Applebee's, Jizan. December 2013
[from FB post: October 17, 2016]
I have just learned I am now to be paid on the 5th day of the Islamic solar calendar (which uses Zodiac signs for names of the months). So I anxiously await the 5th of Scorpio... yeah, where I work is REALLY different.
The 5th of the Shamsi month looks to be my new favorite day....
Schizophrenia
I rode in a car with Saudi friends and WBT for hours down the mountain across the Red Sea coastal plains to Jizan just to eat at a newly-opened Applebee's. Saudi Arabia was in love with all things Western. I always received a lot of photos taken at the Starbucks in Mecca when my students were doing Umrah (an "off-season" pilgrimage). Everyone's clothes were Western branded - there was even a line of Burberry Islamic wear. Except wait a second.... Saudis supposedly HATED everything Western, too.
When the government realized that paying people on the lunar calendar actually cost them more money (when spread out over many years, but multiplied by millions) than the international solar calendar, suddenly a solar calendar was preferable. Unfortunately, that would have meant adopting the Gregorian (Christian) calendar which was anathema to the Saudis. They ended up dusting off a pre-Islamic solar calendar (Shamsi) whose months were based on the signs of the zodiac. In a country that craved Starbucks and Pizza Hut, January, February, and March were somehow intolerable. So it was that an old solar calendar was adopted and the first month it was used was the month of Scorpio. Everyone (including the Saudis) just howled with laughter. The Zodiac Calendar didn't match the Gregorian Calendar either, so no one knew the exact conversion. Our exact payday each month (the fifth) was always a mystery - even to the Saudis.
Were the Saudis such fanatic religious followers of Islam that they went to extreme lengths to deny anything Western (read: Christian)? Or, did they see their ancient and very traditional country being quietly eroded by the modern world and they were just doing anything they could to slow down the trend? Airbrush out the cross on the FC Barcelona crest in football-crazed Saudi Arabia, so that no symbol of Christianity was visible in the Kingdom tasked with guarding the two holy mosques and then later sit down to a coffee at Starbucks a stone's throw from the Kaaba (that black box oft-shown by the media at the center of Mecca): that was all somehow "normal".
Again I say, schizophrenic - the only word I can use to describe all the contradictions of observed life in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Love and hate really might be different sides of the same coin.