The Return to Insta (& other news)

I am backed up with blog posting so here comes a bunch of disconnected tales at full speed –  a short story compilation if you may:

A Fishy Experience

Many of my foodie posts have been quite sophisticated dishes but that is actually not as often as you may imagine. A blistering hot day in Madinah and having had red meat consecutively for too many days, we went to a fish place for lunch. Now this is no any ordinary place, the shop is located in a major street selling pretty much the same thing! The way it works is you pick out a fresh fish from the freezer, often only a few days old: we picked out two beautiful hamour (a type of reef cod). Next, the cook scales and cleans the fish, simply salts it and tosses it into a huge vat of boiling oil. A few minute later, the fish is taken out with long metal tongs and a spice mix is sprinkled on top. And that’s it! Eaten with rice and a tomato salsa-type sauce, you break into the crispy skin and pick off the soft white flesh from the bone.

We brought our food to a farm on the outskirts of the city and had a tremendously filling meal under the shades of palm tree and drenched the fish with fresh lime we pulled off bushes around us.

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Brick by Brick

Back in Jeddah for only a few days, I was lucky enough to have been able to meet some of my old school friends before I returned. We decided to go to a new and hipster coffee shop called Brew92. Themed to be set somewhere with the temperature at -92°F, the cafe was cool and decorated with “snow” as the sun streamed through its glass walls. With all its baristas in a jumpsuit uniform, this place even put the hipsters of Shoreditch to the test.  

A section of the menu was called Stranger Drinks (playing on Stranger Things..) and I asked about a drink called Brick on Brick. It was described as: a shot of espresso and condensed milk blended with an ice cream sandwich and topped with ice cream sandwich bites. It was as good as it sounds!

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Summer Project Done!

Just a day after my return, I had to give a talk as part of my summer project to students from the Mathematics & Physical Sciences faculty. Finalising the presentation at 2am before my 8am flight, this was a true test of doing an unprepared talk. And it didn’t go too badly! I enjoyed going through a worked example and presenting as though I was having a conversation. I just gotta keep doing it!

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The BBC

Not a breath to lose, my next day started off at the BBC Broadcast House. Meeting Elena on the EDUCATE cohort, she got me as a mentor for the Teens in AI accelerator programme they were running. As part of the tour, we got to to go into the live newsroom and zigzagged between the computers as the camera rolled in the main studio. We weren’t allowed to take pictures there (for security reasons) but here’s a shot from above!

These 12-16  year olds are tackling global problems using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. The rest of the afternoon was spent at the Accenture offices where we did some design thinking, not before I joined the teens and played Around the World table tennis.

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Run of a Day

As there were many days to pick from, I’m going to show you the run where I broke my 10km personal record – 41:16!