From Riyadh to Amman: A letter to Roba Al Assi (Arabic).

David Galbraith has written a funny post on messing with Starbucks orders. “I will ask for Small, Medium or Large instead of the stupid: Tall; Grande; Venti, Party Bucket and Swimming Pool or whatever.”

Egosurfing is not my favorite thing to do in my free time online (it’s not good for any blogger’s health), but it can be useful every once in awhile to check out who’s linking to you, because you might find something interesting, or offending, that has been said about you.

Recently, during a short session of egosurfing, I found something interesting, but it wasn’t actually about me. Nour, a blogger from UAE, thinks that the internet can do for the Arab World what the printing press did for Europe, helping them to find the way out of the Dark Age. “A Revolution is bubbling underneath the shrouds of ignorance. It will not happen overnight, but everyday is a step closer to it,” and when she says revolution, she doesn’t “necessarily mean overthrow-the-government-in-a-bloody-coup type of revolution. I mean an intellectual revolution, a social revolution, a religious revolution, a cultural revolution.”

I was following this conversation on AskMeFi the other day, and been thinking how people in our society look at such behavior. I know that men and women don’t mix that much in our society, but would you act differently regarding holding the door for someone behind you based on their gender? How about opening the car’s passenger door? I sometimes do this with women, and I get this look as if I was doing something really weird.

Don’t you just love/hate this t-shirt? I do love it.

Some of my old readers may recall that I had some Google AdSense ads on the blog for a short period last year. I did not write about it then, because I was just playing with it. But few days ago, I read this piece by Benjamin Cohen, and was like “OMG! That’s exactly what happened with me!” I’ve been thinking about using Yahoo! ads, or something like Chitika, but I don’t know if it’s worth it.

Bloggers meetups are awesome, period, and meeting up with Fouad Al Farhan was really awesome. He is absolutely one of my favorite Saudi bloggers, and few weeks ago I interviewed him for Global Voices. I thought he was in Riyadh, which he hates so much, to attend Gitex, but he actually was here for business. We were supposed to meet at Dr. Cafe, but he said he needed a sheesha, something modern coffee shops such as Starbucks and Dr. Cafe don’t serve, so we decided that I should come to his hotel where it is served.

We talked for a couple of hours about many stuff, and it was a good conversations that I enjoyed very much. One of the interesting things Fouad told me was that he does not feel he belongs to this place. “Probably the only place I can call home is the little village my family comes from,” he said. This reminds me with a post I read a few days ago on a friend’s blog. “I think it finally has clicked that I am no longer tied to one location on this planet. I think when you travel enough you realize that you really are part of something much bigger than the state or the country you come from. You are really a ‘global citizen.'”

It was really great meeting Fouad, and next time I visit Jeddah (hopefully this summer inshallah), I’ll make sure to meet him again.