The Desert is Just One Big Beach...

As I sit here sipping a non-alcohol Budweiser that I bought for about 75  cents, I am reminded of how fortunate I am to be here.  Yes there is not much to do.   But on the other hand, because there is not much I have to do, I have room for thought and reflection, room to pursue my other passions, and room to just sit back after planning about a week of lessons and just chill.

This Bud (and picture of my hand) is for you.

This is not product placement because..really... are you actually
going to go out and buy some non alcohol Budweiser?

 When I first came to Saudi Arabia, I was expecting the religious police….old men with the red headscarves to be everywhere telling everyone what to do. The more I’ve been here, the less I’ve found this is the case.

A week ago after my first week working, I went to the neighboring city of Khobar (which is en route to Bahrain) with some of the other teachers.  We went to a Lebanese restaurant, ordered about 10 delicious dishes, didn’t finish them, and each of us had a bill of about 10 dollars apiece.

We also witnessed countless women without hijabs.  They seemed to be Filipino.  The taxi driver told us that if you’re not Muslim, you don’t have to wear a hijab.  Then in Dammam, by the sea, I saw other (although not as many) without hijabs.  I assumed they were Indian Hindus…but maybe they were Muslims.

In Korea, I felt like a king….because of A. “wow! there is a white person” remark everywhere I went, B. the plentiful, ubiquitous and delicious food everywhere, and C. the ability to travel anywhere in the country quickly and cheaply  (the Korean Buddhist nuns gave me an earful after hearing that I said I felt like a king).  Here in Saudi Arabia, I don’t feel like a king as much as an aristocrat under house arrest.

Or “mansion arrest” rather.  I have a two bedroom place and haven’t even stepped inside the second bedroom.

Today I went by the Marina Mall that I had always wanted to visit but was always walking there when it was too early to be open.  I had heard that there were family days and single men days, and that you had to go on the right day or be escorted out.  I also thought the shops there would be mainly for men (my male students’ favorite hobbies are shopping for clothes and perfume/cologne), and that the only women’s clothing shops would be full of abayas (the ankle-long black dresses) and would all be staffed by men.

Nope...

None of the above was the case.  There were families there, and I went right in without any problems.  Most of the stores were clothing shops for women and only two of over twenty were black abaya dress shops.  The rest sold either the elaborate clothes that women are supposed to wear at home for their husbands and house guests OR Western style women’s clothes, perhaps for when the women went with their husbands to tour and/or visit other countries.  There were female as well as male clerks working, and the only store that said “families only” was a store sporting tank-tops and called “Women’s Secret.”

 
 Quite a juncture of surplus wealth and fundamentalism for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia…

 

Kids, one day this kingdom of camels, honey,
and American franchises will be yours.

 

 

 

 

Granted, there were men with the red headscarves, but they were young and playing with their cell phones.

I also saw one couple (married or who knows?) holding hands, which is, from what I've heard, a big no-no to do in public

As I was heading back for the end of an evening, waving away taxis and waving hello back to people surprised to see me (not as an white American, but as a pedestrian), I walked into a whole group of men with the red headscarves shouting at me something like “riya!  riya!”         Great, I thought to myself I finally was getting in trouble for something….

Not so actually.    After I having to answer to several attempted English something to the effect of  “You’re walking somewhere?  Why don’t you take a taxi?” I later realized they were saying “Riyadh!  Riyadh!” asking me if I was going there.  As it turned out, I was at the bus station.  The buses don’t really have scheduled times here.  They just go to their destination when they have enough passengers.

So I accomplished all this before prayer time (when I would most assuredly be kicked out of whatever establishment I was in)

And I don't even have to worry about a hangover.

#ComfortablyGentrifiedToTheMiddleEast        #HipstersStayAfar

 

See the feminist activism there with that broken"Ladies Section" sign.

Just Kidding..it probably just fell off and no one cared enough to change it back.

 

                                      

 

Next up: the workplace...what it's like to work at a training center for Saudi nationals.

 

. 

Water and Proper Behavior

I was looking through a stationary shop, picked up a book called Proper Behavior and found the following mistranslation:

 

Does water need to be rationalized?    I don't think anyone would argue that it's not important or essential to our survival.  I thought it was perhaps meant to say "Always conserve water" but it doesn't look like she's doing that with the water coming out of the sink.

The Diminishing Return of Cultural Shock Exhilaration

  I had to go find a camera battery fast because of the tendency for cultural shock to diminish over time.  In other words, if a traveler isn't careful, he or she becomes so accustomed to his or her surroundings that what once appeared marvelous ends up becoming commonplace and less than spectacular.   As someone who has ingratiated into a foreign land before, I feel as if this tendency of cultural shock to diminish over time becomes more rapid the more places one stays for longer than a few days.  I am concerned that if I continue this world traveling/working business too long, I will end up going to an indigenous community in South America or somewhere and thinking to myself "yeah it's different, so what?"

    Fortunately, when I finally found a camera battery, I still had some ignorance and curiosity about my community left.




Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and United Arab Emirates
are petitioning local school boards in America to change the
name of the Persian Gulf in student textbooks to the Southeast
 Gulf, the East Gulf, the Engulfed-by-the-Gulf Gulf and the
North Gulf respectively.

 Dammam City is a moderate size city in Saudi Arabia that sits on the coast of the Persian Gulf (which is actually a real body of water with even fish in it.... not just a pit of oil) and sits almost directly across the island country of Bahrain.
When I looked up tourism in Dammam, there was almost nothing there (someone wrote "watching camels" as a joke).  The only thing I could really find was the Corniche, which is pretty much the equivalent to the Promenade in Brooklyn, a walkway along the Persian Gulf with playgrounds and small little Coffee shops on the other side.

This Corniche is right by my apartment, and it's quite a nice walk in a city that you can't really go anywhere except by car and taxi

Alright kids, it's 5:30 AM, time to pack up
and go home   (not my picture)

The best time to go to the Corniche is early in the morning at about 4-6 Am on the weekend before it gets too hot and when there are a lot of fishermen and families enjoying their time.  I first went to the Corniche the early morning after the Eid-Al-Fitr holiday, and there were still people setting off firecrackers.   In my path, there were signs that some Saudis really let their hair down (figuratively, not literally) with trash from a party of cookies and bottled water (what would be beer bottles and condom wrappers in America). 




No one really jogs in Saudi Arabia (at least that I could see).  When I was jogging (for the few seconds that I normally do at a time), a young boy started running right next to me as his mother laughed.   For a country that is presumed to be opposed to fun, there are playgrounds everywhere and Chucky Cheese's as well as probably every Fast Food chain you could imagine from Uno's, Red Lobster, Chili's, Hardees, Krispy Kreme..just to name a few.

That's enough blabbering for now.  Enjoy the pictures:

The view from my apartment, not quite as spectacular
as it was.





 

A Saudi Arabian roundabout

The sign of tropical climate is just a mirage

Class, this is what we would call cultural diffusion.

 

 

 

 

Is Extremism in the Middle East Rising or Falling?

When I asked the company director what sort of social taboos to avoid while in Saudi Arabia, he said something that I more or less expected: avoid at all costs talking about sex, religion, or politics, all of which we Americans (or some of us at least) make an effort to avoid when interacting with "polite company."  But then he mentioned a fourth one, which is somewhat connected to two of the above three topics but distinct enough to warrant its own category: Tribalism.  He went on to advise me that if any students start to get into a discussion or argument about their family backgrounds, regional identities, etc. (and that I would know when it happens), immediately shut that conversation down.

Now obviously I neither have the expertise nor observational scope to answer the question asked in the subject line: Is Extremism in the Middle East Rising or Falling?  Nevertheless, it is certainly an issue that people here are genuinely concerned about.  I know that English newspapers in non-English speaking countries (like the Korea Herald in South Korea and the Arab News newspaper here) are not exactly the barometer of the public.  Such publications are catered towards the Western expat community as well as rich, highly educated, and economically-conservative nationals. It's worth pointing out though that the Op/Ed pages in the paper I bought yesterday were completely dedicated to the issue of Middle East Extremism.

One article called Middle East's cycle of violence, written by a former US department official, was about "Sectarianism" and how regional and ethnic compound identities such as Sunni Iraq, Alawite Syrian, etc. were contributing to widespread division within Arab states and weakening the authority of those states and their leaders.

The other called It's Time to Fight Extermism, written by a Saudi Arabian women was not so much a concern about terrorism inside Saudi Arabia as much a reaction against what she saw as the boorish behavior of certain religious leaders in their interpretation of the Koran as well as the number of young Saudi men who are leaving the country to fight in illegal wars elsewhere  (although she also unconvincingly draws a connection between these kinds of extremism and the "extremism" of a group of workers for the unction to protest their boss's plans for relocation).

With the issue of  extremism throughout the Middle East (rising or falling...who really knows?) and of the restrictive society in general, it is easy for the outsider to fall into a kind of paranoia that can lead to false assumptions about what it is that is actually happening.  I myself was not immune to this.

As I was out and about one morning, I felt a tad bit uneasy thinking about my potential deviance: when and where was it appropriate to cross streets  (where American crosswalk red lights have countdowns from 10-20, Saudi crosswalks have countdowns from about 50), when exactly was prayer time and what I was supposed to do during how far I had to walk away from women, and if I should even be walking around at all.  What added to this anxiety was the fact that there were people looking and gesturing at me, cars honking around me, and what looked like a police officer backing up his vehicle and seeming to follow my footsteps.

I stopped: what was the consequence of crossing a street improperly?  Would I deported?  Or worse still, have a toe or foot cut off?

But then I took a second look: the guys who were honking were mainly taxi drivers, some of the people looking at gesturing me were just saying hello (pedestrians along the road were few and far between, let alone a Westerner), and the police officer that was backing up was actually pursuing a certain parking spot.

What is most indicative of this gap between my perception and the reality was what transpired following a group of guys who pulled over their vehicle and slowly rolled their window down.  I thought, were these undercover police officers or cadets about to interrogate me about having too close a proximity to the family entrance (as opposed to the single man entrance) of the McDonald's right in front of me.  It turned out to be two kids, first greeting me in Arabic (Salam Allaykum), and then trying to make conversation with me about where I was from and if I liked to exercise.  They concluded by saying "Thank You" and drove off.

Yup....just like Korea.

#CautiousButConsiderate

An Oasis is the Right Power Adapter

(This post is brought to you by the other American teacher here who let me use his power adapter.  Without it, I would have little to do other than actually learn the language of the country I'm in----which I'm trying to do anyway...just much more holistically)

 

 

I don't know if it is ironic or entirely appropriate, but my first immediate need in this vast desert was water.  I arrived at the airport at 1 AM.  (Unlike my first time in South Korea, someone was there right in the front with a sign ready to take me to my living space.)  When I asked the driver how I could purchase water, he gave me bottled water 25% the size of the Aquafinas we have in America.  In Saudi Arabia, they have these water tanks instead of bottle with a dispenser in the apartment.  I suppose it's the most efficient way to distribute "el agua" or  in Arabic, al-ma ماء

But unexpectedly...or rather all too expectedly, my water tank turned out to have no water.   While I was able to stay asleep for about 10 hours, I woke up to the heat with nothing to quench on.  Eventually, after finding out that the apartment and the office of the guy who is kind of like our RA were two different places, I was able to get water.  Someone was called to come up and deliver a tank, but it was the wrong kind of plastic and it smushed.  Apparently, if you bring back an empty tank, they can refill it, which costs less than buying a new one. Expectedly, the name of the grocery store to do this is "Convenience Oasis" or something.  But I'm not sure how much of an oasis it really is because I have heard they may not carry the kind of tank that the machine requires.  Needless to say, I am still in the process of resolving this particular issue.

The second even more cumbersome issue was (as the title suggests) finding the right power adapter.  It seems that instead of choosing one kind of socket, the country never made up its mind and put a few different kinds in each apartment with no apparent rhyme or reason.  The only way I can describe it is that there are different sockets for two pronged and three pronged plugs, and some of compatable with multiple kinds of plugs and some aren't.  Then you have power strips, which I haven't even begun to try to understand.

The one I bought back at Wal-Mart that said "for use in the Middle East" unexpectedly or perhaps all to expectedly didn't work for any of them (and I thought it fried my power cord, but fortunately it didn't).  Fortunately, another teacher let me borrow their adapter (although he couldn't really explain the kind I needed), so I plan to buy him a new one tomorrow, so again still in the process of fully resolving this issue as well.

#ADeserterCantExpectAllOasis