In 1982 my family moved to Saudi Arabia. I was 7. My sister was 4. We grew up in Riyadh and later Dhahran. I could say it was a crazy place to grow up but that was only in retrospect. At the time it was just where I grew up. Now it is a place I can’t visit. How many of you would have a difficult time just traveling to your home town? Don’t think it was all strange. There were things you would recognize too. Sizzlers Steak house, Burger King, Nike shoes, dodge ball. There were other experiences that were just so Saudi, like living in walled compounds, having the stores close periodically during the day for prayers, not having any real TV shows broadcasted like in the States or camels in the back of pickup trucks on the highways. We called it the Magic Kingdom for a reason. Sometimes you had to do magic to make it feel like home.
Perhaps the first thing you should understand about Saudi is that getting into it is a huge chore and leaving is like being set free, for everyone. Leaving or arriving in Saudi is such a dramatic event that we often told each other stories about traveling to and from Saudi. For example whenever you left Saudi you experienced an event I call The Parade.
Right after the seatbelt sign comes off the parade begins. The Saudi men and women in their traditional garb of thobe and gutra for men and abayas for women will all head to the bathrooms. Long lines of them. As a child you better have already taken care of business because it can be a while. Then each will come back from the restroom in western clothes, done up with make-up, perfume, cologne, really nice clothes usually. The scent was coming from the large bottles that were kept in each bathroom. This is where I learned the phrase Eau de Toilette. At 7 I thought that phrase was a horrible name for something that was supposed to make you smell nice. Over an hour of this parade, this transformation. Then the drinking started.
Baring some college frat parties I have never been to a more jovial and lively party than the ones that happened on the way out of Saudi. Perhaps it was just the contrast of being 1000s of feet up. Once we left Saudi airspace the liquor could be served. The rules and paranoia we live with today during air travel was absent. It was like just a little of the myth of 1950s era of fun flying had survived. People were walking up and down the aisles, knelling on their seats to talk to the person behind them, making new friends.
Another travel story I’ll call The Cover-up. It starts when a Saudi woman doesn’t lock a bathroom door in the airplane. She is sitting there when another passenger opens the door. You know what the expected reaction is, you cover your bits and tell them to get the hell out. Not our mythical Saudi woman. She pulls her abaya up and covers her face. It actually makes a certain kind of sense. We all look fairly similar between our legs but now you don’t know who the bits belong to. Now get the hell out and close the door.
After the 14 or so hours flight time from the States you were tired. It usually had been closer to 16 or more if you weren’t coming from the east coast. It was a long day. Not that touching down in Saudi ended that day because then The Wait began.
The Wait starts with a walk down the air-stairs attached to the airplane onto the tarmac. I don’t think I once walked down a jetway in Saudi. They just didn’t have them in the 80s. If you are lucky it is night and not too hot. You could smell the jet fuel and everyone headed to some small brown building nearby where you could stand in line. Immigration control was an extremely long wait. Usually there were 7 or 8 lines all full, maybe 15-20 people or families in each. It was poorly lit, fitfully air conditioned and usually smelled of sweat, exhaustion and indifference. The exhaustion was from the passengers and the indifference from the passport control agents. The sweat we shared. I alternated between sitting on the floor, sometimes on some luggage, or standing and whining like only a 7ish year old can, probably reading in any case. Sometimes you were so exhausted and tired of reading you would just stand there like a zombie occasionally kicking you bag forward in line. My sister Keri would often fall asleep.
I don’t know why it took so long. It isn’t like going into England for example where the hall is huge, cold, well lit and the questions short. We think the agents just hated us. Perhaps they took long breaks. They certainly moved very slowly. I don’t remember there being many questions but I am sure my dad answered those. I only came in on my own once or twice. If you got out of that part in an hour you thought you had gotten a huge gift. It was often 2 hours.
Don’t think you are done. Now you get to collect your luggage and go and standing in line again with those same sweaty people and wait to have all your bags searched. Every single passenger had every single bag searched. This took as long as immigration but seemed a little shorter because you had the distraction of seeing inside other people’s bags. The bags and suitcases would all get put on these long thick counters, with you on one side and the agent on the other. The suitcase would be opened and laid flat and the bags as open as you could make them. It was all about making the agents job as easy as possible so it would go as smoothly as possible. It rarely went smoothly but you tried. The bags were always packed to the gills with new clothes and books and anything else you wanted from the outside world. You knew you wouldn’t be leaving for another year and there were no English book stores and sometime the clothes stores didn’t have what you needed. The agents didn’t really unpack the suitcases but they did make a thorough inspection. If they found anything they didn’t like a New Travel Myth of Saudi would be born. Some of these I experienced myself.
The Myth of the Offensive Cover was started because I read lots of science fiction as a kid. I mentioned there weren’t any English language book stores in Saudi so for a voracious reader like myself one of the best things about vacation was getting new books. One trip I brought a book of short stories back and one of the stories was about cloning in vats. The cover had a picture of two naked people, a man and a woman in some cylindrical vats. Their nakedness was covered by mist and condensation but they were clearly naked. I might have hidden the cover from my folks since they would have known that if found it would be a problem. In Saudi grocery stores in the magazine section you can find all kinds of magazines you might find in the States. Except that every single one had been handcrafted with a sharpie to make sure all the exposed flesh was blacked out. That’s right, it was someone’s job to go through every magazine that came into the Magic Kingdom and blacken out the shoulders, legs and necklines of every woman in the magazine.
So my book was going to be a problem. Sure enough the agent found it and asked me what it was about. I told him something about cloning, and space ships and science fiction. I told him I was still reading it and would really like to finish it. I think he wanted to know if it was pornographic. I guess I convinced him it wasn’t. He took his fingers and tore out first the female image then the male image and gave the book back to me. I got lucky that day I guess. He could have easily just taken it from me. They always took video tapes. Enter the myth of the Ministry of Lost Tapes.
My dad was an electronics engineer and mostly worked as a project manager helping to first build the new airport in Riyadh and then Dhahran. He was a gadget guy. In the 80s. For him that meant building his own PC from a Heath/Zenith kit, constructing a radio controlled tank which he drove once and put on a shelf under a clear plastic display box and carrying around the most advanced video recording device on the market. At the time that includes a smallish VCR for standard size tapes connected to a camera nearly as large as his head.
After taking video of our family’s vacation he knew we would have to give up the tapes at customs. The understanding was that they would review them and in a couple of week call and my dad could come and get them. The assumption was that they wanted to make sure pornography wasn’t coming into the country. Not sure how the copy of 9 ½ weeks I watched at 14 got into the country but that is another story. Sometimes if you were filming at the beach or for no apparent reason you wouldn’t get all your tapes back. The system usually worked and we usually go all our tapes back.
We often would wonder if they had a nice place to watch our home movies. Lots of people would bring in commercial movies too so they got a chance to see them too. We would imagine comfy chairs and big TVs. We were pretty cynical about the Saudis and Islam so we figured there would be drinks. Not that you could buy alcohol at stores but lots of people made beer and wine and there was a local moonshine call siddiqui you could get if you knew the right people. My folks make beer and wine too in jerry cans in the spare bathroom. The authorities knew this was happening in general and tried to make it difficult. One way was to make the right kind of yeast difficult to obtain. That is how the myth I call I Was a Child Yeast Mule got started.
While you can use regular baker’s yeast to make beer and wine it doesn’t work quite as well as the right brewers and wine yeast. So what is an enterprising couple to do when the want to make some nicer beer and wine in Saudi Arabia? You need to bring in the right kind of yeast through customs. How can you greatly reduce the chances of getting caught? If it is winter in the 80s you are wearing one of those jackets that have zippers in the shoulders so the sleeves can come off. More importantly you have a zippered collar that hides a hood. Perhaps the whole family has one. How many wine and brewer’s yeast packets fit into each hood pouch I wonder? At least 5 or 6 without being noticeable at all. Yep, that’s right, in the hidden hood pocket of my family’s jackets we smuggled yeast into the Saudi Arabia. The beer was good and we never got caught. They never checked out jackets. The custom agents might check the ingredients of your favorite English jarred spread.
This story is call How much pork is in the bottle? There is an English man or perhaps an Australian coming into Saudi. He is bringing back with him a small bottle of something he loves but can’t get in Saudi. Something like Bovril or Branston Pickle. The agent sees this item and reads the ingredients. He notices that pork is listed. Perhaps it was pork gelatin. The agent asks the man how much pork he thinks is in the products. Of course he has no idea. He just wants to keep his little taste of home. He tells the agent that there is very little. Perhaps the pork ingredient was at the bottom of the list. Today our man from England or perhaps Australia is lucky. He has an accommodating customs agent. The agent opens up the jar and using a couple fingers scoops out a tablespoon or so of the stuff and flicks it at a trashcan, disposing of it. Closing the jar he hands it back to our man from England or Australia and sends him on his way. Lucky lucky man.
So you’re in. Usually a colleague of my father’s would pick us up in a big suburban. It was a duty you often passed around and arranged ahead of time because no one would risk their family in a taxi if it was possible to avoid it. The driving in Saudi was crazy. Fast and with few if any lines on the roads. My mom of course wasn’t allowed to drive but she always told me that she was quite happy with that arrangement considering the insanity of driving. We even had a car chase once but that is for a little later. I don’t remember arriving that first night. I am sure we were all totally spent. My dad had already been in country for a few months so I think he picked us up himself that first trip. Having a couple kids myself now I am sure it was top priority to get my 4 year old sister and my 7 year old self in bed as fast as possible. The unpacking and exploration of the compound could wait.
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