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.

Sophia's Birthday

I obviously don't get British humor.  Twice in the past two weeks, I've jumped in on what I assumed were long running jokes, but which were in fact, not jokes at all.  Or, well, I guess, paradoxically, they are jokes now. Jokes on me.

When we got on the bus to go home one day, some of the male teachers were laughing.  They told one of the my teacher friends that a male friend of theirs was still upset that she had read his aura and told him that his aura was very small.  Well, you know how men are when you tell them anything of theirs is small.  So now, months after the fact, he was still bringing it up from time to time.  She defended herself saying, "It was, it was quite small, that happens you know."  When she said "you know" she happened to look at me and I nodded, simply because that  is what you do when you are conversing with someone and you want to let them know you are listening and have gotten their secret message.  I figured she must have been having a go at the guys by talking about their auras in the first place.  I was sure she wasn't the kind of person to believe in that sort of thing.  One of the male teachers saw me nod and got the wrong idea.  "You can see them too." he said more than asked.  I decided to play along.  "oh, yes," I said, in my most sarcastic tone, "can't you?"  Apparently, the British sarcastic tone is different than the American sarcastic tone, because he clearly thought I was serious.

The other joke actually started the night we went to the beach.  One of the girls, Fozia, was telling a story about her mother, and then one of the boys asked why she said "my mother" because the two girls were sisters and shouldn't it be "our mother"?  I had met these two teachers at separate schools, and I knew they lived in separate apartments, and until then, I had never seen them together.  Though they were both on the shorter side, they looked nothing alike and I was sure they were not sisters. But I also noticed the look they gave each other when the guy had called them out on familial terminology.  I quickly realized what was going on.  They were trying to pull one over on the guys and pretend to be sisters.  The sisters were still both looking at each other blankly, and I figured if no one said anything soon, their cover would be blown, so I jumped in and said, "You know how it is, if it's something you are proud of, you say my mother, but if it's something you don't like about her, you always say her mother.  Just like when parents say "do you know what your son did today?"  He bought it.  It set off a whole other conversation about times we got in trouble as kids.  Crisis averted.  I gave the "sisters" a knowing glance and slight head nod. Later that night we got into stories about how siblings torture each other, and I was amazed at the creativity of these two who earlier hadn't been able to save themselves with quick thinking.  They were telling ridiculous stories, where one would start and the other would finish the story.  I thought they were doing a great job improvising.  They were even making up hairstyles for each other.  "When she was little she had this awful perm done..."  "She used to have this pair of shoes that she bedazzled with all these jewels... you needed sunglasses just to look at them they were so bright and sparkly."  A few times, I thought they had gone overboard inventing stories so crazy the other was sure to deny it and blow their cover.  But they never did.  I was sure they had those guys convinced that they were really sisters.

About a week later, Fozia asked me to help throw a last minute surprise party for the other girl.  We had one of the other teachers take her out to a restaurant and got her key.  Then we blew up balloons and stuck them around the room and had a cake and "crisps" and got everything ready.  Then we tried knocking on all the doors of the other teachers, but because of traffic, they were late getting back and by now it was after 10pm on a work night so most people were asleep.  But we managed to round up five or six of us, and we had a great time yelling surprise (a little late because we were all trying to figure out how to light these candle things and she came in when we all had our backs turned) but it was all very good.  Then the girl had a present for the birthday girl and I thought, oh no, I didn't know! So I hadn't gotten her a present or anything, and by the looks of the other girls standing around empty handed, no one else did either.  When she opened her gift she said, "oh, wow, aren't these the shoes you bought yourself last week?  and isn't this the shirt I picked out for you?"  They both laughed and the other girl said, "yes, I know, I'm the worst sister ever!"  And suddenly, I thought, oh, of course, they are sisters!  No wonder she went through so much effort for her birthday, and had a key to her place, and bought her a present.  Now I felt supremely foolish.  They really had been sisters the whole time, and here I was thinking I was in on a private joke!

To make up for the sort of thrown together last minute birthday party, we all met up to go to a restaurant on the next weekend shopping trip.  The place was on the corniche and it was new and fancy.  Since I still hadn't gotten paid yet, I was a little nervous about going, but I figured I could always just not order anything, and it was better than sitting around waiting for the bus to come back in three hours and take us home from our weekly shopping trip.  So we made our way to the restaurant on foot, and even though it was only about two blocks away, it was over 100 degrees and when you are wearing an abaya and headscarf, it automatically adds about ten degrees, so I was sweating pretty heavily.   It just so happens that while we were walking, one of the guys who had been on the bus to hear my sarcastic comment about aura's was walking with us, and so was the man with the small aura.  You can imagine my horror when they asked me to read his aura and see if it was still small.  Would this joke never end?  So, sweating more than ever now, I looked at him and squinted and stared and finally said simply; "yes".  By the time we arrived at the restaurant, I was pretty much soaked in sweat from the combination of heat and embarrassment.

The Front Entrance to Naia Restaurant

I could tell I was in trouble when the name of the restaurant was lit up in a giant water fountain wall out front. That, and the doorman who ushered us into the lobby with modern art covering the walls while we waited for the elevator to take us up to the top floor.  This place was way out of my league.  I was wearing sweaty pajamas under my abaya, and only had about 40 riyals ($10) to my name at this point, to last me until whenever they decided to pay me, so I clearly didn't belong.   When we got to the top floor, the restaurant looked like a strange combination of zoo and strip club.  All of the seats were zebra print, and the chandeliers were covered in black and white feather boas with LED lights that rotated from red to green to blue to yellow and back again.  Even the tables themselves were lit from underneath with rotating colors.  Everything was marble or polished chrome. I kept expecting stripper poles to descend from the ceiling or rise out of the tables, it had that kind of a vibe, minus the music.  There was (as there always is) a separate room for praying in the restaurant, but during prayer times, they turn the muzak off altogether.

Naia Restaurant Decor

There was a waiter or bus boy standing around about every 20 feet, just in case anyone needed another napkin or dropped a fork.  The didn't have traditional menus.  Instead they had iPads, and you could just scroll through the menu and select anything you wanted.  There were actually three different menus, a Chinese menu, a Lebanese menu, and a Sushi menu, plus all your standard American fare.  There were about six pages of appetizer options and another half dozen or so pages of just drinks.  Which is surprising when you stop to think that alcohol is illegal.  Saudi's may not be able to drink liquor, but they sure have excelled in inventing creative ways to drink just about everything else.  For example; avocado and watermelon juice (those aren't two separate juices by the way, that's a favorite blend).  As you can imagine, ordering took a while.

Happy Birthday to Sophia!

When the food came, it was beautiful.  It was probably the prettiest looking food I have ever seen.  I hadn't ordered anything myself, so this part of the evening was sheer torture.  I watched people eat and eat this amazing food and struggled not to say "are you gonna eat that?" when peoples appetites started to wane.  Luckily, Fozia had gotten an ice-cream cake for her sister from Baskin Robbins earlier and the ever helpful waiters brought it out with firework style candles before my scavenger instinct overcame me too greatly, and I was able to satisfy my hunger with chocolate ice cream cake instead. Overall, it was a very pleasant evening, and well worth the mad dash back to the bus so we wouldn't be left behind.  I'm sure Sophia had a marvelous birthday, but I think we all got something of a present out of that day.