I don't think I have ever seen so many notes in any denomination anywhere. It made me suppose for a second that he had just won some gameshow fronted by the Arabic Noel Edmonds. In fact Noel really wouldn't look out of place here with his perma-tan and regulation goatie beard. just add a White smock and a dish dash and off he would toddle like an Ewok on amphetamine.
I eventually left the bank and took a cab downtown in search of a laptop.
Downtown is totally dead. I discover why after 10 minutes of walking on a sidewalk in the mid day eastern sun. My sunglasses even get so hot they are burning the bridge of my nose. I decide to cross the road and walk in the shade and still my ears burn from the heat. Mad dogs and Englishmen eh? A completely accurate description in this case, except that I haven't seen a dog since I arrived.
I eventually found the sanctuary of an air conditioned super mall and skulked past the shops which will not open until 4 pm after the afternoon prayer session. I found the food hall where I am now sitting and ordered some chicken noodles from the suspect looking Chinese fast food stall and waited again patiently 40 minutes for my food to arrive.
It's now 3:15 and I am killing time writing this right now.
There is a table of Saudi kid rockers sat at the next table. They are wearing T-shirts of their favourite bands including Pink Floyd, Guns and Roses and Alice Cooper. They all have regulation long rock hair, bleached rock jeans and beards. They could easily be sitting in a cafe in Box Hill with their Harley outside or sitting under the smoking tarp in The Rainbow on sunset....well with one notable exception they are all wearing rolexes and have iPhones and probably are twice as rich as the members of any of the above aforementioned bands. Fair play to them though for expressing themselves and breaking through their social and financial restraints.....hold on a minute these guys are actually more punk than Johnny Rotten and Joey Ramone put together....;)
I wish I wasn't too polite to take a picture.
Smoking seems to be permitted in most places but for some reason I don't seem to be able to smell it at all in the big shopping malls. As I write there are three people nearby all smoking and I cannot smell smoke at all.
Whilst on the subject of smells there are many to experience in Saudi. All of them are not half as bad as the smells in Turkey.
Kebab here though doesn't smell half as good as back in Turkey. It just doesn't have that BBQ taste either.
One absolute gift though. I have become accustomed (after three years of living in Turkey) to resorting to mouth breathing whenever I walk past a group of males. Deodorant for the male genre hasn't exactly caught on in Turkey. In Saudi that cannot be said of the Local male population. At the risk of sounding metro sexual Saudi men smell absolutely amazing. Not in the Essex chav dripping with Jean Paul Gaultier way but in a totally Subtle understated fresh way. In fact in the way that any man would like to smell to the opposite (or indeed favourite) sex.
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