Ten Years of Blogging

Today, exactly ten years ago, I wrote my very first blog entry.

I guess I instantly took to the idea that I could tell people what I was doing and that there was an audience out there. Anyway, as it turned out, blogging wasn’t a fad in my case. It’s more, like, a part of life. 

Here are few posts from my blog – a mini-walk down memory lane.

This blog entry is probably one of the more dramatic ones, when I was stuck in my office during the terrorist attack in Khobar, Saudi Arabia in May 2004.

This blog entry was the first one I ever wrote on a concert – Sting by the Pyramids. I’ve done quite a few blog entries on concerts and music festivals over these past ten years.

This blog entry is about one of the most exciting and fun experiences I’ve had from the last ten years: the camel trekking I went on in the Sinai desert in 2002 with a group of ten people. This entry includes my Ode to the Camel.  Ten years ago, I didn’t have a digital camera (did anybody?) and there are very few photos on my blog entries from this time.

This blog entry just has to include the most nostalgic component from these ten years of blogging – a picture from the hospital where I was born, way up in Lapland – now a furniture shop!

After twelve years in the Middle East, I’m pretty used to Palm Sunday being on a Friday. This year, I had decided to make use of one of a bunch of one-night-for-free-if-you-book-one-night vouchers for four and five star hotels in the region – so I didn’t have to travel so much back and forth this Palm Sunday weekend. I had discovered that there was a Marriott Courtyard hotel in an area called the Green Community, which was near the church. Good choice, I told myself as soon as I had checked in Thursday evening.

The hotel was next to this man-made lake, and there were a couple of Venetian-style bridges over canals next to the hotel, so it was all very atmospheric. One thing I particularly liked was all the candles they lit in the lobby after sunset. Very cosy, very Swedish.

However, the feel-good factor suddenly came to an abrupt halt on Friday morning when I discovered I was the only person at church. Now picture this. We always have a service on Friday morning,  52 Fridays a year, so it was really weird to walk into a completely empty church at this time – especially since there are normally 400+ people there any given Friday.

It was not just that I had planned this so carefully for the Palm Sunday weekend – with the hotel for two nights and everything – but the realisation that I was the only one who didn’t know that the Palm Sunday service had been cancelled or moved. It was like I could see for my inner eye how everybody in the church was invisibly connected with everybody else, so when the service was cancelled/moved (moved, I found out), everybody just knew it through their little connectors. And there I was, the only one who was not connected properly to the network. Instead, I was flapping disconnectedly in the wind.

I felt pretty rotten after that – disconnected and rotten. The luxurious surroundings at Marriott Courtyard helped dampen the impact, but the image of the empty church kind of stayed with me for the rest of the weekend.

That said, the weekend was not all bad. On the way back to Fujairah, I stopped at my favourite spot along the desert road and I kind of walked right into these camels as I was going for a walkabout in the red sand.

There was a camel watchman nearby, keeping an eye on things.

I really like this part of the desert. The sand here has this golden reddish hue, and even if the sand looks quite soft, it is surprisingly easy to walk across the dunes – a bit like snow that has been frozen over.

During my desert walk, I came across this bush/mini-tree in full bloom.

I have no idea what it is, but it always lifts your spirits when you see something blossoming in the desert. My desert walk did actually go quite a long ways in helping me forget the Palm Friday that wasn’t.

Holy Week is now here and I’m in firm possession of a comprehensive church programme, with days, times and places for all the services.