{"id":30066,"date":"2013-10-13T14:09:08","date_gmt":"2013-10-13T10:09:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/?p=30066"},"modified":"2013-10-13T14:09:08","modified_gmt":"2013-10-13T10:09:08","slug":"packed-malls-road-rage-hajj-break-kingdom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/middle-east-society\/packed-malls-road-rage-hajj-break-kingdom\/","title":{"rendered":"Packed Malls and Road Rage: Hajj Break in Kingdom"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Riyadh-shopping-mall\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Hajj is here again and I and my family brace ourselves for the informal rituals and occurrences characteristic of the season. If you are not making Hajj, this usually entails booking a ticket out of Saudi Arabia for some recreation that perhaps involves vegetation\u2014perhaps a tropical paradise in the Far East or a cooler place in the far west. Those of us that don\u2019t have the aforementioned options merely try to make the most of the local amusements or avail ourselves of the spiritual practices to obtain the prescribed religious redemption and solace for certain occasional missteps since Ramadan, Hajj can be a less than enjoyable predicament for those in Saudi Arabia just for tax free employment.<\/p>\n

For me, the Hajj break from work usually means lots of driving around to do things \u2018the Mrs.\u2019 wants to do\u2014since in Saudi, women can\u2019t drive (not because they aren\u2019t capable mind you, it\u2019s just against the tribal and social sensibilities). My wife, far from being a good sport about this sort thing, wouldn\u2019t drive anyway due to the dearth of skill among the indigenous population and the lack of law enforcement necessary for safe road maneuvering. Unless one is willing to hire a driver (which I wasn\u2019t and am not for all sorts of western reasons) , the task of making sure my wife and our daughters go where they like falls upon me.<\/p>\n

Despite the tales to the contrary, Saudi is filled with men like myself\u2014slaves to wage in the daily grind while on the weekend, we are chained to the wheels of our jalopies weaving the hazardous roads to the Souqs (shopping centers) in the Saudi landscape to keep our women (of those who forgo the luxury and expense of drivers) from feeling cooped-up like barnyard chickens and sane.<\/p>\n

Now there are lots of things to do in the malls during the evening, which during Hajj, has become the first and last resort of everyone not lucky or well off enough to score a plane ticket to \u2018any place but here.\u2019 This mentality produces grid lock everywhere and the malls are generally packed to capacity at night with an infinite variety of scenarios for road rage.<\/p>\n

The rest of us (to avoid the madness) mainly set a schedule that side tracks the herding instinct of our Arab neighbors. Early mornings are usually a good time for the beach, a safe bet of vacancy where many locals take dinner between 11 pm and 1 am and (as legend has it) don\u2019t roll out of the hay until 1 pm. A late breakfast at a fast food place (that gives away toys) and then buzzing an old Souq before the wall of traffic descends at 4 pm is the way to go for an off the top of your head pre-framed itinerary as well as inexpensive.<\/p>\n

No matter what anyone says, don\u2019t go to a kiddy arcade your adored children are over the top about. They are generally only open in the evening and become too crowded for your children to get any enjoyment out of. Wait time getting out of Arabian Mall for me last year was three hours\u2014four, if you count getting to a road that could take us home.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ABU MOHAMMED: Many of us on the Hajj break are slaves to our cars, busy transporting our loved ones from beach to mall to play center <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":340,"featured_media":30076,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[173,90,482,10,5],"tags":[1209,3620,906,16510,91,249,707,18275],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30066"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/340"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30066"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30066\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30078,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30066\/revisions\/30078"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30076"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30066"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30066"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30066"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}