Ramadan and Repat

Traditional nighttime Iftar feast, to break the daytime fast during Ramadan

The month-long Ramadan celebration started on August 1st. For the next moon cycle, Muslims will fast during the daylight hours, and then break their fast with the traditional Iftar meal at sundown. I went for a walk through the neighborhood last night at around 9 p.m., and passed several households that were brightly lit, the driveways and curbs crowded with cars. I can picture the dining tables inside these houses in a few hours, groaning with food and surrounded by family and friends until the early morning hours. 

This morning Michael came home from his first night shift during this Ramadan and declared that he would eat nothing until he went to work again this evening. He is a paramedic, so he has a “hurry up and wait” pace at work. When there are no patients to attend to, his shift is quiet, especially at night. Last night, though, his Saudi colleagues brought in a huge midnight Iftar feast, and he stayed up all night eating and visiting.

Other than the night-time Ramadan celebrations, August looks like a ghost town on our compound, with most of the resident expats off on holiday. On my night walks, I can stroll down the middle of the street and not be passed by a single car. I don’t even try to do anything outside during daylight hours, and I have been watching too much TV. I can’t seem to work up the motivation to do much of anything.

Time stands still during the afternoon when it’s hottest, and I feel the overwhelming pull of the couch for afternoon siestas. Time also seems to jump instantly forward: another day has gone by, the white-hot sky has dimmed into blackness, and where did all those hours go?

All this hermit-like behavior makes me feel sluggish and throws off my internal clock. Am I sleepy, or just hot? It feels wrong to stay indoors, breathing air-conditioned air all the time and avoiding the sunlight.

Up the chimney on the climbing wall at our community's school gym

That said, my activity level has also been swinging to the other extreme: I have been improving my technique on the climbing wall in the gym at the nearby school. Also, a friend has been giving me swimming lessons (I already knew how to swim, but until now nobody ever taught me the proper way to do the various strokes.) A few times I have hauled myself out to the track shortly after dawn for some desultory jogging laps. Also, the gyms in our community (we have separate gym facilities for men and women) just got new equipment, and I have been getting a little carried away there with the fancy new weights. Plus, my yoga students are commenting that I have been cranking up the intensity in recent classes. I'm discovering that the secret to success as a couch potato is to find the proper balance balance between utter, slovenly sluggishness and intense physical activity.

Shannon, my dear friend and ruthless swim coach

I am counting the days until my husband and I take our long annual holiday outside the Kingdom. Saudi law requires that we leave the Kingdom for at least a couple of weeks each year. Expats call this "repat," short for repatriation. Not that Saudi Arabia cares whether we actually return to our home country or not. We just have to leave this one. No problem! We will leave in late August, and our first stop will be in Switzerland, to visit some friends Michael made last summer when he was in Zanzibar. 

Estate Belvedere, St. Croix

Next we will go to St. Croix and stay with my cousin and her husband, who manage the Estate Belvedere, a four acre guest estate that includes the ruins of a 1700s sugar mill. There I'll get to meet her two children for the first time. New cousins! We hope to do some boating, diving and snorkeling there, and enjoy beautiful sunsets with fruity rum drinks in hand. I can’t believe my good fortune, to have a crazy-fun cousin who actually lives on a Caribbean island!

Our last Sunday night potluck dinner before we left the U.S.

After St. Croix, we’ll go to Maryland and spend a few weeks catching up with friends and family. Part of our time will be in our hometown of Greenbelt, which will be celebrating Labor Day as only a New Deal-era planned community can, with a three-day festival and a parade. We’ll also enjoy a few Sunday dinners with the group of friends we’d been having Sunday potluck with for the last ten years or so before we left the country. Of all the things I miss about living in Greenbelt, Sunday potluck dinner is at the top of the list.

Ocean City Boardwalk

While in Maryland, we’ll also spend some time at our family condo in Ocean City. (Marketing plug! Did you know that I wrote a travel guide to Ocean City? It’s the most recent, most definitive guide to Maryland’s seaside resort!)

Idyllic Eastern Shore spot for our big family celebration

Plus, we’ll spend several days on the Chesapeake Bay on Maryland's Eastern Shore. We rented a house big enough for our entire extended family, and there we will have our annual all-purpose family holiday. We call it Thanksbirthmas. Since we only make it home once a year, we have one giant blow-out dinner party and present exchange. I love this new tradition that our family has started, and this year we’ll get to enjoy it in a quintessentially Maryland spot, on the water between Easton and St. Michael’s on the Eastern Shore. It’s fun to plan a trip home as a visitor. We’re like tourists who already know all the good spots, and we will actually have time to kick back and enjoy our home state.

At the end of September, we will head back to Saudi Arabia, suitcases full of things that cannot be had in our newly adopted country: Old Bay Seasoning, Q-Tips, Optive eye drops, My Organic Market decaffeinated coffee, Glide Dental Floss, and new clothes in sizes that fit my 6’4” husband.

As much as I’m looking forward to our travels, I am sure we’ll be just as excited about returning to our own home sweet desert home.

Desert Diving

Red Sea Life (photo by Rachel Abel)

Moving to the desert is a great way to get dive certified. It worked for me!

When I lived in Maryland, I think I knew one or two people who were into diving. Here in Saudi Arabia, half of my friends are open water certified, and have made dive trips to the Red Sea, Thailand, the Philippines, and Mexico. My husband and I got our dive certifications this spring, and in early July we traveled to Yanbu--not far from Jeddah--with our compound's dive club. 

Saudi Arabia's west coast borders on the Red Sea, which, according to DIVE: The Red Sea ("The definitive Red Sea guide"--Sunday Times) is "the epitome of all that is enticing and fascinating about tropical reefs, with fabulous coral walls and gardens stocked with mythically beautiful sea life. For divers it remains the stuff of legend." And for most divers, a legend it will remain, because it is very difficult to get the proper entry visas to visit Saudi Arabia.

You can dive the Red Sea from Egypt, Jordan, Israel, and a few other places, but Saudi Arabia has the most coastline. Plus, because of the country's strict visiting policies, its underwater treasures are safe from the ravages of over-tourism. At every dive location on our trip, we were the only group there.

We live in the desert in Saudi's Eastern Province, which is a couple hours by plane away from the Red Sea. This doesn't sound like such a promising location for learning how to dive. However, we have a swimming pool for confined water exercises, and we're about two hours away (by car) from a beach on the Arabian Gulf. That beach doesn't have much of interest for the diver, but hey, it's open water. Plus its brown, silty depths are ideal for testing underwater navigation skills!

During the recent trip to Yanbu, my husband and I both completed our advanced open water certification. The tough part for me was doing the required "deep dive." We dropped down to about 80 feet below the surface, along with our dive instructor Ricky, and his daughter, Rica.

The others settled down at the bottom fairly quickly, but my ears had trouble equalizing. I've had difficulties with this on every dive. So I had to stop and hover about every ten feet, moving my jaw around, shaking my head, swallowing, doing this whole complicated routine until my ears gave a satisfying pop. Then I'd drop down a little further, feel a bit more pressure, and do it again. 

It wasn't much of a hardship to have to drop down slowly, anyway, because we were diving around an old shipwreck. It was eerie and thrilling to look down on the barnacle-encrusted hull of the Iona. Somehow, hovering in space (water-filled space, but still...) above a man-made object is much trippier than just hovering above the sandy bottom. If you've ever had a dream where you were flying, then you can imagine how this felt.

Finally I reached the bottom, and Ricky handed me a simple puzzle: pieces that fit together to make a small square of metal rods and joints. We had done the puzzle already, up on the dock before we boarded the dive boat, and Ricky had timed us. He timed us again underwater, and the point was to show us that everything happens more slowly at depth.

Puzzle success! (photo by Ricky Rabang)

After we surfaced from the deep dive, we got back on the boat to rest and wait for the next dive. Divers have to spend a certain amount of time on the surface between dives in order to avoid decompression sickness. We use a table to determine how long we must stay on the surface, based on how deep we just went and how long we stayed under. 

Until that day, I had never in my life been seasick. When I re-boarded the boat, though, the combination of a pitching deck and a set of inner ears that had just been thoroughly messed with made me feel just awful. Another diver (who is also an emergency room doctor) suggested that the best cure was to get back in the water. So I put my fins, mask, and snorkel back on, jumped in again, and did, in fact, feel much better. I floated around and checked out the beds of coral and schools of fish stretched out below me as far as I could see.

Finally, though, I had to pay for all the churning that my stomach had been doing earlier, and I fed the fishes.

That taken care of, I was once again right as rain, though I will say I picked through the strange hotel box lunch a bit more carefully than I otherwise would have. I had a lower tolerance level for mystery luncheon meat than normal.

Coral Wall (photo by Rachel Abel)

In the afternoon, we dove again and checked out several walls of coral. It's fun to explore a vertical surface, partly because the visual reference makes it easier to keep track of your depth (if you're a new diver like me, it's hard to tell exactly how deep you are unless you glue your nose to your gauges the whole time.) We swam around some "foothills" of coral, where we saw several sting rays settled down on the sandy bottom. Two of them were parked side by side in their own coral carport. They were completely still except for their rubbery gray edges, fluttering ever so slightly in the bottom current.

We also checked out a wall that dropped down, down, down to who knows how deep. It was a little disconcerting to look down and not be able to see the bottom at all. It was also thrilling.

When our run of dives was over, we secured all our gear and the captain (who chain-smoked and cursed with zeal) turned the boat around for shore. He crossed the open water ridiculously, absurdly fast, like any self-respecting Saudi driver would. The boat hit wave after wave with resounding, jaw-cracking crashes. Those of us who didn't squeeze back into the hot, crowded helm of the boat got soaked by the waves that repeatedly washed over the rails. 

As it happened, I was the only woman on this dive trip. When we got back to the harbor, I had to throw my abaya on like a beach cover-up over my (still soaking wet) bathing suit. I took a certain satisfaction in putting my abaya to such a non-traditional use.

As we disembarked, all of us were carrying our gear. Here I had another uniquely Saudi moment. In the blazing afternoon sun, there I was wearing this completely impractical, black, flowing robe that comes down to my ankles and has long, flowing sleeves. I was about to make an unsteady step from the floating dock onto the firm wooden dock, and I had an armload of diving gear. A man from the hotel was standing on the wooden dock watching me, but unlike any other man on any other dock in any other country I can think of, he did not offer me his steady hand.

I looked at him. He looked at me. He could see that I was having difficulty. However, it is not appropriate for a Saudi man to take a strange woman's hand. Finally, we did the best thing we could. I handed him my armload of gear. Then I stepped  onto the dock, and he handed my stuff back. We nodded to one another, and I continued on down the dock.

Hotel Pool Rules (Check out the third one from the bottom.)

Back at the hotel, the Saudi madness continued. The hotel has just one swimming pool, but it is not appropriate for men and women to be in a swimming pool together. So the hotel simply forbids women to use the pool. Lovely. All of our dive gear had to be rinsed off and laid out to dry on the hotel's pool deck, so that job fell to Michael. Here's another example of what a hassle all this sexism is for everyone! 

All bellyaching aside, though, seriously, I am absolutely thrilled to have this rare opportunity to see things that most westerners simply will never see, above the surface of the water and below. And I am grateful for experiences that show me how different my culture is from others'. These annoyances are eye-rollers, for sure, but I never forget how lucky I am to be here, and what a grand adventure it is!

Camp Life

Flower Show on our compound

With all the unrest in the Middle East these days, I have gotten many concerned messages from friends who are worried about my safety in Saudi Arabia. When I leave our compound, I will admit, my anxiety level climbs a bit--but that's probably because everybody here drives like an 11-year-old on a Mountain Dew-fueled rampage. (Doubtless, some of the boys behind the wheels of those old Caprice Classics are overcaffeinated 11-year-olds. There is no particular age limit for driving.)

However, at home on our "camp" inside not one, not two, but three gated checkpoints and surrounded by fences patrolled by security police and monitored by cameras; at home nearly an hour away from the nearest town and over two hours away from the Eastern Province's big city; at home in a tiny village surrounded on all sides by flat, brown desert where there is no place to hide and no way to approach without being seen clear as day--here at home, everything is peaceful. 

Race start for a recent half-marathon on another residential compound

Expat life is probably intentionally designed to distract residents from the fact that all of us are thousands of miles from our "real" homes. It is busy for those who choose to participate. On the company's compounds there are flower shows and golf tournaments, cultural evenings and coffee mornings, book clubs and tennis matches. There are petanque tournaments and triathlons, spinning classes and yoga classes, cooking demonstrations and concerts, a cricket club and a running club and a photography club and a dive club and on and on. When the terms of employment include a house and a phone number to call for maintenance of that house, then suddenly there is time to pursue hobbies and fitness and culture, of a sort.

Last weekend's petanque tournament grounds

Maybe all of the busyness and self-absorption of camp life causes a somewhat cavalier attitude. It would be easy to say, "this political stuff has nothing to do with me. I'm safe." So I am keeping in mind that I could stumble into a dangerous situation and get hurt just for being in the wrong place--that is, when I leave my ridiculously remote hometown. I also am trying to be respectful of the fact that I am a guest here; this is not my country, and I don't have any right to judge Saudis about the way they live their lives and they way they run their country.

As expats, we are generally treated as esteemed guests, and my husband is grateful for his job. The weird thing is, I am hearing about a demonstration being planned in Riyadh (far, far from my home!) to protest the high rate of unemployment in Saudi Arabia. I am confused about why unemployment levels are so high for Saudis, when about a third of the population is made up of expat workers. There are foreign workers everywhere, and I'm not just talking about manual labor jobs: I mean doctors, shop clerks, engineers, truck drivers, grocery store managers, construction workers, people on every rung of every ladder, except for upper management positions. Why do Saudi companies hire so many foreigners? I'm not making a judgment; I just don't understand.

Eddie the Cat, keeping an eye on global events

Overall, though, life goes on here, just like anywhere else. I'm keeping a closer eye on the news than I normally would, but that is the only way in which my world is more violent now than it was a couple of months ago.

The Largest Oasis in the World

I live about 45 minutes away from Al Ahsa, the largest oasis in the world. It is in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, and is known for its date farms. We spent the whole day on a tour of the region, and now I have a much better understanding of where I live. This is a tale best told in pictures, so here goes!

Camel Market

We started the day at the camel market, a big operation outside of town. There must have been hundreds of camels there, including lots of baby camels. Camels make strange, loud, Wookie-like noises, and they smell slightly rotten. Their lips are floppy, often revealing teeth and gums slimed greenish or brown.

Camel drool

Baby camels

We were told that adult camels often don't like humans (quite possibly because some are not treated well), but baby camels are almost always friendly and playful. 

Camel and Camry

This illustrates just how big a camel is. We visited with one of the Bedouins there at the market, who offered camel rides and free camel kisses to anyone interested.

Ibrahim Palace Wall

Next we visited the Ibrahim Palace Museum, in the center of the oasis, in the city of Hofuf. This is really more of a fortress than a palace; it was built by the Ottomans and includes a room that was originally a Turkish bath.

Turkish bath in Ibrahim Palace

When the Arabs reconquered the region and took over the palace, they converted the Turkish bath into a storage room. Our tour guide said that Bedouins are too tough for baths and massages.

Ibrahim Palace mosque dome and minaret

The palace had inside its walls a beautiful, simple mosque which was open for us to tour.

Inside the mosque

The mosque was lit with this simple chandelier, which had been converted to electricity. It was easy to imagine what it must have been like, though, with the domed interior lit by candles in those glass globes, along with the perforated openings higher up on the wall.

Inside the courtyard of Al Mullah House

We drove just a few blocks from the palace to Al Mullah House, a residence which was established in the late 1700s. The house presents a blank wall with just a single door to the street. Like most traditional architecture in this region, the windows and doors of the house face inward, into a central courtyard.

Al Mullah interior living space

Traditional Arabic cushions furnish the interior rooms, which are dark and ventilated with cool air thanks to the perforated filigree that allows air to pass through the walls.

Still in Hofuf, we visited Ameriya School, a traditional school for boys (as all traditional schools were), and the Al Ahsa Museum, which offered an easy-to-digest history of this region and Saudi Arabia generally. And then: lunch!

Poolside dining

The bus took us to a walled compound--there are 101 such resort compounds in Al Ahsa, we were told. Inside, were free to relax, remove abayas (for we were to treat this like home), tour the grounds, and sip tiny cups of Arabic coffee before lunch. 

Strolling around the resort

The resort reminded me a little bit of an upscale version of something you'd find in Rishikesh, the little city in India that I visited last year. The overall effect was exotic and lush, but the details were screwy: a taxidermied duck perched next to the tropical waterfall. A dusty, disused game room included a pool table that looked too small to be regulation sized. A sad, small zoo or menagerie included an ostrich, the largest turkey I have ever seen, and some long-haired felines that looked to me like big, well-fed housecats. 

Menagerie cat

The resort put out a massive Arabic buffet, including hummus, tabbouleh, baba ghanouj, several green salads, kebabs, chicken in a rich gravy, seasoned rice, and on and on and on. We ate, then had plenty of time to relax after lunch. This relaxed break in the middle of the day was a really nice touch that struck me as distinctly Middle Eastern.

Lounging after lunch

It was a good thing we got to rest a little after lunch, because the next stop on our tour was Al Gara Mountain. We toured surprisingly cool sandstone caves, and then we climbed around on the mountain. 

On the path to the cave entrance

In the picture above, you can get a sense of the scale of the mountain. The Al Ahsa region is flat, flat, flat, so it is appropriate to call these "mountains," though of course they're not so big compared to other places in the world.

Entering the caves

A cool breeze blew out of the cave entrance, which was quite disconcerting on a warm, sunny afternoon. Our group explored some of the caves under the mountain, but the guide explained that there are many, many others that branch off. We came across some extinguished campfires and debris that told us that people wander in here and camp.

Tight squeeze

Our guide told us that this passage was a diet test: if you can pass through, you don't need to go on one! I got through, but I was touching rock front and back.

Looking across the top of Al Gara Mountain

After we explored the underside of Al Gara Mountain, we climbed to the top of it. Parts of the uphill climb were steep, and the hand and footholds were loose with sand. This being Saudi Arabia, I was climbing in my abaya. My friend and I tied our abayas up like long shirts, and a couple of times my wide, floppy sleeves got in the way. Western women were, of course, the only females who were attempting to climb. On the ground below, Saudi women were arranging picnics on blankets and watching over their younger children, while the men and older kids clambered around on the rocks.

View of the oasis

Here's a good illustration of how big, and how lush, Al Ahsa is. The trees down below are date palms. There are hundreds of date farms here.

Dates

From Al Gara Mountain, we went to see a traditional pottery demonstration, and then to a date factory--though this is not date season, so there was nothing really going on there. We did buy some Al Ahsa rice there, which looks like reddish basmati rice. Can you imagine: they grow rice in Saudi Arabia! 

Finally, we returned to the resort for another incredible meal. It was after 9 p.m. when the tour bus returned us home, caked with mountain dirt and stuffed with traditional Arabic food.

East Coast Overload, Part 1

We overbooked, and I feel like I have been eating birthday cake, or sitting at the Thanksgiving table, for about six weeks straight. My husband and I are back in our hometown of Greenbelt, Maryland, visiting all the family and friends we left behind one year ago when we moved to Saudi Arabia. I have been eating and drinking more than my share, and exercising less than my share, so I'm feeling kind of gross. But also blissful! What I really am understanding now is that I need to build more time in between things to enjoy and process. We have stuffed so much into our schedule that I haven't had time to savor our experiences, much less think and write about them.

That's how it goes. But I can show you some photographs, and tell you that in future, I want to slow it down so that I can be a more considered traveler--and take a little more time to digest and to write. 

 

Here is my eldest niece at soccer practice. She's on a league team now, and the difference in her skill level after a year is remarkable!

Here is our new nephew and our new niece. Both were born while we were overseas.

In early October, our family visited a farm in West Virginia, and I took a turn on a hand-cranked apple press that dated back to 1860.

I learned to shoot a rifle....

... and took a trip to Ocean City, Maryland with my husband and with Baxter, the dog Michael and I had to leave behind when we went to Saudi Arabia. (Don't worry: Baxter is fine. He's living with his best doggy friend Henry, and Henry's family.)

Michael and his father shared their first drink in a year.

The family traveled to Rhode Island to celebrate my husband's grandmother's 90th birthday. She showed up to her own birthday party dressed as Tipsy the Clown.

Next: a week in New Hampshire, the Marine Corps Marathon, and a New York weekend.