This picture of the Saudia Airlines call center has nothing to do with my comments, except that it was taken at night. I’m almost finished with my Jeddah gallery and will soon start on the Janadriyah festival pictures, which will be a lot of work to even sort through, so thought I’d make a diversion for this one picture and adventure.

Tim has been in the States for two weeks, so I have had to walk Sahraa every morning and evening, which really cuts into my “free” time, but in any case Friday nights on the DQ have proven to be fascinating.

Last Friday evening Sahraa dragged me up to Al Kindi Plaza, when suddenly I realized that there were a lot of women (in abayas) walking around where there is usually nobody, and lots of souped up cars driving up and down the street. There were a quite a few guys walking around, too (one group of which were carted away as I assume they didn’t belong on the DQ and were there to try to meet women). It reminded me of Fourth Street in San Rafael, near to where I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area – young people out cruising on a Friday night. Since Tim usually walks Sahraa, I had no idea this went on and was totally dumbfounded, but he assures me this is a regular happening on Thursday and Friday (our weekend) nights. I guess young people will be young people regardless of where they live!

Then tonight, we were walking by the entrance to a park where three young women were sitting. They wanted to chat and photograph Sahraa, which of course she hated ;-). They were all Saudi and just delightful to talk to. One thing I found particularly nice was that they kept saying how much they liked my abaya and how elegant it was. They asked if I was Muslim because of the way I wore my headscarf, very modest, I guess. (That has taken a lot of time to perfect because they always fall off or blow off my head, driving me absolutely crazy, so I have taken to using bobby pins on the sides and a straight pin at the neck of the hood, and I guess the final product looks natural here.) They had abayas but no headscarves on, which I found interesting.

Anyway, it’s little adventures like these that make this a much more interesting place to live than I ever imagined it would be!