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Saudi Newspaper Notes: Fatwa Edition

Rules can be problematic. No sooner have you made one than some loophole appears that you never thought of. A technicality. A weird application. A four-year-old. Consider, for example, something as simple as "No cookies before dinner." Aha! You didn't say WHICH dinner. I ate dinner yesterday. Gimme a cookie.

This is a persistent problem in religion. People like rules. It's easier to know where you stand when there are rules. But no sooner does a set of principles harden into rules than the weird applications and technicalities start to crop up. Modern situations and cross-cultural interactions come up against rules that have made sense for generations, and the collision produces some absurd questions. Is a caribou kosher? Can an Amish ride in a car he's not driving? Should Mormons drink Coke? Can a Buddhist use disinfectant wipes?

No religion is immune, and the more detailed the rules are, the more miniscule the questions, and the sillier they look to outsiders. Examples from Orthodox Judaism get trotted out a lot. I imagine newspapers in Tel Aviv frequently carry stories about how one orthodox group or another has addressed a technology-based question about what constitutes "work" on the Sabbath.

In Saudi Arabia, what we hear about are fatwas.

In the West, we associate "fatwa" with "battle cry." We hear of some imam or another "issuing a fatwa against..." fill-in-the-blank. Usually a person or group of people. But that phrasing gets us confused about what a fatwa is. Basically, it's an Islamic legal opinion. A qualified Islamic scholar studies an issue, the Islamic law and principle that applies, and offers an official opinion--a fatwa--on how he (and he alone--Islam is not hierarchical so opinions are not binding) thinks an observant Muslim should deal with the question.

And there are a lot of questions. The model for a Muslim life is Mohammed's, and given that Mohammed lived 1500 years ago, in the desert, there tend to be a lot of questions these days that can't be answered by any ol' amateur just reading the standard canon. As a token of respect, for example, many feel the Qur'an  should not be taken into the bathroom. Call it the George Costanza/Barnes & Noble rule. But now we carry books in our phones, including the Qur'an. Am I doing wrong if I take my phone into the bathroom?

Thorny, eh? The conclusion (of the scholar who was asked the question) was no. The reasoning was that Muslims memorize the Qur'an as well, and therefore carry it with them, internalized, all the time, in the same way the data is internalized to the phone. Go in with your brain, go in with the phone. (But while you're in there, could you quit spraying water all over the room?) That conclusion would be referred to as a fatwa. I like titles, so I call it the Potty Fatwa.

I've been seeing a lot of fatwas in the news here lately. If you're curious, you can keep yourself abreast of some of the latest reasoning and conclusions at fatwa-online.com. Most of the fatwas you see there are thoughtful and practical ways to make an individual life more holy, and therefore aren't even slightly newsworthy. And since it's always more fun to talk about what other people are talking about, I'll leave them alone as well. Conversation clusters around the sensational, so let's join in!

First,what I will call the Infidel Infant Fatwa. Full disclosure: This isn't actually a fatwa. This is not an opinion about what one should do, but a straight-up public law decreeing what you must do. The thing is, though, that law in Saudi Arabia is based on religious edict, so the lines get blurred. And it lends itself to such a nice title, don't you think?
This past week the Interior Ministry published a list of 50 given names that may not be given to Saudi children. The list includes names that are affiliated with royalty (e.g., Highness, King, Queen), are blasphemous in some way or another (e.g., Messenger, Prophet), or are foreign. Coincidentally, a number of the banned names are commonly used among the minority Shi'ite Muslims. What a coinkydink.

As for the foreign ones, though, you see where this is headed, right? If I can't name my girl Alice (true), what about Alicia? If not Elaine (true), what about Elena? Let the rule-twisting begin! Linda, Sandy, and Lauren are on the list, too. But that's all. Just those. Which seems like a miss, because there's a boatload of names out there that do a WAY bigger job of tying you to a non-Muslim group. SallyJo, BettySue, and JoEllen, for example, are far more likely to turn up in a congregation breathing fire against Muslims than Lauren is.

So I can't explain the logic of what makes the list, but I can certainly understand the logic of having one. Who, on seeing the jaw-dropping list of baby names given at Madison Memorial Hospital in Idaho, doesn't think "There ought to be a law against this"? (Decide for yourself. I'm especially fond of this blog categorizing the 2010 batch.)


If you're curious, here's the Gulf News article, with the complete list of 50 names.


Next, I offer the Don't-Boldly-Go Fatwa. Sorry, kids. All you aspiring astronauts and space-camp nuts. According to a fatwa issued by the General Authority of Islamic Affairs and Endowment in the U.A.E., a trip to Mars is prohibited. Relevant parts of the fatwa say that "Such a one-way journey poses a real risk to life, and that can never be justified in Islam. There is a possibility that an individual who travels to Mars may not be able to remain alive there, and is more vulnerable to death." Both of those.

Dying in such a mission would net you the same punishment due to those who commit suicide. This was important to clarify, because the council was concerned about Muslims who might want to make the trip to escape divine punishment or avoid having to stand before Allah in judgment. Well, gosh, councilmen, if you're worried about people having those ideas, it would seem that BOTH Islamic and scientific education needed to be cranked up a notch around here.

Don't believe me? Check the Arab News article here.

Finally, my favorite, the Chuck-a-Rama Fatwa. This comes from a single Saudi cleric, who declared that all-you-can-eat buffets should be prohibited (see the article here). One should know what one is going to eat, he declared, and how much of it, before making the purchase.
That explanation leaves me more puzzled than I was before he offered it. The Twitter conversation suggested he had the idea that Muslims might end up stealing from the proprietors, or be robbed by receiving less than they paid for. Maybe he's never been to a buffet, which is all it takes to understand the business model: You pay a low price for a large quantity of poor food. The restaurant owner makes a profit, and the customer rolls away stuffed. Win-win!

When I saw the title of the article, I thought the fatwa was going to explain how the Kingdom's obesity epidemic was un-Islamic and call on citizens to make healthy choices. But it sounds as if it had more to do with the fairness of the transaction, drat it.

OR, you could go the American route, which addresses both. My husband and I once went into a buffet restaurant for breakfast while traveling (before Instagram, unfortunately) and I saw a handwritten sign taped to the cash register at the entry: "Gastric bypass patients must show ID to receive a 10% discount."

Go ahead. Think about it. Think about it some more. The layers of wrongness will multiply and fold over each other more and more the longer you go. Have you reached the "That more-is-better mentality is the real disease you need to cure" layer yet? Clearly, we need to be saved from ourselves. Perhaps a fatwa would be a good idea.

Dear Mom (and P.S. Abdullah): Life in a Saudi Arabian Compound

Being back in the U.S. in December and January, among American friends and family, highlighted how far beyond a Westerner's comprehension the idea of living in Saudi Arabia really is. A monarchy? Islamic law? Separate treatment for men and women? Living in a walled compound? To someone who hasn't been here, there's no frame of reference for any of it. Not a lot of sitcoms or movies set in Middle Eastern neighborhoods. So I thought I had some 'splaining to do when I got back. A letter home from camp, so to speak. You know, Dear Mom, here's what compound life is like.

But while I've been living here I've also wondered what the Arabs around us think. Wouldn't you? This is what my compound looks like from the outside, right smack in the middle of a community of homes and apartments and shops and streets:

Foreboding, eh? How would you feel if that was your neighbor? Would you look at yourself and wonder what made people feel as if they needed to separate themselves from you that way? I would.

And then I saw this, by Abdullah Sayel, in the Arab News, which is a major English-language daily in Saudi Arabia:

Dear expat, if you live in a compound with a main gate and a number of villas surrounded by a high fence, then you need to accept the fact that you represent a legend or a human myth. In the next few lines, I will try my best to explain how.

In Saudi society, there is a stereotype about expat compounds and their inhabitants. Many still think that a secret life is run behind these high walls. To many Saudis, you are seen as someone who runs loud parties (especially during Christmas and New Year), crazy entertainment and fancy recreational facilities. All of this, of course, is thought to be taking place behind your compound walls. Is this true or not? This is something that I cannot comfort my fellow citizens about.

Now, what you need to do as an expat living in a fancy compound is easy. If a young Saudi or an Arab colleague asks you about the myths and lives of Hollywood stars, which you might enjoy in real, what would you say? Could this be the truth? Who can deny that this is just a stereotype?
(The link to the original is here, if you want to check me or explore the reader comments.)

Okay, THAT had never crossed my mind. Champagne fountains! Flappers! Feathers! Heathen music! Everybody in the pool! He seems to be picturing something like this:

Oh, man, how I wanted to sit this guy down and say, "Look, I need to explain a few things to you." (Including how puzzling that last paragraph was.) And although the subject would be the same as my letter home from camp, it would be a very different set of things than the ones I explain to my mom. But Abdullah threw down the challenge, didn't he? And I do like a challenge. So, with a lot of brainstorming help from Mr. Wood's English classes at Clearfield High School (hollah!), I'm going for it. My Abdullah-footnoted letter home from camp to Mom, which in a perfect world would help both sides understand each other a little better:

Dear Mom,
How are you? Compound life is fun. Living inside these walls isn't as weird as you think. Turns out everything is behind walls here, so we're not that different.* Every Saudi home is behind high walls and a gate so you can't see the house itself, and the windows are small and covered up.

This is what a Saudi neighborhood street looks like:

Street-level view of a typical Riyadh neighborhood.

*Dear Abdullah, I have to explain about the walls here because western homes don't have them. In fact, we build our homes with the express intent of making them look welcoming to everyone who passes by. We landscape along the front walk or at the door to invite people in. We have big windows. Even in an apartment residents will put a mat that says "Welcome" at the front door. Fences might enclose property behind the house to contain pets or children, but anything in the front is ornamental, and is rarely more than waist high.

And this is what my street looks like:

A residential street inside the compound.

Looks like an Arizona retirement community, don't you think? Front doors and walks are visible, houses face each other, windows are open. We greet neighbors and rap on a door to borrow something or say hello. Kids ride around on bikes and scooters, people go for a walk. Most days, people go to work in the morning, come home, eat dinner, watch some TV, go to bed.*

*Dear Abdullah: Really, that's it.  

We wear western dress inside the compound, so it's very comfortable to be out and around, meeting new people. I'm making lots of new friends.*

*Dear Abdullah: Your families live comfortably in individually walled homes because you ARE at home, with lots of extended family that may not live in the same house, but are spread around nearby. We come here without family, and many foreigners would find it isolating to live in a walled home, without freedom of movement. Even with family nearby, Westerners are big on friends, including neighbors. We depend on them in times of need. We don't have tribes. The network of family, friends and neighbors is the closest thing, and without any family with us here, friends and neighbors become extra important.

We have a restaurant; a gym; tennis, basketball, and racquetball courts; and a market here on the compound. There are also a couple of little hair salons, a playground, and a nice big pool and deck area. It's nice to be able to have recreation and go about routine daily activities independently, without having to cover.*

Compound gym, looking one way. I'm in a committed relationship with the farthest spin bike.

Compound gym, looking the other way, toward a lot of weight equipment long abandoned by exercise professionals. Free weights, at least, don't expire.

Compound market. Refrigerator cases run along the wall to my right, with dairy, meat, juices, and produce. You can get by pretty well on just what's available at the market and the prices are good.

Compound pool, with the restaurant through the arches at the end. (Early March--just now getting back in the pool.)

*Dear Abdullah: In the West, men and women mingle freely and nobody thinks anything of it. Men and women are at ease around each other. Western women find no use in covering in black robes and are more comfortable without them.

Truth be told, I'm probably making more friends, and faster, because of the way we're all packed in here together and can't access the outside world on our own. (You know, with the way the women can't drive.) The compound has a couple of buses that take children to their many different schools and then go out every day to take women shopping. There's a monthly schedule, so you can look and see when the next trip is to IKEA, or a souk you like, or a store you need to go to. The nearest grocery store sends its own bus almost every day to pick us up, take us to the store, and bring us back. The driver drops us at our own doors and helps us carry in the groceries, which is great. However, you have to go right when the bus wants to, and check out according to the schedule, no matter what you have to leave off your list.

*Dear Abdullah: In Western countries women drive, and both men and women tend to errands whenever they need to. If you're printing a document and run out of ink, you jump in the car, go to the office supply store, buy your ink, and come back. If one store doesn't have what you need, you just go to another. If you think of something else while you're out, you change your plans and add that errand to your itinerary. Arranging for drivers or adhering to a bus schedule is considered burdensome.

The silver lining is that the bus is the best place to get to know the other women. You talk about what you found, or give each other tips so that next time you can find what you didn't this time. You can help each other look for things, or pitch in to help somebody who has a shopping emergency (birthday party, feeling unwell, new to Saudi Arabia). Those things wouldn't happen anywhere else.

We also have socials and parties and activities*. The restaurant on our compound puts on a Thursday night buffet (Thursday night is Friday night here) where we make a habit of meeting up with our friends. Some of the women play board games in the afternoons. I like to play badminton, and sometimes women from the shopping bus decide to meet at the restaurant for lunch. We've also started having regular "princess parties" where we dress up in our latest finds from the Princess Souk (aka, the second-Hand souk--you can find the blog post from my first trip here). Here's our gathering from this past week:

The Princess Souk Party Group

*Dear Abdullah: We ate dinner and went home about 10:00. No fountains, nobody in the pool, and if there were any feathers they were already on the Saudi dresses we bought here. Our "crazy entertainment" was conversation and picture taking. I had a Greek salad and some lentil soup. Oh--and a Diet Coke. Sorry to disappoint you.

Well, Mom, that's about it for now. It's Indian night tonight at the restaurant--my favorite. I hope everything is great at home. Write back soon! I'm having lots of great adventures that I'll write about another time.
Love, Margo

A Very Metric Christmas

I've already decided what I want for Christmas next year. I realize MY wish comes at the expense of everybody else, but isn't that the way Christmas works? Dear Santa, please exert yourself and all your elves, and expend significant resources so I can have what I want? So I'm going for it:

I want the U.S. to go on the metric system.

Ow! I'm bracing myself for the kickback. But again, this is all about what I want. And I want it because I now live in The Rest of the World, where the metric system is standard, where I struggle to keep up, and where I'm routinely embarrassed by not knowing how big/hot/heavy something really is.

My beloved, Mr. Calculator-in-His-Head, walks around with the conversion formulas as solidly in place as the names of his children and with the mathematical capacity to do those conversions inside said head. Well, good for you. Not the case in here.

The worst part is the way it kills my opportunity to enjoy something funny.

If I had to convert just the currency, I'd be so much quicker to enjoy the joke of how expensive these cherries are. So let's see...119.95 Saudi rials for a kilogram. A rial is worth $.28, so I customarily divide by four and add a little. 120/4 = 30. That means the cherries are selling for about $34/kg. (You get used to guessing--turns out it's actually $33.60, so I'm pretty pleased with myelf.) Easy!

But we're NOT THERE YET. Now I have to go through the weight conversion to give myself a point of reference against what I'm used to paying at home--something none of my European friends have to do. SO, 1kg = 2.3lb, and 1lb = .45kg. What we're looking at is two different ways of describing a really awkward relationship. Bigger than double, less than double plus a half. And because I have so many Big Ideas in my head that I don't have room for formulas and math, I just function on the idea that a kilogram is a little more than 2 pounds, and that a pound is a little less than half a kilogram. In my world of approximates, $34/kg means $17 for a half kg, but you're paying LESS than $17lb because a half kg is MORE than a pound, right? Or did I just do that backwards? No, so these cherries are selling for about...$16lb? (Less pleased with my guess--turns out it's actually $15.30ish.)

THAT'S SUPER FUNNY! Or it would've been if the punch line hadn't taken ten minutes and a calculator to set up. And they don't even look as if they'll be that sweet. A little bright, don't you think?

Which is not how I feel most days. A recent cold snap in my dear old home of Colorado pushed nighttime lows into the -30F neighborhood. People around here tend to talk about the weather when it gets into the 50s, so you can win any "Yeah, but" conversation when you whip out numbers like that to local folks, whether they're actually Saudi or from India, the Philippines, Thailand, Australia, South Africa, and really most of Europe. But only if you can put it in centigrade! I've been left stupidly silent in a lot of these conversations, itching to impress, but unable to accurately translate the temperature in Colorado to something anybody else can understand.

The latest from my favorite food writer, not yet
published in the U.S. because it'll take a while
to translate it for us backward Americans.

And they shouldn't have to work at it. Our system is stupid, and theirs is logical. Let's review: A pound is 16 ounces, so when the kitchen scale says you've measured out .8 pounds of chocolate, that's not 8 ounces. It's a little shy of 13. A cup of liquid is 8 ounces. A pint's a pound the world around, so 2 cups is a pint, and a quart is 2 pints, but a quart is only a quarter of a gallon, so you need 4 of those to get to 1 gallon. We good? A tablespoon equals 3 teaspoons (3?), but 8 tablespoons equal a cup. A stick of butter is a half a cup, so you have 2 cups of butter in a box that has 4 sticks. DOES ANY OF THIS MAKE SENSE? And I haven't even touched on miles (5,280 feet), yards (3 feet), feet (12 inches), and inches (divided into eighths).

Of course the transition would be hard at first. I know exactly how hard because that's pretty much where I am right now. I have a metric converter on my phone, a website link on my iPad, a sticky note by the oven with temperature conversions, another by the baking goods with units of measurement, and a kitchen scale set to grams. But I expect that my head will come around eventually. I already know that 0c is 32F, so I know what 0 feels like. I know that at 10 I'm wearing a sweater while my beautiful Thai neighbor is in some fabulous boots and slammin' skinny jeans and a coat and is showing me on her phone how incredibly cold it is. I've gotten used to the idea that 20 is comfortable for the house, 30 is starting to warm up, 40 is desert-hot, and 50 is what you're afraid of in a Saudi summer. We can do this, people.

Because, you see, we're not just embarrassing me, but embarrassing all of ourselves. Right now, in this land of imported food, I am constantly confronted by boxes and cans and jars that have American weights and measurements. You have to know that every time a non-American picks one of those things up there's a head shake, an eye roll, and a silent "those idiots."

But back to me. You see, when we make the grand transition, so nobly attempted and abandoned when I was in elementary school ("We can fight the Nazis and fly to the moon, but not count by tens!") I and my children's children will no longer be global hicks and rubes, but will finally be fluent in the language that probably started all the rest of the language: A couple of cave guys, trying to estimate how much more meat was on a mastodon than a bison, and whether the cost of pursuing one was more per unit than the other.

In the name of global commerce and international cooperation, everyone else has made the grand gesture of learning our language. (Thank you, Silicon Valley.) And that's hard. So in return, can't we make just a little effort to use their measuring cups? For Christmas. For the children. For me.

Arabian Holidays: Shopping the Souks

City sidewalks, busy sidewalks, dressed in holiday style...

Walking through an alley at the Diyrah souk.

Okay, so shopping is a little different here than what most Americans are used to. And the quantifying ALL the differences is way beyond what one blog post can hold. I should be able to milk this topic for a solid dozen.

But this is a good place to start: the souks.

Yes, the malls of Riyadh are famous and plentiful. It's in the malls that you find Sephora, Banana Republic, Pottery Barn, Marks & Spencer, dress shops, hypermarkets. But do you think the people on my gift list are going to be happy if I go to the other side of the world and come back with sweaters from the Gap? No, I need to find someplace else to shop.

Saudis are new to city living. Most adults here have grandparents who lived in mud brick villages scattered around the desert. Shopping happened in souks, which are just open-air markets. Merchants grouped together by type, so you'd go to the camel souk for Bedouin supplies, the gold souk for jewelry, the clothing souk for clothes...you probably have the pattern figured out by now. If you've been to an American farmer's market or a European Saturday market, you've been in a souk--fruits and vegetables over there, sketchy electronics over there, cheap sunglasses and weird shoes over there. As Saudis migrated to cities, they brought the souk paradigm with them. As I'm sure the Europeans did, too, when their cities were new. So you have actual souks--sprawling, rabbit-warren-like arcades of stalls and storefronts grouped by type, such as you see above or in my photos from the second-hand souk, taken earlier this fall. (It's morning in the shot above, so a lot of shops aren't open yet.) But the souk model also influences the way other shopping happens.

Typical Riyadh streetscape on a Friday morning.

This is not a bad neighborhood. This is a street near our home, and pretty representative of what you see all over Riyadh: mile after mile of concrete block cube-style buildings with rectangular, plate-glass shop openings at the street level with roller-style pull-down doors or metal gates. And a bunch of trash in front. Above are apartments. (In this case, it's Friday morning, so the shops are closed and the normal jumble of every-man-for-himself mis-parked cars is missing.) What's souk-like is the way the business are arranged: same-type businesses tend to cluster together (interrupted by mini-supers, pharmacies, and eateries). A row of car-rental storefronts, a city block of lighting stores, another of furniture stores, another for tile shops.

Figure 1: The snuggle effect

To the American mind, this is puzzling. If you're trying to sell teddy bears, why on earth do you want to snuggle up with your competitors? But here, shoppers would never find you if you eschewed snuggling. The snuggling produces a mass big enough to be a landmark people know about.  Refer, for example, to Figure 1. Do you see how much bigger the fuzzy mass of puppy and bear are together than either would be alone? None of these individual shops has an advertising budget--any more than the stalls at the farmer's market do--so standing alone they'd have no way of letting shoppers know they're there. People around here start their search for what they need not with Google or Yelp, but by asking "Do you know where you can get teddies with ribbons round their necks?" Then someone will say, "Oh, the adorable fuzzy thing stores are along Ali Bin Somethingorother--you know, just south of King Somebodyelse." That block of roadway becomes, in essence, the fuzzy thing souk for that part of town.

(This is a forced example, I know. It was driven by the Google image result for "snuggling." Of course you'd never ask where to buy a teddy bear because stuffed animals aren't sold here, silly. Another story for another day.)

But the street-front shops are driving destinations. If you're shopping a number of lighting stores, you might park your car and go to the eight or ten right in front of you, but you cross the multi-baracaded street at your own peril (especially at night, dressed all in black), and you're separated from the next block by another uncrossable street. This kind of shopping is an evening errand that you do with a Man...who has a Car and can drive to the next block. Or that the Man with the Car does on his own. If you're going to stroll and shop, outside a mall, you're going to a souk. A real souk.

In the picture above, we're in one of the alleys between souk areas at Diyrah, the sprawling souk that sits near the site of Riyadh's original mud-brick settlement. Duck inside, and you see something like this:

Bedouin souk, Diyrah

This is the Bedouin souk area, To my right, beside the blue bags in my hand, are tent furnishings. And I'm not talking about sleeping bags and blow-up mattresses. No, Arabian tent furnishings are rugs, floor cushions, and sofas or back rests for sitting on the floor. Rope curtains with tassels. Plus camel supplies. This fellow is just walking into the souk to find out where to unload his truckload of camel saddles:

Camel saddles outside the Bedouin souk, Diryah

Fun, to be sure, but not very practical for Christmas giving.

On, then to men's clothing:

Inside the men's clothing souk, Diyrah

Much to my surprise, it turns out that not all red-checked headscarves are the same. Men who shop here are actually making decisions between these:

Shimaghs and ghutras at a men's clothing shop, Kuwaiti Souk

But they had plenty of time to develop a sense of style as little boys:

Boys' costumes, Kuwaiti Souk

Okay, again I'm being distracted. I don't think my daughter and son-in-law would appreciate us arming their 8- and 9-year-old boys with daggers. Perhaps I'll fare better at the gold souk:

Gold souk, Diyrah

Off these grimy alleys, with the clattering old gates and faded signs, are stunning jewelry shops. My phone camera struggled to deal with the contrast, but my friend Patty managed to get this one:

Inside a jewelry shop in the gold souk, Diyrah

But gold is gold, folks, the world over. There are no deals to be had, so...sorry, kids.

Now, because shops close at around 11:30 a.m. for prayer, and in the traditional souks tend to stay closed through the afternoon (reopening after afternoon prayer, sometime between 3:30 and 4:00), the compound bus goes early in the morning so we can maximize our time there before 11:30. Only a few shops are open when we first arrive. This week, the Al Shark craft-and-who-knows-what store was the place to kill time and find, oh, all kinds of stuff before other Kuwaiti Souk shops opened.

Treasures at Al Shark, Kuwaiti Souk

Let me help you figure this out. Those are Flower Fairies scented sachets on the right, next to "best quality" police whistles, next to mouse pads that look like oriental rugs, above gold-covered cardboard place cards. YES. Turn around for plastic air horns, novelty clocks, and clown shoes.

Treasures--including clown shoes--at Al Shark, Kuwaiti Souk

 WHAT?!? CLOWN SHOES?!?!!

Clown shoes at Al Sharq

Yes. Clown shoes. Sometimes "living lightly" means not having what you really want, doggone it. Back to the souk.

But look at the furniture shops!

Furniture at the Kuwaiti Souk

Be advised: Anything that sits still for very long in Saudi Arabia will be gilt, embellished, or tufted.

Home decor shop at the Kuwaiti souk

Unfortunately, this shop was closed, so we had to snap pictures through the glass. Oh, how I would've loved to see it with all those lights turned on. So I found comfort on the divan:

Gold divan at the Kuwaiti Souk

 And played hide-and-seek among the abaya closets:

Abaya closets at the Kuwaiti Souk

Around the corner were the fabric shops:

Fabric shop at the Kuwaiti Souk

Yes, fabric shops. Those dresses are draped and pinned. You can see the bolts of fabric beyond the display window, through the glass.

Fabric shop display window at the Kuwaiti Souk

(When you get that black one figured out, let me know.)

Okay, seriously. I have to focus. Close my eyes and go straight through the gold souk at Diyrah to the shops of trinkets, collectibles, and gifts clinging to its edges. I'm finally on track.

Finding collectibles at Diyrah

I actually found some things up this alley. But I'm keeping my secrets for now. And that doesn't mean I'm finished. I'm sold on souk shopping, and will be back often. Rate for yourself, if you would, the irresistibility factor of the antique shop:

Inside an antique shop at Diyrah

Or the Afghan/Pakistani handicraft shops:

Inside Bedouine Art, Shop No. 12, Diyrah

Inside Royal Kashmir, Diyrah

Are you catching my drift? I just love handling this stuff and hearing the stories. Lunch boxes from Afghanistan, wedding jewelry from Saudi Arabia, hand-painted bottles and plates, daggers, camel bells, astrolobes, mascara cases, perfume bottles, jewelry chests, carved camel-bone panels...

Too many choices, too little time to decide. But when you get right down to it, nothing says merry Christmas like a camel saddle, right? I think I'm done for this year.

Merry Christmas, everyone. 

*Extreme photo credit goes to Cheryl Glassett and Patty Jones, who bailed out my lazy bad self when I either (a) forgot my camera or (b) couldn't be bothered to download my own pictures.

Christmas Crafting, Saudi Style

I'm very excited about Tuesday.

Do you see it? There's a HUGE turndown. Partly cloudy (or "mostly sunny"--not sure of the difference) and right around 70 for THREE DAYS. It's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas, eh?

Having none of the seasonal markers has made it a challenge to feel the Christmas mood. And I really LIKE the Christmas mood. (Glenn Miller. Get it.) It's more than the weather, although it certainly didn't help to find myself standing outside the gym yesterday in shorts and a tank top wishing "Happy Christmas" to a friend leaving for home on Sunday. No, the bigger problem is not having all those other crutches--malls and shops decorated for Christmas, holiday music piped into the grocery store, everybody around you involved in the same scurry, putting up the tree, getting out the decorations, cookie exchanges and planning my *sniff* annual wrapping party. When you bring suitcases rather than a shipping container to start a new life, you're not bringing your Christmas baubles. Besides--I don't want to have to store them for the rest of the year. So I've had to start from scratch in a country that doesn't sell Christmas decorations. Desperate times lead to desperate measures, so I CRAFTED.

Stop. What?

I. Crafted.

My friend Landee, professional crafter and blogger and do-er extraordinaire, is reaching for her smelling salts about now. I should explain: I don't craft. I'm not opposed to crafting, and I even own a craft or two of my own making, work products of ladies' crafting evenings that were a ton of fun. But I'm an instant-gratification kind of gal, and multi-step processes will shut me down faster than a power switch. You know--one of those big lever-style switches like Igor flips to turn on Frankenstein. Now picture a bunch of pieces of wood, and sandpaper, and bottles of paint, foam brushes, and something in a spray can, and a design, and a ribbon, and...whump. Dead on the table.

So I started easy. Lights, thanks to the grocery and hardware stores that sell them in plain boxes, labeled just as "LED lights," with a wink and a nod to western buyers from the Filipino checkout worker. There are more ways to make those lights flash than I can count, but I finally found the option for a steady burn. I put them in a philodendron:

Thanks, IKEA. And thanks as well for the candles, tray, and lanterns.

One of the all-IKEA furnishings in my furnished villa is an odd floating shelf, all by itself way too high on my living room wall. It would make a great decoratable mantle (I'll be getting a couple of hefty shelf brackets when I'm home), but 220v power means monster cords and inconvenient outlets, so there's no way to put little lamps or a nice bunch of those lights in some sort of garland up there. So, thanks to Pinterest, I scrounged up some Christmas printables and put them below it in frames that will hold family pictures after the holidays are over. Plug in the iPad playing a fireplace app and voila. Happy almighty holidays.

You have to keep staring into the fire to get the full effect, though, because just to the left, this is the view out the patio door:

Yes, those are petunias. And yes, that green surface is "grass."

Finally, the tree. You can buy Christmas trees here if you're determined. Departing expats are always selling them, or the shop inside the compound has small ones (flashing like crazy). But I don't want to store one all year. I like this whole living lightly thing. Pinterest, again, to the rescue:

Hmm. Two-dimensional trees. That board tree, in particular, seemed like something I could adapt. I didn't want to mess with lumber for a variety of reasons (acquiring, painting, hanging, storing), but I thought I could work with foam core--you know, the stuff your kid makes his science fair displays on. Correction: The stuff YOU make your kid's science fair displays on. Then glue decorative paper on it, which I knew I'd seen at the office/art supply store. Ta-da!

Problem: That decorative paper turned out to be a figment of my imagination. So how about printing my own Christmas paper from online designs? Great, but the mock-up I did in miniature looked a little too folksy-patchworky:

Fabric? Ah--the shopping bus had a scheduled trip to the fabric souk and haberdashery (as the Brits refer to the shop full of trims and notions and sewing supplies) after the Thanksgiving weekend. Perfect.

Saudi fabric stores are...different than American ones. Folks here don't do crafts or home decorating projects. These shops sell dress fabrics, and by "dress" I mean "fancy dress." The display windows have mannequins dressed in fabulous ball gowns that aren't gowns at all, but draped and pinned designs. When I went shopping at the second-hand souk, none of the ballgowns I saw had a label inside. Though you certainly see plenty of ballgowns in mall shops, it's typical for women go to dressmakers, choose a design (or make one up themselves, judging by many I saw), and then buy fabrics.

How else would you explain this?

Quite the treasure, eh? My friend Cecelia found this at the second-hand souk and let me try it on. (The purple is my workout top, not some weird liner. Heaven forbid there should be something weird.) Those are inexplicable little kerchiefs tacked around the hip (for twirling?), and with the right moves I was able to make a real sparkle show on the patio out of sunlight reflected from the jug-jewels.

The starting point for something like this is back in the fabric shops: pre-made jeweled bodice fronts. For beginners, start simple.

Then work your way up:

Now, time to match and build. For fabrics, there's tulles and satins and velvets and laces... And if the bodice isn't enough, here's just one wall of beaded and gilded trims in a shop with rows and rows of them:

For me, making a plain ol' tree, shades of green satin worked well. I cut the foam core into rows, the longest being the full width of one piece, then cut right triangles (your high school geometry at work!) off the ends of the shorter ones, taped them together, laid the satin here and there over the boards, taped it to the back, sticky-tacked it to the wall, and voila:

(Okay, a craft blog this ain't. I actually did take step-by-step photos, and I'll add them at the end if anybody's interested.)

Pretty freaking proud of myself. Original concept, original design, AND actual execution. Not a box full of supplies. I CRAFTED. (How we doin', Landee?) I don't know about you, but when I put it all together, I'm feeling pretty Christmatastic.

I did pick up more trims. I have red pom-poms, a gold chain, a ruby-and-gold jeweled swag, strands of plastic pearls in ivory and celedon and red, but I kind of like it with just the thin swag of green-velvet-I-don't-know-what. Edit, as they say to the bedazzlers on Project Runway.

So maybe I'll save the sparkles and pom-poms for decking out my next princess dress.