Work environment

I am at the office at the campus right now and someone just brought me my afternoon snack, an apple and a banana. It's very nice and you would be amazed at how used to this kind of treatment you get. In all fairness, I will have to go out on site and have a meeting in 105 degree heat in an unfinished building, translate that as no air conditioning, so there is the occasional downside.

I go out on site in jeans and a long sleeved shirt and workboots and for the most part, I don't get any strange looks anymore. I gave up the abeyah as just beiing plain deangerous on a construction site. Pretty much it's me and 40000 guys. Occasionally (and it is extrememly rare) I will see another woman but I think there are only a handful and most of them are secretaries so they aren't even on site. It was a little wierd at first but now I hardly notice it and neither do the crews and that's a good thing. Women here just don't do manual labor jobs like you'll see back in the states. There are simply no women doing that type of work. I think it's good for them to see a woman doing something they don't expect.

The site is amazingly busy. The standards here are quite a bit different. AN OSHA inspector would have a field day. I just can't look anymore when I see someone in a ditch with a pair of flip flops on and no safety glasses doing welding. The workers live on site and almost 100% of them are contract workers from outside of the country. Language barriers get interesting when you are trying to get something technical across but I've gotten really good at drawing things. I know enough Arabic to be dangerous but since most of these guys are not from Saudi, even that doesn't do me any good.

My buildings are just packed with people at this point and you are constantly stepping over and around someone or something. I am totally amzaed at the progress being made. We only received news of the building change 3 weeks ago and they are pouring it on to get the job done. Very impressive indeed.

The buildings in some cases are almost works of art. The Grand Mosque is simply breathhtaking. The campus buildings have wide thoroughfares underneath the buildings with fountains that connect them all. The detail work that goes into marble floors is painstaking. Some of the specialty buildings such as the nanolabs are unreal. The clean rooms have floors that are so seamless they are scary. I cannot even begin to figure out how they did it even though I watched them lay the floors and saw what they did; it just blows your mind when it is done and it is so perfect. I am highly impressed by Saudi Ojer as a construction company.