March 20th, 2009
I’m here in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia. It’s not as bad as I was thinking it would be. People are generally friendly, and the local food tastes pretty good. It is however very different from good old Australia.
Flag of Saudi Arabia
For starters, everybody wears a ‘throbe’ (for men) or a burka (for women). Some Men don’t wear this traditional dress, but most Saudi men do. All the women, Saudi or non-Saudi wear the big black dressing gown, showing only their eyes, and sometimes not even their eyes - it’s just a big black walking robe.
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Tags: riyadh, saudi arabia
Posted in travel, work trips | 2 Comments »
March 19th, 2009
Just updated to the latest Wordpress. About time. Haven’t used the ol’ blog in nearly a year! Sheesh I completely missed the Sweden trip in the blogs. Facebook is taking over!
Well, maybe this upgrade can kickstart a mini-blog revival? We’ll see…. We’ll see…
//Graham.
Tags: upgrade wordpress
Posted in Blogroll, ramblings | 1 Comment »
June 27th, 2008
Writing this from the airport lounge in Jakarta.. Quite nice in here, free food, free drinks, free computers, much nicer than sitting with the riff raff outside. 
So.. what’s been happening over the last 2 weeks? The most interesting thing I’ve done is visit Mt Bromo, an active Volcano 4 hours drive from Surabaya. The thing to do here is to watch the sunrise over Mt Bromo (at 5am..). So on Saturday night at around midnight, off we went to drive to Bromo. We got 1/2 way up, and then you have to rent a 4×4 and a guy drives you up the rest of the way. It’s very high up, air was thin & hard to breath. We got up to the top in time to see the sunrise over the crator and the view was fantastic. Its a big tourist attraction to watch the sunrise - there were about 200 people gathered around watching it. After the sunrise we braved some breakfast from a street vendor - a bowl of what tasted like chicken soup, with noodles and strange meat.. tasted good, and didn’t make me sick. We then travelled back down the mountian into the crator to walk up the main crator part… if that makes any sense.
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June 10th, 2008
Hotel here is Surabaya Plaza. Room is pretty nice, but the breakfast stinks. Brekkie in Jakarta was awesome in comparison. I got sick once I got here. We had some food in Jakarta for lunch at a mall which was the culprit. I made the fatal mistake of ordering noodles instead of rice. They were 2 minute noodles literally swimming in oil. Barely ate any of it. Some of the other guys weren’t feeling good either.
There is the Surabaya Plaza mall next door to the hotel here which is handy. Easy to buy water & other supermarket items there. Some of the australian made food I’ve found in it are manderins and nutella! Went to the pizza hut here too, and the bases are huge. Its like an inch of base in height. Doesn’t do much for the pizza. Thin bases are best I reckon. Did some work, did some more work. I’ll cut to the interesting stuff.
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June 7th, 2008
Hey Hey, what a long time it has been since a blog post made it to this site. Its been a while between trips I suppose!
Indonesian Flag
My first 2 days were spent in Jakarta. A flight through Sydney and then Singapore landed me here around 8.30pm local time (3 hours earlier than Melbourne). Met up with the other 5 guys here for a quick beer in the hotel bar, then off to bed. Tuesday was then a large project meeting, meeting people and organising flights, local sim cards, etc.. We had dinner across the road from the hotel (Sofitel - Gran Mahakam) at a pizza joint which made quite the tasty pizza, then another dude and I hit some bars for some cheap jugs of beer.
Wednesday did some work from the hotel, before heading off to the airport for my flight to Surabaya (2nd largest city in Indonesia, in East Java, just west of Bali). Bout a 1:30 hour flight to get there, no dramas.
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