ten minutes to myself

transportation woes (again!) and other stories

It didn't quite go like this:

Dear Family Who We Didn't House on the Special Compound

In order to give our employees and their dependents the best-ever bus service between where we've housed you and the place where you work and your children go to school, we're eliminating the bus services at 3 pm, effective the week of those afternoon parent/teacher conferences. To make this the most convenient for you.

K. Thx. Bai. 

But it's not too far from reality.

It really is the week of parent/teacher conferences, and the the bus at three that I had counted on when I scheduled my interviews at the elementary school and the middle school has been eliminated from the schedule. 

So that the kids and I aren't stranded at the elementary school - which is near nothing unless you happen to live in that part of the Dharma Compound (because then it's near your house!) - for three hours until the next bus appears, Chris is going to pick us up in our rental car. 

We have a rental car, and it's totally a big deal! Sure, it's one of those Toyota Fortuners that I came to loathe during our time in Thailand because ours lacked any sort of feature to make it compatible with my children's car seats and the lap-shoulder belt loved to cut into my neck in the most uncomfortable way, but it's also given us a lot more freedom to do things on the weekend that we didn't think that we missing out on before! We zoom on over the causeway to Bahrain, and have bacon with our breakfast, see movies at the cinema, and shop in stores that stay open all day. We drive to Tamimi on Friday mornings and bring home a trunk full of groceries instead of lugging them home on the bus. Even going into the compound to do whatever - check email, return library books, grab a burger at the eatery that is actually good (but otherwise inaccessible) - is so much easier when we can do it on our own schedule. 

You all know where this is heading, right?  

Yes. Ten months after arriving here in the Kingdom, we bought a car. Well, Chris did. It's a cute little Hyundai with cranberry-red leather seats. We should have actual possession of it sometime next week. 

We aren't exaggerating much when we say that we bought our last car, our Subaru, over the internet. Our experience buying our desert-mobile has been nothing like that. The drive out to the car dealerships has been a bit harrowing, even early on Saturday mornings when the traffic is "light". It seems that the best time of day to buy a car is at eight at night when the traffic is the heaviest. Chris took a GM Acadia out for a test drive one night a few weeks ago and passed a seven-car pile-up. The rule-of-thumb on the road here seems to be "if there's half a metre between your car and the car in front of you, you aren't following close enough." You can understand how things get dicey so fast here.  

After several false-starts and plenty of fretting, a winning model emerged, and Chris drove the rental car to the Hyundai dealership. How would he like to pay for the vehicle? Bank wire transfer. "Sir, can't you pay with your credit card?" 

Yesterday, he returned to Hyundai once again to fill out more paperwork, and one of the employees led him to a place he called "Auto Chapeau" so that Chris could hand-pick out the window-tinting for his new car. First question, "Would you like legal or illegal?" For serious.

If we'd known that buying a car here in KSA was going to be such an amusing experience, we would have done it months ago!

 

lamentations on photography

The "Memory" feature on Facebook popped up yesterday with a gorgeous photo of my bigger kid that I'd taken three years ago. We were in Ho Chi Minh City, and my photography group was shooting at a park at twilight to play with the gentle lighting. My photography group is probably the thing that I miss the most about my time in Vietnam - our outings to markets and temples and the tiny side streets were an excellent opportunity to experiment with perspective, texture, lighting, patterns, etc. 

I haven't been able to indulge my interest in street photography here in KSA. Wandering around the streets of Al Khobar with a dSLR isn't really encouraged, and even on the compound, photography outside of selfies, snapshots of your kids, and special events may be viewed as poor manners and at the extreme, highly suspicious. It feels like a complicated spectrum.

But there are Saudis and foreigners who make their living as photographers here (this gentleman's blog is abandoned but full of useful info, particularly this); I've learned that while Khobar's favourite look is "Flat and Sand Beige", this country has some stunning landscapes and urban character.

I took this photo over here on the left with my phone yesterday (funky filter also courtesy of my phone); I was returning a book to the library before going to a meeting and turned left one block too soon on when I was back on my way to the venue. I walked for about five minutes before I realized that I recognized none of my surroundings, and inwardly groaned at having to backtrack in the intense heat, but then I saw this interesting little pathway with the tunnel of trees, connecting the road that I was lost on with the road that I really wanted to be on. It was shady and cool inside the archway, and also just delightful to stumble upon something that was worth recording. This also made me wistful for a little piece of my former life, you know?  

ramadan and the rookies

It's that time of year, so my inbox and social media feeds are (helpfully) filling up with guidelines and helpful tips for the holy month here in the kingdom. I had the bare basics down already, but I've been reading most of the emails and articles and trying to memorize what business on the Dharma compound are open at the usual time and which ones are closed until sunset. 

One sentence that I read yesterday while googling was, "Ramadan is a poor month for planning birthday celebrations," and you know what? That was actually was I on the computer researching. 

Madeline turns eleven years old in a little more than one week. Since her birthday usually falls after school is finished for the year and most of her schoolmates have left for their summer holidays, parties aren't the most practical plan, but we have a pretty established tradition of going to the movie theatre for her birthday to see the latest Disney or Pixar summer release. It's lovely, and there's popcorn. 

My understanding is that movie theatres don't actually exist in KSA with the exception of ones on housing compounds, but the cinema at the City Centre Mall in Bahrain is a mere sixty-minutes-or-less drive away. We'd kind of been planning to take Madeline to see Inside Out in Bahrain. We could have a nice dinner and a swim there, too. This idea began to percolate a couple of months ago, definitely before I started to get those Ramadan: What You Need to Know emails. 

So, now what I know is that there is a good chance that the movie theatres in Bahrain might not be operating on Madeline's birthday until after sunset. Actually, for that matter, neither Chris nor I are totally certain that they're going to be open at all. That's fine ... but I'm just not sure that our contingency plan for celebrating my kid's trip around the sun should be!

I'd feel kind of bad if her birthday is just another day of hanging around the apartment, you know? Even if I bake awesome brownies. 

Stay turned.

it's the little things

This morning when Madeline pressed "0" on the elevator panel (it's the kind where a person has to select the floor they want to go to instead of pressing the arrows for up and down), instead of telling us to wait by elevators A, B, C, or D, the output screen showed the much-feared "XX". It meant that the system was down. Again. 

We live on the fifteenth floor, so taking the stairs to the ground floor is a reasonable undertaking and preferable to missing the bus to school, so the three of us headed to the stairwell to begin our descent. Madeline's fast on the stairs, and as I watched her figure round the flights well ahead of me and her little sister, it occurred to me that she was also carrying a backpack full of twenty pounds of stuff with her. 

The schools on the Dharma compound are running out of classroom space (just as the compound has run out of housing for families like mine), so fifth grade has been moved to the middle school and currently housed in an office building that was vacant and available. The students have to carry their backpacks everywhere with them. Madeline's has her lunch, water bottle, a large binder, a crazy amount of school supplies, and anywhere between 4 - 8 notebooks of various sizes. 

A few weeks back, I asked her what she was looking forward to about sixth grade. Her response came fast: "A locker!"

little miss cheerful

It's been brought to my attention by a handful of the very lovely ladies who live in my building that for a newcomer to Saudi Arabia, I seem way too upbeat about living here. I have to admit that I'm not sure how to react to that accusation, so I usually shrug and say, "Well, this isn't the hardest place that I've lived." 

I am guilty of declaring that my abaya is awesome after realizing that I don't have to dress up at all to go out (sidenote: you might have to come here to understand why; I'm not slovenly, I promise). I think that it's cool that my kids can choose any fancy beverage from a restaurant menu to have with their lunch instead of having to hunt for the non-alcoholic offerings. I am quite happy to read a book while in rush hour traffic rather than navigate through it. 

My family is in a minority here because this isn't our first overseas assignment. We are also unique because we've repatriated once and then moved across the ocean again (albeit a different ocean). I know to expect that many of my frustrations about KSA won't go away, but that I'm going to find that many of the things that I love are going to outweigh them. And I know not to idealize life in my home country (thank you very much, repatriation reality-check). That last point is probably the hardest thing to let go of. 

When we first left Canada and moved to Thailand, I know that it took me months - at least nine - before I emerged from my deep funk enough to even realize that I had been in one. Maybe this is why I don't know what to say when my friends and acquaintances tell me that I seem bizarrely happy with life here; I could be fooling everyone right now without the self-awareness to realize it!

i think we all learned something

Shortly after we arrived in the kingdom, we noticed that one of the swimming pools on the compound appeared to have a pair of colourful water slides, and Chris took Sadie there yesterday to test them out.

 

Their afternoon at the pool got off to a bit of a rough start. You see, one of the main themes here in the kingdom is gender segregation. On the compound, people have more degrees of  freedom to mingle according to their comfort level, but apparently there is no lee-way for the change rooms at the pool - even for small children. If Sadie wanted to swim, she had go in the main entrance to the female change room by herself, shimmy into her swim clothes, pick up her street clothes, and find the door that led to the pool area. All this on her own, and she can't read signs yet. 

 

She gave it a great try. Sadie did change and carry all of her street clothes. Chris didn't find her waiting beside the pool after he'd gotten ready; instead, he backtracked through the recreation building and found his very upset child outside of the main entrance to the female change room. I joined them awhile later and found both of my favourite people floating in the pool, so Sadie must have been persuaded to go back into the female change room and try again to find the exit to the pool area, and it turned out that the second time was the charm. 

 

In retrospect, we should have thought to have her wear her swim apparel under her dress :)

every canadian needs an emergency bottle of maple syrup, right?

So, yesterday we had just walked into our apartment after school when Madeline announced, "So, that international luncheon at school that I mentioned a few weeks ago? It's actually tomorrow and they only told us today. Can you make some of those yummy things?"

The "yummy things" that she was referring to were tarte au sucre bars, which I'd attempted for the first time ever a couple of weeks ago for a cultural event put on by our building's residents' association. (They didn't entirely turn out - my crust was too thin and my butter was probably cubed too coarsely). 

I had none of the ingredients on hand. Cue disappointed expression on my ten year-old. 

What Canadian-esque consumable did I have in our kitchen cupboards? "I have a bottle of maple syrup!" I told Madeline. 

Today, my kid hopped on the school bus with a bottle of maple syrup in her backpack, and plate of pancakes in her arms. 

how to weekend

When we first arrived in KSA, weekends were my least favourite days of the week. Our family had to choose between these three not-necessarily-appealing options: long bus ride into the compound followed by a long walk in the heat, bus ride to a shopping mall where we spend more time locating shops and restaurants than we spend actually visiting shops, or staying in our small apartment where it is likely that the tv and radio will be on in the same room simultaneously and the three people that I live with will be getting on each other's nerves by doing largely age-appropriate things. This still happens sometimes, but it's getting better. 

We have a bit of a routine now. This past Friday, as usual, we went to one of the large grocery stores. We've been to Danube twice and I am still a bit confused by the layout (it's a large retail space and suffers from sprawl, alas).  I am happy to stop off at the small grocery store on the compound during the week to pick up small items to bring back on the bus, but it's nicer to go on Fridays in a car to bring home large and bulky items like cases of drinking water. Sidenote: Danube has an incredible number of varieties of Cheerios, but none of them happen to be the plain old ones in the yellow box. Weird.

For the second time ever, we went out to dinner. And by "out to dinner", I mean eating someplace that is neither our apartment (obviously) or one of the dining options on the Dharma compound. We went to the Steak House in Al Khobar, and had a lovely time sitting in a real restaurant eating nachos (that looked nothing like the picture in the menu), burgers, and sandwiches. 

Both the grocery store and the restaurant are public spaces, so I wore my abaya while we were out, and it occurred me that it was kind of awesome because I spent the entire weekend wearing yoga pants and a tee instead of having to change when we went out. 

We've headed out to the malls for the past two Saturdays. This past Saturday was good because Chris found what he was looking for, I found what I was looking for (stationary supplies!), we took the kids to the amusement park that is the top level of Rashid Mall, and we managed to order our lunch shawarmas before the food court restaurants closed for mid-day prayers. Same thing last week, except that our shopping mission was to check out the newly-opened Old Navy at the Mall of Dhahran to score some warmer-weather clothes for M. 

It always feels good to feel like you've finally figured something out. 

two monthiversary

Of course it feels like we've lived in sandy Al Khobar longer, but it's only officially two months. Amount that I miss living in Calgary? About zero percent.

Things that I like about living here:

• Mint lemonade and shawarma
• My kindergartener is in class for more than 12 hours/week!
• Unlocked contract-less less expensive mobile phone!
• There's a library. I think that it's a little smaller than the Fish Creek branch that we borrowed from in Calgary, but they have a fantastic selection of magazines and I've made a lot of good finds there!
• I can get on a plane and fly for six hours and land in one of several foreign countries (instead of just the United States - or frankly, I could still be in Canada)
• I get to wear my favourite combination of jeans, hoodies, and sweaters all year long because here, modesty trumps dressing sensibly for the weather :)
• This store that we went into to buy a few small gifts at, and walked out having bought a cute little corner desk. I miss having the lovely carpets and decor items that we bought in Bangkok and Saigon with us here, but I think that I could happily decorate my entire apartment from Desert Designs.

 Things that could use improvement

• Transportation! A couple of my friends here keep small cars parked in the compound (where it's not actually illegal for women in Saudi Arabia to use their foreign driver's licenses) , and I am quite envious because they can pick their kids up from the elementary school and then drive to the middle school and pick up the other kids and then cruise onwards to the big park after school. If I tried to do that, I'd end up arriving at the elementary school thirty minutes early, and then after I'd collected Sadie from kindergarten, I'd have to wait two hours for a bus to come to take us to the middle school to pick up Madeline, and we wouldn't get home in time to do homework, let alone visit a park! Nothing about that is practical.
• Similarly, location. Life here would probbably be more varied for my family if we lived on the compound and our kids could participate in after-school activities and schedule playdates with their friends.
• Our apartment is one bedroom smaller than promised, and the kitchen is a window-less ugly brown rectangle with a poor layout. Also, my stove is not level! Weird.
• The weather is already approaching intolerable levels of hot (for me), and it's only the beginning of April.
• The women's gyms here have exactly zero squat racks, zero kettle bells, and bar at the bench press station is frequently AWOL. 
• The ban on changing rooms in clothing stores keeps me from supporting that particular part of the retail sector.
• Sandstorms aren't fun. Sand somehow gets onto all the surfaces in my apartment, and now I'm kind of panicky that my kids will get stranded at school or on the school buses during one. 
• No chai lattes at Starbucks. This is criminal ...
• My apartment building does not have enough elevators to deal with the school rush-hour that happens twice every weekday, and dealing with the school rush isn't particularly great for my nerves. 
• To be filed under School, Transportation, and Location: My kids have to be up int he morning by 6 am to catch their bus at 6:35. They don't get home until between 3:30 - 3:45 in the afternoon. Madeline has said that she "doesn't have time to have fun anymore" because the hours in-between that and bedtime are taken up completely with homework and dinner. I feel really sad about that. 

Things that have surprised me:

• The weather was quite mild when we arrived in February; it was chilly enough to actually need to wear a sweater and long pants
• Don't really miss eating bacon, ham, or any sort of dish with pork, actually, though sometimes I wish that I had a meat to add to the dinner rotation besides beef and chicken.
• Most of the things that I believed about life in Saudi Arabia - as reported by the western media - have to be taken with a grain of salt. Just a few days ago I read an article from the UK that stated something to the nature of, "of course, women in Saudi Arabia can't leave their homes without their male guardian" and I had to close my browser immediately. There'd be a lot of unemployed taxi drivers here if that was actually true.

What's upcoming for Month Three and beyond? We're supposed to be moving into our permanent housing (which won't be on the compound, ugh). Our sea shipment from Calgary should arrive and clear customs, so there will hopefully be a happy reunion with our bedroom and living room furniture. And figuring out where we'll travel for a long weekend in June - Chris's latest suggestion is a resort outside of Abu Dhabi to check out the sand dunes, and I'm already imagining the photos that I'd be able to take.