Contingency

With all of the unrest in the Middle East lately I know many have been worrying about how it will affect Saudi Arabia, especially our family back home.  While this worry may be well placed, here on campus we haven't noticed any changes or signs of uncertainty.  Regardless, according to this article, a significant number of Saudi Arabia's military has been moved to the northern region in response to recent events in Bahrain.

To be on the safe side, we went ahead and registered with the US embassy in Jeddah (the Smart Traveler Enrollment Program), and truthfully we should have done that when we first arrived.  Now we'll be notified by email if something were to happen that the US State Department deems worrisome.

We also came up with a brief emergency plan.  If necessary, our plan would be to try and buy airline tickets to somewhere outside of the Middle East leaving as soon as we could.  It's kind of a lame, super obvious in a duh kind of way, but there really isn't much else we could do.

I do suppose that we'll actually want to figure out where the US embassy is in Jeddah, so we'll have to research that as our next solid step.  We'll also need to get an airline approved cat carrier so we have it if we need it before we come home in August.  Like we said before, we have no reason to believe anything bad will happen, but it's always better to have thought about a contingency plan before you actually need it.

On a much happier note, the State Department also recommends registering with the local embassy whenever traveling abroad so we went ahead and registered for our trip to Italy which is coming up very quickly.