Celebrating King Abdullah's return

Today, in honor of King Abdullah’s return after three months of absence for medical reasons, we were given the day off. Actually, not just us, but all governmental employees and all schools were closed. And we soooo enjoyed this unexpected day off.

King Abdullah flew back in Wednesday afternoon.  This morning, we went for a drive, to see the decorations and flags all over town, armed with my trusted camera. Already last Monday and Tuesday crews were decorating bridges and fences along the main highways around town. Official portraits of King Abdullah are all over town, on fences, over bridges and on buildings. The pictures really don’t do justice to what we saw… for some reason the luminosity was so bright that the photos are too light to my liking.

Businesses are showing their patriotism by displaying the king’s likeness as well as a message greeting his return. Some were of small size while others took the whole side of a multistory building. The building right above looks like the Arc the Triomphe in Paris is the Sabic building, a huge building you can see from far away. Its complete bay of windows were covered with pictures of the King, making him over 30 meters high!

All the messages were written in Arabic, whishing a happy welcome back to King Abdullah, I would guess. Not easy to know for sure when you can’t read Arabic.

Even McDonalds was all decorated and saluting the King

Flags were flying and with the wind today very beautifully, If I may add.

It does really give another meaning to the expression “Paint the town green”