Costumes

You can try Zamil store in Khobar for costumes. If you’ve never been to Zamil store, you should make the trip. They also can make a custom costume for you. Ordering from Amazon to ship directly here might be a problem or not. I've never tried that. I have an Aramex Shop & Ship account so Amazon sends my orders to Aramex in New York and they bring it here. So from order to doorstep is about 6 - 7 days on avee. To have Amazon send directly here, you would need to get the credit card company or bank to register the foreign address with your account. If you want to order for Halloween, better sooner than later. Halloween costumes are technically not allowed here so an enthusiastic customs officer might not let it through if it is too close to the holiday. That happened to me once many years ago. I would avoid using USPS at all costs. If they send it here, you might get it by next Halloween if you are really lucky. Even using USPS with Amazon to my New York address has, at times, taken up to 30 days just to get to New York City. Even with a tracking number, USPS packages just disappear from the radar for weeks at a time. Impossible to trace.

Also check Partyland for costumes. Zamil Store in Khobar is located on 3rd Street and Prince Abdulelah St. just off the Corniche and facing ANB Bank. Partyland is located on King Khaled St. between 21st St. and 22nd St.

Halloween is a big event on camp. Security will set the hours for the event and will provide additional security and traffic control with some streets around the Hills School being blocked off. For small children or even children not so small, better to go early and wear lights or something to be noticed as it will be pretty dark then. Adult supervision is a good idea and going with a group of friends is most common. In the past, this has drawn a lot of people from off camp. Candy gets really expensive this time of year. Buy early.

If you arrive here and decide you want to ship a lot of things back after your first repat, go talk to DHL. They have a special service for Aramco but there are some rules that have to be carefully followed. They also have to handle all the arrangements from here but it will save a lot of money. From experience I can tell you that if you ship 10 boxes, for example, you should make the proforma invoice itemizing each box (10 things on the invoice) rather than just saying it is 1 shipment (i.e. only one item on the invoice). If you do it the latter way and customs finds one single item they object to in only one of the boxes, they will destroy all 10 boxes. You would have the option to have DHL ship everything back to your home country but you would pay standard DHL shipping rates to do it which will be very much more expensive than what they charged to bring it over. The former way, you receive 9 of the boxes and then can decide what to do with the 10th box.

You can ship via surface very economically but the shipment would take 2 - 3 months to arrive. Still might be attractive on the first repat when you think about all the things you regret not having brought with you.

With regard to the costumes, I wanted to add that, if this will be your first Halloween, don't be surprised when you discover over 90% of the older kids will dress up as soccer players (only the shirt though).

This year, only those living in camp will be permitted entry into Dhahran on Oct. 31st. Last year was kinda crazy...