you have mail, at last

Yesterday I received a letter from my wife. My wife joined me here in March, and we are on speaking terms, so there is no need for her to send me missives. The letter actually accompanied some documents that she had sent before coming over here. It was mailed on 28 December, 2008, two-and-a-half months before her departure. The envelope has a Jeddah postmark dated 4 Muharram, which is 1 January 2009 according to the Gregorian calendar. So it travelled some 5,240 kilometres in about four days. That amounts to around 55 km/hr. However, the 1,200 kilometre journey from Jeddah to my mailbox in Dammam took around 130 days. That's around 0.4 km/hr. I had heard about the inefficiency of the snail mail service here, but I didn't expect it to be this bad. I am not sure though if I can blame the postal service for the delay, or if the internal mail distribution system in our organization was responsible. It reminds me what people told me about living in Saudi Arabia. You need patience. A lot of it.