Khobar Traditional Village

For lunch on Friday, (our Saturday), I went with my Peace Corps friend and his family to the Khobar Traditional Village, a restaurant which boasts having won the award for best Saudi Arabian food in Saudi Arabia three years running.  We were excited to go, but as with most things here, we needed to carefully plan around prayer times.  Luckily, the phones here come pre-installed with a kind of islamic app tool.  This tells you the date in the lunar calendar,  prayer times each day, and  help you locate the nearest mosque, and probably a dozen other useful features. We tried to time it so prayer time would be just ending when we arrived, or course, traffic and life in general get in the way, so when we arrived there was still a few minutes of prayer time left.  While we waited we examined the decor of the outer part of the restaurant.  In front, they had sculptures of the two crossed swords famous from the Saudi flag that you could walk under as a sort of entrance way.  Also flanking the sides of the restaurant were two older cars, cemented into the ground.  Apparently, the owner of the restaurant really had a thing for collecting old cars. I know you all want to know what kind of cars they were, but the best I can do is that one was blue and the other was red.  I'm not good at identifying make and model, and I had intended on relying on my camera to just post a picture of them.  Unfortunately, even though I was smart enough to have brought my camera, I was not smart enough to make sure the battery was charged before I left.

 Like all restaurants, there were two sections, the men only section, and the family seating area.  But this restaurant had a third section, a separate building with stairs that led to a door marked "Grooms Area Only."  I wondered if perhaps there was a similar door somewhere for the brides, and if this was a popular place to have a wedding feast.  We sat outside for a while waiting for the doors to re-open with a few other families, mostly Saudi.  Finally, someone came out of the Exit only door, and several people rushed inside, so we followed suit.  We made our way through a room with a large glass table case full of what were probably very interesting objects, most of which seemed like old swords and Bedouin objects, but at least one seemed like it might have been a rollerskate.  I didn't want to stop to look, because I was following my friends wife, and from the back in an abaya, every woman looks the same, so it would be easy to get lost.  This has often been a concern of mine.  I remember getting lost as a child, and the first thing anyone asks you is, "What was your mom wearing, sweetie?"  If a child is lost here, what do they do?  How do they find their mother in a sea of mothers all dressed in black with nothing visible but the eyes?  I guess that's why everyone pays so much attention to purses and shoes and bracelets. 

Thankfully, I needn't have worried about that here, even though it was crowded.  My friend is very tall, and carrying a blond haired blue eyed baby makes you even more conspicuous in a crowd of Saudi families.  As we entered the main lobby, we were handed a number, in Arabic, which none of us knew how to read.  We tried to stand out of the way, but as always seems to happen when you are trying hard not to be in the way, everywhere we stood seemed to be the exact place someone else needed to get through on their way to somewhere else.   We landed on the stairs, against the railing and took a moment to soak in the surroundings.  The walls were painted in geometric patterns of bright reds, greens and yellows, there were pictures of men eating here, perhaps famous Saudi men, lining the wall of the staircase, and every 10 feet or so there were old looking lanterns on the wall.  There were benches with elaborate pillows all of different designs, and everywhere families in black and white, with splashes of red and white on the men's keffiyahs and children in every color  We were all waiting for prayer to finish, and for rooms to be cleared so we could be seated..

Eventually, someone began calling out numbers, and not knowing either what our number was, or how it would be pronounced when it was called, we waited.  I kept an eye on the man who had come in just before us, figuring that at least we would know we were sometime after him.  Time passed and, people went up and down the stairs, more numbers were called, and then a man coming down the stairs noticed the baby, and seemed very pleased and excited. He shook my friends hand, and touched the baby's arm and cooed at her and then told us to run up and take the room at the top of the stairs, we tried to show him our number, but he rushed us up the stairs conspiritorily and told us to go in room number 20.  I speculated if he was just a patron who had wanted us to have the room he and his family had just vacated, or if he was some kind of manager, or restaurant employee taking pity on us.  I suppose we will never know.

We entered room number 20, which was beautiful. There were rugs lining every inch of the floor and pillows lining the walls. Every five feet or so were box shapes draped with more pillows that acted like arm rests of a couch.  The walls themselves were painted to resemble stucco falling away to reveal the underlining brick.  There were several windows, each one decorated like stained glass with images of cups, and teapots, and knives.  There were several tapestries with large tassels that they baby enjoyed playing with, and in between the tapestries were pictures of Dammam in the 1960s and 70s.  Other than changes in the car styles, Dammam looked remarkably the same.   In the ceiling there were small lights whose shades looked remarkably like upside down shot glasses - a useful repurposing since alcohol is illegal here. The piece de resistance was a chandelier in the center shaped like a train, complete with old rollerblade wheels as train wheels, and flashing red and blue lights at the front of the train near the headlights. And just underneath the train light, In the center of it all, on the floor, were the remains of what had clearly been a large and delicious feast.

The Khobar Traditional Village.  Thanks to Joanna for taking such beautiful Pictures.

We found an employee (they weren't hard to spot, each one was wearing a uniform with an apron made of multicolored glittering thread, and a hat that would have reminded me of an army hat from the 40s, if it hadn't also been covered in the glittering rainbow material.) and asked him to clean the room.  With amazing efficiency, he used the plastic tablecloths they had laid down to collect all the remnants and dishes and plates into two neat little tightly wrapped bundles.  He got all of it in one trip.  I'm sure it would have taken me at least three trips, maybe four.  He returned shortly with a vacuum and cleaned up any remaining bits of rice from the floor.

Now the room was perfect for a baby.  She had so much space to crawl around everywhere she went there were cushions to soften the fall.  I figured she would practice standing and crawling around to her hearts content, exploring every corner.  Nope.  She made a bee line for the door.  It seems to be a universal truth that kids only ever want what they can't have.  As soon as the door closed, she was after it trying to open it.  I suppose it didn't help that there was a slit at the bottom of the door, probably to slide food in through, but which was at exactly her eye level when crawling, to entice her by giving her a glimpse of the world beyond.  We attempted to block the door with pillows, which were surprisingly heavy, but not heavy enough to keep her from pulling it down.  There was a lock on the door, but worryingly, it was on the outside.  We could easily be locked in here like prisoners.  It was almost as if someone had that exact idea in mind when they installed the doors with holes in the bottom for food...

Eventually, my friend decided to venture out and try to discover the process of ordering food, and he took the baby out so she could see what she had been missing.   After a while, he returned, having ordered the traditional food Kobsa, in both meat and chicken varieties.  He explained that he had been held up by a Saudi man who had come to him while he was ordering, gushed over the baby, and then took her out of his arms, and over to his family in an eating room similar to ours where they all admired her.  Then the man returned the baby to my friend, beaming and happy to have shown his family such a cute baby.  "What could I do?"  He said.  "He spoke no English, and we couldn't communicate, and he just sort of took her right out of my arms.  It happened so quickly, what could you do?"  In America, this sort of thing might get you arrested, but here, it's fairly normal.  Saudi's love children, they think nothing of showing affection to strangers children, especially blond ones with blue eyes.

Traditional Kobsa dishes.....
 and some other foods I don't remember the names of

Not too much later, our  food arrived, first a soup, and then a plate of different types of Hummus and two salads, a cucumber salad, and an olive salad.  The a plate of porridge with a vegetable sauce, and finally three dishes, each with probably a pound of rice in them and on top half a roasted chicken on one, and what we determined to be lamb meet in the other two.  It was delicious, the meat was juicy and fell right off the bone, and the rice was perfectly spiced.  I thought the porridge dish was okay, but couldn't quit wrap my head around eating oatmeal with something savory.  I liked the hummus and pita bread as well, especially one kind that was red in color.  The challenge was actually eating the food.  I pride myself on being a master of eating with my hands, so i figured eating on the floor should come easily to me, since I don't really have any manners to begin with.  Let me tell you, it's a good thing we were in a private room where I could take off my abaya.  I don't think I could have done it with my sleeves flapping about and sitting on the hem accidentally etc...  It was hard enough just to find a comfortable seating position without it.  I tried sitting with one foot under me and the other on the floor with knee bent, in what I am told is the traditional fashion, but had to switch feet after about 2 minutes and gave up altogether a minute later.  I tried kneeling with both feet under me, I tried sitting cross legged, I tried sitting with my feet to one side, then the other.  Every position I tried, left my mouth dangerously far from the plate, inviting spills and mess.  I think by the end, even the baby had gotten less food on her than I had. 

We gave it our best, but in the end, we still had a lot of rice and about a quarter of a chicken left.  We probably could have all shared just one of the dishes there was so much rice, but the menu said they were single portions.  Unbelievable.  I took the leftovers home and managed to get 8 more meals out of it.  I don't think I'll be wanting any more rice anytime soon.  But I promise to go back, there are some traditional desserts I need to try, and hopefully, this time I'll remember to charge my camera better and take a picture of the cars in cement for you.