16. Groundhog’s Days

On February 2, the groundhog comes out of his hole. If he goes back into his hole, winter will be a while longer, but if he walks about, spring is just around the corner. When I arrived in Riyadh in mid-March, it was still a little chilly at night without a thin jacket. But winter, even in the Saudi sense, was definitely ending. I proposed that we picked a day to crack an egg onto the pavement at twelve noon. If the egg doesn’t cook within five minutes, winter will be a little longer, but if it does, summer is just around the corner.

The title of this letter, however, refers to the movie Groundhog’s Day, in which Bill Murray wakes up to the same day over and over. On more than one morning I woke up to my dim and curtained bedroom and a thought went through my half asleep brain that it was a dark gloomy rainy morning. Not more than what seemed like a few seconds would need to pass before my senses come back to me. It could be nothing but yet another dry hot sunny day. The months of May, June, and July in Riyadh for the most part had been slow and featureless days – days that I could not tell one apart from the next. I am in serious danger of running out of interesting material to write you about. What can I tell you? Our office villa move from VIP 16 to 243? The furniture took four trips to be delivered? We got a few cubicles in the brand new building at the client? I finished one of my Penguin Classics – books that I should have read but never did – the Secret Garden in May, but somehow never got the chance to start on another one?

I went back to New York on Wednesday, June 2 for four and half days, three of which were spent on ceremonies.

The first was the hooding ceremony at Rockwell Cage at MIT on Thursday. The hood is a piece of heavy velvet cloth worn over the academic robe and is conferred upon recipients of doctoral degrees. The MIT hood has three colors - gray and cardinal are the colors of MIT, blue indicating Ph.D. or yellow indicating Science Doctor. The hood has a little pocket, which supposedly was used to catch coins the students throw at the professor in medieval times as payment for the lecture.

The second was the Commencement in Killian Court on Friday. At MIT, a thesis can be turned in anytime, but the degree is given only three times a year, and the ceremony is performed only once a year. I finished my thesis last September, too late to be at last year’s commencement featuring David Ho and Bill Clinton. This year, we had to settle for Clik and Clak of CarTalk on National Public Radio. Two MIT graduates turned into auto repairmen and talk show hosts, they had joked about not being invited to speak at the commencement. Charles Vest went for broke and got them here. At least they were half entertaining, although it is rather hard for me to explain to people who they were.

The families take ceremonies like these a lot more seriously than the graduates. Dan, whom I knew from Tang Hall Residents’ Association, wore a T-shirt and shorts underneath his abaya, … uh, academic robe. Sorry, I had just left abaya country. Yet I was immediately subject to another two days of black robes. Imagine the horror! I had thought that I wouldn’t know anybody at the ceremonies, so I was rather surprised that I had bumped into nearly a dozen people that I knew, all of whom I met quite a long time ago. I went to see my Ph.D. advisor and my pals in the research group. At the hooding ceremony I also bumped into a very senior partner of the Firm who had interviewed me. He was there for his son, who had an office across the hallway from my research group.

The third ceremony was my cousin’s wedding on Sunday.

It seemed that every time I came back from my breaks I met someone new joining the team. This time, however, it was Carlos who was rolling off. It’s been close to three months since Carlos, Ricardo, and I joined. Ricardo and I had decided to stay on for a while longer. As a farewell party, Ricardo arranged a dinner on Tuesday, June 8 at Al-Shaabiyah, a Saudi restaurant behind Al Oruba Plaza. We had gone there once before. This was where Ricardo fought the green slime. He picked the place because of the ambience as we could have a tent all to ourselves. There must have been more than ten of us, so many so that we had to get a bus from the compound to take us all to the restaurant.

Aside from the team members and family, Ricardo had invited Karine, a French girl. She lived in the compound with her parents and worked at the Saudi Center for Women. The center is off limits to men except between seven and nine in the morning. When she wants to talk to her boss, a man, she would have to go to the center during those two hours. Karine actually liked being here in Saudi Arabia, but she would be leaving soon. This was her first job after college. She had never worked with people so different from her before and found it interesting. She said that the Saudi women wear quite fashionable clothes, some even more revealing than the Westerners’. They thought it fine to have a husband provide for her and generally couldn’t understand why Western women would want to work and have all the responsibilities.

Not too long after Carlos’s departure, Srini left the first week of July and Larry in mid-July. In the mean time, a few more people from the German offices joined.

When I tried to find the Kenyan embassy to get a visa, I walked into the dining room of the Kenyan ambassador’s residence by mistake. No one was there to stop me. It was pretty much the same for the embassy itself. The American embassy, on the other hand, had a long line outside a jailhouse revolving door. It’s a sober reminder that beneath the calm exterior and despite the friendly relationship between the governments, Saudi Arabia is not where an American would want to keep a high profile.

The American embassy throw a July 4th party in the evening of Thursday, July 1. Terry got tickets for most of us to go. After checking in the cell phones and the abayas, and a body search, we proceeded to purchase "tea tickets". This is American territory after all, although before anyone should start lamenting about the ban on alcohol here, might he be reminded of the Eighteenth Amendment? There was also raffles tickets to be had. Since it’s a party outdoors in the courtyard of the embassy, many wore neck coolers. It’s a cloth tube filled with a super-absorbing material. Once it soaks up water, the water is slowly released. Because the air is so dry here in the desert, this evaporation cooling around neck made quite a bit of difference, especially since Chris, Ricardo, and I went to dance a little.

We were generally not all that well plugged in in the expat community here, but at the July 4th party we did run into a few people we knew through work. One of them is John, who seemed to be fairly well connected and rather enjoyed his time here in Riyadh, a notion that we found hard to comprehend. He told us about the ballroom dance classes at the Najd compounds. Ricardo, Chris, and I were interested, so he arranged things for us. The first class was in the evening on Monday, July 5. The admission fee was 75 riyals or about $20 for five lessons. The instructor didn’t know how to instruct at all. I lamented to Ricardo, a Sloanie, that the classes at MIT were far cheaper and far better. He reminded me that we were not exactly there to learn Tango, were we? Oh, yeah, that’s right. I suppose that the whole point of social dancing is socializing. There seemed to be an in-group of expats that’s a little hard to break into. One or two people we kind of know through work. Most of the people were some years older than the three of us. There were quite a few long-timer Australians and New Zealanders, or at least the ones I danced with were. Chris reported that he danced with a young single Irish nurse. I did enjoy the Tangos, but for one reason or another, none of us ever went to the remaining classes.

Terrence
Riyadh
Tuesday, July 20, 1999