Through The Looking Glass (2)

Going shopping for any item not available on camp is not a trivial exercise. In fact, it's a bit of an ordeal and has to be treated like any major expedition: check lists for materiel, personnel, victuals, transport.

I've got a new friend named Martin, a geologist who arrived in KSA the same night I did. We went through our orientation together and ride the same bus to work in the mornings. He's a Brit, about my age, a super nice guy if a bit hapless. He's a perfect companion on these expeditions we must make to get ourselves settled into our jobs and our new homes. I figure two of us can muddle our way in and out of problems just as well as one. Because we are geologists, although working at very different pursuits within Aramco, we do speak the same technical language.

We also share similar outlooks on life. Martin sees the absurd as often as I do, another reason he's fun to do these things with. So here are two stories of the absurd. Martin got adventurous and bought a bag of local flour at the commissary only to discover after the second usage that it had a bunch of tiny beetles in it. He took it back to the commissary, telling the guy, this bag of flour has beetles in it! Martin said, the guy replied with a total deadpan face, oh, how were they? Martin said all he could do was laugh.

In reply to his tale, mine was about my library card. You have to fill out a very simple form online to get a library card, which I did last week. But I never heard anything back from them. So I called yesterday and told the young Asian woman who answered (probably Saudi but you can't tell for sure) about this. She said it should have taken only one day. So I said, okay, I suppose I'll try the form again, maybe it will work this time. She replied, inshallah, and hung up! Obviously, after telling me "god willing" the form might work, the conversation was over from her perspective.

You can only laugh at this sort of thing. Otherwise you'll never make it here.

Anyway, Martin needed a phone. Not any phone but the absolute cheapest mobile available in the Kingdom. The commissary where I bought mine only has high end models. Far too pricey for Martin. Too many features, he said.

I needed a new camera, having messed up the optics in mine from dropping it once too often. Although my phone does take pictures, I like having a real camera to carry around in my bag.

Two problems, one solution: eXtra, a local outlet in Al Khobar of a company called United Electronics. Think of Best Buy conflated with something like Conn's, only in Arabic.

I knew about this store because my boss's boss and his wife took me there last week on an outing. They had errands in Khobar and I went along for the ride.

But I have a rental car which can't be taken off camp, and neither Martin nor I can drive off camp anyway (I can never do so and he doesn't have his KSA driver's license yet). So what to do?

Martin and I decided on the day (Sunday) and I checked the prayer schedule. If we left camp by taxi at 5pm, got to eXtra by 5:30pm, we'd have an hour to shop before they kicked us out for the long prayer at 6:30pm (or so). First thing on Saturday morning when I got into work, I called the main taxi company on camp and reserved a taxi for that day and time. I requested that the driver wait for us while we shopped. This is common and you pay a small fixed fee per hour of waiting time. The fee to and from Khobar is fixed too. Very civilized and easy to deal with. You can't have the driver wait if it is a busy time such as the weekend. Rather inconvenient if you ever want to get back home. We deliberately planned our outing for a relatively quiet time of the week.

Once we got to the store, Martin and I piled out of the taxi and proceeded to conduct some seriously tactical shopping. He had his SR 86 (USD 22) bottom-of-the-shelf Nokia and I had my spiffy new Canon camera in less than half an hour. I told him I was surprised that they even made phones that plain anymore. He said as long as it has a green call and red hang up button it was just fine. I said, well, you need 10 number buttons too! Yeah, he agreed, this was true.

Our driver had the taxi doors open for us when we exited, and we made it home in good time.

But what would have been a trivial errand in the States took two hours, advance planning, and a bit of cash (total taxi fee SR 65 + tip). Nothing is simple through the looking glass.