'Blog' for the Year 2019
The year 2019 has started very well for me - January was at least semi-quiet, i.e. not too many 'issues' at work, such that I was able to take it a bit easier during the first few week, and - most important - I was able to take a course at the Ithra !
Late January - Course at Ithra
Beginning of this year the Ithra has started to offer a lot of events and workshops for the general public - speaking with one of the organizer, who told me that she has to arrange 600 workshops (!) during the next three years. Myself, I took a course, which was related to how to use drawings as a mean of communication.
The course was taught by Von Glitschka, a professional designer working and living at the US West Coast. Most of the participiants were having some sort of an artistic / designer background, or they wanted to develop themselves into that direction ...
... our 'star' was Mohammed, a Museum Guide at the Ithra, showed a great talent in drawing like the one "Sitting on the Liver', an exercice where we had to draw some metaphor. Interesting was also that in Arab, we have the metaphor of 'Sitting on the Liver", where in German we have the same metaphor with "Creeping across the Liver". The Joint Work was a drawing we did together (the 5 participiants sitting around one table), where each one was drawing something and the next one added an additional drawing to it - sometimes something new, or sometimes related to an already existing drawing.
Early January - Further development of Woman Rights
Beginning of the year, the Saudi justice ministry announced that - going forward - woman will be informed by a text message (sic!) about their marital status after they have been divorced. Earlier, it was possible that husbands could divorce their wives without their knowledge.
To officially communicate a divorce via a text message may sound pretty odd from a Western perspective, but at the same time it also shows the willingness of the Saudi government to give additional rights to Saudi women !
February - Visiting Jeddah, Al Ula & Madain Saleh
In Saudi Arabia, there are three main centers - Riyadh, Dammam & Jeddah. In Jeddah, I was once for some business meetings, but privetly, we did not vitit it yet. Thus, it was clear that we wanted to go to Jeddah - in particular as it has a nice old part of the city - for a few days, before we would go back to Switzerland after summer.
And we did not only spend a couple of days in Jeddah, we also wanted to visit 'King Abdullah Economic City', a completely newly built city, which was founded in 2005, as a new economic center at the Western Coast of Saudi Arabia, and - according to the original plan - by the time of completion in 2020 (i.e. next year), it was expected to be larger than Washington D.C. Well, when we visited it - one year before completion - about 7'000 people lived in the city, and somewhat between 12 and 15 compnaies had build some sort of (small to mid-size) factories. At the beach side it had a very nice (!) hotel and several restautants - half of them are closed during the week. But we learnt that during the weekend a lot of visitors are coming from Jeddah to sned a few hours or the weekend at the beach, which is exceptionally nice. But in terms of economic development it was a complete failure so far, as it was not possible to attract sufficient investors (mainly from abroad) to build up facilities in KAEC, even as an excellent public and transport infrastructre has been actually built by the government.
