Technobedouin

In one form or another I kept getting the same question: “what does it feel like to be leaving?”

In truth, I didn’t know. One plane reservation in an endless queue doesn’t do much to the psyche, and the trip to London was going to be the 10^th weekend running I got in a plane left Riyadh. At that point it felt like my mind had been too many places and was going to be in too many places for much change to register anymore. It’s like I had become location-deaf. I figured leaving Riyadh would only register itself after a few weeks, when I realize that Chinese training is more than a week vacation from visa interviews and sandblaster heat.

But coming to London, the differences once again blast my location-deaf self into realization that my tour is done and I’m starting something new. Perhaps it’s because London, and Europe as a whole, has always served as a layover between the U.S. and the Middle East. I’ve never been to the continent for more than 10 days, and it’s always been going to or from somewhere else. But it’s also how much of a cultural pole the west is, and how far away it is from all the countries I’ve visited recently.

Morocco, Azerbaijan, Congo, Kenya etc. are all very different, but when compared to the U.S. or the U.K. they look a lot more the same. In London (the west) there are stripes on the road, movies in the theatres, internet fast enough to play games, concerts with thousands of attendees, and a native language I have in common with the local population. These are things, like rediscovering a childhood album, I’d forgotten how much I liked.

Yesterday I bought a plane ticket to Abha, a popular Saudi tourist destination. The biggest selling point for me was an average high in July of only 82 degrees. As a coworker noted, that’s 50 degrees cooler than the worst we have experienced in Riyadh. Here are some snippets of what a Saudi summer feels like:

• On a motorcycle, it is cooler to stand idle than to move forward.
• In a car, it is cooler to leave the windows rolled up than rolled down, even if you have no AC.
• Some people wear gloves, as not to burn themselves on metal left out in the sun.
• If Air Conditioning breaks in your house, it is considered an emergency, and AC repair crews are supposed to be ready 24/7.
• It is widely believed that the government does not report the true temperatures, as recorded temperatures above 50c mean that people doing outdoor labor get an official break.
• Metal feels like it’s been left all day in the sun, even if it’s 10pm.
• It’s hard to tell if there is humidity or not, as the air is too hot to discern the difference.
• Days with highs of 110 are considered ‘cool’ and duly remarked upon.
• When riding under an overpass, you can feel it radiating heat from the day.
• Even at night, a visor is necessary on a motorcycle, as the wind is too hot for your eyes.
• I have slept curled up next to the AC unit in my house to get the cool
• Cats sleep curled up next to the side of your door to get the cool seeping out.

Simply put, if you haven’t been to the desert, you don’t know what hot means.

I’ve am surprised how different experiences prove themselves useful in consular work. Arabic, Islamic Studies, and Political science all seem logical preparatory endeavors. Now that I’m working on the website, even computer science courses I hated have proven their bureaucratic worth.

But beyond study, travel abroad, or anything on a resume, the best preparation for consular work has been playing Starcraft.

The obvious boon is dexterity. Every visa application requires some combination of 20 clicks, 20 hotkeys, and a few sentences of notes. Thanks to years of computer gaming, I am a master of hotkeys. When I started playing Starcraft it turned out that the split second difference between a mouse click and a keyboard stroke could be the difference between victory and defeat; any player who could not control their units with lightning speed almost always lost. In visa interviews the same skills make the difference between a 7 minute interview on navigating archaic software and a 3 minute interview focused on talking with an applicant.

Strategy games like Starcraft also force a player to combine ‘micro’ (using the mouse and keyboard to perform a precise actions in-game) and ‘macro’ (overall strategic considerations for a game).This means that one part of the brain would have to focus on the tactics and battle at hand, while the other must consider the entire game as a whole. During interviews, ‘micro’ is navigating the application, and going through bureaucratic checks. Nearly all visa interviews start with the following (micro) sequence:

“Hello, how are you?” (Eye contact)

Scan Barcode

Ctrl-e; Ctrl-o; Ctrl-tab;

“Okay we are going to start with fingerprints, can I get your right index finger on the red screen?”

Spacebar; Ctrl-end; Tab down arrow; shift tab tab enter; ctrl f4;

“Thank you. Hold on a moment while I take a look at your application” (Eye contact)

alt v; ctrl f4; alt m

As the interview continues, the focus shifts to ‘macro’. Is the applicant lying? What category of applicant is he? Are there security concerns? But then the interview plunges back into micro. As part of closing an interview, the following sequence is common, almost 20 keystrokes strung together:

Alt-s; g; tab tab tab tab c; alt-s; [mouse to window]; tab tab; “student” tab “i20 start”; alt-f alt-s alt c alt m; “self” ; alt-f alt-s alt-c alt-m [click]

Finally, Starcraft lengthens the attention span for the repetitive and the mundane. For Starcraft, perfecting strategy meant repeating the same actions in 7-minute games over and over for hours. I could spend days without interruption. Now I do spend days working the same 4 minute task over and over.  Perfecting an attack strategy in Starcraft is like interviewing the 45^th student in one day. If only I had known Starcraft would have been so useful for my job, I wouldn’t have wasted time on things trivial like a college degree.

You may have noticed that according to my blog, I have barely been living in Saudi Arabia for the last 6 months, and barely been working for the State Department. The truth is that I don’t know what I can say on either of these subjects that may not have repercussions down the road.

Right now, I am fortunate in my obscurity. But while Diplomatic Security may not be monitoring my blog, anybody else handy with google can. So the really interesting areas for blog entries such as Saudi Culture, Federal Government Bureaucracy (which I think is interesting!), have been all off limits. On the first day of A-100, everyone was warned about the dangers of blogging and all the interns who were kicked out of country for posting the wrong content online. In Riyadh we are bombarded with online courses about ‘cybersecurity’ and protecting personally identifiable information. In this tangled web of warnings, I don’t even know what the consequences would be if I write the wrong piece of information. But knowing that something might happen has been enough to dissuade.

So far I’ve limited my postings to clumsy references via twitter or facebook. It may not be any better from a practical standpoint, but that way I can be vague enough to satisfy some paranoid instinct. But there are a lot of interesting stories to tell, many take more than 140 characters. Either I’ll be setting up some form of walled garden, or I will simply post more about the less sensitive parts of life. Hopefully, there will be more content, of some sort, soon.

I hated Cairo last time. During one of my last days in the city in 2005, I wrote my annoyance down in journal form:

I went to the Islamic quarter and the citadel, and I probably did something wrong—because it sucked. The Islamic quarter had some cool mosques, but following the guide books instructions to get lost, I did and soon regretted it. Getting more tired and frustrated, I ended up at the citadel, only to find out that the entire thing was under renovation and thus closed. I snapped a few pictures, proving I’d been there and took a taxi to figure out ths situation and the train station. All of this combined to put me in foul mood, many hours left in a city I don’t really want to be in.

I left the country fasting in order to spend less money in this ‘den of theives’ and continued to not eat for the three days it took to boat, bus, and taxi back to Damascus. For the intervening years, I wondered at the Arabic students that loved their time in Cairo, but was unconvinced.

Yet in Riyadh, another three day weekend means another trip. It was only after my 3 other top destinations were nixed due to security concerns that I reluctantly gave Cairo a second try.

I like it much more this time; although it may be that I’m becoming increasingly fond of any city that does not enforce café segregation. I do believe that Koshary is the Egyptian equivalent of a Chipotle burrito (in my book, this is a very positive review), and the view of the Nile from Semiramis is tough to beat. Also helpful, I’ve avoided tourist destinations like it’s my job. Just give me a good internet connection or good conversation. If I need some history, I’ll catch it on my next trip to Damascus. Finally, Egyptian Arabic is not as strange or as foreign as I feared, and I can communicate with minimal difficulty. There are plenty of interesting people to meet, so I have been having a blast. After giving the mother of the world a second chance, I think I can take it off my travelling blacklist.

Looking out the window of the bus there were Syrian workers in blue jumpsuits working on the side of the road- hard labor. If this sort of practice existed in Saudi Arabia, it would make headlines. Construction, service, and manual labor are all in the realm of the 10 million foreign workers in Saudi Arabia. Class in Syria in not determined by passport. In Riyadh, it is easy to tell who is a foreign worker, who is Saudi, and who is Royal. Class differences still exist in Syria, and indeed they may be just as wide, but they are more transparent. Also obvious when seeing pedestrians was is gender mixing. To see women’s faces on the sidewalk, or even hair is a bit of a shock. In Saudi Arabia, women must have a male guardian if they travel in public, so even seeing women alone with their children is like a breath of fresh air.

Damascus makes Riyadh look like a fake city, a haphazard collection of buildings and people. In Damascus, the culture inescapable, and it’s possible to find new places of interest without plugging into Bluetooth and driving a car onto the freeways. When a Syrian director (whom I was going to film a show with, but that’s a different story) complained to me about the lack of an urban atmosphere in Riyadh, I didn’t believe him and defended the merits Riyadh. Ho related how the mutawa’ complained about his fashion, forcing him to remove a bracelet he was wearing on the street in Riyadh. He also complained that there wasn’t a class muthaqafiin  (cultured) in Riyadh, and about the constricted culture in the Kingdom. I may not have agreed with him at the time, but now I see where he’s coming from.

This was written on the last day of my trip in Sri Lanka, in early December.

I’ve never thought about ‘comfort zones’ before. It’s never troubled me beings somewhere new, security doesn’t trouble me, and theft seems just a fact of life. So why did I feel such an acute need to return to the familiar after riding highway A17?

I came to Sri Lanka with the intent of doing something new. I wanted to travel alone, my plan was no more specific than ‘surf in the south’. I rented a Honda Baja to ride down to Hikkaduwa- the hippie surf town on the southwest coast. For the trip back north, I decided on the inland highway rather than the coastal strip to see a different part of Sri Lanka. Highway A17 started out well: two lanes, a line down the middle, and sunny weather on a dilapidated but dry road. But as I rode past tea plantations of ascending elevation, the weather became more ominous, the road became narrower, and civilization disappeared. Then the thunderclouds opened up.

Very alone and very far from anything familiar, I was anxious. I didn’t know what I had gotten into.  I knew my place on the roadmap, but the roadmap didn’t tell me this ‘highway’ was a glorified cliffside goattrail.  Besides bad memories of riding during a downpour, I was specifically worried about running face-first into a bus around one of the numerous blind corners on the mountainside. It baffles the mind how busses could fit on this road, but if they did, there was not room for me. A certain mental image refused to go away:

“Slowly going around a corner only to discover a fully loaded passenger bus charging towards me. Cliff dropoff on the left, and cliff rise on the right. Too much front brake and hydroplaning makes the bike go down. I’m low, but not enough to slide under the bus…”

Too much. In the mountains, I changed my planned route to avoid the remaining mountainous route to Kandi and return to beautiful invention of multilane roads and guesthouses with menus written in English. For the next day and a half, I was eating, sleeping, or riding straight towards Negumbo. I didn’t pause to think, I had tunnel vision focused on the familiar.

Venturing outside of my comfort zone was not an entirely pleasant experience. I did not get the most out of my trip in Sri Lanka, as I missed Kandi the center of the island in my flight from uncertainty. Instead I got an entirely different experience- it just took going off the deep end of the unknown to find it.

Driving in Sri Lanka is anarchy, and the busses are the warlords. Old and grizzled, the belch black smoke as they charge around hairpin turns without abandon, giant bricks overstuffed with people.  Each bus looks to be over 30 years old, either a Tata or Lanka Ashok Leyland model. As opposed to the tuk-tuks, scooters, and compact cars, when they occupy a lane there is no room for maneuver. If they pass while in your lane, hug the shoulder while they straddle the centerline. If they are passing in oncoming traffic, dodge to the left- the lane has been hijacked. If a bus passes a bus- your lane doesn’t matter, dodge the moving roadblock. The drivers themselves seem oblivious to the bleating of their engines, using size and horns to terrorize slow traffic into submission and charge through the clogged highways. When they pick up or drop off passengers, they don’t even come to a complete stop, just slow down enough that someone can jump on. If I haven’t had nightmares about these buses yet, I certainly will.