Thursday came and and went and despite my phone calls and emails, I hadn't been given the chance to see the college or the accommodations. Now it was the weekend and nothing would be done on the weekend for sure. I definitely didn't want to be stuck in this hotel, nice though it was, the whole weekend with nothing to do, so I made up my mind to go back to Dammam until Tuesday, for the Salt Flats trip.
Booking a train ticket online is not an easy thing to do. The Saudi Railways Organization website is terrible. On the other hand, the Saudi Railways Organization has a website, so.... I guess it is a step in the right direction. Still, given the trouble I had last time with the ticket, I decided I would be better off just going to the station Friday morning and buying the ticket in person. I figured, worse came to worse, if they were sold out, I could just hang out at the train station and get the next train.
I arrived at the station with an almost completely empty bag. I figured I would fill it up on the way back with the rest of my kitchen gear so I could cook at the hotel when I got back. I was getting a little tired of living off the junk food they sold in the little shop next door. I went to the counter, and turns out, there were seats, but only first class seats. I didn't really want to pay the extra 60 Riyals. I just didn't think it was worth it. Especially because I had already paid 60 Riyals to get to the train station in the first place. I asked him again if he could please please check for any second of third class seats. He seemed surprised and confused. After all, I was an American, surely I would be happy to have first class seats, I told him, that no, I couldn't afford the first class seats, and asked if I could wait and see if any second class seats became available. He told me sure, and asked me to leave my passport and the money at the desk, and as soon as a seat became available, he would book it for me. This was a little scary. Since getting my passport back, I have been very very nervous about letting it out of my sight. He assured me everything would be fine, and he would get everything back to me as soon as he could. So I sat down in the ladies waiting section and I kept my eyes on the guy the whole time. He said it might take up to an hour, but less than 20 minutes later he came out and delivered my passport, my money, and my change. Maybe it was just a lucky break, or maybe it was the fact that me staring at him was making him really nervous and he just wanted to get me out of there, but either way, It was really nice of him.
Now, this is my fifth trip on the train, so I'm kind of an old hat at it by now, but for some reason, this time, it wasn't the pleasant four hours of napping I had envisioned. I think it could have been because this was the start of a week long national holiday, so none of the kids were in school, but then again, I had pretty much always traveled on weekends so the kids wouldn't have been in school anyway. Causes aside, on this trip, I somehow managed to choose to sit in the one car that had all the kids in it. I swear the Parents on this train had collectively decided that my car would be the designated drop off car for kids, and they would head off to other cars further along in the train, abandoning this car to the craziness of unattended children.
A word about Saudi parents. Any Saudi's with even a little bit of money usually hire a Filipino nanny/maid or two, which is funny because as a rule, Saudi women do not work, so they are usually at home with the kids. If I wasn't allowed to work, I think I would certainly want to do my own cooking, cleaning, and child caring, just to keep from being bored to tears, but I guess Saudi Women don't really think that way. Anyway, Saudi's are generally not strict with their children and are particularly tolerant of crazy behavior in public. Example; in shopping malls, it isn't unusual for children to be rollerblading, riding scooters, or just running around chasing each other, often knocking into any innocent shoppers who happen to be in their way. Parents don't tell the children not to run, or that screaming indoors is probably not the best idea. In a way, I guess I can understand this. A combination of the heat and the culture means that kids don't really have anywhere to go to play. There are no neighborhood soccer games, and only a few places have parks they can go to at night when it is cool. So, the malls are the playground for most kids. It's the only time they get to be out of their houses. Still, a little restraint might be nice. Even in the homes, the kids don't learn discipline. Largely because the Filipino nannies aren't allowed to discipline the kids, only the parents are. But the parents aren't usually around, so, you end up with a lot of really spoiled kids with no discipline.
I started off sitting next to a woman with a baby, and a two or three year old. In front of me were four children, all under the age of 12. I couldn't really gage if there were parents with them or not. There were some adults in the train car with me. But most of them were filipinos who were either not connected to the families in any way, or who were paid to be nanny's but unable to discipline the children in any way. Over the course of the train ride, the ratio of adults to children seemed to be shifting. More and more adults casually left this car, while children seemed to be flocking to it. There was a strange sort of tag game taking place in the aisle, which started with 2 children, but now had at least 7 playing more or less regularly. The mother and her baby had disappeared, leaving me with the two or three year old. She was fascinated by everything I did, which consisted chiefly of reading and trying to sleep, neither of which was very successful given all the noise. Sometimes she crawled across me to try to see out the window. Other times she would go to sit in the seat behind me, which hopefully, was where her mother had disappeared to. Once she crawled under my seat to get back to our seats, but ended up crawling into my abaya between my legs instead. She thought it was a hilariously fun trick, and spent the next ten minutes playing hide and seek with me using my abaya.
The screaming and crying reached a crescendo about 2 hours into the trip and then begun to die down until by the third hour, it was only occasional. Of course 3 hours in is when we reached our first big station, and the combination of the train stopping and people getting off and on again, well, that set them off again, and there was more screaming and crying. All in all, it was the longest four hours I have ever spent on a train. Even so, it was worth it to be back in Dammam again.
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