Nick Hardcastle

I got my car back yesterday evening. It had only taken a week to repair. The chap at Fuch’s took me into his office and gave me a bit of a lecture on car maintenance. Or the lack of it on my part. “I took the oil cap off and waited for the oil to come out. But nothing came out sir. When I looked for the engine, I couldn’t see it. Only sand. It took me four days to get everything working again, but now it is like a new car. Toyota make very strong cars, you are very lucky.” Indeed, it does feel like a new car. I have acceleration again and it is running like a dream. Even with a hefty tip and MVPI (like MOT) testing and certification, it only cost me SR1468 or about GB£200.

I ran home from school today. With the temperature being well over 100 (at a guess) and a strong, dust laden wind in my face for most of the journey, it was a tough run. Periodically I had to stop for a drink. I need to replace the bladder in my running bag; the last one went moldy after I left it unused for too long. Rather than spend an hour cleaning out the tube, I dumped it in a waste bin in Sarawak. By the time I got home today (50 minutes 22 seconds) I’d drunk one and a half liters of water, stopping each time for an illicit rest as I took the bottle out of my backpack. Thanks to the wind, my skin was remarkably dry until I walked in to the house. Within seconds of getting out of the wind my skin was running with sweat, dripping on the floor and trickling down my legs into my shoes. I turned the air conditioning down as low as possible, stripped off and headed for a cold shower. Having, errr … relieved myself, I transfered to the bidet…

Sweat makes a remarkably slippery lubricant. I slid straight across the bidet and into the waste paper basket between there and the wall. Laughter hurts!

There are only 15 more work days left of the school year. Hard to believe how fast time is flying by. I was going to go to Bahrain at the weekend, but my car is still at the garage. Something to do with coils, of which there are four and one isn’t working. Of course, I have absolutely no idea what that means.
Thinking of Bahrain, I remembered some photographs I meant to post on my website. They are from a day there I spent with Janet some months ago. http://www.hobnail.com/Blogphotos/2006-05-Bahrain/index.html

On the climbing wall, like bats. In Starbucks at prayer time.http://www.hobnail.com/Blogphotos/05-25-06/index.html

Back in October 2005 I sent a hunk of money home using Saudi Hollandi Bank’s online banking service. It had worked flawlessly before on a number of occasions. Sure enough, the money disappeared instantly from my account and the transaction was confirmed. So much easier than queuing for hours in Speed Cash in downtown Al Khobar.

Money usually appears in my UK account within 48 hours, but a week later nothing was showing. I then rang SHB to enquire what they had done with my money. That was the first of many, many calls. The pattern usually went something like this. 1) Ring the online banking service; 2) spend several minutes inputting card code, pin number; listening to menu options and dialing the numbers as told in Arabic and English; 3) getting to the end of the messages and being cut off; 4) trying again. Eventually I found that the menu option I wanted didn’t exist, but if you said (via key taps) that you wanted to transfer an amount of money and then entered 0 as the value, you would be transfered to a real person and could then begin stage 5. At stage 5 the clerk would greet me “Hello Mr Nicholas, how can I help you?”. I would then quote my query number. 6) Wait for the clerk to go off and find the records; 7) explain what the problem was, again, all records seemingly having not been recorded in an accessible manner; wait; 9) talk, once again to the clerk, this time to be told either “Please ring back tomorrow, I am going to investigate this” or “I will call you tomorrow”. 10) The next call would produce no further results of course, and I invariably waited in vain for SHB to call me.

Eventually I enlisted the help of the bank manager in Al-Khobar, the company bank managers in Al-Khobar and Riyadh, our finance director and our accountant. All to no avail. Ten days ago, with a large wad of documents I went to see our Head of Government Relations, Mr R. He wrote a couple of letters for me, which I signed. That though, was only the start of the process, for he obviously did a great deal of behind the scenes negotiating. My money is now in my account in the UK!

At last, the internet has started working again and I have managed to update the website! We announced the the French trip and the China*Climb trip this afternoon. The website has the details: http://www.dhahranbritish.com/4_trips.html

The internet is driving me nuts at the moment. I can’t update the school site from school for unknown reasons. The internet at home hasn’t been working at all. It really effects my workflow as I have come to rely on it for so much. Remarkable when you think that we once had to put a proposal together for our former head teacher, explaining why we needed the internet in our classrooms. That was only 5 years ago. Perhaps he thought we would just waste time surfing, like he did. Now even the students are bringing laptops into class and connecting to the internet wirelessly. Well, at least they would do if it would work.

I’ve been busy today preparing the briefing for next year’s school expedition. It looks like being another fantastic trip. I am still sorting out the fine details, but it will be another adventure, this time involving climbing, Tyrollean traverses, abseilling, caving, trekking, swimming, kayaking, cycling and exploring. I’ve made a slide show and when my internet connection next allows, I will post it to the website.

Some days are just horrible. At about 12.50 today I finally managed to get down to marking exam scripts. I had gone in to do that at 6.45 am, but with one thing and another it wasn’t to be. We finished the day with a joyous meeting – the sort where we spend an hour discussing trivia and achieve nothing. Even when we make decisions we don’t do much about it.

I finally got round to putting together a gallery of photographs of the climbing wall at the beginning of its life. I’ve put this on hobnail.com as blogspot’s images are blocked in Saudi. See http://www.hobnail.com/Gallery_Climbing_wall/index.html

OK … it is fun to post using iWeb and the pages look very good for very little effort. But they take a long time to download. Blogspot is very fast too, although Saudi Arabia blocks all photographs on their site. I have posted a bunch of stuff on the .mac site. Is it worth taking out a subscription? http://web.mac.com/nhardcastle/