Whilst I appreciate we live in difficult times – and it has been said before on the forum, but I will say it again – BAA have no interest in spotters or enthusiasts as has been proved by the closure of facilities in recent years at Heathrow Gatwick and Edinburgh. When I first started spotting I remember walking out on top of the piers at Gatwick and there was a cafe reached by a bridge from the left hand pier for spotters and in the summer you could sit outside on a patio area have a cup of tea and sandwich and watch and photograph to your hearts content. Its a shame but I only see things getting worse rather than better.
Anyway on that depressing note I will wish everyone a Merry Christmas!! :diablo:

Very nice shots – the first one is awesome.

Whereabouts in Buenos Aires was this? I was working down there a few years back and I remember visiting the museum at the Jorge Newberry aeropark. Very interesting.

I understand what you’re getting at.

We experienced the same kind of hostility at Mumbai Airport, where the security are just looking for an excuse to manhandle someone.

These people also shouted, and did not speak in a calm way at all, which seriously angered me back then. Of course you can’t even speak back to them, their police stations aren’t very kind.

Anyway, which part of Saudi Arabia/Jordan/Egypt did you stay in? That could explain it.

It was not so much the rudeness, it was what lay behind it. I used to get s*** from the moment I stepped outside my door till I came back. On advice from the embassy I followed these procedures as well – Before I left for work I used to check the roofs of the three buildings opposite my place from INSIDE my house in case there was someone ready to take a shot at me. When I got to the car outside I had to check the wheel arches and underneath for bombs and then have a good look around to see who was hanging about because the prelude to an attack is they will check your movements and times while they size you up. All this was sent in weekly updates by e mail to us from the embassy. We were told not to use Large supermarkets after a Dutch family (including a 6 and a 4 year old) had a device put under their car at a supermarket on the airport road called Watania which I regularly used. That device incidentally failed to go off because it was one of the few days it had rained and it had got wet and only went off partially. All this for no other reason than you are not one of them.
I was in Jeddah but my job required regular travel to Riyadh, Dammam and Khamis Mushayt and the treatment never varied with the exception of Riyadh which was the worst.
It was the fear of being shot and (as happened to one British bloke North of Jeddah) having your corpse tied to the back of a pick up and dragged through the streets for 3 miles plus all the low level hostility that went with it that made me jack it in. My nerves were gone at the end. My job while I was there was to train two young Saudi men in their 20’s to pass on my knowledge to them which I was happy to do.
Of course one can say these things happen to other people but I am more concerned with what happens to me. As I said previously I went with a great deal of goodwill and I had even bought a copy of the Koran to read.
By the time I left I felt as if I had gone to someones house with gifts and had them thrown back in my face. The thing is that Saudi is not everyones cup of thea but it was my cup of tea and I liked the life there. I had plenty of interests and I enjoyed diving in the Red Sea. It was only when things kicked off that life became intolerable.
Incidentally, an Egyptian bloke in the same company I worked for said goodbye to me when I left and said on behalf of all Muslims and Arabs he apologised for their behaviour that had forced me to leave so its not all bad.

That is intriguing.

Did you experience this from a wide variety of people, or just one individual?

“Bearded cretin.”

I am not bearded, but please do not go any further with that little comment.

Thanks.

I certainly will go further with that “little comment” as you put it. The people who used to shout at me (and there were many of them) almost always seemed to have long beards and wore thobes as opposed to say Egyptians or Jordanians most of whom I met or worked with tended to wear western style clothes. This meant they were almost invariably Saudis. I will give you another example – one day I was stopped at a road block by twelve armed policemen who asked for my papers.They were really p***** off although I don’t know why. When they spoke to me in English I replied in Arabic. The greatest hostility seemed to come from the three bearded members of the group. One of them asked me if as I spoke Arabic was I also Muslimeen? I replied again in Arabic that No I was a Christian – he then flung the papers back at me in the car and said “Big Problem” and motioned with his thumb for me to go. You seem intrigued why I mentioned “Beard” but I fully understand the reasons for wearing a long beard, particularly so amongst the Saudis but the reason for my annoyance is that I went to Saudi arabia in 1998 with a lot of goodwill towards the culture and people. I studied for a degree in Arabic at my own expense and time and as I say I have spent many years in Muslim culture but that last spell in Saudi has changed my mind about the way I view the Middle East. I come from Ireland which has no axe to grind with the middle east. When I was there there was a terrible slaughter of hostages in Khobar including a Swede and Filippino who were murdered for no other reason than they were not muslims. On TV, the room they were murdered in looked like someone had thrown buckets of blood all over it, it was even on the ceiling. I lived in the middle of this nonsense for five years so perhaps you will forgive me if I have offended you in some way.