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