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.