The day started with the planned 8:30 breakfast time meeting with Majid and Mohammed, the two guys of our partner company AHCSC-OLAYAN that will be all day around hospitals with us, and their colleague Nabil (here we take picture 1 with all the group together preparing for an intense day around Riyadh; of course we take an additional picture … just to be sure … poor deluded!). But here comes master Brian that takes a couple of additional pictures with his beloved iPhone: thanks to him this post is not totally pictureless!
At 10 we’re reday to go; the big GMC car of Budget-rent-a-car pick us all up and we go to King Fahad Medical City. I have to thank Brian again for the car's picture below (the GMC is almost identical to the car he used to drive when he lived in the Emirates).
The ancient romans used to say “nomina sunt consequentia rerum”, which means “the names are a consequence of things”: in fact King Fahad Medical City is no less than a city! There are many many buildings, not to tall but they cover a surface that extends to the horizon. Brian's iPhone gets another picture and there you are the entrance of this city in the city.
We have our meeting with the biomed department people; they’re really charming and welcoming. We spend a good couple of hours together and also have the possibility to visit their workshop (nice pictures of medical devices in repair, desks, … ahrgghh!).
Then we make a short visit to AHCSC offices (were we talk to Hosam and Essam, general manager and regional manager for the central region, respectively) and we go to the Dallah hospital. Their chief of engineering arrives 30 minutes late, but that’s ok (apart from us not having lunch, but it’s my fault, I didn’t put lunches in the schedule …). I take a couple of pictures at their fire extinguishing system (open baskets full of sand … trust me), and we go for the meeting. At this point we don’t have much time, because we’re waited at the King Khalid University Hospital, so we discuss the main topics we have in the agenda and we go back to our car.
During the trip we realize that inside our car the conversations take place in 4 different languages! In fact I and Roberto use our local language that only people from Friuli (the northern-east region of Italy) could understand; only when we want Youssef to undertand us we speak Italian (and this is the second language). On the other hand, Youssef is able to speak arab with Majid and Mohammed, and for the “global conversations” we all switch to English (and thus involve Brian as well); quite a strange bunch of people is moving around the capital of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia!
The University Hospital is placed in the middle of an enormous campus that is still growing (imagine the pictures with the many buildings under construction). We meet the biomed department managers and have a very useful discussion. We are very satisfied of the information and suggestions they give us. The three hospital meetings we had in the first day in KSA were great!
We happily go back to our GMC car and leave the university. It’s 4pm, we didn’t have lunch and went through 3 intense conversations … we’re in the best conditions to go on with our battle plan for the day!! A short visit to the GE medical service headquarters, a look to the building that may become the starting point for establishing our offices and laboratories in Riyadh (there’s also a swimming pool: you should see Roberto and Youssef playing next to the border) and than we’re finally ready to go for dinner …
Hosam, Majid and Mohammed take us to a typical local restaurant. Here my regret for loosing the pictures reaches its highest: we have dinner in a wonderful garden surrounded by a portico with areas delimitated by low partition walls. Each area has carpets and you eat sitting on the floor; after taking off our shoes we enter the place we choose and sit down in a very comfortable and relaxed atmosphere. Everything we eat is delicious (even though I actually can’t figure out all the things that our kind waiter is taking to us); we have different soups (with chicken and vegetables of all kinds), rice and meat. I had never eaten camel meat before, and I have to say it’s not bad at all! We continue talking of the impressions we had during the visit to the hospitals, but we also have the pleasure to be pleased by the company of our local guests that are so much nice and we exchange our experiences with the different countries and cultures we had the occasion to meet; Saudi Arabia has many peculiarities, and we take the occasion to ask questions about the woman condition in the country, that may seem absurd to the foreign eyes (all covered, segregated from men in public, not allowed to drive a car, …) but is radicated in the culture of the local people. We’d close the evening with a glass of spirits or something like that, but here it’s not the case, so we appreciate the glass of mint tea we are given, thank the waiter and go back to the hotel.
Tomorrow it will be another very intense day with meetings all day long, and we should go to bed, but as I enter the hall I can’t resist and go straight to the barber shop where I take an arab haircut! Here the camera-battery-card incident takes place while Youssef is taking funny pictures of me being sheared, and the rest is history …
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