Ord in Monterey to be trained as a diesel mechanic. He barely finished his training before the war ended and he was mustered out.
In the minds of people the world over, the most romantic, most exotic element associated with the deserts of Arabia are its oases. Images of palm trees swaying in the sultry breeze...
Over the next week, you may see many excited new faces on the streets throughout the Saudi Aramco residential communities. However, these folks are not newcomers; most have actually had a long connection to the company and the Kingdom.
After I graduated from college, I worked in film and TV for six years before I returned to Arabia in January of 1974 to start up the television department at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital in Riyadh. I was one of the first 20 American employees, and the hospital was still being built when I arrived.
In the special world that is ExPat life in the Aramco camps of Saudi Arabia, institutions taken for granted by people living elsewhere than in the Kingdom such as Little League baseball, Toastmasters, and Boy Scouts...
In 1950, the Girl Scout Cookie sale came to Saudi Arabia for the first time. In the photograph below, fourteen-year old Mariner, Louise Snyder of Stamford, Connecticut, gives cartons of cookies to her father, L.M. Snyder, Vice-President of Arabian American Oil Company, to deliver to the Girl Scouts in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, 9000 miles away.
At 9:00 a.m. on the morning of the 26th of April 1979, our undaunted troop of fresh-faced ExPat voyagers grabbed a Saudia flight in Dhahran and flew to Jeddah, where we encountered a planeload of pilgrims from Pakistan...
The appointment of Princess Reema bint Bandar as Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the US has been welcomed by foreign diplomatic missions in the Kingdom. Princess Reema made history last Saturday when she was appointed to the role, becoming the first Saudi woman to be named ambassador.
There is stupid, and then there is another category even dumber than stupid. At seventeen, I was pretty much the poster child for beyond stupid though it wasn’t entirely my fault.
People unfamiliar with the geological and climate history of the Arabian Peninsula are often surprised to learn that lakes and streams and verdant flora once graced areas where today one finds only...
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Anyone using a computer to read this story owes a debt of gratitude to the month of September in the year 1958. For it was in that month and year, in the Central Research Labs of Texas Instruments in Dallas, Texas...
In April 1979, in pursuit of spring break thrills, a largely untested band of young American ExPats living in Saudi Arabia and working for Aramco launched an unlikely assault on the treacherous upper reaches of the Euphrates River in eastern Turkey.
Life moves on, but so too does remorse. Contemplating our crime I began to think that Milt and I had done a great service to Aramco. Now all the radios would be more secure, or at least the windows rolled up and the truck doors locked.
Like the hyper-kinetic Energizer Bunny in those omnipresent battery commercials, some people just keep going and going and going. Take the family of John “David” LaRue. David, Badge Number 196810, will need to keep himself...