STEER Day 2 in Saudi Arabia.

An entirely random photo that I took at the King Faud International Airport at Dammam, Saudi Arabia.  After flying off from Dubai Airport finally, we reached Dammam in 2 hours on board Malaysian Airlines MH154.  Not entirely friendly, I must say..  There is really a difference between SQ and the rest it seems.

The atmosphere in Saudi Arabia is a lot tenser than that in Dubai because of the stories we have heard about how strict their religious police were. When we landed, everyone was solemn and afraid to draw attention to ourselves.  The late hour of our arrival didn't exactly help matters, since we now feel like we are stowaways from another country... The customs didn't help matters either.  We had to scan in all ten fingerprints and our passport was detained.  I never felt the importance of a passport until then.. They were perfectly able to take it away and I would never able to go home again, I thought while waiting.

Eventually we did get our passports back, and we cleared the checkpoint without much problem thankfully!  And on we went to our hotel!

We are staying at the Crowne Plaza Al Khobar for the KSA leg of our trip. It's the same Crowne Plaza that we have at Changi Airport back at home.  5 stars!  By the time we reached the hotel, it was 6 am and had been 26 hours since I woke up.  Luckily, there was nothing much on the itinerary for the day, and I slept the day away...

To do the hotel some justice, it is only right to write a bit about how marvellous it is.  When we first entired the hotel, we were greeted by a waiter offering us Arabian coffee and dates.  our bags were left in the bus and carried for us into the hotel by the bell boy.  Check-in was incredibly quick and all we needed to do was to get our card keys and head to bed.  Before that though, we tried out the buffet breakfast at the mezzanine floor.  The spread was awesome.  Kind of reminiscent of the spread I got at Angsana Bintan.  I haven't seen it for myself yet, but some said that the pool at the top floor has an awesome view and great amenities such as a jacuzzi (yay!), sauna, turkish bath, etc.  The Saudis are truly very generous!

The next item on the itinerary was a shopping trip to the nearby Rashid Mall at around 5 pm.  It was smaller than Dubai Mall, but more than enough to make our legs ache.  The things there were more or less what we could find in Singapore though, so I didn't manage to get anything other than a scarf for my SEP.

One interesting thing we observed at the Mall was the call to prayer at sunset.  The PA system sounded the call, much like what I heard in the Bruneian jungle, and suddenly all the shops started closing or the shop owners to go pray.  Interestingly, there were some who chose not to pray but took the time instead to have a smoke and slack a bit.  Kinda new to me, since Singapore is a secular country, but really quite cool!

After shopping, we were shown the 30km long causeway that linked KSA to Bahrain.  Can you imagine a causeway that goes across the sea by 30km? It's totally insane!  Pity we couldn't see much because of the night.

And that was actually all that we did today. Not much, which I am actually glad for.  At least we got the time to replenish our energy!

We are going to Jubail tomorrow to visit the Royal Commision, SABIC and Rotary Engineering, a Singapore company based there.  It's gonna be great!