How the Other Half Lives

This weekend we were invited to visit the Oasis compound.  Compounds are like gated communities for expats.  And by gated, I mean, gated, walled, barbed wired, armed guarded communities. You might say that is being a little paranoid, but this particular compound was attacked by terrorists in 2004 who killed about 27 people.  Since then they have added an extra layer of walls with electrified fences and a ton of other safety measures including face recognition software and big brother cameras everywhere.

So we got picked up from our regular Friday night shopping trip bus stop at the supermarket by a couple of American guys who are here working on contracts and staying in the villas on the compound.  We drove through three separate gate checks before we were officially on the compound, but even after the first gate, I could feel the difference.  There was so much greenery everywhere for one thing.  The other is the architecture of the apartments and "villas" looked like some thought had actually gone into planning the place.  The streets were laid out in typical suburban style with date palms lining the sidewalks.  We parked right in front of the villa they shared between five guys.  We walked into the entryway, which was the size of two of my bathrooms, and then into a living room dining room that was bigger than my whole apartment.  there was a second living room, just for the TV, a kitchen (with a dishwasher!) and then a completely separate laundry room that was bigger than my kitchen/living room.  There was even a room just for the maid with it's own private bathroom!  (They didn't actually have a live in maid, but they could have...)  There was also a back yard porch area with a grill and lawn chairs and everything, even though at the moment it is too hot, even at midnight to hang out out there.

Gemma and I were stunned.  We probably looked like idiots standing there with our jaws hanging open.  They all just sat back and watched us like we were crazy while we oohed and ahhed over the simplest things, like a toaster and coffee maker, an oven, the fact that there was more than one electrical outlet in the kitchen, and that they had real chairs instead of stools, the fact that the ceilings were a good 10 maybe even 15 feet high, all the ways this place was just superior in every way to where we were staying.  Then they dropped the bombshell.  This was just the first floor and there were two more stories of this paradise.  It took us over a half an hour to get the whole grand tour of the place, it was that big.  One guy had a hallway of closets longer than my bedroom and living room combined leading up to his bathroom.   Another guy had 2 TVs, and all of them had their own bathroom (with bathtubs!).  It was all so overwhelming.  I felt like we had been dropped right into upper middle class America.

And just to solidify the impression, we were offered a glass of wine.  This may not seem like much, but you have to remember that Saudi is an alcohol free country.  So to give us this glass of wine, grape juice, sugar and yeast had to sit around for three months in water jugs, then be bottled and sealed up for another little while before it made it into our mouths.  They called it "Shower Wine" because they used the maid's spare bathroom shower to store all of the water jugs while they were brewing the wine.  The wine was impressively good for having been made in a shower.  With an actual fancy wine glass in hand, we had now become fully immersed in little America.

And Gemma and I would have been more than content with just that, but wait, there's more.  This compound has not one, not two, but three swimming pools.  Of course, we had to go swimming, so the boys took us over to the fitness area, which was less than five minutes away, and the best part was, we didn't have to wear our Abayas!  We passed through a really long fancy looking dining area and then down some stairs to peek into an indoor tennis court.  Actually, two indoor tennis courts next to each other.  Then we went down another flight of stairs to an ice-skating rink.  Can you believe it?  In Saudi, an ice-skating rink?  How much refrigeration equipment do you think it takes to keep ice frozen in year round temperatures of 85-120 degrees fahrenheit? There was also a whole gym with cardio equipment and weights and basically any exercise stuff you could think of.  Finally, we went back up a level to the olympic size swimming pool.  It was crazy.  There was a diving board, and a ceiling that had to be three stories above us.  Suspended from the ceiling were bunches of large fiberglass dolphins, usually in families of three.  I counted at least 27 dolphins, but there may have been more.

And the best part of all of this?  We were the only people there.  There was absolutely no one around.  I couldn't believe that more people weren't spending their Friday night swimming in a pool.  If we lived in a place with a pool, I would be going swimming every day.  No, twice a day.  You would have to drag me out of the pool kicking and screaming. Nowhere on earth has swimming ever been more on my mind than here, where the heat and the dust constantly make you dream of water.  We swam until 10pm, when the pool officially closes, but there was no one there to kick us out, so we could have gone on swimming forever if it weren't for the fact that we were hungry.

We went back to their villa, and they were kind enough to offer us the use of their showers to rinse the chlorine off.  They even let us use their towels!  I was happy to have a shower, but I was ecstatic when I discovered the water did not taste salty.  For the first time in three months, I was bathing in fresh water!   Just when I thought nothing could top that, they offered to wash and dry our bathing suits for us right then and there.  They had a washing machine and a dryer!  I can't believe how lucky they are!  They can't believe how easily impressed we are.

So we made our way to the restaurant for a buffet.  The restaurant was large, and because it was one of the only places in Dammam where women were allowed to smoke shisha, the place was full of women.  It was oddly decorated in a weird combination of traditional Arabic designs and patterns crossed with neon colors and high tech tables lit with rotating colored lights.  So when we sat down our table went from blue to green to red and back before we had even decided who would sit where.  This was cool at first, but got to be somewhat distracting when we were trying to eat. There were a lot of Philipino and Indian staff waiting at every turn to be helpful.  One woman followed me around the buffet, and at first I thought she was following me because I wasn't in thier face recognition software so she was worried i was a terrorist or something.  I did my best to pretend I didn't notice she was there.  I focused instead on the many kinds of meat and hummus and salad, and only after I had already filled my plate did I notice that they had a chef making fajitas and another chef making mongolian noodles.  The woman who had been following noticed my plate was now full, and insisted on carrying it back to my table for me, while the chefs insisted on cooking me up some fajitas and noodles.  I told them what I wanted added to each dish, and then they sent me away.   I thought that was weird, but maybe I hadn't used the secret code word or something and chef-made dishes were only for people who actually lived here, but after a few minutes, someone dropped off both dishes to our table.  Every time I started to get up to get something, water, more juice, knapkins, someone was right there to get it for us.  They were so attentive, I was beginning to wonder if they would even go to the bathroom for me.

The food was just as good as the service, but unfortunately, because of Ramadan and all the fasting, I couldn't eat half of what I wanted to eat.  I didn't even have room for dessert even after sitting around for an hour after we had all finished eating so we could smoke shisha.  Normally when we smoke shisha, we get one or two shishas for the whole group.  But here, shisha automatically comes with the buffet, so we each got our very own.  And they had some unusual flavors too.  I got watermelon, which was pretty great, but not quite as good as grape mint.  Gemma got grape cherry, which I thought tasted like feet, but which one of the guys insisted tasted like lifesavers.  By the time we had finished it was nearly 2am, and I didn't ever want to leave.

Lucky for us, the guys offered to let us stay the night on one of the four couches in their two living rooms.  Sadly, those couches were ten times more comfortable than my own bed.  I had probably the best night's sleep I have had since arriving on that couch.  I'd like to attribute all of that to the softness of the cushions, but at least some of it was the shower wine, and the rest had to have been just knowing I was free of all the Saudi restraints so long as I was tucked up inside this amazing Oasis Compound.

In the morning, they offered to make us breakfast, and who would turn down eggs served up Mexican style by our very own in house chef?  After breakfast, I asked reluctantly asked about getting a taxi, but the guys insisted we should stay since we hadn't experienced all there was to do on the compound.  Even though it was the weekend, some of the guys still had to work, but a few of them were off, so they took us to the bowling alley.  That's right, the bowling alley.  We went to another part of the compound, which was also somehow only 5 minutes away (how is everything so centrally located to their villa?)  The bowling alley was attached to a pool hall with six pool tables and an arcade area.  The best part?  It's all free!  The arcade games don't take coins, the bowling is free, the pool is free, it's all free!  I have no idea how they can afford to pay the indian man with a suit and bowtie who took our food orders and brought us drinks when we don't have to pay for any of the activities.  I want to make this perfectly clear, it wasn't free because the guys were nice enough to pay for us (even thought they were nice enough to pay for dinner the night before).  There was no need because the activities were all free.  Completely free!

We played two games, and I lost both times, but I really didn't care.  After we finished we decided to waste a few hours in the arcade.  I played pinball and packman and some weird virtual sword slashing game that didn't really recognize arm movements.  Then I played a basketball shooting game and I managed to get 61 points in 40 seconds!  I beat Gemma, but was outdone by one of the guys who managed to get 85.  Believe me, I spent at least a half hour trying to beat his score.  My arms got tired before I came close.  I've never been that into video games, but Gemma is, so while she played every game to her hearts content, I wondered next door to the indoor soccer field.  I had only worn flipflops, but the soccer ball was made out of tennis ball material so we decided it would be okay to play barefoot, so we did some one on one for a while, and then slowly a few more of the guys joined us and we kicked the ball around for a while. I really hit my toe hard on something at some point, maybe the ball, maybe somebodies shin, I can't remember, but it has a nice purplish tint to it now.  I also started to get a blister on the ball of my foot after a while, so I called it quits. Sadly, that little bit of swimming and soccer and shooting hoops was probably the most activity I've been able to do since arriving in Saudi!

 It took a little longer to pull Gemma away from her games, but eventually we managed it.  The crazy part was, with all this free stuff to do, we only ever saw one other person come in that whole time.  What is going on?  How can all these great features be free, and no one takes advantage of them.  I can only suspect that most of the people are away at the moment for the Ramadan and Eid Holidays and it will be busy again in August.

Somehow we managed to waste that entire day.  When we left the arcade I was surprised to find it was already dark.  In fact, it was nearly ten o'clock.  The guys offered to drop us off at the mall, our pick up point for the bus back to our crappy lives.  Before we left though, they let us raid the maids bedroom, which they had been using to store all the stuff they didn't want.  I got an awesome rice cooker, a can opener, some measuring cups and a tupperware container.  Gemma got a pan, a cheese grater, an alarm clock and a vegetable steamer.  We made out like bandits.  The hardest thing was putting on our abayas to leave.  They don't weigh that much, but when I slipped it onto my shoulders they felt instantly heavy.  There is no way we can ever repay these guys for that beautiful escape from reality.

But as we drove back out of the three gates, and nearly died in several completely normal near misses in our drive back to the mall I started thinking about how bored the guys are living there in their expat bubble.  I thought about how little they knew of life outside of the compound walls and beyond their office. For them, there is no amazing great escape from Saudi for a weekend.  For them, it is all the time.  So, there is nothing to look forward to but leaving.  It got me thinking that I'm glad I live in such a crappy apartment.  I'm glad I get to experience both worlds, so that I can appreciate both what I have, and what they have.  Maybe someday we will take them to see our pool, our teenage mutant ninja turtle green cesspool that is. Somehow, I don't think that is the best way to express our gratitude.  Still, we got to see how the other half lives.... maybe they would like the same chance?

McDonalds

So, I never did get my iqama or my passport.  Apparently, the government limits how many iqamas they issue of each nationality to each company.  Guess whose company has already exceeded their quota on Americans for this time period?   So, on the last day before my two week vacation to nowhere, the official status of my passport/iqama according to the company is that the government still has it and they have not heard back from the government about whether or not they will grant me an iqama.  According to the saudi government website "visa inquiry" page, they either have no record of me at all, or it has already expired.  When I brought this to the companies attention, the representative mumbled something about possibly having to send me back and start the process all over again with a brand new visa, but he wouldn't explain why that would be necessary or whether he meant back to Riyadh, or back to the US.  He just said we should wait to hear back from the government before any big decisions were made.  If I hadn't already lost most of my hair to the dodgy water here, I would be tearing it out in frustration over dealing with this company.

In the meantime, I've resigned myself to a staycation, here in the lovely area 91 of Dammam.  Luckily, even though there are only 5 of us in the whole apartment building right now, they are still providing a bus for shopping trips.  So, like every Friday, we headed off to the Cornish to wonder around supermarkets and risk our lives crossing the street to walk along a somewhat smelly boardwalk, and sit around playing cards on the few hundred feet of surprisingly green grass planted between a horseshoe of America's most beloved chain restaurants.  Instead of looking up at the stars, we can lay back and gaze at the neon glow of Chilis, Taco Bell, TGIF, Starbucks, Red Lobster, and McDonalds.

Playing rummy at the Khobar Cornish

We have gotten into the habit now of playing Rummy, and the pockets I sewed into my abaya happen to be the perfect size for a deck of cards.  I bring them everywhere with me, and they have come in surprisingly handy.  I won the first four games we played, but have subsequently lost every game since.  Beginners luck I guess.  But it is still fun, and we are so limited on fun here, so we take what we can get.

After a few games, we were pretty hot.  Even at 10pm, the temperature is still around 38 celcius and add to that humidity, and the abaya, it can get pretty uncomfortable.  So when someone suggested a trip to McDonalds for an ice-cream, I was all for it.  It would be my first trip to McDonalds since arriving, and seeing as how I was on vacation, I figured I might as well spend the time exploring places I had never been before.  We walked across the grass and the parking lot, and came up on it from the rear, meaning we had to walk through the drive through to the other side of the building.  We were hot and tired and a little nervous we might be run over by a car racing around the corner into the drive-thru without looking (a very real possibility) so we just went in the first door we came to without really thinking about it.  Instantly, the room froze.  I felt about 20 pairs of eyeballs all shift to us.  At first, I couldn't figure out what the problem was.  My first thought was that it was prayer and they were closed, but no, then there would be no one in the room instead of a few dozen men staring us down.  Then it hit me, we had entered into the men's side, instead of the family seating.  I guess because McDonalds is so western, and because it isn't a proper restaurant, my mind sort of forgot to think about looking for the right entrance.  As soon as I realized our mistake, I turned around and headed back outside to walk around the building to the family section.  Gemma walked calmly through the air conditioned men's section to the door on the other side of the room right next to the door for the women's section.  We met up outside in front of the family entrance, and teased each other about our different approaches to the same situation.  I wanted out as quick as possible, so I turned tail and fled, but Gemma felt entitled to a little AC, so she said screw the rules, and let the men stare at her apparently dangerously arousing shapeless black form, with the occasional flash of toe under her abaya.  Scandalous.

Safely on the other side in the family section, there was someone ahead of us at the register, so the guy taking orders on the men's side, leaned across the wall dividing the two sections (but not the counter and kitchen area) to take our order of two ice-cream cones.  Never has a thing tasted so lovely.  We decided to stay and eat them in the air-conditioning, so that we could eat them before they melted outside.  There was no seating in the women's section downstairs.  Instead, there was a staircase that led to the playroom and eating area upstairs.  When we reached the top, my first thought wasn't of a restaurant, but a locker room with rows of showers.  The room was divided into stalls with tables inside, and each stall had a curtain rod and curtain, so that each family or group could pull the curtains closed and have an instant private dining room.  This is necessary so that the women who wear Niqabs (the ninja mask) can take them off to eat without fear of being seen by the men in other families who may also happen to be eating nearby.  At first, it was just weird.  But honestly, I kind of liked it. I know there have been times when I wished I couldn't see the guy across the lobby shoving the BigMac into his mouth and chewing it with his mouth wide open for all to see, or overhear the couple arguing over catsup in the booth behind me.  It was very secluded and intimate, and might have even been peaceful, if it weren't for the screaming kids running around through the narrow passages between shower stall like it was a maze.

After we finished our ice-cream, we went in search of a restroom, but instead found the play area.  It was kind of your typical play area.  There was a two story slide and netting to climb, and even a ball pit, but it was the special editions to the play room that really caught my attention.  This McDonalds had a foosball table, and three, count them, three, playstation consoles set up for two players with the controllers attached at kid height. Gemma and I both said "wow" at the same time, but hers was an excited "I wish they had this when I was a kid / do you think these kids would give me a turn?" kind of wow, whereas mine was more of a "wow: is it really this bad that kids can't even give up their video games long enough to go to McDonalds anymore?, and where are all these kids parents?" kind of wow.  We looked at each other and laughed again at our different reaction to the same situation. We looked for a ball to try to play foosball, but there wasn't one, and it looked like the kids weren't giving up there spots in front of the playstations anytime soon, so we decided to call it a night.

So, it isn't Bahrain.  But I have to say, this McDonalds was still an adventure, and it felt like a trip to a foreign place for me all the same.  Maybe being stuck here and having to explore what's been right in front of me all along won't be such a bad thing after all.

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.