WINTRY TALES FROM THE APENNINES

Out There & In Here

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  • Experiences in Saudi Arabia, 2013-2021

    by JM

    One of the reasons I went to live and work in Saudi Arabia was that I knew nothing about the country, and its hermetic nature intrigued me. Some friends criticised me for my choice due to the ‘Western’ perceptions of Saudi, and of course I had my own limited preconceptions on that topic too.

    I’d already seen in my travels elsewhere that stereotypes are rarely accurate and had learnt how there can be elements of foolishness and arrogance on the part of some countries in their affection for dictating to others how to run their own nations. I wanted to have a look at things in situ for myself – if I could.

    I lived and worked for a total of three years between 2013 and 2021 in different parts of Saudi Arabia and would like to report a little on my own experiences there, which might contribute towards whittling down the persistent ignorance between cultures and countries (it works both ways of course: I met Saudi women who felt sorry for the lot of European women) .

    I’d also like to acknowledge those who were so hospitable to me in Saudi Arabia particularly now that sadly they’re essentially in a war zone.

    My first job was in Saudi’s glitzy capital, Riyadh (below) in 2013, and the university I was to teach in was brand new, designed by some of the world’s most prestigious architects and was next-gen unutterably beautiful.

    A vast amount of money had been invested in this specific institution as part of a national project to boost Saudi girls’ educational levels, and a Western university was given a lucrative contract to set up teaching programmes, recruit qualified faculty members from English-speaking countries globally, monitor examinations and oversee the entire undertaking.

    In 2013 Saudi was like most countries at different periods in their socio-economic histories, I suppose. The chance to do foundation year courses as a means to access university education must have been exciting for a lot of our young women students, not perhaps because they admired scholarship (although earning a degree would have been prestigious), but because it got them out of the home and meant they could make new friends and have some independence.

    The university I worked in was a public institution, so the students (aged 18) were not vastly rich or even rich at all ; they were certainly not being driven between fabulous palaces or parties in Maseratis or flying to London for the weekend on shopping trips. In many cases, I was told, the students’ parents ( which means their fathers too ) made sacrifices to send their girls to the university.

    As far as I managed to find out, the students’ mothers were involved in family life and running their households ( most had domestic staff, some had little home-based businesses ) rather than lunching with friends in fancy shopping mall cafés. Their fathers were civil servants, office workers, policemen, teachers, military staff, small business owners or similar.

    ° ° ° ° ° °

    The first time any parents came into my Saudi life was in my initial week of teaching when one student arrived 90 minutes late for a two-hour class and told me with great melodrama, and to her classmates’ delight:

    ” Teacher I love you ! Late. Yes late, teacher. My motherr, my fatherr – dead ! “

    I was new, I was enthralled by the emotion and intensity of the story, was poor at classroom management and unaware of the fun the students were cooking up, so was briefly horrified and concerned for the recently and unexpectedly bereft student.

    ” My teacher ! I late, I know. But my motherrrr, my fatherrrr, verry bad crash, the carrrs, the flames ! The police ! My motherr, my father. Dead ! I sad, very sad, late, teacher. I late. Verrry. “

    The class chorused the ‘verry’, and one girl even trumped up a few tears of sympathy before the entire group broke into affectionate laughter.

    Plenty more tales of classroom hilarity followed, but there are other stories to come, from other Saudi experiences.

  • Cookery books & aliens in a Sri Lankan hotel

    by JM

    It started in the usual way that you get on your travels if you like talking to strangers, and this particular chat happened last month in the elegant reception hall of the Galle Face Hotel in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

    I’d just spent a few pleasant weeks with friends in my usual place, right on the Indian Ocean in the south of the island – at $23 per night, including breakfast – so I was happy to revel in the very different ambient of the Galle Face Hotel (partly designed by a Scottish architect, and frequented by world luminaries for over 150 years ).

    I was enjoying the spaciousness of the hotel foyer and its air conditioning, and watching people arriving and leaving when a lady with lustrous, well-cut silver hair, intense energy and beautiful colours, silk and cotton, sat down. An elderly but nimble man was with her, he smiled politely.

    The lady moved close to me, conspiratorial like a schoolgirl, as if she’d known me for years:

    “Don’t tell anyone but my husband is furious. Don’t draw attention to us. He’s a famous astronomer and they’ve sent a film crew to the hotel to ruin our holiday ! “

    She was older than me but felt like a teenager. Healthy, vigorous, quick, lithe amusing and easy to amuse. We chatted a bit about Britain ( where she’d been living for decades although she was Sri Lankan ), she mentioned a trip she’d had in the Highlands and demonstrated an unexpected ability to mimick Scottish accents.

    ” We’re waiting for the driver: been invited for afternoon tea with the former Prime Minister, the woman. We’re nipping off now quickly so the camera crew don’t catch on. “

    The ‘famous atronomer’, who I later discovered online is also an eminent mathematician and pioneer in astrobiology, was Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe MBE, and here are a few lines from a recent interview with him on YouTube:

    “We are connected to an infinite source of intelligence and bacteria have intelligence. ….We could be subjects of manipulation through bacteria ingress from space, and ‘the aliens’ we are looking for could maybe all be bacteria. I have an open mind about this….. God to me is the total content of the intelligence in the universe. That would be my god with all its bacteria and viruses and quantum interactions.”

    And his lively and charismatic wife Priya was not only waggish, brilliant and friendly, but is the author of various Indian cookbooks, published internationally.

  • Masked & on the move during covid

    by JM

    1. Buraydah, Saudi Arabia

    2. Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

    3. Istanbul

    4. Bolzano, near Austria, Italy

    5. Kuwait

  • Living in Saudi – The Inspector

    by JM

    I called her The Inspector because that’s what she felt like the first time I met her. She was English, tall and slim, and a Moslem revert – as many term it – with a spirited intelligent face and a great sense of fun, which you could see from the lines at the sides of her eyes and because she was always smiling, even when you weren’t looking at her.

    Of course she wasn’t really an inspector, but her height, breezy mien and vigorus gait gave her the air of someone supervising others in an efficient but friendly way.

    Also, although she was a fellow English instructor, most of the time she was in the corridors and not in her classroom, where sulking and insolent students lolled around at their expensive desks, exchanging vapid comments during brief breaks from their compusive phone scrolling.

    Most of our students were perfectly pleasant as individuals, but whether you were there in front of them trying to teach them – or not – their behaviour didn’t change much (and there were plenty of good reasons for this, not relevant here).

    Our bosses, who were probably wiser and more mature than we were ( but also more sycophantic and less impish ) took a while to notice The Inspector’s characteristics, and when they did, they found her rather difficult to manage, partly because she was cleverer than all of us, and popular, and because she was marvellously unpredictable too.

  • Talking to strangers in the street, the New York Times & Jono in Tangier

    by JM

    I haven’t been to Tangier for a few years now and Jono doesn’t live there any more but he sent me a message the other day saying that of course I could mention him in this little blog. I told him I had about 30 readers and we had a good laugh about that.

    Anyway I’m so pleased we met that day at the faded Café Tingis, that we shared easy and entertaining companionship for a few weeks every time I went to Tangier, that I was a guest at one of his lunch parties ( he had a resident cook and housekeeper, a view acrosss the sea to Europe, and pet cockeral called Gregory Peck ) and that it was all so amusing and light and warm.

    The photo above is Jono in his Tangier home, and then here below he’s photograped top right in the New York Times article that had taken me to Tangier in the first place ( little imagining I’d meet any of the people in the article), and at the bottom, with Anthony Bourdain who – Jono later told me – also met him by chance on the street… :

  • Jono & the Mauritanians in Tangier

    by JM

    Jono and I went to a service at the St Andrews Church in Tangier one day.

    After church we drank cold water in plastic cups and fell in with the vicar and a scraggy cheerful and colourful group of Mauritanians. The vicar was a friendly bon viveur of the colonial type and a terrible snob, who was quick to tell people that he was – at that time – the chaplain to the Queen. He was also quick to make a few comments about our Muslim brethren:

    “Watch your purse, and yourself. These people will latch onto you and you’ll never get rid of them..they come triapising all the way up here from Mauritania and try to get on boats across to Spain, only to be turned away by the Moroccan police and sent packing down south again. Then they come back up a few days later. Some of them come to church because they know there’s a bit of money here and some kind of social conscience.”

  • Jono’s Tangier

    by JM

    Jono had the finances, health and leisure to live exactly as he chose, but he had something much rarer too: the imagination to actually do it.

    And he did his Tangier daily life well, which is what I loved most about him.

    Soon after our first meeting, he and I got into a tacit loose-fitting kind of arrangement which meant sometimes meeting at the Tingis Café, sometimes at the Cinéma Rif, sometimes at the French bookshop, or even just on the streets, and none of it ever by arrangement.

    ” I’m terribly spoilt, you know. Pa left me quite a lot of lolly a long time ago now, so I just stopped working. Used to be a journalist, bit of a hack, to tell you the truth. Lived in Cairo for a while, fascinating place, have you been? I first came to dear old Tangier 30 years ago, was sent out by my paper in London on a story about artists here. Never left, really.”

  • Saudi Arabia – credit cards and porridge oats

    by JM

    Living and working with 250 English-speaking women colleagues on a gated campus in Saudi Arabia was quite an experience, and to this day makes me question many aspects of ‘the sisterhood’, and a lot else.

    The confining conditions – think Mallory Towers meets Alcatraz – sometimes brought out the worst in us all, and the financial stakes (described by one wag as ‘the money addiction’) were high, which added to the stress.

    * * *

    Nevertheless, the experience was highly entertaining a lot of the time, many colleagues were talented, clever and funny, and some inconsequential story or another was always on the go. Once or twice though, there was an exceptional event involving an exceptional character.

    One such was called Morag, and as soon as she arrived, she advertised an already-opened packet of porridge oats on our staff intranet for 50 cents, which was derided as weird and miserly, and much criticised at the time.

    Obviously Morag was flat broke and gossip quickly fired up and darted through the university about her supporting some boyfriend or another on a Greek island, plus his mother ( her name was even mentioned in some versions, Sophia ).

    * * * *

    Morag began her contract just when a well-known Saudi bank opened a branch on campus, and they were giving out credit cards to anyone who asked. We all had good salaries and were working for the same university, so it was easy and quick to get a card, with generous credit on it too.

    She might have been penniless, but Morag was neither daft nor slow. Within weeks, she managed to get two Visa cards, pocket the substantial credit (rumoured to be around $20,000) and leave the country on the next flight out.

    Of course there was a lot of finger-wagging afterwards, but once that was over, Morag’s reputation acquired the secret admiration and sparkle that the crafty fly-by-night often tends to enjoy.

    She was last sighted two years later in expensive clothes on Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm, sans boyfriend (and sans Sophia).

  • Saudi Arabia when no-one went there

    by JM

    It didn’t take long for my experiences in Saudi Arabia to jolt me into realising that the Eurocentric world vision is just as limited as any other, and that I too had been influenced by a whole lot of nonsense about ‘the Magic Kingdom’.

    For a start, most of the Saudis I met in my three years there – in three very different regions – were welcoming, warm, and fun.

    What was more challenging about Saudi Arabia, however, was living with 250 other English language instructors in a gated university campus just outside the capital, Riyadh.

    You had to be a certain feisty type of Western woman to choose to work in what at that time was a hermetic country, to arrive there alone, and comply with the prison-like restrictions of the contract. And of course it’s the feisty among us that find it most difficult to obey rules.

    For example, you couldn’t get back out of the country unless three of your bosses authorised it with their signatures. You could be dismissed within minutes though, and deported on the next flight out. Your visa was in the hands of your employers, you had to share an apartment with a colleague you’d never met, you couldn’t be seen with a man in a public place, and on top of all that, it was forbidden to discuss various key topics in the classroom ( outside it too, so it was not dissimilar to the United States at the moment ). Also, women weren’t allowed to drive then, and there was no Uber, and no public transport.

    The reason of course most of us went to Saudi Arabia – and happily signed our contracts – was the time-honoured immigrant worker’s pursuit of money, but the country attracted people for other motives too, which became clearer as the months went by.

  • Saudi Arabia-no such thing as a free lunch there either

    by JM

    ‘Look, you don’t actually have to speak, you know. They’re there to talk about themselves and won’t listen to a word you say anyway.’

    Sherry Lee and I were having coffeee at an uninteresting café in Saudi Arabia, in the town of Buraidah, in the isolated region of Qassim, known (to few) for its camel market and dates.

    The end of the month was arriving fast and Sherry Lee was short of cash.

    ‘I’ve been doing it since I got here. But only at the end of the month, though, when I want a bit of fine dining and I’m low on the bucks’.

    Sherry Lee was quick-witted and entertaining, not too great in the looks department, and enjoyed a certain cachet – or renown at least – in expat teaching circles throughout Saudi Arabia because she’d once been driven into such a tantrum by the students that she’d grabbed a girl’s phone from her desk and smashed it to pieces on the classroom floor.

    This had caused great hilarity and feigned outrage from the students, of course, and Sherry Lee was sacked on the spot and ushered onto the next plane out of the country….only to briefly dust herself down back in the States, find another job in another town in Saudi and start afresh a few months later.

    So we were having coffee in that ‘other town’, Buraidah, and Sherry Lee was trying to persuade me to join her in her latest scheme, which was going onto some kind of dating site ( at that time forbidden in the kingdom), hounding out an unwitting Saudi guy who was lonely and keen to speak English, and getting a free meal in a fancy restaurant as the reward.

    ‘Aw c’mon. Women- and men too – do this all the time all over the world ! It’ll be much more fun if there’s four of us. A double date. Awesome ! You don’t have to put on the slap, just try to be kinda nice, and interested in their jobs or whatever it is they’re talking about.’

    I quite liked Sherry Lee, but not this side of her, which to me seemed merciless and cynical.

    ‘Think about it, hon – it’s a win-win. The guy gets someone to listen to him, and to speak English, and you get the fine dining. They’ve got fresh salmon at that new place downtown! Yay !’

    Needless to say I did not join her on her little monthly dinner dates, maybe not due to any moral high ground posturing, but more because I knew I couldn’t sit through an entire evening listening to anyone talking about their job, no matter how fine the dining, or how attractive the companion.

    I must admit though, that I found Sherry Lee’s crafty inventiveness quite fascinating, even though it was cruel.

    Saudi Arabia was full of stories like this.

    . ‘