April 28th 2010 tomorrow - Day 5 in KSA (last ... for some of us)

So, tomorrow is the last day in KSA for the main part of the TBS team visiting the Country. After our last scheduled meetings, Brian is leaving for the Emirates in the afternoon, while Roberto and Youssef will take the 00:20 flight for Paris and then home; more or less at the same time I'll take my internal flight and go back to Riyadh. Since we'll be leaving the hotel in the morning after breakfast, and will be around the city all day long until getting to the airport in the evening, I think I won't be able to post tomorrow, so here are a few notes at the end of our presence in Jeddah.

The city here is a lot more lively than Riyadh, especially at night. We went to a beautiful libanese restaurant with Marty and Jeff of RTKL and then left for a ride around the city with Khalid; the city is really beautiful, of a beauty I could not see during the hot day. It really changes its face, with the all-bright signs of the shops and restaurants, the nice front of the houses and some amazing monuments and attractions. The one that most impressed us was the King Fahd's Fountain, that is the highest fountain in the world, shooting water at an height of 312 meters!

So, I'm going to spend a couple of days in this Country without my TBS soulmates, but my new Saudi friends prepared a couple of interesting days for me while I'll be waiting for the eHealth conference next sunday, so I have to thank them and Majid in particular. With him I'll attend the 6-sigma survey at his company, we'll have a holyday with his friends (on friday, being thursday-friday the weekend for Saudi) and follow up with a couple of the hospitals we visited in the last days. He's a great guy, both nice, funny and deep.

I have learned a lot in these days in KSA both from the professional and the cultural point of view, and I'll post more about this side of the trip in the next posts, so stay tuned for the next posts from Riyadh, and for more flavour from the middle east!