First Post
First of all, I would like to say hello and thanks to anyone reading this blog! I’m very much looking forward to writing a bit about Riyadh and Saudi Arabia in general. This being the first post, I thought I should give some context for my being here and maybe talk about my first impressions of the city.
I moved to Riyadh in late August to teach English at King Saud University. When I arrived it was still Ramadan, so during daylight hours almost every public place was closed and there were no cars or pedestrians on the street. Since jet lag had me going to sleep around sunset every day, for the first week or so I felt like the movie protagonist who wakes to find himself the last remaining man on earth. Eventually, though, life in the city went back to normal and I was able to travel around a bit.
Riyadh is a very large and in many ways very new city. The government likes to stress its long history as a hub for the Saud dynasty, but until the twentieth century it was home to just a few thousand traders and date farmers. In the last forty years, however, the population of Riyadh expanded from 500,000 to about 5.5 million people, roughly half of whom are “guest workers” from Bangaladesh, Pakistan, the Philipines, and so on. This dramatic expansion can be clearly seen in the city landscape, half of which seems to be constantly under construction.
Riyadh’s other salient feature is of course its weather. My first week here, daily highs hovered around 115 and the relative humidity sat at 10%. By now the highs are only in the 90s, but the humidity hasn’t changed and shows no signs of doing so. Riyadh is not a city that offers much excitement for meteorologists.
In some ways the perpetually low humidity is actually sort of nice. When it’s hot in St. Louis or New Orleans, if you so much as walk 10 feet outside you find yourself drenched in sweat. Here, though, one’s clothes stay perpetually dry. In fact, everything in Riyadh gravitates very quickly towards a state of dryness. Just spilled water on something? No need to worry about patting it dry or mopping it up. Just wait a few minutes and it’s like it never happened.
The final characteristic of Riyadh that cannot be missed by a new visitor is the impact of Islamic law on public behavior. Women are almost entirely absent from streets and shops. All public places are required by law to close during the five obligatory daily prayers. Alcohol, pork, and movie theaters are forbidden. Western music and discussions of non-Islamic theology are highly discouraged. But as I said, this is all a description of what goes on in public. Private behavior in Saudi Arabia is for the most part not considered to be anyone else’s business.
And that about covers it. Riyadh is big, hot, and extremely Islamic. I’m enjoying the city in my free time, my job isn’t too tough, and I’ve finally learned to drive stick. Things are good and I expect them to get better.
