A Journey about/along/amid Immigration

You remember prepositions, right? Those location and direction words you are supposed to, at all costs, never let dangle? (e.g., "Yes, Mother, that is the mad ballah whose crib I was at" would be more correctly expressed as "Yes, Mother, that is the mad ballah at whose crib I was.") In school I had to memorize an alphabetical list of forty-odd of them, though the list can get much longer if you're willing to get archaic. (Abaft?) Almost all would work equally well to describe my experience with Saudi immigration. My journey about immigration. My journey along immigration. My journey amid immigration. My journey at immigration. A few won't, however. The problem words are those that suggest a journey that begins on one side and finishes on the other. My journey across immigration? Hardly. My journey through immigration? Don't be ridiculous.

My objective: An iqama, the residency card that shows you're allowed to live here on a long-term basis and come and go freely, roughly equivalent to the American green card.

They don't give these puppies away. To get the initial residential visa (good for 90 days), you have to complete a series of medical tests somewhat similar to what livestock might get before being shipped across a border. My U.S. doctor didn't know what some of them were. I think the lab had to Google them. I was visualizing something like Jerry Seinfeld's doctor and his medical reference book. In the end, all the boxes got checked and I was on my way. On the ground in Saudi Arabia, it became iqama time.

Ordinarily, getting an iqama is no big deal. A mildly annoying but routine process, not unlike registering a new car. However, fate had something different in store for me.

Wrinkle 1: Guess what? New medical tests! Yes, a mix-tape subset of the same stuff I'd already done. Bloodwork and, er, samples. That's not absurd at all. No, what's absurd is that when I said I was unable to produce a certain...sample on the spot, so to speak, the tech said that was no problem, I could bring it back in the morning. "How?" I asked. "I'm not allowed to drive." He seemed genuinely surprised by the question. Like it had never come up before. And at a loss to come up with an answer. Unsurprisingly, another evening was then tied up with a return trip.

Wrinkle 2: Ordinarily, a photo, fingerprint, and eye scan are done at the airport when you first enter the country, and they're tied to your passport and entry number. However, driving in as I did, I entered the country at a pokey, low-priority, wild-frontier ground border. Out in the sticks like that, they didn't take my picture or get the biometrics. So I had to get myself to an immigration office somewhere here in town where that information could be collected. Fortunately, I wouldn't have to wrangle with the airport or the main immigration offices downtown. There was a little satellite office at a nearby mall. Date night!

Wrinkle 3: After a fair bit of asking around at the mall, we found the passport office for women (pictures require that the face be uncovered, which can't happen around men), and found it CLOSED, with the following helpful signage:

I've made it as large as possible so you can read it as well as I could. However, if that's not enough information, there was also this:

Fortunately, a mall security guy hanging out in the food court (obvs) was able to explain that the office for ladies is open only in the morning. That's right--the office for women who have to be driven there by men who are supposedly working during the day supporting said unemployed women is open only while men are at work. The office for men, on the other hand, at another mall, is open during the evening. But those cameras don't take pictures of women.

Wrinkle 4: We have reservations for an early-October vacation. Out of the country. On an airplane. I'd be unable to leave the country without an iqama. We decided that rather than wait for the mall office to open and potentially be unable to help us for reasons as yet unimagined (and who knows what else the sign might be warning us about), we'd better head to the belly of the beast, the full-on immigration office, to make SURE we could get everything done.

Wrinkle 5: An large number of Saudi government ministries are crowded together into one quarter of town. Thousands of people work there. Thousands more need to do business there. And there are no parking lots. I'm not saying that in the way you'd say "I swear the mall has, like, no parking lots." I'm saying that in the same way you'd say "The zoo has no dinosaurs." If you've ever barked about government regulation, try living in a city without any, where nobody says "for every x number of square feet you must provide y number of parking spaces (and z number of bathrooms)." It's survival of the fittest out there, folks. Lord of the Flies. On a separate trip to the same neighborhood (on a Saturday, so the lite version) I managed to snap off this picture:

(Please excuse the thumb. People are touchy about pictures around here, so in crowded places where I'm the only western woman and sometimes the only woman I try to be quick about it.) To clarify, that's not a parking lot. That's an intersection, after a fashion, though there's some freelance parking going on in the center. My immigration destination was about three blocks away. Three v-e-r-y slow-moving blocks.

Wrinkle 6: In a government building where foreigners need to do business, there is exactly one word of English: "Entrance." After that, you're on your own. You therefore need Saudis to help you get around. My husband's company has a sort of preferred-provider relationship with a couple of guys, and the one in charge of getting my iqama probably would have gotten everything done just fine if it weren't for my unorthodox entry situation combined with my pesky deadline. Figuring out where to get my picture taken was a new wrinkle for him. One government worker directed him outside and around to the back of the building. We toddled behind. There, we were told to go back inside and upstairs one flight. We toddled behind. That one said to go up another. We toddled. That one said to go back to the back of the building. More toddling. That worker then finally confirmed we were in the right place. But don't sit yet!

Wrinkle 7: Remember, I needed to have my picture taken in a room for women, by a camera meant for women. Thus, my Saudi Immigration sensei couldn't come inside with me. (And of course, only men can do that job.) Inside, again, all signage was only in Arabic. Have you ever been to the DMV on, say, the last day of the month, at, say, 4:00 in the afternoon? Was it windowless because nobody's supposed to be able to see you? Were there 100 women packed like canned black beans, wall to wall, in a space about the size of a bedroom, shoving their way toward the one woman seated behind a counter set up with four unoccupied workstations?

That's not the actual scene, of course. Put papers in those hands. Now add a low ceiling, low light, and pack those bodies against walls on four sides. Then squeeze in some truly tiny women suffocating with their heads down at about my rib level. There you go. That's it. It's an experience everyone should have once. ONCE. Through the use of various reaches and squishes and pushes I managed to get to somebody who talked to my sensei outside on the phone, took me to the camera, then, on the razor's edge of having everything done, said "No match" and handed me back my passport.

Wrinkle 8: Yes, the Einstein who got himself stationed at that low-priority, wild-frontier, middle-of-nowhere border station had written the wrong entry number on my visa. The one in the database assigned to my passport number did not match the handwritten one on my visa. No match. No more action on this until somebody changed the number, which I couldn't do, and which the woman in the women's office couldn't do with the pen in her hand, because any change also has to have a stamp. I must say, a lot of countries have a lot of love for stamps. This is one of them. Back outside. At this point the sensei said don't worry, he'd take care of it getting the number changed and get back to us. We were unconvinced.

Wrinkle 9: While trying really hard to get the sensei to stick with us and with this project, we ran into another sensei, who had helped Steve with his paperwork. This guy is actually kind of a power-player, with some very well placed tribal connections and an ability to get things done. He seemed to believe the first sensei was underperforming, and said he'd take care of it. Go ahead: imagine for yourself the alpha-male tribal-rivalry striving that ensued, the bossing around, the push-backs, all taking place entirely (from our perspective) in body language. A lot of waiting around inside the main hall. A computer system shutdown. Noon prayer. When we left, Sensei 1 had my passport and Steve's iqama, and Sensei 2 was going to meet us at the mall later in the afternoon so he could magically open that office and get my biometrics done. We were skeptical but without options.

Wrinkle 10: A term everyone understands in this part of the world is wasta. I saw a cartoon at a souvenir stand this morning that explains it quite well. Joe Camel is lounging on one elbow surveying his domain and the caption says "Wasta: It's not what you know. It's who you know." Early that afternoon we got a call from somebody at Steve's office saying my iqama was there. Wait--do you mean my passport is there and I need to pick it up before going on to get my picture? No, the finished iqama. Finished. Done. Legal. I have no idea what happened. I'm confident wasta was involved. I'm not asking whose or how. However this journey got finished for me, I'm grateful. I'm just taking my iqama and going on on vacation next week. 

As a new kid, I get asked a lot how I like it here. It's a tough question to answer. If I say "This place is crazy" it sounds as if I hate it. Plenty of people think the U.S. is crazy. Go for it. I do, too, often enough. If I say "I love it!" I sound ridiculous, as if I'm so stupidly diplomatic I'm going to straight lie when we both know how crazy it is. I need both answers: This place is crazy. And I love being here. A new friend expressed it exactly. She said she loves being in a place where tourists don't come, knowing that not very many people get to see the things we see. She loves living in a way that's completely different from the rest of the world. Agreed. But now that I've got that precious card, I'm going to use it, jet off, and go lie on a South Pacific beach for a couple of weeks. Because the opportunity to do that is also part of living here. I'll be back with/among/alongside you in a couple of weeks!

Adventure Among the Ruins

Despite what my earlier posts might indicate, I didn't come to Saudi-Almighty-Arabia to go to Chili's, or Applebee's (pft-pft kiss-fingers cross-yourself), or Tamimi (Safeway), or Saco (True Value), or even IKEA. No, I came for an Exotic Adventure. Well, if you're going to get technical about it, I came because I'm married to guy with a job in Saudi Arabia, but if I'm going to be here, so help me, I'm going to have an Exotic Adventure. I'm living in SAUDI ARABIA, for heaven's sake. I should be able to drub anybody's cocktail-party Mexican vacation story in zero flat, right? Telling about how no one has vanilla because of the alcohol isn't going to get the job done.

Enter the Good Fun Fairies, Evan and Cheryl. 

As you might surmise, they've been here a while. (Contrary to appearances, no, Evan is not Saudi himself. He gets that a lot.) And this weekend they put out a call for anybody who was interested to join them on a trek into the desert northwest of Riyadh to explore ruins. Now few terms get my attention as quickly as "ruins." Well, "cheese" might be another. Or "fresh bread." Or "funny." And "TV." Oh! And "Bachelorette meltdown." So maybe there are a lot. But "ruins" is way up there.

Heading out for a day of adventure in Saudi Arabia involves some preparation. Step 1, take water. A lot. We haven't seen daytime highs below the 104 since I've been here. (The teenage girls of an Australian family with us complained about it being "fifty" outside the same way we'd say "a hundred and twenty." Exactly the same way. An exaggeration, which makes it a joke I get only after using a metric converter.)

Step 1a, load the car with everything else you can imagine you might ever need. Should you get stranded (breakdowns, stuck in the sand, whatever), you're on your own out there, folks. The highway patrol ain't comin' by. Ever. We stopped on the way home when we saw a man wrestling with a tire on the side of the road. The treads had come off, and that sucker was shredded like nothing I'd ever seen. Picture yarn wrapped around a donut and then pulled loose by a cat. I didn't know tires could do that. Fortunately, our hosts traveled with a tire iron, steam iron, waffle iron, pump, jumper cables, corduroy jumpers, cable-knit jumpers, and an old coffee can of magic dust. We wound up giving the guy a ride to the next town, and learned Evan works with his brother. I'd say Evan's job is pretty well set for as long as he wants it. All because they know not to go into the desert without EVERYTHING you might possibly need.

Step 2, dress appropriately. Now "appropriate" here does not mean the same thing that it does anywhere else. It doesn't mean functional. Hiking in a long black gown makes no sense in anybody's world. The Saudi solution: Don't go hiking. The expat solution: Hold your abaya in one hand and your camera in the other.

And refer to Step 1, have water, because it's a mite warm in there. But less of an issue than you'd think.

"Appropriate" also does not mean "fashion forward." A dress hem touching the tops of running shoes is absolutely, empirically, universally offensive. But appropriate. My mortified feet, ladies and gentlemen:

Step 3, move into a guarded relationship with your GPS. Kind of trust-but-verify sort of thing. It's not as if the roads leading out of Riyadh are new, but Garmin doesn't seem to believe anybody will be on them, and therefore doesn't think about them very hard. Road signs are often only in Arabic, and roundabouts may or may not be signed in any language. So in every town ask somebody where you are. Never hurts to check.

And you have to ask because every one of these small towns has ruins. When concrete block came along, folks just build new houses across the road from the old ones and moved out. Lacking stone, Arabs built their homes (those that didn't live in tents, that is) out of mud brick, which erodes and slowly collapses so that new homes had to be built often. None of the ruins we saw were probably any older than a hundred years. But they were also no different from the ones being built 5000 years ago.

I know, RIGHT? Now we're having an Exotic Adventure.

Our first stop was Sadus (remember, spellings can be anything you want, so you might see Sadis, Sadas, Sudis...), which looked like this:

 I stumbled into somebody's kitchen and found this stove:

Reigning over it all was this colonade:

And underneath, this extraordinary hall:

I was intrigued by this little still life:

Last dinner for creature, or last dinner of creature?

When we stopped along the street for some more pictures, a group of Saudi boys approached us, eager to discover what the Westerners were all about. The goal seemed to be to sling an English word or two, talk to women, and laugh a lot. One stuck his hand out to me, then started laughing when I took it, then didn't let go or stop laughing:

This little playah's brother got his own (or his dad's) phone out and handed it to one of the men, who started to line up a picture of the kid with one of the other men. No, he indicated, shaking his head and pointing at me. That one. Smooth. It quickly turned into a group shot.

The father of some number of these kids came over soon, too, and promptly invited us all to his home for tea. Or coffee. Or anything we wanted. Please come. It's just over there. No problem, no problem. We excused ourselves by saying we had far to go, but I left wishing I was that free with my own hospitality.

From there, we went to Al Qassib, where the ruins are being actively restored and the project manager showed us around. If you're into doors, it was a gold mine:

 And this Old Testament view:

Finally, the Ushaiga Heritage Center north of Shaqra, where the site is being actively managed, maintained, and rebuilt, complete with museums. Your typical Saudi-on-the-street doesn't think much of these ruins, much less of preserving them, so I'm incredibly grateful that somebody does. The museum, I admit, has a way to go on achieving international status with their signage:

I'm dying to know what that contraption is, but won't anytime soon. The curation is also a bit quirky. In the jewelry and clothing room, in a six-foot case of elaborate jewelry, we find this:

But they also have this, a ladies' camel saddle, complete with curtains to keep the lady shielded from prying eyes:

And refreshments:

To the right is a cracker of some sort. To the left is dried camel cheese. The cheese is formed into rounds and the cheesemaker rolls a palm across the top, so the ridges you see (look at the piece just right of center, a little past 2:00) are finger imprints. You remember how I feel about cheese, right? Well, assuming you do, too, I'll tell you how to replicate the experience without traveling to Saudi Arabia yourself: Take a piece of chalk and dip it in milk. Allow it to sit out for a couple of days, just enough so the texture of the chalk gets a little coarser and the taste a little more sour. Eat it. You're there. The candies in the foreground ("lollies," as the Australian kids called them and which I'm now going to, as well) are to clear the taste out of your mouth, so make sure you have those handy, too.

We would not be similarly duped into eating wild watermelons growing along weedy vines on the ground, but no one could resist the purely obvious shot of women holding melons:

Low, certainly, but exotic, right? A genuine Exotic Adventure. That's what I'm talking about.

Lost in the Lingua Franca

I'm not sure what to do.

I'm having a little trouble with household chores as well.

Getting a mite cryptic with the pictures, don't you think? I'm trying to figure out what's going on during the glasses-with-the-nose-piece and the flower cycles. (The tornado is a spin, obviously.) And on some settings, the washer stops, half-filled, between the spin and the flower, and takes a manual nudge to stop flowering and start spinning. But not always. I'm pretty sure I'm putting the soap in the right place, at least, but I'm not getting any answers here:

Inexplicably, the hand soap is Polish, so that helps a little:

English speakers--especially if you studied French or German or Spanish in school--can figure things out pretty decently anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, Europe, Africa, and the Pacific. Root words are often similar, and at the very least you can read a destination name combined with an arrow to get around, or identify an icon for a toilet or an exit or a hospital. But when the alphabet is different, things get complicated.

Though it can be possible to just puzzle things out well enough on your own:

C'mon, you've got this. Or maybe this?

Most places that don't use a Roman alphabet (Asia, the Middle East, Russia) recognize that foreigners are completely shut out and at least provide phonetic versions of place names in Roman letters. Better still for foreign-languge-impaired Americans, English has become the default second language for everyone. (Thank you, IBM, for starting computer languages in English. Those Selectrics worked pretty well, too.) English provides a way for Indians and Saudis and Filipinos and Greeks and Brazilians to talk to each other. In public-interaction settings in Saudi Arabia (retail, medical, customer service) you can always find somebody who speaks English. Usually, packaging and signage appear in both languages. But not always. Saudis are not completely dialed into the realities of how life here feels for everyone else, and are a little puzzled by Western reluctance to do business here. It's not uncommon to find a road sign like the one at the top after sailing by others with English words on them. At that point you have to rely on the hope that you knew what you were doing two signs ago and just stick to your guns.

The problem isn't helped any by the lack of a standardized method for translating Arabic to Western spellings. You'll therefore see Medina, Madinah, Madannah; Mecca, Makkah, Mekka; you might shop at a souk or a sooq or a souq...you get the idea. Of course, I can't blame Arabic-speakers for not fully comprehending our alphabet when I'm trying to figure out how anybody makes sense of wiggle-cloud-bump-straight line-wiggle-curlicue. It can be very disconcerting to see your text message inbox look like this:

On the other hand, I think I've got this one:

Oh, and Arabic is read from right to left, but numbers are read from left to right. I do not understand this. But I'm intensely curious about how this translates:

For non-native English speakers, allow me to explain the joke. See, the whole point in English is that kids are just so darn dumb and are so cute about it that you can make your store look like it's actually made by children when you not only substitute the letter R for the word "are," but then double the hilarity by turning it backward as a precious five-year-old might. C'mon in, folks! Be a kid again! ("I don't want to grow up, I'm a Toys R Us kid...") Of course, that awesome joke works only in English. What could they possibly do in Arabic that would work out to be that darling? Or does translation bring the truth out, that those colorful letters mean "the gates of hell" in any language? Abandon hope, all ye who enter here?

So maybe there's common ground. I think the road sign said, "Who're you gonna believe? Me, or that idiot voice on your GPS that almost drove you straight into the souk/sooq/souq last week?" The text messages, I learned, communicated something to the effect of "Welcome to Mobily. And we're going to welcome you by asking you to provide information you've already given us, then not accept that information when you give it to us again, then shut off your phone." Yes, phone companies are impossible, McDonald's can't explain why they're still counting burgers, and objects in mirror will always be closer than they appear. A lot of things seem to be pretty much the same all over, in any language.

Rookie Mistake, Part II: Getting It Right

Read any guidebook, magazine article, or travel post and you'll get the same tips about Paris: Don't go in August unless you want to wander an empty city. Greet shopkeepers when you enter their places of business. Keep your voice down. Dress well. In Madrid, don't go looking for dinner before 9:00. In London, don't ask for a napkin. In Dubrovnik, don't be shocked at topless sunbathers.

But there aren't any guidebooks for Riyadh. Why would there be? Jordan and the ruins at Petra are just right there, and wild and beautiful Oman with its world class diving is right there, and Egypt and the Pyramids are just over there. Nothin' to see here, folks. Besides--it would take some mighty sights to make the trouble of being here ("Women have to wear what? Businesses close when?") worth it.

So as a new expatriate you have to figure stuff out on your own, with information gleaned from friends you don't have yet. I'm surrounded by great people I'm looking forward to knowing, but my half of conversations in the gym so far have gone something like this: "Where are you from? Glasgow/Madrid/Amsterdam/London/Sydney? That's awesome! Thursday night socials are good? Yeah, this compound sure does seem great. Hope to see ya again!"

We still have a way to go.

This past Thursday night (previous post) was one of those learn-as-you-go experiences. Learned: Don't go on routine errands on Thursday night. Looking back, this should have been obvious, and the takeaway is one I've known and used before when traveling. I'm a morning person (who likes to stay up--bad combo), and most of Europe and the Middle East stay up late. So...if you get up early, you can have the place to yourself. An early-morning run in Paris one time took me to the courtyard of the Louvre, where there was Not One Soul. Putting the pyramid behind me, I could imagine it was all mine. In Croatia, being an earlybird let me see this:

In Riyadh, getting a minimally early start on a Saturday got us in and out of Ikea in a half hour. WITH shaded parking. It got us everything we needed at the hardware store, and--courtesy of my new Muslim Pro prayer times app--outa there five minutes before the cash registers would close for noon prayer. We got to meet new friends for a late lunch at a Najd Village, a traditional-style Arabian restaurant, where the meal looked like this:

There were about ten of us, so yeah. There were leftovers. I wish there had been labels in the dishes. Most are rice-based, with various twists. The large platters are the meat (chicken, in this case). The brown blobs are a delicious puffed, slightly sweet bread. I was very grateful to have an abaya with narrow sleeves, since all the reaching is done on hands and knees, across the cloth. And I did a fair amount of reaching.

Next, we got to the grocery store about five minutes before it re-opened after afternoon prayer. Found everything we wanted there. Plus a thing or two we didn't.

Well, yet, anyway. When I enter "camel" in Epicurious, I get two results, neither of which actually use camel. One merely suggests you have camels standing nearby ("Rockin' Moroccan Stew") for atmosphere, and the other is a recipe for spiced honeyed locusts from the Unofficial Game of Thrones Cookbook, which claims that a certain group of fantasy people would have preferred dog or camel in their stir-fry. I'll keep working on it.

No, we came home, left the city to the night-crawlers, and cooked a terrific dinner. I didn't set out to write a food blog, so no step-by-step photos, but this one ought to be shared: Lamb with yogurt mint sauce, couscous with onion and apple, and ripe honeydew. If you're not interested in the food, skip ahead.

For the lamb, we'd wanted to grill some lamb chops, but didn't find any. We wound up with a very delicate little rack of lamb, which we took the meat off of and pan-seared. Rare, with espresso-brown crusts. Yum. For the couscous, we cooked it with chicken broth (plain pre-cooked couscous--just add the broth and let it sit five minutes), then stirred into it previously sauteed diced onion, apple, and celery, and toasted pine nuts. The crowning piece, though, was the yogurt sauce, courtesy of Ina Garten:

Yogurt Mint Sauce

6 scallions, white and green parts, chopped (that quantity seemed high and mine were large--I used two)
1/2 c chopped fresh mint leaves
2 Tbsp minced fresh dill
Pinch crushed red pepper flakes (I forgot those and didn't miss them)
1 Tbsp olive oil
1 Tbsp freshly squeezed lemon juice (I used more--a half of a large and juicy lemon)
7 ounces Greek yogurt (Greek, schmeek. All anybody can talk about. I used plain nonfat yogurt and like the looser texture for this sauce)
1 tsp kosher salt
1/2 tsp freshly ground pepper

Place the scallions, mint, dill, red pepper flakes, olive oil and lemon juice in the bowl of a food processor with the steel blade and puree until it's a coarse paste. (I don't have a food processor here, and my blender was unable to do much with the lightweight, dry ingredients. A mortar and pestle would've worked, but the coarse chop was also good just as it was.) Add the yogurt, salt, and pepper and pulse until combined. Transfer to a bowl, cover, and refrigerate for a few hours to allow the flavors to develop. (I just stirred mine together and we ate it within the hour. Delicious. Though I must say as I'm tasting it with leftover lamb from the restaurant today it's even better.)

P.S. For followers of the Kitty Chronicles (a number that's surprising me), Yard Kitty seems to have defeated Roof Kitty in the battle for our back yard. When I came outside from clearing the first round of dishes off the patio last night he was on top of the table, licking out the bowl that had held the lamb. Today, Peaches/Marmalade/Mango, now napping in the back bed, a lord at ease in his realm. To the victor go the spoils.

Come to think of it, I feel kinda the same way. Take that, Thursday night. I OWNED Saturday.

Rookie Mistake

You know the one about the frog in a pot? How if you put a frog in cold water, then turn up the heat, the frog won't jump out before it's too late? Yeah, that one.

Turns out it's true.

Diagram explanation:

Hyper-Panda: Panda is a retail chain around the Kingdom with various incarnations, not a baby in China who's being too active.

Panda Markets can be found all the way down to little neighborhood mini-stores. A Panda is a regular grocery store, and a Hyper-Panda is comparable to a Super Wal-Mart. Mmm...plus a little.

Thursday night: In Saudi Arabia, as of a couple of months ago, the weekend is Friday and Saturday. Friday is the Sabbath and Saturday is, well, Saturday. Then Sunday is Monday. Got it? It's the U.S. weekend in reverse and advanced by one day. The workweek is Sunday through Thursday. The weekend used to be Thursday and Friday--the U.S. weekend in the same order, advanced by two days. But Saudi Arabia was alone in the region by observing that schedule, and a couple of months ago the king decreed that the weekend was going to change as of the next week to line up with everybody else's. Caused some scrambling as employees and companies figured out how to deal with existing vacation plans, but hey--it's a kingdom. Figure it out.

So in short, Thursday night is Friday night around here. But after that, the similarities end. On Friday night in the States, people go out to movies, clubs, bars, restaurants, concerts, theater or dance, ball games, parties. In the summer, they might sit out with friends on a great patio somewhere, or maybe take a picnic to an outdoor concert or movies in the park. In Saudi Arabia, none of those things exist. None. Zip. Zero. There are no movie theaters. No sports. No alcohol, so no bars or clubs or parties the way people usually think of them. No arts of any kind, performance or visual. No parks. No sidewalks, even. No dating. On Thursday night, if you want to get out, you have two choices:

• Eat
• Shop

Saudi culture is a late-night culture. Lots of business and workers knock off for a few of the hottest afternoon hours, then add the intrusions of prayer closures at (give or take) 12:00, 3:00, 6:00, and 8:00, and a lot of things don't start to really happen until after 8:00. Retail business stay open until 10:00 or 11:00. (At least, those that aren't already open 24 hours.)  

Us: On Thursday night, we wanted to get out like the next guy. Besides, since women can't drive in Saudi Arabia, there's always a list of things we can do together that I can't do on my own. (At some point men will realize they won't have to spend as much time standing around outside shoe stores if the women could get out on their own.)

We intended for our route to include a stop at Hyper-Panda for a difficult-to-find battery someone suggested might be at the watch counter. A single pair of batteries. That's it. But you know how things go at the Super-Whatever, right? They didn't have the battery, but the household supplies I had on my list were just right there, so we started down the first aisle. And the soup pot! Into the next. And the cleaning supplies! Oh--groceries. Look! Chicken broth!

Meanwhile, Hyper-Panda s-l-o-w-l-y got fuller and fuller. With no culture of dating, when Saudis go out, they go out as families, so there are children everywhere you go. At Hyper-Pander, as the evening got later, the aisles gradually filled with white columns, black tents, wire carts, and children running and weaving around all of them. Imagine Wal-Mart on the Saturday before Christmas, and everybody brought the kiddies. At 11:00 p.m. After feeding them plates full of cookies. By the time we got to the dairy aisle, it had become difficult to move and we started to say it was time to leave, no matter what remained on the list. That's when we rounded the corner into the meat/fish/nut/cheese/produce department and saw this:

The camera didn't catch all the children. They were moving too fast.

We got a spot in one of the 7 open checkout stands (not exaggerating, actually counted) out of 50 (not exaggerating, they were numbered) and fled just before the water reached boiling and we were completely cooked. We had eggs and milk. We were going to survive another day or two. There's a reason I don't go to Target on the Saturday before Christmas, which I learned the hard way at some point. Here? Lesson learned again. I think we'll celebrate our Thursday nights at home with Netflix from now on.

Sjaudi Saturdi

I live in a rented, furnished villa in a mostly-Western compound in Riyadh. Now be careful that with the word "villa" you don't conjure an image that looks anything like what I get when I Google "villa":

Or that by "furnished" you imagine anything like what I get with "villa interior":

I'm particularly fond of the grand-hall showpiece in the upper left. No, you can find all the furniture in my living room in the IKEA catalog, and although this is probably the way most IKEA furniture is put to work in the real world, I don't think you'll see a picture like this on the catalog cover. May I present my living room, my own villa interior:

I call the collection "drabvit." It's a lovely space, and the palm trees and bouganvillea out of sight outside are my favorite part. I'm looking forward to improving it as we travel and find things we love, but right now, it's far from homey.

The thing is, moving to a foreign country with nothing but the contents of suitcases and a few plastic totes means you arrive like a college student. Or worse, because you have no hand-me-down pots or pans or basic household supplies. You're setting up house like a very unpopular newlywed, who had no friends to throw bridal showers or bring presents to the wedding. I came without a broom. Or a cookie sheet. Or a spatula. Or the most important feature in any room, lamps. All those travels are off in the misty future, and we needed to set ourselves up. And what's the best place to start adding to an all-IKEA collection? IKEA, of course.

The Swedes and the Sauds get along very well, it seems. Well, of course there are the occasional cultural gaps. 

I wonder if the corporate office has noticed that the corkscrews aren't moving very well. Or, come to think of it, maybe they do--I expect they might be the first thing a Saudi packs when he heads to Dubai for a weekend.

The dining area is also unique to Saudi locations, and is essentially what you see in any restaurant here. The dining area for men:

The dining area for women and for men who want to eat with their wives/mothers/children/anything but other men:

The curtains at each booth allow the women behind them to uncover their faces. Otherwise, you have to pull the veil aside, sneak a bite in, then drop the veil again, something like this:

If it were me, and the dish were soup, I'd be walking around the rest of the day with a wet veil. Around conservative Riyadh, the vast majority of women I see wear veils. (And the one in the picture is being unusually bold for anyone who wears a veil in the first place.) I understand that when you get out to the coastal areas where there is more Western influence, and that number drops to about half.

So this is what a typical Arab family eating out looks like:

Those kids, by the way, must be REALLY enjoying the food. A more representative picture would have a two little streaks going by the curtain as they ran up and down the aisles.

Anyway, we found dishes, silverware, kitchen organization tools, bed linens--all the routine things you go to IKEA for when setting up house. And it would have been the same sort of trying Saturday-at-IKEA trip a person would make anywhere in the world but for one thing unique to Saudi Arabia: prayer time.

In Saudi Arabia, five times a day, you hear the call to prayer (adhan) all over the city. When I'm at home, I love it. We're situated between three different mosques, and the muezzins' voices cross over each other. (To get an idea, click here to hear a really beautiful one on YouTube. I'll record and post what I hear sometime, but it'll have to wait for winter--right now all a microphone would pick up is the air conditioners.) At its root, it's a constant reminder to me of the universal human movement upward, toward something better and bigger. It humbles me personally as well, makes me stop and ask whether I'm grateful enough, seeking enough, pointed in the right direction. And it reminds me of the amazingly, impossibly exotic and faraway place where I now live.

But when you're trying to do business, it's a colossal pain. Retail businesses hibernate for anything from 25 to 45 minutes. If you're in the store or restaurant, you can keep doing what you're doing--and most people do--but employees stop working. Cash registers close, kitchens stop serving, salespeople disappear. The call to prayer happens on a sun-driven schedule that varies from day to day and is published in the papers like you find the tide schedule in coastal towns. In general, it happens at dawn, midday, midafternoon, sunset, and nightfall. The dawn call doesn't bother anybody, but noon, 3:00ish, 6:00ish, and 8:00ish are gonna cause you problems, guaranteed.

At IKEA, midafternoon prayer on Saturday looks like this:

Not a yellow-and-blue shirt in sight. We'd been racing to get to the checkout before the call, but because you don't know exactly when it's going to hit (unless you havee an app, which can make you crazy because it's adding to all the calls you hear around you), you're only guessing and hoping. In our case, the checker cut off the line with us. So we sat. Like everybody else.

That pile of red cushions went to good use. The good news? We had a flat-bed cart and therefore a place to sit (no thanks to IKEA and their stand-up tables in the bistro area). The sunset call to prayer caught us in an appliance store and unable to read the descriptions on the microwaves and blenders for 45 minutes, but the evening call found us crashed at Chili's, iced diet Pepsis in our hands, with the food just hitting the table. Sometimes, things work out.

But I still don't have a lamp.