Driving Tour of Dhahran

Since you are reading this blog, you must be looking for a time waster.  :)  Well, in that case, check this out:  somebody posted a driving tour of our fair city!  The link is below.  A couple of things to mention, first, though.

1) Please turn off your speakers.  The music they slapped on top of this video has the double whammy of being both terrible AND repetitive.  Believe it or not, I would really rather listen to the actual ambient sounds of both the incessant, insistant, grinding whir of approximately 6000 heavy-duty air conditioning compressors AND the deafening roar of F-15s flying 200 feet overhead approximately once per minute.  Sure, they are loud, but much better than that awful music.

2) Camp is made up of two residential sections separated by a golf course.  It's rather like the shape of a barbell, with the bar being the golf course.  There are roads along the top and bottom of the golf course that connect one residential part ("Main Camp") with the other part ("Dhahran Hills" or just "The Hills.")  The commissary, the movie theater, the library, the barbershop, the mail center, etc., etc., are all in Main Camp, which is the first part of the movie (but the movie only shows you the houses.)  Rolling Hills Boulevard is one of the connecting roads, and then we live in the Hills, which is the second part of the movie.  When you get to the playground, that is our street!  And that is our playground! To get to our house, you would just turn right rather than left and go up about four or five houses on the left side.  But you might as well have seen our house...all the houses in our part of camp are the same.  That style is called "adobe," as in "We live in an adobe," or "All the houses on our street are adobes."  Lots of the houses on Main Camp are prefab homes, called "modulars."  Also, pay attention to the rear parking lot of the Hills Rec Center.  We walk across that parking lot all the time!  We cross Riyadh Road from our house and walk through the parking lot to get to the pool and the squash courts.  (We don't play squash, but it's a nice air conditioned room the kids can run around in when it's too hot to do anything else.) 

3)  Notice how the sky is yellow, not blue.  Yay, dust from the desert!

http://www.aramcoexpats.com/articles/2013/04/a-driving-tour-of-dhahran/

So that's where we live.  Hope this gives you a better sense of Camp!