Hospitality in Saudi Arabia

 

Of all of the places I have travelled, none has been stranger than Saudi Arabia. The rules of society baffle and the culture follows a secret map that’s never shown to me. I was surprised to end up here and feel anything but miserable. And yet, it is the very miserableness that makes me grateful for the ray of metaphorical sunlight which illuminates my life here.

I am approaching my second Thanksgiving in Jeddah, and while there are many things to be ungrateful about—like prayer time or the enforced dress code—the sheer difficulty of everyday life here makes me all the more grateful for the small and occasional kindness of strangers. My husband and I had been married for one month when we moved to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia to teach at an international school. Though we had lived in Muslim countries before we met, it was hard to be prepared for this.

As a newly married couple, we were bracing ourselves for a major power imbalance, where my powerlessness gave my husband additional responsibilities. For example, it is illegal for me to drive here. I am also required to wear an abaya, a long, black, polyester, judge-like robe, whenever I am in public. The first days in Saudi Arabia were a twister of heat, sand, shopping, and jet lag. Our employer ferried the new teachers around the city, helping us get all the things we needed to set up a new life in a new country.   Shopping in Saudi Arabia can feel a lot like an obstacle course. Shops rarely adhere to posted hours and prayer time is an omnipresent specter. Prayer time is a five times daily phenomenon, when all businesses of any kind shut their doors for thirty minutes minimum (sometimes more if they decide to start early or end late). This is to allow the Muslim workers and shoppers time to complete their prayers.

Not being Muslim, the utility is lost on me. Instead, it is a constant struggle to keep an eye on the time for fear of being shut out of somewhere or shut in. To make things even more complicated, prayer time shifts by a minute or two from one day to the next, so though you can leave one shop at 5 pm in October, by 5 pm in November you will have already been locked inside. On this particular occasion, a great busload of new and tired teachers pulled up to Extra, the big box store of Saudi Arabia.  My husband and I finished shopping before the bus was due to pick us up again, so I suggested going to the mall next door for coffee, hoping that the caffeine would combat our jet lag. The mall was like a ghost town. Every window front was boarded up and dark, though it was only four or so in the afternoon. The coffee shop was a small, isolated kiosk, solitary in the middle of the mall, but dark like the rest. Prayer time had struck again. I burst into tears. The one thing I wanted more than anything else in the world, the one thing that could brighten my sandy, hot day, was an iced latte.

My husband flitted around me like an anxious butterfly. Physical contact in public between members of the opposite sex, even married, is frowned upon here. The fact that my own husband couldn’t put his arms around me and soothe away my fears made the crying come harder until I was gasping, struggling to breathe. With his arms outstretched, he herded me towards the chairs arranged outside the coffee shop. With our closer vantage point, we could see a man sitting inside the closed kiosk, looking at his phone. Leaving me seated and hiccupping, tears streaming down my face, my husband approached the man and asked if I could have a cup of water. The man’s face looked stricken; my crying clearly made him uncomfortable. I’m still not entirely sure what happened next. My tears absorbed my attention until my husband walked back to the table, an iced latte in his hand. I jerked my head up, startled. “But, it’s prayer time!” “I know. He asked what you wanted and I told him. He made it anyway.” My crying slowed to a trickle. I put my lips around the straw and let the sweet liquid fill my mouth. Maybe I could do this. It’s only now that I can be truly grateful for what the man at the coffee shop did for me. I did not realize it at the time, but serving me during prayer time was an act of defiance. He broke the law to comfort a lost woman, a stranger.

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One response to “Hospitality in Saudi Arabia

  1. Always interesting to read of fellow expat experiences in KSA.

    I was in Riyadh between 2000-2001. Whilst I never made it to Jeddah I always heard people say it was a little bit more “relaxed” in Jeddah.

    Prayer time and Ramadan and certainly things to get used to if you are not a muslim. I remember we often used to go to Subway for lunches. Once the staff realising we were foreign happily locked us in during prayer time so we could continue to finish our lunch. Then the religious police arrived and the owners got into a lot of trouble. Thankfully the religious police were very forgiving of us and just asked us to leave.

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