My Saudi Adventure - Part 1

Although this blog post is entitled ‘my Saudi adventure’, it was much more than its simple Latin translation might suggest, as not merely a ‘coming to’ or a ‘visit’, it was probably 6 of the strangest days of my life. I should have realised what the trip was going to be like by the tone set in the days preceding my departure. Chaos was the buzzword of the day, and it’s a chaos I took with me to Brighton as I descended on Rupert the day before I left, bringing all my stress and Saudi fears in tow. I should explain the reason for this last minute departure. A company I worked with in November called me up to see if I’d be interested in helping them out. Being desperate, poor and un-busy, I of course said yes. Saudi Arabia recently legalised film and began opening cinemas. On this cultural wave there was a Saudi Film Festival established a couple of years ago, this year held in this centre called ‘Ithra’. Sadly the people in charge only contacted us about 8 days before the festival began, wanting a full schedule of film workshops, hence the rather chaotic nature of the project.

The nightmare of organising flights, hotels & visas was only actually finally resolved the evening before we were flying, and so I departed Brighton late, taking a detour via London to collect my newly Saudi-ready passport. Sadly this involved a trek across the capital to our offices where I was to collect my credentials. The security guard present there was clearly happy to see another human. So happy that he spent the next 20 minutes telling me about his girlfriend in Abu Dhabi. Being too polite and unable to pass up the opportunity for conversation with anyone, I naturally stayed, nodded, and smiled - just enough to encourage him to continue with his life story. Ideal. This meant I only made it home late, tired, and still needing to pack before my 6:30am pick-up for the airport. But as ever these things fall into place somehow, and I set off the next morning, money, passport & visa in tow ready for the first step on this journey.

Sadly the first step was more of a shaky start. After the delightful Business class experience that meant priority check-in & priority security (I’m not sure you can picture my smugness, safe to say it was radiating) I met one of the people running one of our workshops. Despite being a 56 year old man he turned out to need a lot of ‘looking after’ shall we say? In a panic he had booked an extra, unnecessary flight in fear of visa invaliditiy, which of course meant I then had to book the same emergency flight (all £278 of it), and our whole team who were flying the next day did the same for the sake of being safe. I also found myself being told off for being ‘a very naughty girl’ by the middle aged Gulf Air manager, all of which I found leaving a bit of a bitter taste in my mouth (not simple because of it’s rather creepy quality, but mostly because it was in no way my fault!). It transpires that his worries were entirely unfounded, our visas unproblematic, and we could all have saved ourselves the money and the stress. Hindsight is of course a wonderful, if incredibly painful thing.

This means that my business class flight, which on the whole was a luxury I have grown worryingly accustomed to, was not as easily enjoyed as I might have hoped. Still that didn’t stop me drinking the champagne (thankfully that was served long before we reached Saudi air space). What would have been a direct flight to Bahrain & a drive to Dammam turned into a transfer flight that was delayed, busy, exhausting and ultimately detrimental to my physical & mental wellbeing. At the transfer desk at Bahrain I had to argue the case for why my bag should be allowed on my new transfer flight with me, rather than remaining here in Bahrain. Whilst I was arguing just that, an Australian family next to me got chatting. It transpired they had missed their flight in Bahrain Airport because they usually live in Riyadh, had been so excited at the prospect of alcohol in the Hotel Irish Bar that they missed their flight for the sake of their booze. Not ideal, but at least it made me feel a little better.

So when we did eventually land in Dammam airport, unneccessarily 5 hours later in Saudi than we need have been, the icing on this monumentally frustrating cake was the fact that my bag had indeed not made it on the plane and was stuck in the Kingdom of Bahrain. Great. For some strange reason I’ll put down to lack of sleep or wry mirth, my companion was more worried about my bag loss than even I was, but with nothing to be done we hopped in our taxi and headed for the hotel. I knew this was going to be something of a stressful week not least because of events leading up to this moment, but exacerbated by the fact that there was a bomb scanner for every car that came up to our hotel, as well as a human body scanner upon entry to the lobby. Now that’s what I call creating an ambience! A fresh wave of misery hit me only when I got up to my bagless room and realised that my hairbrush, toothbrush, toothpaste, pyjamas, and all things I had consoled myself with were in fact still across the border. Woe is me. So a miserable crawl between the sheets in my birthday suit was all I could manage before some feverish sleep took hold.

The next morning my misery was compounded by the necessity of wearing the same underwear as the day before. Not only did I have to face the prospect of an incredibly busy and hectic day of organising workshops, keeping people happy, avoiding any cultural no-gos, and carrying thorough feedback on the session. No, I had to do all that whilst smelling of something close to stale lemon cake (I think that had something to do with the hotel shower gel rather than my natural scent…I think…). I went to meet my ‘boss’ to find out what the plan was, and the bitterness of my Saudi experience to date was mellowed only by the presentation of some delightfully decorated and even more delicious macarons. Things were looking up. Sadly all my joys, in Saudi & in real life, were short lived, as my immediate task was a printing one. Unfortunately what one would presume to be a simple task turned out to be a frightfully difficult one. For a start no one knew how the printer worked, then when its mysteries were temporarily resolved the business centre helper managed to print every single one of the 50 sheets I had ordered with something wrong, and when I begged for her to cancel the order the pages just kept flying. Eventually I had to leave with a mere fraction of the documents I was supposed to have, and with a blood pressure one would usually deem necessary for hospital admittance.

So we headed to Ithra, the cultural centre where our film workshops were due to take place over the next few days. I arrived hot, sweaty, in yesterday’s clothes and generally frustrated. I was very kindly handed an abaya of my own (which I was able to keep as a gift in the end!) and made the somewhat bold decision to go commando. It felt especially wrong in such a conservative country, but times were desperate and needs must. Going commando might sometimes be thought of as empowering (if not breezy) but I found the only thing I could associate with it was a certain cleanliness. There certainly wasn’t a lot of empowerment happening in other facets of my hectic day, as I found out when I tried to borrow some books. Our workshop was located in the adult library, one floor above the children’s library. I went down to them in order to borrow a few books for our workshop, but was told point blank that this was an impossibility. I batted around some important names of important people but this still didn’t impress the burka-clad women I was dealing with and they merely looked at me with what I presume were raised eyebrows and a certain disdain. It was only when a young Saudi man came and insisted they give me the books that all was resolved. If you want a thing done in Saudi, get a young male Saudi to do it, it would seem.

After my blood came back down from boiling point we got on with the children’s animation workshop, which turned out to be a huge success. That still didn’t make the evening much more bearable though, as the prospect of collecting my bag still lay before me. I had called the airline several times to check that it really was my bag and I really could collect it (because they refused to send it to me or allow my friends to pick it up). So when our day drew to a close (at 22:30) I summoned an Uber for the hour long drive to Dammam airport. Firstly getting the Uber was a challenge in itself because at least 5 cancelled on me and several were refused entry onto the Ithra site, but eventually a very sweet Pakistani man called Gulzar picked me up and I explained my woes to him.

Now this journey was itself not particularly relaxing, as a young woman in Saudi in an Uber on her own I was a little on edge. This wasn’t helped by the fact Gulzar then pulled into a petrol station in the middle of nowhere to fill up. The harsh neon lights and the Saudi men staring into the back of his taxi were all a little unnerving. This slight unnerviness was exacerbated by the fact that he insisted on accompanying me into the airport. I thought this was an odd request, bordering on the creepy, and I kept on insisting I’d be fine on my own, but, ultimately Gulzar proved to be a knight in shining armour and I felt terrible for ever having doubted him. We parked up at Dammam and he marched in with me (our conversation was limited, I’ll admit, but a bit of moral support was welcome). We went to the lost luggage desk to find two Saudi men with their feet up who casually pointed us in another direction. This direction led us to an endless stretch of corridors and an eternity of locked doors. One man was marching us round knocking here and there but to no avail. His suggestion was to come back tomorrow. This I could not bear.

I clearly kicked up enough of a fuss, because after half an hour of marching round corridors he sent us back downstairs to the same unhelpful guards who gave us the same unhelpful hand gesture sending us to their left. I then tried the other door on their left which it turns out was some military office (not what I was looking for) but finally we found someone who showed us where to go. We reached an office with two other casual Saudi men who instead of answering my questions and pleas merely pointed at a phone number and said ‘call this’. This was the same number I’d been calling all day, but by this point I was desperate and did what they said. The young boy on the other end of the phone couldn’t really understand me and was struggling even with my conception of the Nato Phonetic Alphabet, and finally concluded that the case number I’d given him was reporting that my bag had still not been located. Well you can imagine that by this point I was at the end of my tether. All reason was gone. I began insisting and re-spelling out my case number again and again until finally the unhelpful Saudi men in the office pointed through a door to a desk in the arrivals lounge.

I marched over there, met the young man from the phone, pointed to my case number before he said ‘Oh yes, your bag is here’. No kidding. When I saw that big yellow cuboid I could probably have cried. In fact when he was going to fetch some paperwork I did caress it lovingly with my right hand, saying ‘it’s good to see you’. I’ll justify my behaviour only by the fact I was mildly delirious from stress and exhaustion at this point. The taxi ride back to the hotel was at least a fairly smooth and painless one. Gulzar gave me his personal number (but by this point I was fairly convinced he wasn’t a creep), dropped me off with a good night and I went up to my room, unpacked my beautiful, beautiful case and finally went to sleep.