Greetings friends and family,

We just enjoyed another great day at the beach. Friday is equivalent to a Sunday in many parts of the world, so we typically go to the beach on buses from the Marriott hotel. Today about 45 people from our KAUST faculty went together. We snorkeled and swam, tried to remain cool in 106 degrees, played with peddle boats, rented kayaks and paddled out to the reef (David and friends). It was awesome. It's a day that everyone seems to really like! It's nice to get out of the hotel, throw off the abayas, run around in swimsuits, and avoid meetings.

One of the greatest aspects of living here so far is the amazing people we have met who will be our teaching colleagues. They are from all over the world, are like-minded in many ways, are willing to explore and try new adventures, speak various languages, love spending time with children, and - often out of necessity - have pretty good senses of humor. Yesterday several of us, with our kids, went to walk along a boardwalk of sorts, called the Corniche. At one part of it, which we never did see, is the highest fountain in the world. Unfortunately, we typically are ready to go out and explore after breakfast and morning prayer times, say around 10:30 a.m., but this happens to approach some of the hottest time of the day. When we really need to go is after 5:00 p.m. when prayer times are over until around 7 p.m., stores re-open after the hot afternoon hours, and the temperatures begin to cool down a bit. We headed to the Corniche yesterday at the HOT time. We walked along for quite a long time in the sun, until we were basically dripping. We dodged into an upscale tea shop which seemed very modern and sophisticated. We ordered fruit smoothies, just before prayer times were called, and chilled out, literally and figuratively. The photo above is Logan and Hayden, with their new friend Adam, standing by one of the many sculptures along the water front.

Progress at KAUST campus is coming along at a fast pace with laborers working all night long every day of the week. However, it's not going to be ready as early as everyone thought, so we will probably live in the Marriott hotel together until the end of August. It's not terrible - in fact, many aspects are wonderful - meals, laundry, Internet, cleaning included - but it's not like having your own home, of course. The funny thing is that school starts in the middle of Ramadan, so after two weeks of school, we have 10 days off. We are hoping to do some traveling in September. Thanks for reading, Jennifer

FIRST VISIT TO KAUST - DAVID'S REFLECTIONS

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, located 90 km (about 60 miles) north of Jeddah, was conceived early in the King's now five-year rule and began as a formal idea three years and 22 days ago. Construction began just two years ago. Like Jeddah, KAUST is on the Red Sea, and, at 14 sq. mi., has an area that rivals many a city's. Unfortunately, unlike Jeddah, it hasn't had nearly 2500 years to achieve its present state, which is in part why its present state isn't nearly as far along as many had hoped. It seems that Rome, and KAUST, can't be built in a day.

So on Monday, ready or not, we were given a tour of our present/future campus, and after traveling along the coastal highway for the better part of an hour we made the left turn toward the Red Sea. Ahead, shimmering in the distance, beckoning us, was a campus far larger than I'd imagined, but before we actually drove into the academic nucleus of the campus we made our way past an almost unending sea of mobile homes, each housing possibly a dozen or so of the 42,000 workers dedicating themselves 24/7 to the idea that is rapidly becoming KAUST. Just like a plane that lands and then spends the next 15 minutes taxiing to a far-off gate, we KAUST Schools faculty spent a similar amount of time meandering our way around an extensive campus road system, the nexus of the campus very gradually coming into better focus. Huge research buildings, vast recreation facilities, robust administrative offices, and vast avenues and pedestrian ways interconnected in an almost Versaillesesque manner, at least some possessing the outward appearance of being completed. Workers were spread across the landscape like ants, each working in sweltering Arabian August. Not one of the workers is Saudi; most are from Bangladesh, Philippines, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka. Remittances back to one's home country, just from KAUST, must be significant!

Once off the buses and cooled off in a plush meeting room, we were treated to the remarks of a number of top-level Saudi KAUST executives , one of whom was as inspiring and well-spoken as any speaker I've heard in quite awhile. I'm hoping to get an audio file of his remarks; if so, I will attach them in a future blog. Most interestingly for me, in his speech he referred to his meeting with the King in which the King took a look back a millennium to a time when the Arab world was dominant, ascendant, in many ways the primary repository of scientific and mathematical thought at its House of Wisdom in Baghdad. As I've told many an algebra student over the years, not only do we owe the Arabic speaking world our thanks for the name algebra (and algorithm), while nothing much was happening in western Europe between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Reformation, Arabs were at the clearinghouse of Chinese, Indian, and previous Greek advances in math and science, with Baghdad happy to extend academic invites to all intellectual heavyweights, regardless of ethnicity, religion, or gender. This apotheosis lasted nearly 400 years, a very long time by anyone's yardstick, and it is a renaissance of this kind of cutting-edge all-inclusive academic vitality that the King most clearly wants via KAUST. Yes, the campus won't be completed on time, and yes, it may be awhile before all of it is fully completed as planned, but the genesis is well underway, and it is very exciting to be a part of such a huge and potentially meaningful endeavor.

Thanks for reading, David