Up at 2:00 AM

The other night, I had to relunctantly get up at 2:00 AM; a driver was picking me up to welcome a PYP workshop leader leading a workshop at the school, and since that’s kind of what I’m in charge of, it fell upon me to go to the airport and be there for her! For those of you who know how much sleep I get each night and even for the others, I can tell you that I was not happy about having to miss on my precious sleep. OK, enough complaining. Let’s get to what I want to tell you about.


Imagine 2:00 AM anywhere in the Western World on a weeknight…What do you expect to see…Not much, a couple of cars on the roads, nobody around, nothing lit up…well, you get the picture. Hence, this is what I was expecting, early Tuesday morning. How wrong was I!

At the intersection of two heavily traveled highways two major soccer games were raging. Yes, at 2:00 am, on fields of dirt, only lit by the road lights. A whole bunch of guys were playing, and another bunch was on the sidelines watching. Since I’ve been here, I’ve heard that the Saudis are a nighttime society.Well these two soccer games were one proof.

Upon arrival at the airport, it was so busy you would have thought that it was the middle of the day. Guys upon guys were waiting for their friends arriving from faraway places, all standing next to each other, without any consideration for personal space. From their clothes, the majority of them were not Saudis, as very few were wearing thobe and gutra. I can even venture and say that they were Pakistani or Afghan, again from their dress. Now, of course, all these were guys! Very few females were around. Thankfully the driver was waiting as well, so I was not totally alone. I wasn’t feeling too comfortable there but would have felt a whole lot worse had I been totally by myself. I did draw a lot of glances, sideways look and straight stares. I guess not wearing anything on my head and letting my hair flow free was not the wisest thing to do to go incognito! For the majority of these guys, seeing a woman’s face is rather rare and seeing hair even more. They are working all day long, staying up a majority of the night, playing soccer or waiting at airports, and always in the company of men. Many have wives and families who stayed in their home country. But few interact with women here at all!

An interesting sight was a group of six guys, wearing the traditional Saudi thobe and just sitting/standing around, moving their prayer beads and having what looked like the time of their lives, talking, laughing… After observing them for a while, I asked the driver what they were saying. He told me they were just joking around and waiting for customers as they were taxi drivers. The bad kind! The kind that prey on people who don’t know not to travel by taxi in Riyadh, the kind that take you all around town and charges you twice as much as what you should pay for! We were heavily warned NOT to take a taxi anywhere, and as a woman, doubly warned that by taking one you may never reach your destination, as there have been attacks on women traced back to taxi drivers…

Around 3:00, the person we were waiting for finally arrived and we loaded the car and brought here to the hotel and finished up by dropping me back at home. We passed a mosk by the house at 4:00 am, all lit up, front doors wide open… yes, you guessed it, morning prayer was about to be called, at 4:15 that morning, right about the time I managed to climb back in bed to be hit by the alarm clock not even two hours later!