It's interesting to see that the US and the Saudis are getting on. This article made me smile a bit. It wasn't all that long ago, probably a decade ago, that I got pulled over into secondary at the US - Canadian border. I was going for a weekend snowboarding in Vermont. What was the issue? I had UAE stamp in my passport, because I had been to Abu Dhabi a few years before. Why had I been there? I was doing solutions architect work there for a US company! They were building a new television broadcast center there and I was integrating our software into their internal workflows and systems.
Anyhow the trip went well, I found the emeratis to be very friendly. It was kind of wild as the plane was landing in the early evening, looking down across the vastness of the desert, to see in the distance tiny pickup trucks and people riding camels battling the sand storms.
How times change. I hear and see lots of tech entrepreneurs visiting the region the last couple of years. #