District – Bab Shareif by Derek Morales

Remember the old Jeddah pictures? There is a picture of bab shareif. Now the old historic sites are crumbling, they will be demolished no doubt, to make way for modern buildings, malls, and parking lots… the story of modernisation.

Going in was a bit of a setback, since the security guys who think they are 50cent and fat Eminem acted like we wanted to enter a club and not an art exhibition, looking at us like we owed them money. It is always funny to me when these guys go on little power trips.

Anyhow, it turned out that we needed an invitation, or should’ve arrived with our families (i.e. have a woman with us).

Lucky for us, Thamer saw one of his filmmaker friends Awadh Alhamzani, who was a presenter, who talked to Steve the Director who let us in with no problems, after that it was just cool.

Now, some of the artwork inside blew me away, other works made me think “whaaaa?” really? You must be kidding me.

It is interesting, to see, and I plan on going again with my wife next time.

It will be on until the 18^th of February, so if you are in Jeddah or planning to visit, I recommend you go and see it.

Thanks to @Adnan_Z_Manjal for letting me know about it.

embedded video

I liked this video, a woman keeps painting this broken car, it resembled to me the status of the never ending debate about women driving in Saudi, they keep getting their hopes high, preparing for it, but the car is broken down and does not seem to go anywhere… but as they say, art is always open to interpretation. (Women Driving in Saudi)

I loved it when he says

“My son asks me to stop this work and I tell him No, I can’t stop, If I don’t work, I fall sick”

Reminded me of my late grandfather who, worked well into his mid eighties and died while at work, and people younger than I am thinking about early retirement… the last of a dying breed I guess.

Thanks to @Walrex for letting me know about this video.

- You know what they call a footlong subway in Saudi Arabia?

- They don’t call it a footlong?

- No they use the metric system

- Ok, what do they call a footlong subway in Saudi Arabia?

- They call it a 30cm subway

- What about a six inch?

- They call it a 15 centimeter subway, oh and they don’t call the thousand islands dressing, thousand islands

- What do they call it then?

- They call it cocktail sauce

(inspired from a scene in pulp fiction with John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson.

P.S. A quarter pounder with cheese is still a quarter pounder with cheese at a McDonald’s in Saudi Arabia.

Enjoy your Wednesday

There are economic incentives behind this, 7 billion dollars being pumped out of the country in the second quarter of 2011 alone by foreign workers, anyone can see… it is not good for the economy… it is only good for the one vary famous bank which deals with them every month and gets a transaction fee for every transfer, I think I read that the owner of the back is one of the richest in Saudi, and one of the worst banks to deal with on a personal banking level, it doesn’t make sense… but it does make cents and dollars.

I assume, that once things settle, the big companies that own everything in the malls will begin to employ non-Saudi women, just like they do in other gulf countries, for all the obvious outsourcing (but inwards) reasons, and let’s see if netaqat is also applied to Saudi women, since the labor office says that employing a Saudi woman is equal to employing four Saudi men to fulfill their Saudization quotas, something all governments do in the form of affirmative action (don’t quote me on this, this is what I hear and I am have not seen the labor regulations). So if I had a multimillion dollar business to run, I would have a lot of leeway to play the system.

Some say the head of Hay’a was replaced due to this issue being a problem, I never knew his name until I heard he was being replaced, so good luck to the new guy… remember, change takes time.

Now driving in Saudi is not for the faint hearted, and the drivers are reckless… Of course this has a bit of what George Carlin said “anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac” I will not exempt myself from that.

So with me, it goes like this, a guy cuts me off, abu shaklak… a guy cuts a red light, abu shaklak… a guy does not stop at a stop sign, abu shaklak… a guy opens the window and throws his rubbish out on the streets, abu shaklak… and so on.

So one day, I was driving with my son in the car, the road was clear and I was approaching a traffic light which was green, it turned yellow just as I was on the zebra, so I kept going, it turned red just as I finished crossing the intersection… all was cool… except that my son looked at me in bewilderment and all wide eyed and said… and I quote “Daddy! Now WE are abushaklak!”

All I could say was… yes we are… yes we are.

I had the pleasure of meeting Mazen more than once, and he is a down to earth guy who works as an art teacher.

More of his amazing work can be found on his blog rammal.wordpress.com

The images were captured around the Tuwaig mountains near Riyadh, more info on the video can be found (here).

I have not been away, but unfortunately some russian hackers injected some bad code into my blogs and redirected people to their website, it took me a looooong time to clean it all up, especially with how busy work and personal life has been lately.

So here’s to a year I will never forget, I just hope there are no more surprises… However, if the Mayans were right, then we have not seen the beginning of it.