First Impressions of Saudi Arabia

Finally I’ve seen it, well a bit of it anyway.

I’m talking about the largest Arab country, in size anyway – the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, aka KSA. “What do you think of it?” “How did you find it?” have been common questions both while I was there and since coming back to Lebanon.

Well, it’s like Nevada, but without Las Vegas. It’s very flat, there’s lots of sand and the roads are wide and well made. Pedestrians, however, are rare and the driving standards don’t really match the road system: dawdlers in the fast lane are a regular feature, even though a full tank of petrol is less than a tenner. And there’s a lot of land, so, while real estate and petrol are both ridiculously expensive in London, packets of land and tanks full of petrol are readily and cheaply obtainable.

I liked the appearance of the buildings in Riyadh, not just the spectacular Kingdom Tower (known locally as the bottle opener) and the Al Faisaliyah Centre with which it’s aligned, but the ordinary shops, offices and houses. There isn’t the architectural indigestion that Dubai’s tallest, widest, longest, biggest approach creates, nor is there that feeling of utilitarian concrete overuse apparent in some of the Beirut suburbs, so good marks on that score.

On a completely different note, though having been to a boys only school and men only college at University, single sex education did not inspire me to a life of separation and celibacy. Indeed I used to organise dances and parties at University bringing in young women by coach from single (and opposite of course!) sex teacher training and nursing colleges in outlying small towns. I’ll leave you to imagine the effects of the combination of youthful hormones, dance music and alcohol on groups who hadn’t even seen members of the opposite sex for sometimes weeks. Perhaps, understandably, both the educational establishments that attempted to equip me with knowledge for dealing with life have seen the light and become co-ed.

KSA gave me flashbacks to those times, and not the ones shortly after the coaches had arrived either. The excellent fish restaurant where we lunched, had two doors onto the street – one marked “Restaurant” which was for men only and one marked “Families”. Women do not go out alone and the doors lead to completely separate establishments on different floors. I did not see anyone of the female persuasion neither in the two businesses visited, nor on the streets, nor behind the wheel of a car the whole time I was there; those on the plane from Beirut magically evaporated at airport arrivals to reappear only in the departure lounge, I really hope they hadn’t been there the whole time.

Home life, at least the one I was delighted to share for all too short a time with my step-daughter, her husband and their three kids, seemed like an oasis of normality – and then friends of theirs arrived and a party happened centred on an Indian take away so even more social normality, according to my standards anyway.

I’d been warned not to speak to strangers, but predictably ignored that. I asked a fellow traveller if I was in the right queue at the airport check-in area, he was a local and instead of the curt “yes” normal in most places, proffered his hand and struck up a conversation, in English, before we went to our separate queues, and that made me feel good about the place.

On balance then, I’m glad to have been and seen, and, having broken the duck so to speak, will go back, not much future for it as tourist destination though. Oh, sorry I didn’t answer the second question, “how did I find it”. Well I didn’t, I let the pilot do that.