Welcome to Planet Jeddah

The Romans did not like to work
Their duties they did shirk.

I think I finally found an appropriate context for this ridiculous bit of non-poetry. (For those of you who aren't my father, he wrote this stunning piece of literature sometime in the... 3rd?....grade, and practically ever since then has been desperately trying to convince me or one of my sisters to use it in a paper or an article or something).

I take this couplet to mean this: I can't stand the thought of doing something useful with my time, so I'd rather create a blog. Additionally, I hope that perhaps if someone else is reading my writing I'll have more incentive to actually keep that journal that I need so badly.

It's Magrib, everyone, and that means that in a minute I'll be hobbling down to the cafeteria ("restaurant") to get something to eat with the other girls in the dorm ("residence"). I've been watching Arabic TV in an effort to improve my language skills, and right now the eerie and beautiful sounds of the prayer-call are reminding me of the time.

Some background information is probably in order. I am an American girl, born and bred in the suburbs of Philly. Sometime roundabout my 13th birthday my father decided, for reasons which are still unclear to me, that it would be a perfect time to up and move my family to the Middle East. I like to think of this as a sort of mid-life crisis. At the time, my sisters and I (I have two, younger) had never even heard of Saudi Arabia, and most of my friends responded to my upcoming move with such stereotypical questions as "will you have to ride a camel to school?" and "do you have a real house, or do you have to live in a tent?" I wasn't any too certain of the answers to these questions.

It is now 8 years later. I am older and, perhaps, wiser. Four years in Riyadh for me, my sisters and maman, eight years for my dad. I graduated from the American International School - Riyadh and moved back to the States for college. Though I had various violent reactions to my experiences in Saudi, I would go back and do it again in a second.

And, in many ways, I AM going back to do it again. After three years of college (I'm majoring in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, which encompasses religious studies, language studies, and kindof anything related to the Middle East) I found myself getting antsy and decided, not without much trepidation, to try Saudi Arabia again, but from a different angle. Instead of the mainly expat community I enjoyed the first time, I would cloister (almost literally) myself in a Saudi school - the first private college for women in the country - and I would learn from the inside out what it is like to be Saudi, and female. Effat College is brand new (maybe 7 or 8 years old maximum) and offers the best attempt at a liberal arts education that the Kingdom has yet achieved. I'm living in the سكن (sakan), the residence, with a bunch of other girls who are mostly from other parts of Saudi Arabia. In addition to the wholly different cultural atmosphere, I'm also in a different geographical locale - Jeddah, the port city, rather than Riyadh, the capital. Everyone seems to agree that Jeddah is much more open and permissive than Riyadh. We'll see how that goes.

I've been here a month already (how time does fly) so this blog will have to play catch-up with my life a bit. Suffice it to say, things have not been dull. Highlights of the month (with possible expansion to follow) include:

1) my first Saudi wedding. Envision a graveyard for tacky haute-couture. But for some reason it all looked appropriate in context.

2) Trips to the beach, to Taif, and out on boats... sipping pomegranate juice and lying in the sun sure can get exhausting.

3) Meeting King Fahad's widow. Something of an embarrassing experience, since she wanted me to use my (minimal) Arabic, but I think I came off at least as someone making a valiant effort.

4) Richard Murphy and his wife, Anne. More to come on this later.

5) Dropping a ping-pong table on my foot. This precipitated my first experience with the Saudi hospital system, despite the fact my father worked in one for almost a decade. I am now the proud owner of a semi-functional toe with 7 stitches in it, although they should come out on Friday. I also have a photographic documentary thanks to Mona, the Light of my Life.

6) What I like to call the "Ramadan Diet". More to come on this later as well.

For the moment, that's all she wrote. But judging from the amount of time I currently spend in my room thinking about things, this could become my favorite place to be.

رمضان مبارك (Ramadan mubarak) and a belated Happy Rosh Hashana.