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.