Jeddah, The Red Sea, and Beyond

   The last several days have been full of fascinating adventures in Saudi: two and a half days in the major city of Jeddah (4 million), snorkeling in a well secluded cove north of Yanbu, wandering through Old Yanbu town at 10 at night, and all the while teaching very enjoyable classes, enjoyable students, and enjoyable curriculum. Man, it hardly gets any better. Well, ok, the temperature could relax a bit; I think it's made its point.
Jeddah seen from the air is exciting for first-timers like us, but in the end it looks like any big city except with far fewer high-rises, so I'll spare you the photos from the plane. Mall life in Jeddah is quite impressive if you like that sort of thing and many many do, but after seeing Starbucks and MacDonalds and TGIFriday's for the umpteenth time among the abaya shops, sports shops, and so on, I opted for the souks of old Jeddah, markets dating back a long long time, well into the Middle Ages. And perhaps the oldest commodity traded there has always been dates, and did I find a date shop. You wouldn't see this next to a Starbucks.
The people in the shop were most welcoming and, quite frankly, I was stunned by the variety of dates, spices, and assorted sweets. Dates rolled in sesame seeds (that's my order he's selecting in the photo), dates with almonds, dates in honey, dry dates, soft sweet dates, more dates than you can imagine. The whole thing was such an enjoyable experience, I thought about applying for work.
   Predictably, the souks are colourful in ways that North American-style malls aren't. Shops featuring beautiful bolts of cloth in all colours sold by men in stunning white thobes, less upscale shops specializing in rugs and wall-hangings, quite classy gold shops and silver shops, high-end shops with walls lined in an incredible variety of men's perfumes, steaming restaurants and food shops down crowded alleyways, all ready to sell you what you need. A wonderful relief about the souks, this with the crowded markets of Beijing still ringing in my ears after two years , is that no one is shouting about his wares, no one is badgering the window shoppers, the strollers, or the foreign geezers. I was never hassled nor harried, although one somewhat desperate looking fellow did try to sell me a pretty dodgy looking watch, but with the lowest of voices and the gentlest version of prodding hopeful insistence I've come across in a market. Here's a colourful shop window and below you see Rose and our good friend Marsha Phelps, new grade six teacher, trying to decide on which new abayas they'll get from one of about a dozen abaya stalls we saw when we returned to the souk late in the evening after my reconnoitering visit in the morning.

   The snorkeling adventure went much better this time, although Rose stayed home to get caught up with school work. She'll get her trip in a couple of weeks when Borden and Anita take us, the couple we originally tried to go with two weeks ago. The trip up the coast was eventful in that the low-lying and quite rugged mountains were well within view, camels grazed along the roadside but did not find us nearly as interesting as we found them, and as always the speed of most drivers was enough to make me happy we were only going 120km an hour.
   This spot is a fairly secluded cove about two km off the main highway, a multi-laned road much like the new sections of Hwy 10 near Toronto except for the fact that the strip of land which separates the two sets of lanes does not include a turn-off for drivers coming from the south, as we were. It was clear from the tire tracks in the sandy divide that one is expected to simply drive down into the divide and up the other side in order to cross the other lanes and get onto the road leading into the beach. A bit unusual, but look at the money the country has saved by not creating intersections.

    Besides the water being a lovely temperature for swimming, besides the geographic delights of the surrounding area, what mattered most was the marine wildlife, both the long gone and the very much alive. If only I'd had an underwater camera, I could show you the gorgeous colours of the coral, of the zebra-striped fish and gold fish, of fish dappled in all the colours you can imagine. But you'll have to settle for this crab I found. The other photo is of some exposed rock along the shore and you can see how most of it is actually the bones of ancient sea life, a fossil hunter's dream. By the way, if you click on the picture of the beach, you'll get a better look at those dark spots in the water, many of them quite close to shore; those are all coral outcroppings and each one is its own little underwater world. I'll try to get pictures to show you what I mean when we go in a week or two.












    We finally made it into the older part of Yanbu, where so many of the locals do their daily buying and selling. We visited a brass shop with a very colourful owner who was quite friendly and chatty, willing to lay out many many rugs for our consideration or tell us the story of the various items we showed the least bit of interest in. He's been in the same spot for 21 years and is the type of shop owner who makes going into the town a much superior experience to shopping at the mall. Our prize purchase is a cloth we're using as an end-table cover, a lovely piece of work which cost us all of 25 riyals (about 6 dollars). You can see my foot in the photo by which I cleverly create a sense of scale (note the fancy pj's purchased that same day).
   For those of you wondering about the school and what the teaching is like, we're saving up some photos and stories in order to have one whole blog be about our school life. As I mentioned in my opening, we are quite enjoying the staff, the students, and the teaching. Rose is even insisting I take a photo of the school cat Elizabeth, or as Rob Phelps calls her, Lizard Breath, to include in the blog about our working day. I feel I should get permission from the various people in the photos before I use them in my blog.  Perhaps the school will be the focus of next week's entry.

The Regular Bazaar of Life

We're off to Jeddah early on Tuesday morning for a couple of days and are quite looking forward to visiting the old bazaar there, the souk, as markets are usually called here in Saudi. If you want to get a look at what the old one in Jeddah is like, type in SusieOfArabia (all one word) and click on Jeddah Daily Photo Journal; you'll find some great photos there of various aspects of life in Saudi. I was going to copy one or two of her photos to include here in my blog ahead of our trip, with due credit paid to her ownership of the photos, but I didn't have time to email and ask permission, so pay her site a visit yourself. You'll find some great stuff.

I mention the souk because as I lazed about in the pool this morning after my run (101F at 9:15 when I finished. Good Lord.), the only idea I could come up with for this blog was the variety of things we experienced this week. Nothing major, but many interesting, little things. So here's a souk, as it were, of the past week.

Take, for example, this display at the meat counter. I'm wondering how I would use these in the kitchen, and all I can come up with is beef stock. Any ideas? And how big would my pot have to be? Ah well, I can't kick about the culinary options open to us: many and varied.

Speaking of meals, we had a wonderful "end of Ramadan/beginning of Eid holiday" potluck by the pool the other night and as the sun set and darkness grew, the scene became a little magical. Not having asked anyone's permission to put their photos on the blog, I only include this one nighttime shot of our gathering. By 7:30 it is fully dark now; in fact, this has been the case since we arrived, a result of being so much closer to the equator than at home I guess.

Some of the senior students at the school have been trying to raise money for Pakistan flood relief and one of the ways they offered of doing this was creating henna tattoos for anyone who wanted one. These are the sort that wash off after a few days or so, and Rose decided to get one. The initial process ends up making it look like you've been decorated by someone adept at writing celebratory messages on birthday cakes. But once the "icing" dries up and falls off, thereby leaving a scattered trail of little brown droppings, the resulting tattoo can be quite lovely. Rose's donation of 10 Saudi Riyals was considered very generous (they only wanted four). So for about 2.50 Cndn this is what she got.


Most evenings we have a bit of time to see if anything decent is on tv, and every once in a while a good movie will come on (Blade Runner and Woody Alan's Small Time Crooks have been featured, but usually the movies are quite dreadful--The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, for example) or there might be a Premier League game, an interesting piece on Discovery, or the BBC news channel which almost always seems worth watching, as do SkyNews and Aljazeera. But last night, as I was drifting off to sleep on the couch I gave the channel changer one more go round and was delighted to find an Arabic channel featuring several traditionally dressed men in those flawlessly ironed, sharply creased, and almost startlingly white thoabs sitting in a golden and chandeliered room discussing nothing that I was able to figure out. Until their very calm and reasoned discussion was interrupted by a clip of camel racing. After a moment of watching quite ungainly animals chase after one another, we were returned to the golden room and the extraordinarily dressed gentlemen quietly discussing the racing.

This pattern of discussion and breaking away to camel racing went on for some time. I found it fascinating. I've tried twice to upload a video clip of the golden-roomed bookies and the races, but I keep getting an error message (Is Big Brother watching?) so that won't work. Nonetheless, it makes you nostalgic for the bingo halls and horse tracks of southern Ontario. Here's a poor quality shot of the race taken while I was watching and another of the Arab gents. If you click on the picture, you'll get a larger version. By the way, I have no idea what that bus was doing, but it raced around the track with the camels each time.

Finally, the frangipani tree, pronounced with a soft 'g' as in fringe. Several of them grow on our compound and they have delicate white flowers year round. I'm also happy to see them because they are mentioned in a wonderful short story by Margaret Laurence, "The Perfume Sea," which I taught for years to my senior Literature class. Every time I see one here, I remember that story, that course, and why I still love teaching English.

That gives you a taste of the rich bazaar of life we've come to enjoy here in Yanbu. You can see that regular daily contact with Saudis is pretty limited, but we're hoping to make up for that soon with a trip into the nearby mountains where we'll also get to learn more about the Bedouin and in a couple of days when we make it to Jeddah and its ancient souks.

The Meaning of Inshallah

We've learned to say inshallah with some frequency over the last few days It means "god willing": getting our first paycheques cashed, inshallah, at the local bank without benefit of an account which we can't open because we don't yet have our iqama(our proof-of-residency card) which might come by the end of October, inshallah, as long as our paperwork is in order and the sometimes desperately slow wheels of Saudi bureaucracy turn the appropriate number of times, inshallah; getting our airline tickets which must be paid for before two o'clock, inshallah, at the travel agency for the 50 minute flight south to Jeddah two weeks from now, a process our New Zealand friend Ollie tells us could take 15 minutes, inshallah, or an hour and fifteen minutes depending on how long the line-up is and complicated by the fact that during Ramadan the office is only open from 10:30 to 2:00.

We hear it every day: on the bus taking us to work, in staff meetings, in the grocery shops. It's everywhere, and I suspect the reason for this is that you can never tell with any confidence what's going to happen, how long it will take when it does finally happen, and if it's going to work out in the end anyway. Things here can be maddeningly uncertain, so when things do work out as you might hope they will it is wise to assume Allah has decided to favour you, and it's even better to ask ahead of time with an "inshallah" aloud after every wish, hope, desire, or plan.

Take this morning's trip up the coast of the Red Sea, for instance.

The plan was to go north for an hour or so by car to a small cove with shallow waters and some spectacular coral reefs for a bit of snorkeling. Borden and Anita had set this up for us a week ago and we spent some time yesterday in one of the many pools on the compound learning to use the equipment people had generously lent us for the trip. Friday morning arrives, sunny and 94F, and by 8:30 we're loading the car with folding chairs, mats for the beach, coolers with snacks and drinks, towels, and all the standard beach paraphernalia. Two things, though, make this more than a trip to Sauble Beach or Wasaga. We have two massive containers of water, capable of keeping the four of us well hydrated for days, and "ladders" for the tires to grip the sand should we get stuck on the beach. These ladders are metal frames about two to three feet long, about eight to ten inches wide, and welded together so as to resemble a miniature ladder. The water and the ladders remind me that any trip out of town in Saudi has to allow for being stranded well out of town, and this always means at the very least lots of water.

With everything loaded, we're heading out of town and are driving along a fairly new multi-lane highway when, about 3 km out of town the highway ends quite suddenly in what turns out to be a villager's dusty sun-baked front yard. The highway just ends. We wind our way along bumpy narrow lanes between the village houses and emerge once again into someone's front yard where the multi-lane highway immediately starts again. It's the strangest thing. Borden tells us that the land for this village was a gift from the King to the owner of all the homes and he is reluctant to sell the King's gift to make way for the Yanbu version of the 401. I suspect it is simpler than that: he hasn't yet been offered what he thinks is appropriate compensation.

About two km later, the car overheats and we have to stop. Yanbu is still quite clearly in sight and the nearby mountains, less now than 30km away, loom impressively across very flat fields of quite scrubby brush and sand, lots and lots of sand. We inspect under the hood, and the problem is a mystery to the two of us. No leak, fluid levels clearly fine, fans working, but overheated nonetheless and foolish to go on without getting the problem solved. We limp back to town, stopping to allow the engine to cool every kilometer or so. And with every stop, as the engine cools, we heat up.

The best way for me to deal with the heat we endure as the car cools down is to get out into the sun and mild breeze with a bottle of water and feel grateful this problem didn't arise an hour up the road. Rose and Anita, on the other hand, stay in the car with the doors open, chatting, sipping lemon drinks. It's pretty clear the male fascination with motors and the problems they can cause cuts across vast cultural boundaries. Several Saudi drivers stop to offer help as we wait, hood up, fluids bubbling, and I get a lesson in sign language by watching Borden speak English to an Arabic speaking fellow about what's wrong and where it might be fixed on the Saudi equivalent of an Owen Sound Sunday. Lots of nodding, arm pointing, sweeping gestures meant to indicate heading off to the left or right in search of a mechanic. It's a strange dance.

An hour and twenty minutes after we left the compound in coral-snorkeling anticipation, we return with reassuring comments about being able to use the time to get some marking done. We'll try the adventure again in three weeks, inshallah, Borden and Anita suggest apologetically. With the opportunity of marking ahead of us, Rose and I change and walk out the front door into our front yard which is in fact a 14m by 7m pool. The water might be a decent temperature, inshallah. It isn't the Red Sea, and there isn't any brightly coloured coral in it, but it is cool and very refreshing.