Instead of starting on a frustrated note, let me say how much smoother this process has been because of the help of Saudi Aramco. Jen and I are convinced that if we had to go through this without help it would have taken three times as long. We are currently on a listserve of expatriates that are living in Saudi Arabia or are planning on going soon. Most of the people are working with much smaller Saudi companies. I read their stories, for instance, of how visas take three to four months, and two to three tries, and I am grateful that we have only been waiting two to three weeks.
Here is what we know:
- The boys have been accepted into the schools in Dhahran.
- On Dec. 12th we pulled the boys out of school here.
- On Dec. 15th we will be moving up to Blair and Delora’s while we tear apart the house in Nibley; we will be traveling back and forth each day to continue packing, sorting, tossing, and storing.
- On Dec. 20th we will have a cleaning party at our house to clean walls, windows, baseboards, etc. (we will save the carpet cleaning til later). It will be an all day event. If you can make it, you are welcome to come at any time after 10:00 am.
- On Dec. 22-23 the shipping company will come to pack up our shipments for the air shipment and the sea shipment.
- On Dec. 25 we will have Christmas at Blair and Delora’s.
- On Dec. 30 we will get on the plane to fly from SLC to Minneapolis to Amsterdam to Dhahran. That is approximately 18 hours of flying time!
What we are still waiting for:
- We are still waiting to hear about visas; although that should be here very soon.
Although we are still waiting on visas, we have been given the go ahead to start making the big changes: Sell cars, get property management company to rent the house, ship furniture, etc.
Vonage
I will be setting up an Internet phone account with Vonage. For those who aren’t familiar with how Vonage works, let me simply say, you will be able to call our Logan phone number and get us in Dhahran. The cost is the same as if you were calling us in Logan. My understanding is that we will be able to keep our current phone number. I will let you all know when that is finalized. Oh the wonders of the Internet. As soon as we get to Dhahran I will be scrambling to get high-speed Internet set up so that the Vonage service will work. There may be a week or two down time on the phone service until I can get it set up.
Email addresses
In between the time we leave and the time I get high-speed Internet set up in the house, we will still be able to get email. We will have dial-up at the house and there is an Internet cafe in Dhahran. Our current email addresses will still work. Those won’t change. Those will be our primary form of communication for the first few days.
Time Zones
My understanding is that the time difference between Dhahran and Mountain time is 9 hours. It is 10 hours between Dhahran and Pacific time.
Time to play with the boys
For those of you in Nibley/Logan that want to play with the boys before they go, please call us so that we can arrange play times. For the cousins in Idaho, hopefully they will be around enough that there will be plenty of play time during the Christmas break.
Christmas presents
We hope that you will understand if we don’t send out any Christmas presents until well into January (or maybe February). Please understand that we haven’t forgotten you. We are just not in too good of a position to adequately deal with Christmas right now. As for your gifts to us (and please don’t take this as a solicitation 
the smaller the better for us since it will have to be packed. Sorry it has taken so long to let you know, we didn’t even know we would be stateside for Christmas until today. We do know that there is a JCPenny’s and a Toys R Us near Dhahran. We assume that gift cards will work there just fine. And, honestly, if it is too much of an inconvenience and too short notice, please don’t worry about it this year.
