Technobedouin

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.

After 15 years of school and 3 months of orientation and training in Washington DC at the Foreign Service Institute, I am finally entering the working world in Riyadh. Here are some of my first impressions about the Kingdom:

Colors:

Everywhere I visit retains a color in my memory. I imagined Riyadh would be like the Saudi Embassies in Damascus and Washington, or like the Saudi thobes, a gleaming marble white set against the blue and the desert. That’s not the case, the city of Riyadh is camouflaged against the desert; all the buildings are a sand tan including my house, government buildings, businesses, and the embassy.

This is about the greenest I've seen Riyadh.

Roads:

Due to a lack of rain, the centers of the streets are slick with oil and sand. It fills in the crevices in the asphalt and becomes as slick, if not more so than a rainy road.  Even my 5-10’s slip on the asphalt here, and screeching tires are the norm when passing roundabouts. Also, Saudi drivers are crazy. Supposedly Saudi is the most dangerous place in the world to drive.

The Western Bubble:

Living in the embassy community, it is incredibly easy and tempting to eschew contact with the host country. Even the design of the Diplomatic Quarter seems to be to keep us separate from the locals. This is not to say it is impossible, or to say that it’s even hard to get out, but unlike many other places I’ve lived, it’s not necessary or seemingly encouraged to integrate with the local culture.

Now that I’m in Saudi Arabia, I don’t board to the embassy every day. I live too close to make it practical. For comparison, my house is a folf par 4 from the embassy gate. But my cafe addiction is alive and well, so yesterday I finally worked up the awakeness to wake up early and make a Starbucks run before work.

Longboarding down the main road, I was passed by two Saudi shabaab in uniform but off duty. They waved at me, I waved back. After they passed, the passenger half jokingly held his hand out the car window for me to grasp. At first I didn’t think they were serious: who would grasp the hand of a stranger in a moving car in a strange country? Then they pulled over and I wondered if they were legit. Recent counter surveillance and counter-terrorism courses have bred other paranoid instincts.

But I’m not going to let a cultural opportunity pass me by! As I passed by their parked car I held out my left arm- a signal saying “Sure… I’ll try.” They slowly passed me again this time I grasped his arm, and began skitching, about as fast as I’ve ever gone, definitely over 25. We made it to the cafe, where we chatted for a while and then we all had to go to work.

How awesome is it that the Saudi officers are the ones giving me a lift for skitching, rather than the ones trying to fine me for it?

Later, I learned from the Polish Ambassador’s daughter that there is a skatepark in the DQ. Maybe it’s time to get a shortboard too.

My stereotype of Manhattan conjures up the colors of grey and black, imperial chaos in the middle of a stel and concrete world like Hong Kong. Yet after arriving, it’s apparent there is no color scheme or material theme.

I like the street level chaos, the multitudes of construction covering half of all sidewalks. Skateboarding here feels right and new. And through 75mm wheels, it’s impossible not to feel the city: a cacophony of textures with smooth asphalt, unridable cobblestone, striated concrete, filled in potholes, steel plating one after the next. There a more textures on a single block than entire neighborhoods of DC.

I like the lassiez-faire style of the crowd. People move in every direction on every form of transportation. Everything is used for transportation. There are bikes from every era, busses I couldn’t classify, even couples in rollerblades. Satisfyingly, there are also other skateboarders of every type. They know the streets better than I do and float around me as we all run red lights weaving between pedestrian and auto traffic. On my first daytime boarding excursion, I wondered if the mounted officer would follow me for going the wrong way in a bike lane, but after a block of nervous cruising, the numerous other violations in my bike lane by pedestrians and vehicles banished the thought.

Boarding through Times Square is surreal. On approach, the open square the air itself is illuminated with the spillover from LED monoliths and the pavement turns smooth. Once the signs come into direct view, multitudes of light overwhelm the senses, but there is no opportunity to slow down and stop traffic. Focusing is impossible, as not only are the pictures moving, but my vantage is sliding through the intersection. If I look back it feels like I am being inexorably pulled to the forward, as if tied to a rope. Somehow my movement makes the immovability of the skyscrapers surrounding me seem insignificant and the lights ephemeral. Then as fast as the lights approached, they disappear, hidden by the concrete jungle.

Boarding New York isn’t fast, like the slalom runs in Pittsburgh, or as necessarily practical as the as in DC, but I’m not looking for speed or practicality- boarding in New York is fun. If I lived here I could trace the smooth paths around the manholes and regular holes, for now I just like the new feel.

In the second week of A-100 orientation class, an FSO asked Ambassador Charles Ray about coming back to America after 3 year tours in the far corners of the globe. He answered that every time he came back to America, he treated the experience like coming to a new country: the location is new, and the customs, technology and language have all changed. Returning to DC in June, I have felt more culture shock than any of my travels abroad.

There are things that I expected: government acronymization renders conversations with co-workers unintelligible to visiting friends and family. (Did you hear a member of 147^th talked to his CDO about the CNL requirement of three three for LDP?) The local dress suit + jansport or jeans with a tucked in dress shirt make sense for a neighborhood whos main two demographics are bureaucrats and yuppies. As it turns out, Arlington Rap all too accurately predicted the “non-professional” aspects of life and culture in North Virginia. Then there are things that boggle my mind: maid service, two sinks in one bathroom, or cancelling sport events when there is a 50% chance of rain.

I feel more obviously foreign than I did while in Damascus or even Hong Kong. On every subway car, my conversation awkwardly echoes across a sea of headphones and light reading. But I don’t need to speak to make my DC immigrant status clear. I didn’t know there was a ‘west coast’ style of dress until I realized that nobody in DC uses it. One look at my longboard, an object of curious fascination among locals, guarantees that I am either from California, Oregon, Washington, or Colorado. Apart from stares, people ask daily: “It looks like a skateboard, but it’s longer! What is it? Isn’t it dangerous?” “No,” I reply “Only dangerous if I’m trying to look like I belong.”

14,000: Look left, check, look right, check. I wish this procedure took longer! Lean forward, lean back, and jump. I jump because I was standing on the ledge, there was no room to turn around. Was it fear, fear of something inevitable? Something electric, tense.

13,980: I’m in space, and it’s as if I’ve lost control of my body. I try to arch to stop control the fall, but I don’t know which way in forward, how I should arch. Without gravity, my bearings are gone; I don’t know up from down from left from right, and none of it matters because none seems to change my position. This is freefall, and I’m doing quite badly. The instructor holding on to my left unexpectedly disappears, as if a comrade at arms has been blown away. This is not supposed to happen, but there’s enough time to look and see that the instructor on my right is still there (Ohthankgod!) After the initial confusion, 7 hours of training kicks in: “If one of the two instructors breaks off, continue like a normal jump. Check the altimeter.” I can’t say there’s enough time to enjoy the moment, but there are enough logical seconds to form memories: pure horizon 2 miles above the ground and hurricane force winds.

8,000: Check the altimeter, position seems to be good. Once I drop further I wave off the instructors and by this time I’m feeling very comfortable. I think the adrenaline from the lip of the plane has worn off. Maybe I’m just looking forward to having a parachute on top of me. The chute opens, and I still have no real sense of altitude. I’ve dropped further, but the main chute appears fine, big and square, no twists and no bad news.

4,800: With the chute deployed I timidly move the controls around. Regardless of my natural instinct to put this downward spiral on pause, I am still going towards the ground. Looking down at my feet, and I’m somewhere over the river: not where I wanted to land. Gliding a parachute for the first time is a lonely but exhilarating experience. The entire world I know is below me, while I am suspended by a strange and friendly parachute. I need to make it to that green square the size of my left foot somewhere below, so I should probably get used to controlling this parachute while I still have time.

3,000: “Jonathan, I’d like to see you do a practice landing now. Wait, wait wait, OK position one, position two, and full stop.” Thankfully, the radio below is now talking to me, giving me a practice landing. It is disconcerting to practice landing while still suspended far above my comfort level, but I can’t complain- following directions is easy! After the dry (airborne?) runs, I hear “Ok Jonathan, a little left, a little right.” With Mario guiding me down I don’t have to worry about my total inability to visually gauge altitude or plot a landing pattern.

20: Once the ground becomes more than a distant picture, I stop listening to Mario. Parkour instinct takes over in a strange way. It’s as if I’m making a jump, but I have control of my falling speed, and even a rewind button. I thankfully avoid the plane, and land somehow without falling.

0: Wow. That jump was worth all the money, all the effort, all the wait. Everything.