10-26-09 Dhahran Saudi Arabia: 0821 hrs. I think it’s 2221 hrs. Sunday night in Los Angeles at the moment. Day time here. I have been in Saudi Arabia for almost a week now. I have some pals in the Foreign Service and they invited me to visit them out here. Seeing how difficult it is to secure a visa for Saudi Arabia, I went for it. Even with a visa from a high place, it was difficult. Poor Heidi was in charge of getting me all the visas I needed for this trip I’m on and the Saudi visa was the one that was the hardest for her to procure. She did it though and here I am.
I flew from LA to Frankfurt to Amman Jordan to Riyadh last week. Riyadh was a trip, the amount of money some people have there is hard to your head around. There are palaces everywhere. They show themselves as massive walled off chunks of property with houses that are often hotel size behind. The male youth of the rich are very much into their cars. Serious custom vehicles all over. The women can’t drive, so it’s a boys club. In fact, women don’t get to do a lot of things. That was the most interesting part of the time in Riyadh, talking to young people about how it is for them. There’s no dating, it’s against the law. You meet your mate-to-be soon before you’re married, there are a lot of divorces here. I went to a coffee place with a young guy, his friend owned the place and he wanted to show me how they roasted the coffee, etc. We had to leave a girl we had with us in the car. She wasn’t allowed to come in as she wasn’t related to any of the men in the car. Actually, she wasn’t allowed to be in the car with us. It was these aspects of Sharia law that were hard to get my head around. The dimension of weath that some people here enjoy wasn’t nearly as interesting as the restrictive nature of the laws. What it made me think about was how much in line these laws were with Christian fundementalist sentiments in America. Is this what they want? Back on the car front, my host took me to a place called My Car, they do repair and custom work on high end vehicles. I took a lot of pictures. Smashed up Ferraris like broken toys were lined up to get made good again. SUVs getting chopped and extended into six wheel monsters. The amount of money going into these cars is nuts. So, the people who hold the beating heart of the world’s oil supply are into big houses and cars that are worth the GDP of small countries.
It’s all here, Starbucks, Burger King, Ikea, etc. I feel right at home.
I have a couple of more days here and then onto another place, from which I will write you. Next week’s radio show will be an awful mix of good and bad and some playful jabs at my boss. It should be an experience, tune in if you can.
Thanks for reading this. Henry