Three Arabian Nights

My next door neighbor in our apartment complex and fellow teacher is the force behind all my interactions with Saudi culture outside the classroom so far.  She has been in Saudi for over three years (mostly in Riyadh) and so she knows the ins and outs of the secret life of co-ed activities.  She is the reason we have been able to go to the beach houses and date farms, and in general, mix with Saudi men.  Until now, we have always been in the company of more or less the same group of guys, give or take a few friends and cousins who randomly show up.  This weekend, because it is right before Ramadan, and because she is leaving soon on her annual vacation, we spent the last three nights with a different group of her friends each night.  It was a crash course in the many very different kinds of underground life possible in Saudi.

Lobby of the Meridian

The first night, we met up with two guys who work at Aramco.  They had planned to rent a small villa, but unfortunately, there was no vacancy.  Apparently, it is crowded and busy because everyone is trying to get out for one last hurrah before Ramadan.  Instead they took us to a 5 star hotel called the Meridian, which has a coffee shop with family seating.  Even though there are many coffee shops all around, and a few who even have family seating, it is generally frowned upon for men and women to sit together at these coffee shops unless they are related.  At fancy hotels, it's a little more acceptable because for one thing, they cater to foreigners, and for another, it isn't crowded, so you are a lot less likely to be seen by someone who may know you and tell your family that they saw you with a woman.  So we went to the coffee shop inside this fancy hotel.  When you walk into the lobby, the first thing you see is a large pillar with water cascading down the sides into a small pool.  On the wall above it are three giant portraits. The top portrait is of the first King of Saudi Arabia.  The bottom right is the current King, and the bottom left is the man in line to be the King when the current King dies.  In Saudi, the line of succession passes through the brothers before it moves to the son or other relatives.  Unfortunately, the last two people named to succeed the King have both happened to die before the King himself, so that third picture must need to be changed a lot. It's very important that a successor is named in advance, since there are over 2,000 direct descendants, and something like 15,000 other relatives.  The first King, being very politically astute, understood that to unite all of the many tribes into one united country, he had better marry into as many of them as he could.  As you can imagine, with so many wives, he had quite a few kids, who all also had a number of wives and kids of their own.  Imagine trying to sort out that family tree...

Desserts of Art

But back to our night out... so we sat down and the guys ordered us all water and tea.  They asked if we would like any sweets, and we all declined.  Fozia is still on her diet, and Gemma and I had just eaten.  One of the guys disappeared for a while to go outside and have a cigarette, but secretly ordered some desserts for us anyway on the way out.  So we had three desserts that looked more like works of art than food, along with a tray of fruit.  I felt awkward, as I always do in extremely expensive settings.  I'm always afraid I will break something, or use the wrong fork, or otherwise reveal myself to be an imposter.    I suppose in this case, I needn't have been so worried.  We were seated next to a bookshelf with a sculpture of a Roman horse head on top, and to distract myself from eating more dessert, I grabbed one of the books off the shelf titled Furniture thinking it might be a picture book of fancy furniture through the ages.  Imagine my surprise when the book weighed almost nothing.  Turns out, it was a label and not a title.  This was actually a piece of furniture;  a styrofoam replica of a book, used as decor to make us feel sophisticated.  There were other fake titles on the shelf, including: Special Living, The book, Literature, More Stories, and simply, The book.  If I had read the titles more closely to begin with, I probably could have seen that coming.  When we finished our tea and most of the desserts, we took a quick tour of the hotel to look at some of the artwork before leaving.  On one side of the hallway of conference rooms were oil paintings of typical Arabic style rooms.  On the opposite side of the hallway were abstract painting.  If you faced one wall, you could have been in New York's MoMA.  If you turned around, you were back in Saudi. If you looked straight down the hallway and saw both sides at once, you felt a little bipolar, not exactly sure where you were...  It's a feeling I would have often in the next couple of nights.

The next night, we were out with a different set of guys.  Fozia met these guys when she was out walking one day and suddenly got a bad headache.  She needed to sit down, so she made her way to the nearest coffee shop, but it was very busy and there were no tables free so she asked to borrow a free chair from a table of guys by the door, and pulled the chair off to the side.  They could see she was not well, and offered her water and headache medicine, and eventually, their phone number.  These guys had their own apartment, and had invited us to a house party at their place.  When we arrived, we were ushered into an empty living room decorated in black, gray, red and white.  Everything was angular and modern, except for a very victorian looking chandelier.  There were hooks on the walls for our abayas and head scarves, and once we had de-robbed, we were invited into an inner room.  The door to this room was covered in the egg-carton shaped foam you see in recording studios as a sound absorption barrier.  As soon as they opened the door, I understood why. A wall of sound hit us and we were suddenly in a living room / night club.  Everything in this room was black and white.  There was a black and white picture of Charlie Chaplin on one wall, a black and white of the London Underground at Piccadilly on the other, and a series of overlapping silver squares of various sizes on the third wall.  White leather couches lined three of the walls leaving the large area in the middle open for dancing.  The forth wall was actually a winding staircase to the upstairs, and a small corner for the DJ.  A projector was mounted underneath the stairs and cast multicolored shapes and lights on the whole room in flashing patterns that matched the music.

When we first arrived, there was only one other girl present.  She was sitting on the couch smoking shisha.  She had short hair and an even shorter skirt, and we wondered if she could possibly be Saudi.  She didn't seem friendly enough to approach, so instead we sat down on the opposite couch and helped ourselves to some of the snacks and sodas laid out on the table.  There were guys coming and going between the kitchen and the outer living room, and soon there were also more girls arriving, each one wearing something more scandalous than the last.  One girl even had a large tattoo of a peacock on her thigh. Earlier, when I was getting dressed for our adventure,  I had felt pretty daring for decided to wear jeans (pants!) and a t-shirt (showing my arms!).  Now I felt severely underdressed, or to be technical, overdressed.  I probably would have blended in better had I decide to strip down my underwear and bra. I asked the guys who had brought us to introduce us to some of the people, so that it wouldn't be so awkward just sitting around, but turns out, they only knew one of the guys themselves, and that guy had gone out to get more snacks.  So we did the only thing we could do in a room with music so loud you couldn't hear yourself think.  We got up and danced.

I'm not sure exactly how much time went by, but I would say about 3 remix compilations of this years greatest hits later, the dance floor was full.  The girl with the peacock tattoo (which turned out to be airbrushed) was showing me how to dance to Arabic music, and I was failing miserably, which was highly entertaining for them.  Then Fozia requested the Wobble Baby song, which is some new version of the Electric Slide or the Macarena, and we taught the Saudis how to dance it, which was highly entertaining for us.  At some point during all of this dancing, someone brought out balloons filled with helium, and someone else brought in "libations".    I had been too busy dancing to notice until one of the guys asked if I wanted something to drink, and I said yes please, some water, since I had been dancing all night and was very thirsty.  He said, that's it?  and I explained that I really didn't like soda or energy drinks, which is all I had seen on the table earlier.  He told me there was juice he could mix it with in the kitchen, and that's when I started to get the hint that perhaps he wasn't asking me if I wanted a drink, so much as he was asking me if I wanted a "drink".  I was shocked and politely declined.  I figured It was enough that I was already breaking Saudi law just by being in this room in mixed company with music playing.

At about two in the morning, I had had about as much as I could handle of dancing in the smoke-filled "club", so I went out to the outer living room with Gemma and Fozia, and we took a timeout on the couches.  I was half asleep when we were joined by some of the guys who tried with various degrees of success to talk to us in English.  Shortly after them, a very drunk Saudi girl stumbled into the room.  There was a series of attempts to get her into her Abaya, and presumably home, but each time she started to leave, she would turn back to give everyone, (including us) a big hug before leaving.  When she was hugging me goodbye for the second time, she told me that she loved me and that I was her best friend.  I recalled dancing next to her at one point in the night, but don't think we had ever spoken before this moment.  Eventually, they successfully escorted her outside and into a waiting car.  I have no idea who she was, or if she was Saudi, and if she was, how it was possible for her to be out so late, and what would happen to her if or when she arrived home drunk or hungover.  Not long after she left, three new girls arrived. I would have put money on the fact that it wasn't possible for anyone to dress more scandalously than what I had seen earlier, but these girls guaranteed that I would have lost that bet.  Gemma made the suggestion that perhaps these women were not Saudi's after all, but "professionals" from neighboring middle eastern countries.  We didn't stick around to find out.  The guys we came with drove us home, and when I woke up the next morning / early afternoon, I was halfway convinced the whole thing had been a dream until I got a whiff of my smoke filled hair.  I am seeing both sides of the country now, and finding it hard not to feel conflicted.

Before I had fully recovered from last night (I'm getting too old for staying up so late) we were on our third night of adventure.  This time we were meeting up with a couple of medical students.  At least we thought we were.  The second guy who was going to meet us was on call, and got called into the emergency room at the last minute, so he couldn't come.  Instead, Geema and Fozia and I drove around the city.  Fozia wanted to smoke a cigarette, but had lost her lighter at some point last night and didn't have one.  Thankfully, the doctor who was driving didn't smoke and so didn't have a lighter.  But he didn't want to let Fozia down, so while we were driving along slowly in a traffic jam at 10pm, he called out to the man in the car next to him and asked for a lighter.  The man was police officer, and I was nervous.  We were three women, clearly foreigners in a car with a man.  Luckily, the policeman didn't seem to notice (thank you tinted windows!).  He didn't have a lighter, but offered his car cigarette lighter instead.  So our driver got out of his car, borrowed the car lighter so Fozia could light her cigarette, drove a little ways down the road to catch up to the slow moving traffic, then stopped again and ran back to the policeman he had borrowed it from and returned the lighter.  Impressive.

Eventually, we drove to the cornish.  He baught us tea to go from a coffee shop, and we drove to the waters edge, and parked so we could drink it while walking up and down the Cornish which was like a boardwalk area.  We had to be fully covered here to avoid suspicion.  While we were looking out over the water, we saw some men with flashlights and buckets crawling along the edge of the rocks.  We called out to him to see what he was doing and he came up to show us all the little crabs he was catching.  He said that they use them as bait for bigger fish when they take their boat out into the sea.  He must have collected about 3 dozen already, but he headed back down on the beach for more.

We stood around for a little while, sipping out tea and watching the Saudi families with their children.  Some kicking the soccer balls in the small strip of grass separating the boardwalk from the highway, others pushing strollers or bikes.  We had a deck of cards, and so Fozia suggested that we play some card games.  He got a blanket rug out of the trunk of his car and spread it in the grass.  We sat facing away from the road with our heads covered so it would be hard to tell we weren't Saudi women, and hoped no one would question why one guy would have three girls with him.  We started out trying to play "Bull Sh#T", the game where you try to see if someone is lying about the cards they are putting down.  His English wasn't the greatest, and he had a hard time understanding the rules, and was confused about why we were all calling each other liars.  So then we switched to Spoons, which seemed like an easier game to understand.  Only, after I started to explain the game, I realized we didn't have any spoons.  I was looking around for rocks or twigs we could use instead when I noticed that he had three cell phones.  Most Saudi's have more than one phone, but three seemed a bit excessive until this moment.  When it turned out to be perfect.  So we played spoons using cell phones, and it was a lot of fun. But we all had our eyes out for Mutaween the whole time.  Strangely, even though we weren't doing anything but playing card games, I was more nervous than I had been during the previous night's debauchery, simply because we were doing it out in the open rather than hiding behind private walls.

Three nights, three very different experiences, all of them pretty normal anywhere else in the world, but so strange here.  Sometimes I get the impression that the whole country is hiding underneath a giant abaya.  So long as on the surface everything seems proper and appropriate, it doesn't seem to matter what's happening underneath.