Brainscrubber

Some things not easily fleshed out into a full post…

Seems that Americans are the only people who call a cellular phone a cell phone. The rest of the world calls them mobile phones. The saving grace is that many people outside the U.S. (but not all) watch American television; so, they don’t look at you as if you’re a complete idiot when ask if they’ve seen your cell phone or if you can have their cell number.

Thursday nights and Fridays are Family Time, and it’s difficult for single guys to find a place to eat at on those nights. A friend of mine and I went to the Zee Noodle House, and they wouldn’t let us eat inside the restaurant. Instead, we had to eat at an island of tables in the middle of a mall concourse, which the noodle house shares with a steakhouse across the way.

I was considering purchasing a digital video camera, and I mentioned this to a co-worker. He told me not to do it. If I’d given it more than half-a-minute of thought, I would have realized what he told me. The Saudis use the PAL television format, the same as do the Europeans. We, in the U.S., use the NTSC format. He knew this because he’d bought one of the cameras and couldn’t view what he shot. Guess I’ll wait until I am back in the States.

Al-Jazeera, best known these days as the the Arabic satellite news service broadcast from Qatar, is actually a nickname for the Arabian Peninsula. Jazeera actually means island, and, with water on three sides, many people in the past thought of the vast desert as an island.

Saudis like gadgets as much as Americans do; but, by far the most ubiquitous gadget is the mobile phone. There must two of the things to every individual in the country. Even the tea boys and janitors have a mobile phone. Of course, long gone are the days when a mobile phone simply made phone calls. I am pretty sure that, soon, they’ll be replicating food ala Star Trek. Personally, I was seriously considering the purchase of a Treo, but the U.S. uses one mobile phone technology while Europe and Asia use another. There are phones that will work with either technology, but I haven’t done the research, yet, to know if the Treo meets that criteria. Somehow I doubt it.

Dubai broadcasts Dubai One each evening at 6pm. The show is basically a news magazine that is obviously and arm of the Emirate from which it is broadcast. The news is pretty solid, but has a distinctly U.A.E. (and particularly Dubai) slant…which means hardcore capitalist. The news presenter is a gorgeous Arab woman with a very distinguished British accent. Almost all of the presenters in the field have British accents as well, though a couple of them have perfect American accents.

While Dubai One is entertaining and informative, it level of propaganda does not come close to matching that broadcast on the 6pm news by the Kingdom of Bahrain’s official news service. The news contains facts, but it is geared toward pointing out what a wonderful person the King of Bahrain is and what good things he does for the people of Bahrain. The broadcast starts with a feature piece, which always centers around the King, then shifts to video footage of the King sitting in his throne/chair at some official diplomatic audience he has granted…there is no narrative, just stately music and video footage for a solid, uninterrupted 3-4 minutes.

So, the story goes (unverified as it may be): Way back in the days of yore, the Brits and the Americans came to Saudi Arabia and entered into competitive negotiations for rights to drill for the oil beneath the desert sands of the Arabian Peninsula. In hopes of getting in the good graces of the King, the Brits gave him a Rolls Royce. The King enjoyed the automobile immensely and, much to the horror of the gift givers, he took it across the desert sands in much the same we he might have taken a camel across the dunes during the war that culminated in the establishment of the Kingdom in 1932. The condition of the car was shocking, but these men held their tongues. In the meantime, the Americans put an elevator in the King’s palace. As history shows, the Americans won those negotiations and Aramco was established. You see, the King was wheelchair bound, and it was a tough endeavor to get upstairs at the palace – especially for a very proud warrior.

To drag out a trite cliche – last but certainly not least – I have now had an encounter with the Saudi health care system. I have to be honest and say I found it a very positive experience. Last week, I found myself at the end of an extremely robust session of vomiting brought about by an acute case of food poisoning. At the end of 10 hours, I realized I needed to a doctor, and one of my friend and next-door neighbor carted me over to Kingdom Hospital’s Emergency Room. The doctor was Arabic provided a very professional and thorough examination. The male nurses were Filipino and Arabic and did an excellent job of taking care of me and putting in the IV lines. There were a couple of female nurses (Indian, I believe). The hospital is one of the few places you’ll see men and women working together. After three bags of fluids and two shots for nausea and hyper-acidity, I stumbled out the door 30 Saudi Riyal (US$8.00) lighter in the wallet and on my way to recovery.

Until next time…ma’asalaama.

Copyright, Greg Hubbard, 2007.

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A Pakistani-American friend of mine recently returned to Riyadh after a trip to Pakistan to see family. The day after he returned, we went out for lunch and met up with the normal lunchtime traffic jam that afflicts the central part of the city during much of the day. We began our normal dodge and tussle routine, making the jokes we normally make about driving in Saudi Arabia, and my friend (who happened to be driving) said, “I am much happier to be driving here than where I’ve been driving the last four days.”

A shiver coursed through my body as I tried to imagine a more dangerous place to drive than in Riyadh. I mean, this is the place where we justify what normally would be considered rudely aggressive driving behavior by saying, “It’s OK, I have a Saudi Driver License.”

Which is true. In our company, once an expat has their iqama, they must then acquire an official Saudi Driver License. The license, and the third-party insurance required by law, cost roughly 600SR – about US$160.00. That’s a high price in the US, even more extravagant a fee in Saudi Arabia.

We tend to dwell on the aggressive and unpredictable driving habits – everybody’s favorite is the left-hand turn from ANYWHERE on the street. Routinely, those who are going straight on a street leave the left two lanes to those making left-hand turns; but that doesn’t mean a driver can let down their guard lest they be clipped by the guy gunning his motor and swinging around their car to make that left turn. Of course, not all these guys are stealth turners. Many of them pull their cars out in front of the block of vehicles stopped at the light and position their own autos in a roughly perpendicular position, indicating their intention to turn left in front of everyone else. Sometimes there are three or four cars cutting the queue.

What is so surprising, really, is how polite Saudis are in person. Inside an office building or store or mall or any other public place, the majority of Saudis are meticulously polite. It’s normal to offer to allow another person to enter a doorway two to three times before someone finally decides its OK to go ahead and walk through the door – sort of like determining who’s going to pay the lunch tab in Texas. But, get out on the street, and these men are completely different guys. Of course, it’s not just Saudis, lest I be accused of unfairly saddling our hosts with all the driving faults. There are a lot of expatriates from South and Southeast Asia who make the Saudis look timid by contrast. When I say dodge and tussle at lunch time, I’m not joking. Sometimes the Saudi Arabians look surprised by the behavior of some of the other drivers.

I won’t say that Western drivers are guiltless. No, it’s possible to see blond-headed men in sports shirts hitting 140 kph running down the left lane of the freeway, their headlights flashing. Of course, it’s more likely to see those same guys pulled over to the side of the road with a traffic cop scolding them and writing a ticket, which may or may not land the driver in jail. Non-Arabic speakers seem to have a much more difficult time when it comes to tickets, but especially when it comes to car accidents. Our company asks all its employees to immediately call the office and request one of the Arabic-speaking employees to show up on the scene if there is an accident. This is a very important and wise thing to do.

Just as perplexing as the driving habits, to me at least, are how the civil engineers laid out the roads. U-turns, for example, sometimes require a driver to go several blocks to execute such a maneuver – not because there are signs announcing a prohibition – rather because concrete medians run for that distance before a driver can find a place to turn around. On a trip to the camel souq, I found it necessary to drive 8 kilometers before I was physically able to turn around and drive by the camels on the same side of the road as they. Four-way stops are really four-way requests not to hit the guy who is turning in front of you – even if a cop is sitting in his car, watching the intersection. One thing I do like is the presence of frontage road that run immediately in front of storefronts, allowing the drivers on the main road to go forward unimpeded by cars backing out of parking spots or pulling out of parking lots.

They’re talking about making it legal for women to drive here. The rules would be such that only expat women, or Saudi women who’ve lived abroad, would be able to meet the stringent requirements necessary to acquire a license. Frankly speaking, issues of independence aside, I cannot imagine wanting to drive here if I didn’t have to do so. I’d sure hate to be a woman getting into an accident. I can’t guess how a female would convince the police she was not at fault even if she was sitting still at a stoplight and rammed from behind.

A lot of the problems with driving here could be solved if the police would enforce the laws. Unfortunately, that’s not going to happen. Pity the career of the cop who pulls over the wrong car with the wrong inhabitants. They’re pretty unlikely to get shot, but their career could be dead, dead, dead. This has actually been discussed in Letters to the Editor in Arab News. There’s going to have to be a serious change in culture before that issue can be resolved.

Luckily, I’ve proven I can still drive at home without cutting off other drivers and turning left from the far right lane. Of course, I am gaining experience every day. There’s still time to teach myself some new bad habits.

Copyright 2007, Greg Hubbard

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