Aramco

In May of this year a couple of us girls from work went to Dahran for the weekend. Dahran is located about a four hour drive east of Riyadh, close to the island country, Bahrain. Dahran is home to Saudi's largest oil company also known as 'Saudi Aramco'. It produces about 8 million barrels of oil a day! Formerly the US owned 50% of the shares. Now it is solely owned by the kingdom. But there is still alot of American influence in the town.

It is one of the only places in the country where you will see women driving. Americans and Saudis live side-by-side on the same street, and women and men sit next to each other in the movie theater. Yes! There is a movie theater! One of the only real ones in the country. So besides watching a movie, we also went bowling in public. As the picture below shows, we sat outside without abayas on and drank our coffee. These are things we could never, ever do in Riyadh. But the most interesting thing is that we went to a huge church that is completely sanctioned by the Saudi government. The Americans made the agreement back in the 70's that if they were to work for the Saudi's they must be allowed freedom of worship.



May had just a little too much freedom. Here we are raiding the left-over food from the women's brunch we attended.