Miscellaneous: news from Saudi Arabia

From: Jose Luis Gomez

Date: Fri, Apr 3, 2015 at 5:14 PM

Dear all:
¡Hello!

How are you?-. I am fine.

I didn't sent you an e-mail before because I usually don't have any +free time. I have quite -a [1] few free hours, and my weekend is just one day, on Friday.

I am working in a site where we are erecting a production plant of raw -material +materials in order -[for manufacturing] +[to manufacture] plastics. I am in the middle of a powder keg. Around us there are a lot of petrochemical plants, which you -[usually watch] +[can usually see] on TV with torches with huge flames. When one of them is large enough, it's like -a +an earthquake, even though they are far from the office and at great height.

The weather, for the time being is nice. We shall see what happens in summer. Nowadays the sun +rises at 5:50 and goes down at 17:45 and in the middle of the day we have a temperature of 29 degrees.

I now move on to tell you some anecdotes and feelings. Since the +very first day I was -surprise +surprised (the word that applies better -with +[to what] I want to say is "aluciné") with the traffic. Everybody drives -speeding +[too fast] and at the same time overtaking the rest of the cars on both sides even -[out of the side] +[beyond the shoulder] line. Tailgating is a frequent occurrence, even at high speed. They never use indicators. The drivers in a side hand of a queue of traffic will often turn the other side across all of the other lanes at traffic lights. The first day -when +that a driver took me to the hotel, at a high velocity of course, another driver in front of us was wiggling, because he was talking -by +[on his] mobile. It's something usual.

All -what +that [2] I -say +said so far is a draft I wrote three weeks ago in order to keep writing little by little.

Regarding -to the language, at first +it was depressing trying to talk with Indian people, Jose Luis knows what I mean. [JL: I certainly do!]. Instead of "fifty" they said "piti". Instead of "yesterday", they said "yerouli", or something like that, and so on. At first I didn't understand anything at all, but now I am able to maintain a conversation. I spend half of my worktime speaking English.

Regarding -treat +treatment of woman and religion -[when I go to Spain] I'll tell you +[when I go to Spain].

Hugs for boys and kisses for girls

Greetings

[1] CUIDADO: "few" y "a few" significan lo contrario

[2] "what" == "the thing which"

Thanks, JL! Best of luck in your adventure! Guys, comments and questions welcome herebelow!