Day 59: Will I turn into a butterfly?

21.6.09 - I don’t want to worry anyone too much but I think I’m going through a TRANSFORMATION…

Imagine a fish that’s been taken out of water and discovers that it can not only breathe but fly too. That would be quite a life changing experience. And in some obscure way, this is how it feels.

It’s amazing how quickly we’ve adapted to life in Saudi. London already seems a distant place, and our life there a blurry-around-the-edges memory. We are in the minority but we really enjoy living here. Everything is so completely different, it has caused a healthy shake up of... well just about everything. My beliefs, my creature comfort habits, my routines, my grand views of the world, preconceptions. Everything challenged.

And this complete change of scene, away from everything and everyone I know, makes me see my life in a new light. And I find myself keen to reconsider what I believe in, and how I want to live.

I’m shedding some of my western thinking and aspirations. And slowly but surely peeling away the layers created by my fairly insular life in West London. I’m determined to engage with this fascinating country with an open mind and unbiased eyes. And I’m finding that despite the frustrations, living here is bringing about some healthy changes, and is proving to be the adventure we were hoping for. So I thought I’d write a little tribute to the things I love about being here, while the feelings are still fresh:

I love the fact that I’m somewhere so completely different and my life has been turned upside down and inside out.

I love it that it’s unpredictable here and full of contrasts and contradictions. And that you can take nothing for granted.

I love the fact that we are, in effect, living in one big oasis in the middle of the desert. How exotic is that!

I love knowing that a weekend outing could be a visit to the camel market down the road or a trip to a posh mall, full of women in black and men in white.

I love the dry dry heat, sometimes unbearable, always relentless, but from dawn to dusk, every day of the week, it’s sunny, bright and hot. I love that the bathroom is never damp and that clothes dry in minutes.

I love it that we take cover from sandstorms here, rather than rain.

I love our simpler and slower life, and our still many empty cupboards.

I love the sense of community, and being so close to so many interesting people.

I love it that we have money left at the end of the month.

I love the fact that I have time to myself (a lot spent on reading), and the mindset to be awed and inspired by some amazingly good books.

I love that, just like that, you can meet a Prince, and just like that, you’ve got a job! Which bring me onto the no-small-matter of my meeting with the Prince.

Preliminary preparations for the meeting involved sorting out childcare (a team effort between my maid and a friendly neighbour), the purchase of a pair of decent looking shoes to match my Abaya (ie. black), transport (pre-booking of a taxi to take me there and back) and swotting up on dos and don’ts. For this I didn’t do too well and was only able to gather that I should address him as Your Highness. I decided that I would pick up the rest by observing my friend S, who had met him several times.

I met S at her shop, and from there we made our way to the Prince’s office with another expat lady involved in the project following behind. In this unusual country, where few streets have names, and street numbers don’t really exist, finding your way round is at best challenging. Everyone has a PO Box number, but postal addresses don’t really exist. There’s no such thing as a A to Z or detailed city map . This causes endless challenges, and has a huge impact on every day life.

To give you an example, here’s how a simple event like ordering a t-shirt online for Dirk’s Birthday turns out to be a rather convoluted process. I’ll spare you the whole payment phase which involved multiple emails with the t-shirt provider and going in person to the bank to handover some cash to be transferred to the supplier. Once the payment had cleared the t-shirt was despatched from a neighbouring city by special delivery (equivalent to DHL). I did wonder how it would get to me as our compound doesn’t have an address, just a PO Box number. But I decided not to worry about it and let things take their course. 24 hours later, I get a call from a Saudi Mail delivery driver, asking where I live, and no he doesn’t know Eid compound and he wants to know if it’s a hospital, and can I give him directions. Now, imagine trying to describe how to get to a place if most streets don’t have names, then add to that the language difficulty, and that I have no sense of direction anyway. One of the directions for our place is to take Pylon Road, this is an unofficial made up name because it’s a road with… yes you’ve guessed it… lots of pylons. But I’m pretty sure there are other roads in Riyadh with lots of Pylons… anyway, I could feel my stress levels simmering, and decided to get help. I asked for the Saudi Mail driver to call back in five minutes so that I could find a compound worker who spoke Arabic and would be able to give directions. A friendly receptionist agreed, and I waited in reception for about 30 minutes but no call came so headed back home. The driver rang back a few hours later, and this time I didn’t want to risk losing contact so I asked the driver to wait and sprinted back to reception (in the scorching mid forties heat) with the Saudi driver on hold, praying that he would have the patience to wait, and hoping that Dirk wasn’t noticing any of this, and handed my phone over to the receptionist who provided the necessary directions. All seemed to be OK and I made sure the driver understood the parcel was a very important gift for my husband (I almost said Birthday but quickly remembered that is not an event celebrated under Islam and not wanting to incur unnecessary wrath from my only link to my one and only present, I thought it better not to mention it) and the driver confidently assured me he would make it to us later that day. But it never turned up.

The following morning, I get a call from… another Saudi Mail delivery driver, who speaks no English this time, asking where I live…. Aaaaaaaaaaaargh. Not sure what happened to the driver from the day before, but it looks like I’m back to square one. So I run to reception again and hand over the phone. The receptionist doesn’t bat an eyelid and repeats the directions from the day before. By this stage, I wasn’t very optimistic the parcel would ever turn up (buy it did, and Dirk loves the t-shirt!).

The lack of proper addresses I imagine must affect the entire internet industry here. It also affects where you meet people and how you conduct business. The British School’s web designer doesn’t have an address to put on his business card, he runs a service business from an office with no address. It’s crazy. So he always comes to the school for meetings as we couldn’t get to him. Major roads in central Riyadh do have names but no street numbers so a restaurant might be described as being close to the junction between x and y streets. That’s as good as it gets. When we first arrived and were going round visiting compounds, we’d have to phone the compound en route, we’d pass our phone to the driver, and the compound people would direct our driver, real time, to the compound gates.

So here we are, in my friend’s shop, ready to go. She’s the only one who knows where the Prince’s office is (surprise surprise, it doesn’t have an address) so we jump into her car and before we know it we arrive at a large mansion in a residential looking area. We drive around the outer walls, past a couple of gates, until we get to an open one and we drive in. It’s all rather low security. As we made our way in, I wondered if this place was the Prince’s home (it was big but rather modest looking for a Prince) but when I mentioned this to my friend, she scoffed and said that he used this mansion as his office, and that he lived in a palace in the outskirts of Riyadh. That’s more like it!

There are many Princes in Saudi but I gathered that he was an important one with close family ties to the King. So quite an honour to meet him. And not something that you’d want to mess up! The whole thing was starting to feel a little surreal, here I was, a girl from nowhere, an infidel no less, fresh off the boat, parachuted into this mansion slash office, to discuss an internet project.

So here we are, walking down a long corridor. We are ushered into the Prince’s office by his friendly female assistant who shock horror, was not wearing an Abaya (he must be very liberal) and waited for the great man to make his appearance.

Finally, it was happening, I was to about to meet my first Prince.

He didn’t make us wait long and ten minutes later, he makes his entrance. I try not to stare but I discretely (I think) have a good look at him and he looks well, very normal! No lavish robes, large items of jewellery or flamboyant accessories. He is wearing a simple white thobe, his head is bald and bare, and he is neither dashing nor regal. But he does command attention, and he confidently marches in, and politely greets us.

As I was sitting there, all senses on alert, observing, listening, taking in the surroundings, the Prince, his tone, his appearance, thinking about how to hold myself, and hoping he would just ignore me for a while, just while I got my bearings, I heard the Prince respond to my colleague’s comment about the nice smell in the room. “oh, that’s incense I bought from Zara Home!”, he said, and from that moment, I knew that everything was going to be OK.

Indeed the Prince is a down to earth and charismatic person, with a great sense of humour (he printed out an article for us listing Saudi as the 3rd worst country to work in), he is educated in the UK and mixes with many Westerners so has a balanced view of the world, he is well travelled, thoughtful, and above all a great story teller. He talked about many things: the price of pure incense (thousands of dollars a gram), his charities (he is involved in many), his grandfather who was one of the first royals given permission to leave Saudi for an exploratory trip, his education, his love of good food (he showed us his super well equipped open plan kitchen which he is very proud of and even Gordon Ramsey would approve of, and this is not even his home), his health (he wants to take up salsa to loose weight!) and Saudi life a hundred years ago. In fact we talked very little about business, but I think that’s how things work here, you build relationships first, then you get down to business.

My hard work paid off, and I managed to make it through the two hour meeting without a dreaded cultural ‘faux pas’. I was careful to show respect at all times (even when given a weird hand made wooden acorn as a small gift), and not to make too much eye contact (not allowed under Islam) which by the way is very awkward. Trying to listen to someone without looking at them. I found it almost impossible to concentrate on what he was saying if I wasn’t making eye contact. Staring at the carpet didn’t help either. And when I was talking (and he was looking elsewhere or worse just blankly into space), I also find it disconcerting always wondering if he was not interested or just being polite.

Well to cut a long story short, I had a second meeting with the Prince and 5 or 6 other expat women all loosely involved in the project, we talked business and they agreed to the budget I had put together for the launch of the website, including a daily rate for my time. So I’m now officially a paid consultant, and Head of Operations for Women’s Skill Bank!

Since then, I’ve interviewed a male Filipino web designer, which in itself is not straight forward as women are not allowed to meet alone with a man who is not related. So I was advised to meet in the lobby of a top international hotel where foreigners often conduct meetings and was usually left alone by the religious police. Well I pitched up and I was the only woman, and all the other men except for two were Saudis. The web designer, who is a baker by day (cakes are his speciality) and an IT man by night (and by training and background), also looked a bit jumpy. But I tried to ignore all that, and forget about the story of the British lady who was arrested in Starbucks for having coffee with a male work colleague recently, and focus on the task at hand; briefing the designer and assessing whether he was the man for the job. I was a bit taken aback when he said he could have this rather complex project done in a few weeks, and would I like to see a demo next week. It’s all action here, none of this project scoping and planning business. And why bother with documentation? He turned out to be a man of his word and has indeed produced an impressive demo of what we needed within a week. So he’s got the job!

This project is keeping me comfortably busy, mostly working from home, and not interfering too much with my reading, pool time with children, overseeing my maid, and chit chating with friends! So I figure I’ve got the work life balance thing pretty well cracked. Who thought it would be this easy to do over here.

Books I’ve read:

Eat Pray Love, by E. Gilbert (brilliant)

Three cups of Tea, by G. Mortenson (even more brilliant)

Reading Lolita in Tehran, by N. Nafisi (intellectually demanding and rewarding)

Only in Saudi’s press:

40 year old divorces wife over wrong call

JAZAN: A 40-year old man divorced his wife for answering a telephone call from a man who had mistakenly called her, a Saudi newspaper reported. After the wife received a call from someone who had got the number wrong, the husband snatched the phone and shouted at the man who then hung up. The husband then tried ringing the man but found the phone switched off. The husband then began accusing his wife of having a relationship with the man, In turn, the woman tried to convince him that this was not the case. Unconvinced, the man immediately divorced her and sent her to her parents’ home.

Published in June 09 in the Arab News newspaper

For my full blog and previous postings go to http://mysaudistory.blogspot.com

Day 40 - Oh by the way, on Sunday, I'm meeting a Prince

2.6.09 - This morning I had an exciting outing planed.  I was to meet a very interesting lady, an American, married to a Saudi, who runs her own business here. And she kindly agreed to have coffee with me at the famous Kingdom Mall, an exciting destination in itself. There are hundreds of malls here, but this one is special. First it is located at the base of a stunning awe-inspiring building, the tallest in the country and an architectural masterpiece (if I may say so myself – but see photo and decide for yourself). Second, it is, to my knowledge, the most luxurious mall in the country (think Chanel, Moschino, Armani, so not for the faint hearted or light weight spenders) and thirdly it is the only mall to have a women’s only floor. This is the bit I was particularly interested in. It’s quite a big deal because it means that no men whatsoever are allowed on this floor. All the workers therefore are female (I hadn’t seen any women work outside a compound in the whole of the 6 weeks we’ve been here, even frilly lingerie stores and glamorous beauty counters are attended by manly men. Weird.)

Kingdom Tower

Add to all that, the excitement of leaving the compound for reasons not involving school or going to the supermarket and you can see why this was no ordinary day.

So I decided to get an early start, and gave myself plenty of time for traffic, road side accidents, taxi not turning up, getting lost, getting stopped by the Muttawah, etc.

Well as it turned out, everything went smoothly and I arrived fresh as a daisy. But only to find everything shut. Well the mall was open, but none of the shops were. I’m quite used to that now. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve turned up somewhere only to find that everything was shut. 

I have figured out that the opening hours here are GENERALLY 9am to 12pm, and 4 to 11ish pm. HOWEVER, there are 6 big daily prayers which means everything shuts for about 20 minutes, 6 times a day. And to add to the confusion, the prayer times change slightly every day. The advice is: wherever you go, bring a good book.

Coffee shop in a mall

As it turns out, the shops in this mall open slightly later than other malls so I decide to go and look for the ‘Ladies Floor’, locate the coffee shop we’re meeting at and generally have a bit of a nose around. I find a lift that says ‘Women Only’, and figure that has to be a good start. I press the button that says ‘Women Only Floor’ which ends up being just one level up. The doors open and I see a sign saying that all face should be uncovered for ‘security reasons’ and I also see a couple of female security attendants, NOT wearing an Abaya (first time I see a woman wearing normal clothes outside of a compound). Their job is to prevent men from sneaking in. A man was arrested recently for disguising himself as a woman! He was wearing an abaya and niqab (face cover) and was trying to get into a mall (single men are not allowed in malls).

I do a little tour, past Saks, past Debenhams, past the woman’s only bank, and notice there is no view downwards, and the floor is well shielded from prying eyes from the lower floors. But I’m surprised to see that all women (apart from the workers) keep their abaya on, and some even wear their niqab. I don’t understand why. This is a completely safe environment without a man in sight. But I’m told that they are worried that someone might secretly take photos (there is indeed a sign that states no photography, specifically with mobile phones).

Nevertheless I try not to stare at the few women that have taken off their niqab. So far, all I’ve seen of Saudi women were eyes (if lucky, many cover themselves completely, and wear black gloves and socks, literally there is not a micro millimeter of flesh showing). The only women I’ve seen out of an abaya are the ones on the compound, at school or on this floor. But they are not Saudis. They are all foreigners. So it’s quite weird to have been here six weeks and not seen a single female Saudi face. I notice that the women (looking discretely sideways) wear quite a lot of make up but it’s not ostentatious, and it’s done in good taste.  But I do also see a Saudi woman walk past who looks a bit like a punk (my first female Saudi rebel), and another that looks like a boy (very short hair – perhaps another rebel). But overall the women I see are good looking, elegant and very well groomed. Just like me then, hum… With my un-manicured hands, al fresco dried hair, 10 second morning make up ritual, cheap sunglasses and gem-free earlobes. I feel like a granola bar type. Natural in an unattractive way! But as I said before, I am NOT VAIN, so I focus instead on my impending chat with my interesting lady.

She arrives a little while later and we start talking about life here, how to find out about what’s on (very little is published for fear it will be visited/closed down by the Muttawah) and her business (she organises children’s parties, on a big scale, and sells party accessories). She set up her business 15 years ago because she wanted to remain independent, both financially and emotionally, and she tells me about the challenges of running a business here (all her 25 staff are male, and strictly speaking she is not allowed to go into HER office or HER shop, but she still does of course). The problems with customs. Sometimes her shipment gets through, other times not. They recently confiscated an entire container of party accessories because they had “Happy Birthday” written on them. Islam doesn’t recognise Birthdays and they are not generally celebrated. Even though she speaks fluent Arabic, is married to a Saudi and has lived here for over 30 years, she still finds it hard to run a business.

I tell her how I hope to start another business one day, but in the meantime think I should use my skills and find some internet related work, in an advisory or consulting capacity. That’s when she mentions ‘THE PRINCE’. He’s been looking for someone like me! And before I know it, there is a meeting set-up. It all happens in the space of a few hours. Things happen either very slowly or very quickly here (or not at all), but nothing much in between.

So it’s confirmed, I am to meet HRH Prince ‘A’ (name abbreviated just in case the Muttawah are following my blog!) whom I have been assured is a true gentleman. He sounds particularly interesting because he has launched a new initiative called Women’s Skills Bank. A project which aims to bring together employers and skilled women, often expats, seeking work. I am quite fascinated that a Saudi man should initiate such a project and it certainly challenges my preconceptions that men here prefer women to stay at home. I am being introduced because he is looking for someone to help them launch a website and apparently I have the right credentials.

I’m trying to be cool about it but I’m actually VERY EXCITED. I know there are many royals here, but nevertheless, a private meeting with a Prince is no small matter, and whilst I strive to be modest in my endeavours, this is not something I intend to keep to myself!

I now have some preparations to make prior to the meeting. I have no idea about royal etiquette here (being only acquainted with British etiquette – yeah right), I’m not sure how to address him, do’s and don’t’s etc. It’s not exactly easy information to come by and my contact is not forthcoming. Yikes.

I do know some of the basic rules: it’s rude to show the soles of your feet (that shouldn’t be a problem!), to point, and to take things in your left hand. I’m pretty sure that I won’t have to leave the room walking backwards… But beyond that…

Also, I have childcare problems, I’ve heard that Saudis are not exactly punctual, and royals well, they are in a different league and so I have no idea if the meeting will start on time (probably not) and when it will finish. I have to plan to be gone the whole day just in case. But don’t have anyone to look after Rosalie after she finishes nursery. And I haven’t been given the meeting place yet. (hopefully his palace!). At least I won’t have to worry about what to wear (Abaya is the only dress code here). And I know I won’t be expected to wear the Niqab (I don’t have one anyway). I’ll need to buy some new shoes (my £10 black pumps have seen better days). And my trainers, well, let’s not go there.

My next posting will no doubt be after the meeting. Wish me luck. 

***For full blog go to www.florencehughes.blogspot.com***