Mad Dashes & Machine Guns

Passing through Saudi customs turned out to be much less of a production than I had anticipated. Whether this was because it was late or because we were a large group or because we were met by hospital officials I don’t know. But most of us just sailed through security. A quick look at the passport, a few stamps, a scrawl of exotic-looking, indecipherable writing, and that was it. The guy minding the x-ray machine asked me in a sort of languid, disinterested manner to open one of my bags, whereupon he glanced into it and waved me on. I had heard horror stories about people’s luggage being scrutinized with microscopic obsessiveness, or being detained for seemingly no reason, and possibly these things do happen, but fortunately I had no problems at all.

King Khaled airport is a masterpiece of modern Arabian architecture. From it’s vaulted ceilings to it’s inlaid marble floors to it’s glittering fountains, the whole place conveys a feeling of wealth and opulence that befits a country possessing the world’s largest reserves of the world’s most valuable natural resource.

And here, at last, was the real Saudi Arabia. Men dressed in the long white garments (called thobes) and red-checked headdresses (ghutras), women swathed in all-concealing black robes (abayas), the sound of Arabic, so guttural and alien to American ears, being spoken all around. Yup, this is the place.

We were greeted by representatives of the hospital, who collected our bags and piled us into a large white bus for the trip back into Riyadh proper. I didn’t get to see much of the city on the way, because the bus’ windows were heavily tinted (a precaution against the relentless Arabian sun) and nearly impossible to see through at night. Not that I would have seen much even without the tint. Saudis, it turns out, like to drive fast. At the speed the bus was traveling – somewhere between “holy crap!” and Warp Factor 9 – the scenery would have been little more than a blur anyway.

Twenty minutes later I was shown into my hospital-provided apartment in a nine-story building in the Olaya district. Now, "Olaya" isn't really an address – more like a general reference point. It turns out that there are no addresses as we know them in Saudi Arabia. Buildings aren’t numbered. In fact, many of the streets in Riyadh don’t even have names. It makes finding things a challenge, to say the least. And address listings are pretty interesting. If you look up a business in the Riyadh telephone directory, for example, it will list the location as something like “Olaya Street, across from Al Khozama Center.” So, basically, to find anything in the city, you have to know where everything else is.

Olaya 6 is something of an anachronism. It was built in the 1970’s, and with its marble floors, high ceilings, and heavy oaken doors it’s easy to see that it was once a hell of a place. The problem is that it never really moved past 1979. The appliances seem to be the original ones installed during the Carter Administration, and, while everything works okay, it has the general air of The Building That Time Forgot. It’s like finding an old Abba LP tucked away in the bookshelf – once really cool, but now just dated.

The Olaya district itself is the commercial heart of the city and very posh. Right across the street is the sleek, ultra-modern Faisaliah tower, one of the jewels of Riyadh. So our building, surrounded by barbed wire and concrete barricades, is kind of an eyesore. These are precautions taken for the safety of the Westerners, although it hardly seems necessary. A few years back there was quite a bit of tension after several compounds were bombed, but things have quieted down and loosened up quite a bit since then, according to those who have been here for a while. Nevertheless, there is only one entrance point to our building, and it is guarded round the clock by a contingent of Saudi military. There’s even a machine gun nest. Granted, it’s manned by the most bored-looking group of guys this side of a “Vagina Monologues” audience, but it’s still a machine gun and therefore totally freaking cool. I’ve made friends with two of the guys who arrived with me, and together we’ve been chatting with the guards and generally making nice, so hopefully it’s only a matter of time before they let us take pictures of ourselves manning the machine gun a la Rambo.

I wonder if they’ll let me shoot it?