Well I’m getting to know my way around Jeddah a little bit more now, it’s designed in a grid system with obvious American influence. It’s impossible to walk anywhere and the only people you’ll see doing so are those too poor to be able to afford a car, Jeddah is pretty huge so you’d be hard pushed to get anywhere but the local shops even if you could find a pavement (sidewalk).

 The poor unfortunates that have to walk everywhere (there is no public transport except taxis) often fall victim to road accidents, I have not seen any but have had reports of bodies seen laying by the roadside. Their common fate is not surprising to anyone who has spent more than 10 minutes driving around and witnessed the average level of driving care exhibited.

If there are any common road rules or laws in Jeddah then i’m hard pressed to identify them the roads which are usually about 4 lanes wide have no lane markings and individual cars wobble between lanes as they please; u-turns against 8 lanes of traffic are not uncommon, the whole experience feels like a go on the dodgems at a fair ground.

We had our first little scrape the other night when turning left at a junction, a car in the far right (4th) lane decided it too wanted to turn left and wanted to be in the lane we were in needless to say there was nowhere to go and the driver of the car gave up with his manouevre after hitting the side of our 4×4. However after a quick bout of name calling and horn blowing we were on our way again without even stopping to check damage, apparently any claim for insurance here is a long drawn out process involving the police (hmm sounds familiar) and usually ends in a 50/50 split anyway.

The disparity in wealth here is obvious in the cars as well as the buildings, it is not uncommon to see a very young looking Saudi lad driving a sports car or blinged out Hummer next to a huge Indian family crammed in a tiny old battered car.

Hanans Dad has asked me if i would like to drive, however i have to say i feel reluctant to at the moment I fear I might not get very far sticking to my familiar way of driving.

Well here I am in Jeddah, Saudi and already settling into a different life style which will be mine for the next two weeks, i’m excited to come and stay with Hanans family and get a taste of their everyday living.

The compound (there must be nicer name for it) that Hanans parents and younger sisters live in holds 8 houses and encircles a tennis court and a swimming pool.  It feels a very secure and friendly atmosphere helped by  the single point of entrance which has a friendly security guard who waves and says S’alaam Alaikum when we come and go.

The residents kids all play together in the center of the compound kicking a football around and using the basketball nets and the whole setup feels more family orientated than back in Britain, there is even a large family of cats who have the run of the grounds and seem to go around creating mayhem and doing what cats do.

I have met a lot of the neighbours already all who have invited me round for dinner at some point in my stay, I feel I might become fat by the end of my stay with all the good arabic food on offer

The next door neighbour Mohamed is Egyptian and married to a Syrian lady whom i haven’t met yet, he works as the finance director for a medical supply company and is a frequent traveller to Dubai, Qatar and UAE I’ve already received my first job offer here from him although i think it may just part of the hospitality to offer guests a work at your company

The next neighbour I met was Rhoda who is Palestinian but brought up in the French colony of Martinique, her daughter lives in Abu Dabi with her Afghany husband. Rhoda is very lively and entertaining and likes to do eccentric little hobbies like beekeeping in the garden she has made in her section of the compound. She has also dug and lined an oven in the garden and has promised to make some of her renowned wood cooked chicken during my stay.

Basima and her husband are from Lebanon, their two oldest lads are at university in Canada. Basima is another larger than life character, very friendly and full of energy. Again I have the offer of more food at some point in the stay, I think they are trying to feed me up before i go back to England to prepare me for the cold British weather as Mohamed said, he did a round trip of Britain a few years ago but was not particularly impressed by the weather.

Mohamed also commented on how many rules the British have and how he felt scared to do anything for fear of being told off. Don’t smoke here, don’t drink at this time, fill in this form, drive like this… I have to agree with him. It is strange how we sometimes think of Saudi as a very strict place with little personal freedom, in many senses it is but when contrasted to some of the rules and regulations we have, we are also strictly controlled; even more so in our own homes where we cant even do some wiring without it being approved by a government regulator.

Last night we went out to the local Mega Mall, a very Americanized place lavishly decorated with huge marble columns and shops of every conceivable kind. I definately stood out like a sore thumb there and got my fair share of stares all of which felt either mildly inquisitive or friendly, these were justified really as 75% of the men were wearing the traditional white robe and headress that Saudi men wear whilst I was wearing jeans and a t-shirt. The women were for the most part wearing black robes and head scarves some with the face covered and others not, it was interesting spotting the fashions among the ladies robes which by the way look very smart, almost suit like and quite elegant. They were often worn with high heels and Victoria Beckham style sunglasses.

It’s unfortunate that photography is not allowed in public here as there are some fantastic images of people to be had, it is hard to describe the feeling of being stood in a clothes shop with a hoard of blackrobed women stood around examing the levis jeans and trying on Nike sneakers in their Abaya black robes.

Today we also paid a visit to see Hanans dad Jalal at work in the EN&T department of one of the local hospitals, it’s a very smart private hospital extremely clean and airy. We sat in the waiting room whilst Jalal finished with a patient and exchanged greetings with some of the patients there, one old Saudi gentleman took great pleasure in trying out his english with me which was very good, much better anyway than my smattering of Arabic. The waiting area has a separate room for women waiting, most of whom were again clad in their Abaya with face covered; Jalal often tells stories of women who come in and say “why you must remember me doctor?” from behind their veil.

Right well must dash time to go out and have some food again, I have so far had Tagine, fried fish, Shwarma (pieces of Grilled Lamb), Kebab and various other tasty arabic treats. There are thousands of restaurants in Jeddah to choose from so who knows what it will be tonight

Thanks to a great deal of effort on the part of Hanans dad, I will soon be in receipt of a Saudi visitors visa

This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to visit really as its not possible to get in as a normal tourist, Hanans parents will probably only be living there for another year before they move back to the UK, so now is a great time to visit. A few things I’m looking forward to on the trip are…

Snorkelling in the Red Sea - I’ve heard that Red Sea off the coast of Saudi is some of the most unspoilt diving going, and much less crowded then Egypt due to the restrictions on visitors.

Visiting the mountains on the way to Taif. I’ve been promised some interesting wildlife here, included camels and babboons

I’m also looking forward to visiting makkah and the old town in Jeddah.

I’ll obviously be taking my camera, but might have to be a bit more discreet than normal. I dont want to carry on my tradition of being told to stop taking pictures by overeager security guards etc.

Answer… pretty damn hard.

If you are not a resident or national you can only get into Saudi under one of three circumstances, first option - you’re going on business, second - you’re going on pilgrimage to Mecca and thirdly a family visit. I’m plumping for the latter, Hanans Mum, Dad and little sister Amanda live in Jeddah which is the major trading city in Saudi positoned on the Red Sea.

So it turns out to prove I’m family I have to jump through a number of hoops in what seems to be a good ole 1800’s style system. Recipe as follows…

1. Request copy of marriage certificate

2. Send Take marriage certificate to Foreign office in London to be “legalised” (sending was taking too long). I don’t see why it needs approving seeing as the government issued it in the first place. Anway good to know that we have an extra seal of approval on our marriage now…

3. Take Copy to Saudi Embassy in London to be double “legalised”.

…..wait 1 day ……

4. go back to London and pick up certificate. Send via snail mail copy of certificate to Saudi Arabia.

……wait……..

5. Hanans Dad does some more foreign office visits over in Saudi to get visa issued.

…..wait …….

5. Send visa back to UK

6. stick in passport.

Phew done… although we’re actually just up to step 4, sigh… The most amusing part of the day though was the 1 hour delay in the Foreign office, whilst delays aren’t normally a source of amusement the cause was explained to be “the computer system is down”, however Alex the announcer unwittingly left on his microphone and all the back office talk was relayed into the waiting room, the culprit it turned out was a paper jam in the printer which effectively brought the foreign office to a standstill, who needs terrorist attacks when you’ve got paper jams.

The opening hours of the Saudi embassy are obviously designed with the normal citizen in mind !?! a very convenient 10am to 11.30am opening slot, which made my journey from the Foreign office on Pall Mall a somewhat hurried one as I tried to get there before it closed. Luckily it wasnt very busy when i got there.

The Saudi Embassy had its own quirks as well, It very much resembled the inside of a bank or a post office. The general processing method there seemed to be everyone stand in a queue at the first window, as each person got to the front the guy would show a general disinterest in their reason for being there and direct them to a hidden window at the end of the counter. Upon being directed here and standing in line again I was served by a guy who some how was somehow managing to talk on his mobile and serve people. Though the limit of this service seemed to be taking whatever you gave him, handing out a ticket and telling you to come back tomorrow. Not very convenient when you live an hour and half by train away.

Hmm, mental note to go places where they actually want you to visit in future.

Hanan has frequently mentioned the cartoons that she watched as a kid growing up in Syria, in particular one that involved a guy named ‘Duc Feed’ and his robot ‘Klandaser’ who battle against other evil robots trying to take over the universe.

I’ve never been sat at my machine before when they’ve been mentioned, but this time I was and what better way to test out the power of t’internet than finding details of obscure Japanese Anime dubbed into Arabic

Searching on google didn’t result in any hits for ‘Klandaser’ or ‘Duc Feed’, but then i wasn’t sure that these would be accurate translations of the actual names. A quick search later for ‘arabic cartoons’ resulted in this page which listed a whole bunch of old cartoons dubbed into Arabic. A lot of these are Japanese anime and include Hanans old favourite which turns out to be called ‘Grendizer‘ (and the main character is Duke Fleet). A bit more searching and look what we found… yes that’s right Grendizer on Youtube, dubbed into Arabic.

I’m impressed by the power of the Longtail.

Excuse me now while I go and try and calm Hanan down, she’s running round the flat pretending to be a giant robot.

So as part of my ongoing self education I’m attempting to learn the Arabic language, for good reason as Hanan my wife is half Syrian, half English and speaks fluent Arabic. I’m also going to be visiting both Saudi and Syria hopefully this year so I now have the kick up the back side I need to try and learn Arabic a little bit more formally.

An important part of learning Arabic and something I’ve avoided so far is learning the alphabet and writing system. I’m still in the early stages of this at the moment and any exposure to the alphabet helps.

As a little excercise i’ve decided to write a bit of PHP script that takes a string of arabic characters and transliterates them into the latin alphabet. Now what this basically equates to is a big ole switch statement checking the double byte value for each arabic character and then outputing the appropriate latin characters.

Sounds pretty easy ? Well it is really, but it has some drawbacks. It’s not really possible to get an end result that’s deadly accurate using standard internet typed Arabic. The reason for this is that the short vowels in Arabic are represented by using diacritics such as ´ above and below the characters these denote respectively whether there is to be an “a” sound or an “i” sound after the particular letter. (Oh and there are also 2 or 3 sounds that don’t exist in English but that’s another problem )

This is all fine, but the problem is these diacritics are usually left out of typed Arabic except to distinguish between two ambiguous words. So if the information is not there to start with we can’t 100% accurately work out the sound. However we can do an approximation and for most of the time this is good enough

Here’s a little sample sentence before and after transliteration.

قالت مجموعة الشركات “دبي انترناشيونال كابيتال” انها لم تعد مهتمة بشراء حصة الاغلبية في نادي لفربول الانجليزي لكرة القدم.

comes out as …

qalt mjmoAa alshrkat ‘dbi antrnashional kabital’ anha lm tAd mhtma bshraa HSa alaghlbia fi nadi lfrbol alanjlizi lkra alqdm.

you can even start to spot some familiar words in there ‘dbi antrnashional kabital’ = Dubai International Capital (there is no p sound in arabic so they come out as b’s )

I’ll have more of a play and see if i can improve it, but the output is good enough for Hanan to figure out the output without seeing the original (given a bit of head scratching admittedly). However its a good way for me to get a quick gist of how some arabic script should sound while i’m learning the alphabet.