Introducing Ellie Kate!

We are thrilled to announce the arrival of Elizabeth "Ellie" Kate Rogers!

Our precious Ellie Kate

The statistics

Birthdate and Time: September 22nd, 2013 at 8:39 am Saudi time (12:39 am CST)
Place: Saad Hospital, Khobar, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
Weight: 3.145 kg, or 6 lb 15 oz
Height: 50 cm, or 19.75"

So far Ellie has been a pretty typical sweet and cuddly newborn. She has had a great temperament and rarely cried at all while in the hospital. Our first night home from the hospital was a little rough as she was not happy sleeping anywhere but in our arms. Guess we can't complain too much about that, but Lucy as a newborn was happy to sleep anywhere so we weren't prepared for it!

Lucy is a very proud big sister. She loves her "baby sissy" and is happy to help mommy and daddy take care of her in her own little ways. I am sure reality hasn't set in for her yet that this whole family doesn't revolve around just her anymore.

Stay tuned for a more detailed report on our experience having a baby in a Saudi Arabian hospital!

Cooking Adventures

If you've been keeping up with the blog you may have noticed I've lamented on not having my full kitchen available to me, as well as a sometimes strange assortment of items in the grocery store. I think I've learned a lot in the last six weeks and wanted to document some of the fun things I've cooked!

Our kitchen came equipped with an oven, electric stovetop, microwave, dishwasher, and hot pot (and ironically my hot pot is the only appliance that made it in our air shipment... so now I have two hot pots and no coffee maker). I had two mixing bowls, about 3 ziploc sandwich storage containers, 3 oval shaped casserole dishes, a cheese grater, and a colander. For utensils we have the tiniest wooden spoons you've ever seen and a couple of spatulas, and a set of large knives. They also included the worst vegetable peeler and can opener IN THE WORLD. The handle broke off the peeler the second time I tried to use it, and I bet a friend he couldn't open a can of tomato sauce in 2 minutes with the can opener. He quit after about 40 seconds, it was that terrible! So I have purchased new ones. A small price to pay for the convenience of a working can opener and vegetable peeler! I also purchased measuring cups and spoons. Not sure how they expected two engineers to cook without those!

Did you know they even made wooden spoons this tiny? They seriously aren't much wider then the paring knife! Sorry the picture is sideways.

The good news is grocery shopping is relatively easy since the arrival of the Tamimi market earlier this year. Tamimi's is owned (operated?) by Safeway and they have a good variety of American products. Additionally all the food labels are in BOTH english and Arabic! Now what's tricky about shopping at Tamimi's is the selection is not always consistent. Sometimes you can find spinach, once I found arugula, but I think they always have iceberg and romaine. We have valencia oranges from South Africa and a good variety of apples. They import Driscoll's berries (for a steep price!) and even some Annie's salad dressings. Don't buy the local avacados--it's worth the $10/kilo mark up to get the imported ones! The beef from New Zealand is pretty good and they always have a large selection of lamb and veal. They also had this fun display a few weeks ago:

Fresh, Local Camel Meat!

Unfortunately I am not yet adventurous enough to cook with it. At 50 SAR/kilo I didn't think this was quite the right time to experiment without a plan, either! It was very popular--it was sold out the next time I went to the store.

However, there are things that they just don't sell here (besides the obvious pork products and alcohol). The things I've missed the most in my cooking are chicken broth in a carton and vanilla. I'm not sure why they don't sell chicken broth but I know they don't sell vanilla for the alcohol content. They do sell what I think is an imitation vanilla but one look at the mile long ingredients list made me put it back on the shelf. However, I was able to find vanilla beans! And thanks to Alton Brown and his Good Eats episode on Vanilla, I knew what to do with it :) I've also missed things like Red Wine Vinegar and cooking with wine in general. I didn't realize how many recipes I used these for until I didn't have them!

Scones I made by scraping vanilla from a pod. YUM.

Blueberry Scones

When you do find delicacies from home it's best to stock up. They had some organic vegetable broth cartons a few weeks ago so I bought four of them. They were still there this week but I'm guessing they won't be around much longer. I also bought four boxes of Kashi Apple Cinnamon Oatmeal a few weeks ago. Lucy loves eating oatmeal for breakfast and this stuff is really good! They have Blue Bell ice cream right now too, straight from Brenham, TX... if you're willing to pay $14 a carton... and I am. :)

Some other grocery store oddities (for this American) are that milk comes in 2L containers and butter comes in a large 400g block (that's 1.76 Cups) with no measurement markings on it. Next time I buy a block of butter I'm going to have to put my own markings on it! I've done ok guestimating how much to use so far but having some markings will really take off some stress! Once I figured out how to pour milk from the carton without spilling it everywhere I've decided I really like the smaller size. I also found it strange that occasionally you see Kroger brand items, despite this being a Safeway store!

I also find the cheese selection to be really odd. Now they have a nice deli where you can get most cheeses, but only once in the 7 weeks since I've been going to the store here have I seen bagged, shredded cheddar or bagged cheese other than mozzarella. They have an entire 5 ft wall of bagged mozzarella, and one time there was a small section with bagged cheddar, mexican blend, and some string cheese. I was new enough I didn't realize how rare this was so didn't stock up as much as I should have. But that's ok, because I can get a block of cheddar from the deli. 

Because chicken broth is truly a staple I can't live without, I've learned how to make my own broth in the crock pot from my friend Heather--it's actually really easy! I've only done it twice since moving here but that's provided me with enough to last awhile. Here's the method:

Ingredients:
Leftover cooked Chicken carcass (I've been using a rotisserie chicken)
Vegetable scraps (celery hearts, scrubbed carrot peels)
A few celery sticks
An onion cut in half
Water

Directions:
Put all ingredients in crock pot, add water to an inch from the top. Cook on low 8-10 hours. Strain, let cool, refrigerate overnight. Skim fat off the top and pour into ice cube trays. Once frozen put in a freezer bag and store.

See, doesn't sound too hard does it! Much thanks to Heather for the recipe because I probably wouldn't have tried to figure that out on my own. The smell was HEAVENLY!

With the chicken meat from the carcass I made this recipe:

Chicken with Potatoes and Mustard Vinaigrette

Recipe and photo credit: Realsimple.com

Mine looked similar, except I had to use Arugula instead of watercress. I would love to make it again but haven't seen an acceptable greens substitute.

I haven't ventured into making a beef broth but I did find a good mushroom/veggie broth recipe that makes a good, hearty substitute for it.

Easy Mushroom Broth

Too bad you can't smell this

The other pantry staple I'm now hooked on making from scratch is bolognese sauce. Partly because I can use carrots, onions and celery in it and then have the leftover veggies and scraps for my broths!


Now my favorite thing I've made since moving here was a recipe I found earlier this week:

Cajun Chicken Pasta

Recipe and Photo Credit: Skinnytaste.com

It was SO good! Go add this to your meal plan for next week right now!

I wish I had taken a picture of my own creation. We subbed snow peas for the mushrooms so mine was a little more colorful :)

Of course despite all the fun cooking adventures, Lucy still prefers peas. Thankfully there is a good selection of frozen peas at Tamimi's!

"Lucy peas!"

The Other Side of Life

I realized that my Saudi posts have mostly centered around the scary and shocking things that have happened since moving here, and I don't think that's a fair and accurate picture of our life. While they are fun to talk about, I'm not sharing the whole story. We actually have a pretty nice life! Here's why:

1. We live on a compound that has almost everything we need within walking distance, including a beach, restaurant, mini-mart, fitness center, pool, and playschool.  The compound feels extremely safe (much safer than our neighborhood in Houston), and I really like it. Yesterday Lucy and I walked out our backyard and played on the beach for two hours. Travis has had more opportunities to exercise since moving here 6 weeks ago than in the previous six months. He can spend his time with us and focus on his health instead of commuting. Which brings me to:

2. NO DRIVING! Travis is never stuck in traffic (or at a train!) coming home from work. I'm never stuck in traffic just trying to go to an appointment or playdate! I can always address the toddler's needs when we're in the car (although sometimes I miss being able to sit up front and ignore her). Our drivers are fabulous and truly take care of us--I haven't put groceries in the car or taken them out since we arrived! A really nice change from having to carry groceries up the stairs in our townhome. Now I have heard that when more families are back from their summer vacation a car might not always be available when I want to go somewhere, but I suppose that will just force me to plan ahead better.

3. Living on a compound means we live within walking distance of our entire community. I love the regularity we can eat dinner and fellowship with friends simply because they are close! It's also really nice actually knowing all of our neighbors.

4. Moving here isn't just about being in Saudi--We will have so many more travel opportunities than ever before. Travis gets 3x as much vacation, and as part of our benefits package we also get compensated for some of our traveling expenses. Some of the places our friends here have traveled to are (most of) Europe, Thailand, the Seychelles, Maldives, Australia, and of course other parts of the middle east like Dubai. I am so excited to see the world! 

5. Financially we could not make a better decision. Our time here will allow me to stay at home with the girls indefinitely... or go back to school to pursue something I'm truly passionate about.

6. The cities we spend our time in are so much more Western than I ever anticipated, so it doesn't feel like we're actually living all that differently from before. Maybe it was because I was 10 years younger and a poor student at the time, but living in Prague felt more complicated than living here.

Yes, there are inconveniences. If we want to shop or eat we have to plan them around prayer time. We have to call for a driver ahead of time, but they can usually be here in 15 minutes which actually has helped me to be more prepared to leave the house! I do have to wear an abaya when we leave the compound. Clearly we have some work to do to figure out the visa situation. To talk to our families we schedule skype dates--however this is how we communicated with them when we lived in Houston, now we just have to accomodate the time difference. I think being here has actually prompted MORE skype dates since it seemed "easier" when we lived in the states. Or maybe it's because we aren't as busy so we have more time to talk with our families? Regardless it is a welcome change. It is inconvenient not finding chicken stock in the grocery store, and not having alcohol or pork available, but there are plenty of other options and no one seems to be any less happy here because of it.

And yes there are things we miss about being in the US, namely our Houston community who we shared life with on a daily basis for 7 years. But for this season of our lives, this feels like the right place to be. We are excited for future adventures and hope that all of our learning experiences in the past six weeks will prevent some of the scary things from happening again. And while I don't yet feel comfortable discussing the details on a public blog while living here, know that we are leaning on our faith to provide for us and sustain us in those times of need.

That time we (almost) got deported...

I'm warning you up front, this is going to be long. I've divided it into four sections.

A peaceful, relaxing planned day trip to Bahrain
Stopped at the Border
Change of plans--a weekend in Bahrain 
What went wrong?

A peaceful, relaxing planned day trip to Bahrain
We found out on August 26th, last Monday, that our company was again allowing CPChem employees to take daytrips to Bahrain. Bahrain is an island nation connected to Saudi Arabia by the King Fahd causeway and is about a two hour drive from where we live. While the state religion is Islam and most of it's inhabitants are Muslim, as a country Bahrain is much more accepting of western culture than Saudi. This means that westerners who live in Saudi Arabia enjoy traveling to Bahrain because you can find pork products, drink alcohol, and women are not required to wear an abaya. As you can imagine everyone around here was pretty excited that it was open for visits again. Since baby #2 is scheduled to arrive at the end of the month, and we thought this was going to be Travis' last two day weekend before her arrival, this weekend seemed like the best option for going, as otherwise it might be a while before we felt like traveling again.

Friday morning we left at 7:30. First stop was for gas to top off the tank, which turned out to be one of the bigger culture shocks I've had in awhile. I knew gas was cheap here, but...

In case you can't see it, that's 0.61 Saudi Riyals/Liter

0.61 SAR/L is the same as $0.61/Gallon... and that's the premium stuff! Which means we paid $3.94 for 6.4 gallons of gas. One time I drove a rental Sequoia from Katy to Houston and back and it cost me $21 for 6 gallons of gas. Now we understand why a) everyone drives large SUVs and b) they can afford to drive like bats out of you know where.

Mommy and Lucy excited for our day trip!

 The rest of the drive was uneventful and we had no problems crossing the border. We were prepared to pay the 50 riyal fee to cross since Lucy and I did not have our residency permit yet. We arrived at Ric's in time for breakfast.

Lots of people recommended Ric's to us because they serve an American style breakfast. It didn't get the greatest reviews on TripAdvisor, but I realized that's because non-American's just don't understand what a good, greasy American breakfast actually is :)

Could have been straight from Bob's Diner!

 Travis was happy to eat bacon and I had a 3-egg omelette with ham. Delicious.

Lucy and daddy sporting their purple pride!

After breakfast we went to the City Center mall. While mall-crawling isn't our preferred thing to do while traveling, we were limited on where we could go due to our company's security restrictions. This mall certainly has enough to keep you occupied beyond shopping though--they have a movie theater, a water park, and a kids fun zone.

Lucy loved the bubble machine at the Homestore

The mall has several Starbucks, and I was disappointed to learn that they do not serve chai lattes here. Travis and I settled for splitting a grande caramel macchiato, which cost us 2.2 BD, or $5.64. So this explains why Starbucks is a little less ubiquitous here than the large SUV.

The rest of our shopping trip was rather unremarkable. Travis bought some needed new shirts and I was excited to find some matching outfits on an end of season sale for Lucy and baby Ellie to wear next year. After dinner at Potbelly's (yes they have a Potbelly's! Have to say I didn't enjoy the sandwich as much as I had hoped but the strawberry shake was spot on) we found our driver at the designated pick up point, I put on my abaya, and settled in for the ride home.

Stopped at the Border
I was originally hoping this is where this blog post would end. At the border crossing, which is in the middle of the causeway, we made it through 3 of 5 checkpoints, and then there was a commotion and the border guard wouldn't give our passports back. Our driver pulled off to the side, assures us everything is fine, and he and Travis went into the office. There are three other cars pulled over so I'm hoping this is somewhat normal. After about 15 minutes the driver for the first car comes back, then eventually the other two cars also leave. After about 30 minutes Travis comes out and tells me that there is something wrong with my visa, and he's been talking to our company's government relations person on the phone, but everything should be fine, and returns to the office. Lucy is happily playing on the Elmopad so I focus on praying for strength, peace, patience and understanding (and a long lasting battery on the Elmopad!). While I haven't asked Travis exactly what happened in that office, I'm glad I wasn't in there too. After an hour or so Travis returns and is pretty upset because they won't let me and Lucy cross the border. Seeing as it's 7:30 pm on a weekend evening, our government relations person cannot talk to the embassy or whoever else he needs to talk to until Sunday (the start of the work week). Obviously Travis isn't going to leave me and Lucy in a foreign country, so our driver turns around to go through the checkpoints to get back into Bahrain. Of course we had to pay our 50 SAR fine to cross the border again. I'm so thankful that at this point my phone began to receive its Saudi data coverage so I could email our mothers and some friends back home and tell them to start praying. I also emailed a friend on the compound knowing we might need their help to gather documents and other needed items if we were stuck in Bahrain for a few days. The traffic was pretty slow going getting through the Bahraini checkpoints so I was also able to look up the phone numbers for some hotels. In the meantime Travis is calling people to get advice on where to stay in Bahrain and what we can do to get this resolved as soon as possible. As soon as we get through the final checkpoint, our driver informs us that our Bahrain tourist visa expires after 72 hours, so that means we were only ok staying in Bahrain until Monday morning. Yikes!

Change of plans--a weekend in Bahrain
We decided to stay at the Gulf Hotel, mostly because it's closer to the causeway than other hotels in case we were told we needed to be back at the border in a short time frame. Turns out this was a great decision--the hotel is beautiful! The service was excellent and we appreciated being somewhere that they take your bags to your room for you after a long day (evening). I'm sure they found it peculiar we were only traveling with a carseat, stroller, and three plastic shopping bags. As we arrived at the lobby, Travis received a phone call.  I stood around for a few minutes before I realized "hey, this isn't Saudi, I can check us into the hotel!" I was pleasantly surprised when the receptionist greeted me warmly and talked to me as if I was equally capable of checking us in as Travis was. So funny how I've only been here a month but have already adapted to some of the culture norms. Now I've never checked into a hotel in Saudi, so I have no idea if they would actually treat me as less capable, but that's how I think it would feel.

The Gulf Hotel lobby... not shabby.

Outside the Gulf Hotel

Our driver kindly waited for us and took Travis to a nearby grocery store to buy cheerios, milk, and diapers. Heaven forbid we run out of cheerios. I put Lucy to bed and was so thankful I had thought to bring her Elmo doll with us for the day trip. She was a little upset we didn't have her purple blanket, but she found the bath towel to be an acceptable substitute.

The diapers Travis returned with. I don't think Huggies sells these in the states!

Now one good thing about this happening on Friday is that more people were making the day trip to Bahrain on Saturday and could bring us some things . We called our friends on the compound who kindly came to our house at 10 pm to pick up some essentials for us to drop off with a driver the next morning. There's nothing that says friendship like "Please go through my underwear drawer for me!"

Neither Travis or I slept much that night but it had nothing to do with the hotel room. In fact I wish I could have brought those linens home with me. Once he realized I was awake he turned on the K-State game on his phones Slingbox app. (Probably would have been better if we'd just slept through that...) When Lucy woke up we decided to eat breakfast at the hotel because we didn't want to stray too far for when the call came that our essentials had arrived. The hotel had a lovely (and pricey) buffet style breakfast with french toast, 3 varieties of eggs, sausage and turkey bacon, some arabic looking yogurts, sauces and toppings I didn't understand, an assortment of pastries, a few cereals, and some fruit. Not sure that it was worth $25 but I guess you pay for convenience.

After breakfast and getting our essentials delivered we decided to venture back to the mall because they had a large super-target type store where we could pick up a few more things. I also wanted to buy Lucy a toy since we only had Elmo and the Elmopad to play with.

We returned to the hotel in time for Lucy's nap--we ALL needed a nap! After nap we had the opportunity to skype with the Thompson family. It was wonderful to to talk to you! We loved seeing your familiar faces :) That evening we tried to go to a sports bar type restaurant so Travis could drink a beer, but they wouldn't let Lucy in. It's ok though, because on our way to find another place to eat we found ourselves in an adorable European style neighborhood.

A construction zone that used colorful doors removed from buildings instead of a fence! How creative is that!

There were cafes, art installations and lots of people out and about. We ended up finding one of the most amazing restaurants I've ever been to! It's a french restaurant called Cafe Lilou. The beverage section had an entire page of freshly blended juices and teas.

Strawberry avocado juice

I don't remember what this was called but it was amazing

You seriously should look up "Cafe Lilou" on facebook to see some of their other creations! We loved it so much we went back Sunday morning for breakfast.

Lucy ordered apple juice--it was the most delicious apple juice I've ever tasted! It was like pureed apples, but way more fresh and delicious than applesauce. I had another juice blend of strawberry, kiwi and watermelon.

This is for you, Tiffani!

Of course you can't go to a french cafe without ordering the chocolate croissant. It didn't disappoint! We also ordered breakfast croissants with eggs.

After breakfast we headed back to our hotel. We were about to catch the 10:30 hotel shuttle to a different mall (we heard it had a great indoor playground) when Travis got a call at 10:25 from government relations telling us to come to the border right away. So instead we hurriedly pack our belongings, check out and ask the concierge to call a taxi. Right as the taxi arrives Travis gets a text that says "Wait don't come". We tell the taxi to leave and park ourselves in the lobby. About 10 minutes later he gets another text saying "okay come now", followed by a phone call from government relations 5 minutes later telling us we need to be there in 30 minutes or whoever he's talking to is going to leave for the day. This is highly frustrating and we wish we would have just gotten in the first taxi! It takes another 15 minutes for the second taxi to show up but we are relieved to be on our way to the border.

Once we arrived Travis went into the border/customs office with our government relations person. It only took them 10 or 15 minutes to emerge again but it was a very long 10-15 minutes for all of us, especially Travis as he sat quietly in a high ranking Saudi official's office, listening to him shout back and forth with our government relations guy in Arabic. Eventually, Lucy and I were approved to go across the border, got all of our paperwork back and left before they changed their minds!

Thankfully the rest of the ride home was uneventful. The taxi driver left us at a McDonalds on the causeway where our CPC driver met us. While it was a relief to be heading home, I was a little sad to have to put on the abaya again and start looking for the family section of the restaurant.

That's how we all felt, Lucy!

What went wrong?
To be honest, we still aren't entirely sure! What we know now is a) my visa is only single entry, and I used up my single entry when we arrived b) my residency permit was not yet complete and c) the combination of these two made it illegal for me (and Lucy, who has the same visa and residency status) to re-enter the country. Now we knew that my residency permit was not complete, but as I mentioned in part 1, we knew that we would have to pay a fine for not having this, but did not realize it would be a problem. We also did not realize that my visa was only single entry because it does not actually say anything about number of entries allowed on the visa! I truly don't know how we were supposed to have known this, as the visa and residency permit process has never actually been explained to us. Additionally, my visa says "Validity - 90 days" so I was under the false impression I had 90 days to leave and re-enter the country. We had heard stories of other ex-pats who were deported in trying to return back to Saudi after an expired visa period and I honestly thought it was a good thing we were exiting the country when we did! What we still aren't sure of is 1) if my residency permit had been complete, would I have been allowed to enter the country, even with the single entry visa? 2) Will I receive a multi-entry visa? I sure hope so because I certainly plan to leave the country on a regular basis during our time here!  3) How come we were allowed to travel to Bahrain and then allowed to cross the border in the first place? 4) I know the visa that my parents will receive when they come to visit is a 5 year, multi entry. Why did I not receive this to begin with? (*Note: If anyone reading this knows the answers to my questions please enlighten me!)

In closing, we are so grateful to CPChem for handling the situation expeditiously and doing what they could to make sure we were okay during our time in Bahrain. Several people, up to and including the Executive President called throughout the weekend to make sure we were fine and that Ellie hadn't decided to show up early! While parts of the weekend were really stressful, we tried to make the most of it and I'm glad we had the opportunity to see more of Bahrain than the large shopping mall. We are looking forward to our next (legal) weekend trip back!