1. My Dinner with Andre

The corniche, photo by Abushababi.

I had dinner with Andre last night. A Big Mac, fries and a coke. Andre's face wrinkles just before he says, for the hundredth time: 'There is something else I need to tell you about this place.' He's been here 14 years, so I listen attentively.

The Muzzein stop singing. We walk through the streets because Andre needs the exercise and I need to get to know the town. He shakes hands with all the shop keepers. Cracks a joke with them. Calls them all his friend.

I buy four pairs of socks. Two pure cotton bed sheets, a phone top up card and a bottle of Bounty chocolate milk. The shopkeeper slips in a packet of fruit polos, which I discover when I get home.


'I used to walk a lot in Greece, in Crete, I loved walking. Tomorrow we’ll walk on the corniche.

The name of the melting promontory of land we are on translates from the Arabic as 'The Brazier.'

Andre is generous. He’s helped me find a flat. Explained how to deal with students. Got me a sim card. I could make a long list of things he has done for me in the last three days. 

I moved out of the compound after a week. It was thriving, but unhygienic. Outside was an unmanned gun emplacement, the heavy machine gun wedged into the back of an empty pick up truck parked in the shade. 

On TV I watch confluencing pilgrims circle the Kabaa. I switch channels and there is a women covered from head to toe who is sitting in a great silver armchair on a stage. She is reciting her poems to a large audience of men. They all look old enough to be husbands. They smile and nod and comment as she speaks - chants in a rough voice. Two professorial looking men sit to her right at a high desk, they look stern and thoughtful and one of them takes careful notes.

There are fifty, a hundred, two hundred Arabic language TV channels. I have flown through a portal and here I am, living as a guest in the home of Europe’s older brother. 

In the staff room I perceive touches of Lebanese bitterness, Egyptian hopefulness, Syrian trembling, Jordanian Palestinian realism, Sudanese disappointment.

'Tell me about this country.' 

'We are part of the Middle East.' Jordan and Iraq flow into Saudi Arabia and Saudi Arabia clasps hands with Egypt at Sinai, the runnel of the Gulf of Aqaba flows between them. The country looks across the Red Sea to Sudan, and then askance at Eritrea.  

'A person like you may have trouble here,' says Andre, 'you seem a little intimidating, but you do have a friendly face so you'll probably be OK. 

We buy sunglasses in the mall. There is a poster of four fashionable young people jumping for joy at the entrance. All four smile, but the faces of the two girls are misted over. Three women and their children come into the air conditioned mall  and I step to one side and wait. 'Thank you,' says Andre, 'you are learning.' 

I tell the Saudi engineers: 'I walked for thirty days in June on the Camino de Santiago. Every day I walked 30 kilometres.'

They are not impressed. 'My mother', says one engineer, 'once walked 130 kilometres in two nights. In the past our people used to walk in the night and sleep in the day.' 

Now few Saudis seem to walk the streets here. They ride in large cars and family sized SUVs with tinted windows at the back. The pedestrians are Bangladeshis, Indians, Filipinos.

'Why did you walk there?' 

'It’s was like the Haj,' I said, 'but I am not a Christian.' And when I say that I imagine I hear a cock's crow.   

The glasses are big and black, and when I leave work in the afternoon I put them on. I can see again, but even wearing dark glasses I squint and I feel the sun burning my palms and lips.