And here we are. All our stuff packed up (notebooks filled with presentations, corporate gadgets, business cards of people working in Saudi hospitals, emergency phone numbers, ...) and ready to go!
Stefano and Roberto leave from Venice and reach Youssef, who left from Milan, at the Paris Charles de Gaulle international airport (see picture on the left). Brian will make one of his last minute all around Europe tours and will arrive from Frankfurt.
On board of the flight you have many ways to fill the 6 hour travel. One of the most amusing is filling the Entry Card for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia; note the red highlighted statement "WARNING: DEATH FOR DRUG TRAFFICKER". I'm a nimesulide (Aulin and similia) drug addicted, so a shiver goes down my spine, but I'm sure I'll have no troubles with it ... Anyway, we drink our last beer and get ready to land.
At the end everithing goes fine, we pass the customs, bring the team together (Brian arrives 20 minutes after us: Paris-Frankfurt 1-0) and get picked up by a nice guy with a shining Toyota that takes us to the Holiday Inn in Riyadh. 30 minutes later we get there (the part of the city we can see is much like the outskirts of a western city full of neon lighted shopping centres), check in at the hotel and finally have dinner.
We are quite tired after 10 hour of travel, but still find the energy to plan for this intense week (we have a schedule of 13 hospitals and 6 additional meetings in 5 days between Riyadh and Jeddah!) and taste our first arabic food. At the end we go to sleep (well, some of us go to sleep, while one starts blogging ...) ready to meet our local partner company AHCSC-OLAYAN tomorrow morning at 8:30. It'll be a quite intense week!
Tomorrow night I'll post more stories on the first 3 hospitals we're going to visit and the city in daylight and 34°C.
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