Saturday, 12 March 2011

The Prince of Parties


I've been a lazy Arab recently and it’s been a while since I've posted, but now the Saudi weekend is over and I’m back at Uni with time to burn and internet that actually works, I’ll give you a little update.

All of the male teachers have been invited to go for dinner with the prince of Al Jouf at his palace tomorrow. I’m quite excited, but according to a couple of the guys that have been before, it’s a pretty boring affair. Standing round, shaking hands and waiting for hours for the prince to arrive before eating. Obviously no alcohol or girls, but I wasn’t expecting a night out with Charlie Sheen. At least the food will be good, and we get half a day off work to get ready, because we all need six and a half hours to make ourselves presentable.

In other news we had a pub crawl at the compound this weekend. Instead of pubs we used villas; instead of nice, legal alcohol we used homebrew (“joy juice”). It’s easy to make; just mix fruit juice, yeast and sugar and let it ferment for at least 10 days. Although it sounds simple the people who’ve been here longer make it a lot better than the new guys! I haven’t tried yet, I’m still at the sampling stage. The villa crawl kicked off at Craig and Alana’s house with beer pong, where Richard and I won the gold for team England. After that we went to Oyin and Richard’s villa, they’d decorated it like a British pub; a projector was showing the football, there was a dart board, a lot of booze and 90’s music. The next stop was Teri’s house, a more civilised affair where we ate and had a few drinks before moving on to mine and Nick’s place (which Darren had supplied with copious amounts of joy juice, and decorated). The previous three villas had looked incredible; the hosts had obviously put time and money into making them look the part. So I was glad people were too drunk to judge by the time they reached our villa! Our theme was the 60’s, the summer of love, and I’d made a playlist to fit and dusted off the speakers. Everyone was given a flower to wear, we got the shisha going and we had a couple of drinking games lined up. The 60’s if you were unemployed might have been a more fitting theme if you compared our villa to the previous three. Regardless, the music went down really well, everyone was dancing and the drinking games were successful. The final stop was Liz and Andrew’s villa, which they’d turned into a nightclub. You needed to be on the guestlist to get in; luckily everyone made the cut, and inside there were disco lights, a giant sound system, a makeshift bar and 25 litres of joy juice. The Canadian couple had been doing some serious brewing! By the time we’d reached the infidel night club a few people had dropped out, but the remaining hard core had a great time, dancing like idiots, unfortunately all documented by the sober Elvan – videos I certainly won’t be posting on here.

The next day was spent without internet as it had completely gone down all over the compound. So I dragged myself up from my hangover (after watching a couple of films) and went to play volleyball in Oyin’s garden next door. I then watched a couple of couple of movies before hitting the hay early. The thought of getting up at 6:15 on a Saturday morning will never sit well with me.

Speak soon x

الكفار هم العطشى


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