Life in Arabia

Second Umrah trip for the family

Posted by rizal on Feb 15, 2008 in Life in Arabia | 0 comments

Alhamdulillah – we completed our 2nd umrah trip to Makkah last weekend. Unlike the first one, we were “quite” well prepared this time knowing what to expect from the children.
We left Riyadh at around 8pm, Wednesday night on a Saptco bus with 7 families (almost 50 of us from the “Sri Wangi” aparment!) and reached Makkah 12 hours later.
Ammar was in ihram for the first time but only later when we reached Haram (we were at Miqat area at fajar , crowd was huge at the changing room + subuh almost ended so I only managed to get Imran to wear ihram ) Around 8am the bus reached the New Safa hotel and 30 minutes later we were ready to do the tawaf –Masjidil Haram was just around the corner + we can see the Door 56 from the hotel.
Thanks to Bro. Zamhari , an ustaz accompanied us during this umrah, he lead us during tawaf and saie + giving us a short tazkirah too before dinner.

As for the family — our tawaf was OK, I carried the 10kg “baby” Alysha all the way + holding Imran while ummi taking care of Ammar and Sabrina.
The new saie area was crowded that day as they’re still renovating the original one (also Saudi school holidays!) + it was quite dusty , so Sabrina started crying after the 4th round –Ammar was cool, Imran was busy chatting with his new best friend Amir and Alysha was asleep on my shoulder.
We completed the umrah 1 hour before Zuhur at 11.30am and all of us went straight back to hotel.
As usual I bought few books from the bookshop here, my Imran also asked me to buy him a Quran to be given to his favourite ustaz “mengaji” — I was surprised at first but glad that he appreciated his Quran teacher.
Our bus left Makkah around 3.30pm to head back to Riyadh — we reached home on Saturday, 9th February at 2am . Alhamdulillah!

Been lazy

Posted by rizal on Feb 12, 2008 in Life in Arabia | 2 comments

I have not updated my blog for quite some time now — yes I have been lazy, I would say– I got a fever for a week added to that a bad cough . Workload on the new project was quite overwhelming but I think it was still okay as I was enjoying every minute of it. We had this OSI LAN issue on the BSC integration so for few days I could not sleep well thinking about the problem — even dreamt of some BSC commands in my sleep!!
For the bad cough, it lasted for 3 weeks – went to the hospital and the doctor x-rayed my lungs suspecting pneumonia , always knew it was just a bad cough (result was negative!) but in Saudi the hospital would make you run a dozen of tests so that they can claimed as max as possible from the insurance company.

Other than that, I bought a treadmill so that ummi and me can lose some of our “extra” weight — put my Ipod and my EEE PC in front of it for our personal entertainment while burning calories.

Also I am officially now a big fan of Dr. Gregory House , kept telling my wife that I should have done medicine before only if I not scored badly in my SPM biology exam!