19. Where Are the Arabs?

It’s amazing how no one could escape from visa problems. The many ways that things could go wrong were simply ingenious. Srinivasan and I received single entry visas rather than multiples when we first came. Markus went to Bonn to renew his multiple and was delayed for a week, because the Saudis sent his documents to Bern. Sure, both places start with a "B" and end in an "n", and both sound German. Never mind that Bern is in a different country and there is no Saudi consulate there. Carl was told that his visa had expired at the airport and was pulled aside into a room for lecturing. Apparently the first time he entered the country the wrong date was keyed in. After some arguments in Arabic between the immigration guy and his captain, Carl was allowed to enter the country. He had to cancel a trip to Italy. Ricardo was into deep Stage II because his whole trip schedule had to be changed for visa reasons. Larry cut his visa expiration date so close that when his flight back from Hong Kong was seriously delayed, he changed to a flight to Bahrain and entered Saudi Arabia over the land crossing.

Of course, the Saudis are incredibly good at red tape, and government jobs are magnets for the incompetent. For example, one day the Saudis decided that they would have an airport tax like everybody else. In even the most run down Third World country this would have entailed two guys sitting somewhere between check-in and boarding – one guy taking your money and giving you a piece of paper and another guy taking that piece of paper from you. But, no. The Saudis would have to do it in a more elaborate way. You have to go to a bank, a bank, a specific bank, albeit at any branch, to buy your coupon. There is only one counter of this bank at the airport. So there was a big scramble to get the coupons and to check in in advance at the city offices of the airlines to avoid potential long lines at the airport. The worries turned out to be unnecessary. The tax was supposed to start on June 1, but a lot of people never heard about it. Then it was delayed for a week. How that coupon was to be collected, nobody knew. Nobody asked for my coupon when I left for Europe towards the end of June. Now the immigration officers stamp the coupon to cancel it.

Saudi incompetence was expected, but I didn’t anticipate the Firm’s administrative support to be so disappointingly dismal. It’s sad that most of my frustration came from these visa problems. The lack of quality support from the Firm was a major factor. I was fuming last time because I was forced to go back to New York to fix my visa in April. I just couldn’t believe it when I realized that I would again need to go to New York in July to renew my multiple. I had told them at the beginning of May to start the renewal process since the letter from some ministry would take four weeks to get ready. I could then go to New York to get the visa at the beginning of June as planned. Our administrator heard that the Saudis were putting in some computer system and now the visa renewal could be done here in a week, so he did nothing for my visa in the meantime. After I got back from New York at the beginning of June, he told me in casual conversation that I was going to be the guinea pig for this new procedure. Actually, Markus had just tried it and failed. They came up with a suboptimal solution of getting me an iqarma, or residence visa, to save the cost of a trip to New York. The iqarma could be done here in Riyadh, but would take about three weeks hopefully with some luck.

I was told by our administrator that they would need to have my passport for the entire three weeks, so I waited until after I got back from Central Europe to give them my passport. There would be exactly three weeks before my next break towards the end of July. It turned out that they only needed to have my passport for a few days. I could have started the application process much earlier. These guys didn’t seem to know what they were doing. I became very wary as he liked to qualify things with "hopefully, with some luck". It’s as bad as saying two insh’allahs! My whole trip to Singapore and India was in danger of having to be canceled because I couldn’t get my passport back in time. It came down to daily calls towards the end to get the Firm’s administrative people to do something. I got my passport back at around 2:30 on Wednesday, July 21, and left the compound for the airport at around 6:30. Still, I was without a visa to India even though I had bought all the tickets. I shall save the Indian visa story for later. For the moment, I was happy to be out of Saudi Arabia.

The visa to UAE, in comparison, was too easy. The procedure was to get a hotel or travel agency in UAE to do the paperwork and then leave the visa – a piece of paper – at the airport. Never mind that it’s a bit odd that the UAE embassies generally do not issue visas. I arrived at Dubai Airport at around 11 p.m. After getting my visa from a small counter, passing through immigration took no more than a scan of the barcode on my visa sheet and a stamp in the passport. I liked the fact that there was one lane marked for "Americans and Europeans" and that this line was short and fast.

Wes, a consultant of a subcontracting firm working with the Transformation Team, is a long-timer in the Gulf. He has a villa in Dubai. During the month of July and August the expat communities in the Gulf, especially their families, leave for vacation en mass. His villa in Dubai was empty. Only the husband of his maid was there, living in the back of the house. Everyone on the Firm’s teams was welcome to use the villa when in Dubai. Wes gave me directions to his house and a key.

Dubai is probably the most liberal city in the Gulf. A lot of people come here for the nightlife, the booze, and the waters. Off the airplane I saw people with body surf boards. Since Wes asked me to drink an Anchor for him, I went directly to the Pancho Villa at Astoria Hotel – a place LP called a Dubai institution. I didn’t know that UAE, like the rest of the world, follows the Monday-to-Friday calendar, so I was a little disappointed that there were very few people at the bar. The dance music was loud but pretty good. Three women were free dancing for a while. A few people were sitting near the bar. They didn’t have Anchor. I had a Heineken, felt bored by myself, and left at around 1 a.m. I should have asked Wes for the inside track on where to go in Dubai.

The drawing Wes gave me didn’t look too good, so I was worried about not being able to find his place at first. The house turned out to be rather easy to find. Streets in Dubai, or at least the ones in his neighborhood were clearly marked and numbered. Fearing that I may not be able to get a taxi in this neighborhood easily I told the taxi driver to pick me up the next morning to take me to Dubai Museum. The house was just like what Wes had described to me, but the key he gave me, a duplicate that he had someone make for me earlier in the morning, didn’t even fit into the lock! At first I thought I used the wrong key. No. It’s the right one. I thought maybe it’s because of the poorly made duplicate. I forced it a little and had to pull very hard to get the key out. Then I thought I was trying the wrong door. The key didn’t fit the lock on the back door either.

So, some time around 1:30 a.m., in the dark, I was monkeying around Wes’s house. I decided not to wake his maid’s husband, who didn’t have a key to the house anyhow, as I vaguely remember Wes saying. I left the house, found a street light, took out the pages on Dubai that I ripped out of LP Middle East, and picked out a hotel not too far from Wes’s house and not too far from Dubai Museum. I flagged down a taxi on the main road and went to Time Palace Hotel. It must have been very odd to have someone walk in two o’clock in the middle of the night with only a small day pack on his back (I left my backpack at the airport). The guy behind the desk checked me in, never blinking an eye.

First thing in the morning on Thursday, July 22, I went to the Indian Embassy to see if I could get a tourist visa on the same day. No luck.

Wes had recommended three places to see in Dubai – Dubai Museum and Bastakiya wind towers on the Bur Dubai side of the Dubai Creek, and the Gold Souq on the Deira side reached via a ride on an abra to cross the creek. I went to Dubai Museum first. It’s in the restored Al-Fahaidi Fort with a fairly large and modern underground exhibition detailing the history, the culture, and the natural environment of Dubai. The wax figures were quite lifelike. For a moment I mistook the half-dozed-off museum guard in the corner for a wax figure. I then went looking for the wind towers – buildings designed to catch wind and funnel air through the rooms for cooling – but couldn’t find them. It wasn’t clear from Wes’s recommendation or LP’s description whether there is a restored building open for visitors or whether it was just an area where I could see some from the outside.

I walked around in Dubai Old Souq along the creek and found a house that’s built from coral blocks. I walked down to the docks and caught an abra to cross the river to the Deira side with a bunch of laborers. It cost 50 fils, or about 13 cents. I walked around more in the souqs on the Deira side along the river. There was an area with lots of trading companies, an area with lots of textiles shops, an area with lots of foodstuff shops, an area with lots of hardware shops, etc. I walked around with no particular aim, and chanced upon Hotel St. George, so I had lunch there. I found the famed Gold Souq, but the majority of the shop were closed around noon time. The Gold Souq is probably best strolled through at night with all the lights and the glitter.

Dubai is definitely not a place to be explored on foot in the middle of the day in the middle of summer. The problem was not only the temperature but also the humidity. If Riyadh was like a sauna, Dubai was like a sauna with a bucket water poured onto the hot rocks. But I soon discovered that once I was drenched in sweat, the marginal discomfort of walking around under the sun seemed minimal. I took a break and sat on a bench in the Gold Souq people watching, while continuing to sweat, although somewhat less profusely.

There was a great variety of people walking past by – a lot of Indians, some Africans, a few Westerners, an occasional Southeastern Asian, a few Emirati families with four or five kids in tow, and one or two old Emirati women with a peculiar face mask that I had never seen in Saudi Arabia. This was not a veil, but a metallic mask with a wire bridge coming down the nose and a thin triangular piece covering the nose and the cheek bones. The cheeks, the mouth, and the eyes all could be seen. Perhaps a better way to describe these masks is to say what sandals are to normal shoes is what these face masks are to Darth Vaeder’s helmet.

Dubai looked almost like a normal city. It’s not hard to tell that this is a more affluent city than Riyadh. There aren’t piles of construction rubbles on empty lots. The taxis are new, clean, and larger than those dirty stinking beat-up ones in Riyadh. The cabbies tried to cheat me though. In Dubai, women don’t have to wear abayas. Many wear normal clothes. The fact that 85% of the population in UAE is foreign and the history of Dubai as a trading port are not lost on the streets. With so many Indians and Pakistanis (I couldn’t tell them apart), Dubai looked like an unusually prosperous city somewhere on the Indian Subcontinent. The Arabs you see once in a while almost looked like visitors, but you know who really owns the place.

By about two o’clock I was done with Dubai. I took a very long break in a McDonald’s cooling off and waiting for my shirt to dry. What more was there to see? Especially if that entails getting drenched in sweat again. Then it was the airport and onto Singapore.

Terrence
Riyadh
Wednesday, August 2, 1999