My Birthright

People ask me how I can put up with a place as restrictive as Saudi Arabia, where not only alcohol but harmless pleasures such as dancing and music are illegal.

In point of fact, I was born for it: I grew up in small town southern America.



Alcohol was illegal -- a "dry county" as they say. We needed to drive to the county line to get alcohol -- there were two liquor stores there. There were a couple of bars there, also, and if you've seen the movie ROADHOUSE you get the general idea.

Dancing was not illegal, exactly, but it was kind of like the small town in FOOTLOOSE, also, in that there were a lot of conservative religious Baptists and Methodists who frowned upon it (and everything else.) We frequently got lectures in our schools about how there were Satanic messages hidden backwards in rock music.

Women didn't have to go covered or anything, but shorts and skirts above the knee were not permitted in my high school. (Except for the cheerleaders, of course. I guess their short skirts represented clean, wholesome athleticism and not drunken teenage sluttery in the back of cars.(

As large gatherings of teenagers at the fast food places were also discouraged (or actively forbidden) we used to congregate at various desolate locations -- cemeteries, the field next to the city water tower, abandoned isolated farmhouses, etc.



(Some of my friends and I used to particularly enjoy an abandoned slaughterhouse on the edge of town; this never experienced any more mainstream popularity with Average Joe Redneck.)

Things have changed a bit now, of course -- there are a few bars in town with private liquor licenses, and even a nightclub.


But the after-church crowds at the all-you-can-eat buffets look pretty similar. . .

A Short Blog Entry

First holiday of the year starts tomorrow -- time to make a pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, if you're of the faith.

Students have been rowdy all week -- keeping quiet and doing their work only after much monitoring, and then they've started abusing the act of going to the toilet. One guy was gone nearly 25 minutes. (Of course I just went ahead and marked him absent, and they actually care about stuff like that at this particular university.)

I fully expected them all to start coughing simultaneously today, or perhaps all come in wearing vampire teeth.

Off to America tomorrow. In three months I have worked about seven weeks, and saved about as much as I saved in ten months in Korea, and a bit more than I saved in the last two years in Russia. (Yes, I actually managed to save some money in Russia, especially year before last when the ruble was strong.)

Now, why was I slaving away in those shitty private language schools again? Pussy, was it? How quaint.

Compound Interest

When you tell people you live in Saudi Arabia, the enlightened travelers usually ask about the compound you live in.

Well, me, I don't live in a compound. I live on a university campus. The majority of foreigners who live in Saudi Arabia do, however, and I visited a couple the weekend before Halloween to go to some parties.

The first was at a British compound -- after going through a considerable amount of security, we ended up at a small place which indeed had been fixed up much like a small bar,with a DJ and darts and of course an actual bar -- selling locally brewed bootleg hooch -- you had a choice of a whiskey-like brew or a vodka-like grain alcohol brew -- for 10 riyals.

There were some older British folks there, but not many others -- they said that we'd missed the Halloween party, which had been the night before, and they said that around 60 women had been in there.

So of course we took off and went to another compound -- this was an American compound, which naturally was full of South Africans, most of whom were employed at local hospitals. They had a bar at this one too, but the party was in a big cafeteria-like space.

There were a lot of women there, but I felt out of place and uncomfortable -- probably because I wasn't drunk enough. I felt very white, also. And then all the South Africans started doing this, like, tribal dance or something. (Somebody suggested that it was just a South African version of The Macarena.) I stood around uncomfortably with my arms crossed and my hands in my pockets.

In order to satisfy the prurient interests of many of my readers, I will end this otherwise not particualrly eventful story with saying that some of the South African women there had steatopygous buttocks.

Opposites Attract

[10/16/2009 1:06:33 PM] English Teacher X: it's 36 degrees

[10/16/2009 1:06:52 PM] Uncle Cool: you should have got used to it by now

[10/16/2009 1:07:11 PM] English Teacher X: ah, yeah, 35 isn't too bad
[10/16/2009 1:07:15 PM] English Teacher X: compared to 42, anyway
[10/16/2009 1:07:33 PM] English Teacher X: it's kept so frigid inside all the buildings that one doesn't easily adapt

[10/16/2009 1:08:09 PM] Uncle Cool: Like the opposite of Russian winter eh?/-- you toast inside and freeze outside

[10/16/2009 1:08:33 PM] English Teacher X: yeah, it's the opposite of Russia on many levels.
[10/16/2009 1:08:38 PM] English Teacher X: no women and no alcohol, of course
[10/16/2009 1:08:42 PM] English Teacher X: hot and sunny all the time
[10/16/2009 1:08:59 PM] English Teacher X: people are outwardly very friendly but inwardly seething with hatred and resentment.

[10/16/2009 1:09:07 PM] Uncle Cool: NO women students either ??#

[10/16/2009 1:09:09 PM] English Teacher X: (whereas Russians are outwardly seething)
[10/16/2009 1:09:21 PM] English Teacher X: there aren't any co-ed schools here[10/16/2009 1:09:33 PM] English Teacher X: there are in Oman and some other countries, but not here.

[10/16/2009 1:09:59 PM] Uncle Cool: Moslem hospitality -- Dont turn your back on your genial host

[10/16/2009 1:10:24 PM] English Teacher X: and unlike Russia there are a plethora of fine, cheap ethnic food restaurants
[10/16/2009 1:10:40 PM] English Teacher X: in Saudi I've yet to see a single sushi place, and only two Pizza places.

[10/16/2009 1:11:08 PM] Uncle Cool: at least you can have one earthly pleasure

Send Me A Kiss By Wire, Baby My Heart's On Fire

So you're all wondering: he didn't bang any whores in The Las Vegas of The Middle East last week, he's been without a drink or a woman for two months, how is he getting his rocks off?

"He's a very sexual being, English Teacher X is," you say to yourself. "How does he express his Eros over there in a land of hairy dudes, bedsheeted women, and camels?"

Well. Russian girls love cameras, as I said, and it seems love webcams just as well. . .



Next best thing to being there, indeed.

What Happens In The Las Vegas of The Middle East Stays In The Las Vegas of The Middle East

So I went to the Las Vegas of the Middle East last week; it was a bit seedier, and thus more interesting, than I was expecting.

Got up early -- 5.00am -- and made the 2-hour drive with some colleagues of English Teacher KSM in their big fancy company SUV. We did a bit of sight-seeing since we'd arrived so early -- a Portugese fort, the beach full of fishing boats, a posh coffee shop -- and then checked into our respective hotels.

Mine was recommended on the basis of the "scene" in its lobby, which housed a 24-hour-bar and a shisha (water pipe, hookah, nargillah, hubbly-bubbly, kalyan, whatever you want to call them) cafe. The 24-hour-bar was full of drunk Arabs (still surprisingly in their white thobes) and a couple of fat Moroccan hookers at 10.00 am when I checked in; I don't think I saw it empty once during the next 24 hours.



We had a long beery lunch at the Hard Rock cafe and then retired to our rooms to rest for the evening; I took a walk in the evening around the streets surrounding the hotel, which constituted the city's "Gold Souq" -- a colorful mix of mini-markets, cheap Indian cafes, gold and jewelry shops, spice shops, and more damn counterfeit expensive watches than I've ever seen in my life. I don't even wear a watch but by the end of the day I was thinking of buying one just from subliminal influence of seeing all the damn things.

In the evening we went to a hotel disco that had a salsa band; and then on the suggestion of the breasty Thai hooker that one of the guys was with, we went to a dark, black-lit bar full of Thai hookers.

It was the damnedest thing though -- none of the Thai hookers offered to have sex with me for money. A couple danced with me, talked to me, let me take their numbers -- but never did I get hit up for drinks, a "bar fine" (money paid to allow the girl to leave) or just money for sex. . . perhaps I'm missing out on the etiquette of the Middle EAst, but in Thailand one waited for the female to broach the subject.

The bar after midnight filled up with a strange and sinister assortment of shiny-suited Neil Strauss look-alikes -- maybe all the girls had other plans for the evening. It was their peak evening, I suppose, and my cheap cotton trousers and white shirt were far from shiny.

We applied ourselves seriously to tequilla and beer and left the other aspects of the evening to take care of themselves -- the place closed at 2.00 am and we went home without hookers.

We smoked a morning water pipe at 3.00 am in the cafe in the lobby of my hotel, which was full of hammered men in white thobes; the sinister atmosphere was completed by one loud drunken Ethiopian prostitute who all the guys seemed a few drinks away from breaking into drunken war over.

We went to bed at 4.00am and I came home the next day with nothing but a hangover (guess that part doesn't stay in the Las Vegas of the Middle East.) Didn't even buy the counterfeit Tag-Heuer I had my eye on.

Ah well, next time.

(I didn't manage to sneak any pictures of much of anything interesting, and Google image search surprisingly didn't turn up anything much interesting when I searched for "drunk Arabs")

Your Mouth To God's Ear

An email from a fan of the website:

Hey ETX,
I must admit that I have been reading your blog to see if you would go mad from alcohol and sex withdrawal. Well, I think I can safely say at this point that you are not an Alcoholic. How would I know? Well, I was kind of like English Teacher Q from Thailand, or Robert Downey Jr., back in my younger days. I go to those damn meetings with the steps and have done so for years. If you are not bat shit crazy at this point, it would appear that you belong to the lucky class of drinker who can take it or leave it. In addition, you never got into serious trouble with all of your adventures. I would have lost all my jobs and been some bad man's boyfriend in a Russian prison, had I attempted to live as you did. I am a little jealous, but not really. We don't have to give up whore-mongering, and I am too old now to be a party animal. I am jealous of your salary, however. :)

Looks like it. I don't miss alcohol that much, at least not yet. There was actually one day after work I had an unbelievable craving for beer; I had a couple of bottles of Holsten non-alcoholic and the urge went away.

In fact I look back on some of my former drinking binges with something like horror. Good lord, was I insane? What was I trying to prove, and to whom? God help you, Dear Reader, if you ever become a slave to your own reputation as a Fun Guy!

Anyway, I'm going to the LAS VEGAS OF THE MIDDLE-EAST next weekend (its glamorous streets pictured below.) We'll see what happens.