14th
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
After a year and a half volunteering in Ethiopia and a further six months signing on at home in the Fens in East Anglia, my bank account needed some love and attention. When I received a call in October offering a tax free teaching job in Saudi Arabia, I only had to think for a few minutes. It definitely wasn’t on my list of places I wanted to visit and I’d told myself I’d ground myself in the UK for a while after being away so much. But it was too good an offer to turn down and fit perfectly with my plans to do a PGCE next year. I could save around ten grand in six months. I suddenly wanted to know everything I could about the Kingdom.
January 3rd, 2011
Me and three other English guys, Mike, Phil and Ed, arrived at Riyadh King Khalid Airport braced for interrogation and a thorough search of our possessions. I had stripped my laptop and external hard drives of anything remotely saucy – even photos of Hamer women from the Omo in Ethiopia. We’d been warned of the long, slow queues and expected the whole process to take hours. The Saudi officials at the arrivals desk were in no hurry, showing each other things on their mobile phones and texting while lazily waving a person through after ten minutes of inaction at the desk. The procedure for everybody was the same: a photo, after which the official would ominously mutter, ‘handsome man’ or ‘don’t worry’, and also scans of fingers and thumbs – the Saudis obviously like to keep tabs on their guests. There was confusion while I was at the desk, other officials came to peer at my passport and the computer screen. I had my photo taken about ten times. I tried not to look agitated while the growing queue of perturbed Saudis bore holes in me and protested to the officials. Apparently it was a technical hitch and nothing to do with me, my face or my fingers. So where were the hard drive checks? We had all dumped hundreds of hours of entertainment and personal photos. They didn’t even ask to see what was in our hand luggage – we could have brought any sort of offensive literature into the country. A Daily Mail newspaper, for example. So we were here, trouble-free, in Saudi Arabia.
For the first month we will be living in Baron Palace, a hotel of self catering apartments, after which we can either stay there or find another place, perhaps cheaper and closer to the university. The Baron, while no palace, is decent (see photo). I’m sharing an apartment with Phil. We’ve been told the Baron is in a good area, by which people mean there are a lot of shops and restaurants nearby. We couldn’t dispute that, on our first venture onto the streets after arriving we found KFC, Debenhams, H&M, TGI Friday’s, Starbucks, HSBC (called SABB here), McDonald’s, Burger King… . . etc. etc. Even a huge Toys R Us, which looked like the back end of a spaceship. Glass, concrete, metal and neon line all the roads here - only the more residential areas (family mansions like giant sandcastles) and there are no pavements whatsoever. It’s like the worst kind of American suburban shopping sprawl. The KFC shone like a beacon of familiarity from the other side of crossroads, literally thirty metres away but separating us from it was a confusion of construction lanes and speeding highway. We walked along on our side to find a crossing or just a break in the barriers and orange netting. It didn’t come - we would have to have leapt over several lanes to get to the other side. We gave up in disbelief and settled for the next best thing, an empty KFC substitute called Texas Chicken. More importantly, it was on our side.
