On Virtual Sunday morning (Real Friday), I decided to venture out of the hotel grounds and take in a bit of the culture and sights of Riyadh. In hindsight, I shouldn’t have bothered. I should have known better.
Reluctantly, I got out of bed around 10am having decided I need to get away from the four walls of the hotel room for a couple of hours. I was going for a walk around the Kingdom Tower, architecturally one of the most impressive buildings I have ever seen. Showered and dressed (in jeans, as not even men are allowed to show leg flesh here and shorts are taboo, go figure) I grabbed my cap and shoulder bag with bottled water, and headed out into the heat to grab a taxi to the tower.
After a short fifteen minute ride and SR25 later (about ZAR50) along King Fahd Road, I emerged from my mobile fridge into the heat of the day which, by 11am, was over the 50degC mark. Officially, it never reaches 50degC in Saudi Arabia as, if (when) it does, workers are entitled to put down their tools and wait a couple of hours until it cools down to 45degC. Just so that no-one can see when it does go over 50degC, all the outside digital temperature readings automatically switch off when the temperature reaches 49degC and the displays only show the date and time. Guess what the displays were showing when I read them…
Anyway, the taxi pulls up at the Debenham’s entrance to the Kingdom Tower and I get out, expecting to see shoppers going about their respective retail therapies, but to my disappointment all I see are huge, locked, glass doors. That, and a Secret Service-looking guy in a grey suit and reflective sunglasses, coming to meet me before I get too close to the building.
We make the universal shaking of the arms signals at each other to indicate that the place is closed (for those that don’t know this signal, with both palms facing the ground, wave one hand over the top of the other while stretching your arms out low in front of you – practice now if you like) and I walk disappointedly across the road to another closed mall to also stare in disbelief through its closed doors. Trust me to pick the time when prayers were on and all the shops are closed for my visit.
I take a walk in the heat and take my camera out of its bag. After taking a couple of photos of the Tower (so tall that I can’t fit it into the shot from where I’m standing, so I knitted two together, quite badly, for this shot), I walk back a little way along the road the taxi brought me in on and hail another cab to take me back to the hotel. I’d only walked about 300m and the heat was absolutely unbearable, otherwise I would have walked the kilometer or so to the Al Faysaliyya Tower (pronounced Feye-zal-ee-ya), the other popular shopping mall in the city centre, but I know it’s going to be closed as well and decide to just go back to the hotel, grab a Turkish coffee and chill out with my book for a while. In this heat, I think I made the wise choice and I’ll head back into Kingdom Tower some other time, maybe on Real Saturday night as the shops stay open vary late due to prayer times and to allow shoppers the benefit of “cooler” shopping times.
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