Job Discussion Forums

[Griff-James]

[svatopluk]

Good:-

Some of the best quality hashish in the world. I spent two years smoking it when at Aramco.

Driving in the desert.

You can dry out - no booze - although you can find/make it easy enough if you so wish.

Plenty of free time to pursue a hobby, learn a language, study, get very fit, write a book, etc.

Save a lot of money - KSA is way cheaper than its neighbours, especially Kuwait, UAE, Qatar.

The bad stuff has been covered but I enjoyed it there. The gay aspect can be laughed off. Trouble with Saudi now is that the salaries are going DOWN!

[Cleopatra]

[Hot2GlobeTrot]

[Middle East Beast]

[Mia Xanthi]

[Stephen Jones]

Strange; I found Bahrain to be grottier than Saudi, but I suppose it depends on what bits you see.

I liked the part of Riyadh I lived in in the nineties, low-rise apartment blocks and villas on tree lined streets with main six lane highways not too far away. The advantages of suburbia with facilities within walking distance.

I suggest Mia Xanthi tries Egypt or India as a place to live. Plenty of life but the same soulless architecture, and much more litter and dirt.

[Middle East Beast]

[007]

[trapezius]

1) The area of SA is far more than 10 times more than the area of Bahrain, about 3,000 times more, so I don't know where you got the 10 from. And we should be looking at inhabited area of SA, and I am sure it is still well more than 10 times that of Bahrain.

2) The population of SA is at least 10 times greater than that of Bahrain. In fact it is more than 30 times greater.

3) Anyway, all these numbers are useless. Canada has an area 5 times that of SA, and about the same population, and it is spotless.

4) Saudis treat their country like a giant trash can. I used to get very very annoyed and angry when I used to see it in public, but now, I don't care. It is their country... if they want to use it as a giant trash can and an ashtray, that's up to them. It is a vicious cycle... kids watch their parents do it and learn it. I have seen colleagues doing it as well, people with Master's and PhDs.

5) Of course, ostentatious laws exist against public littering and leaving mounds of construction debris in open plots, but as we all know, laws such as those are not enforced in the country.

[Mia Xanthi]

007, Bahrain was attractive to me for 1) shopping, 2) archaeology and history, and 3) breakfast items that are unavailable in KSA.

Actually, I have travelled a lot and I have been in many crowded, poverty-stricken, dirty parts of the world. Dirtiness that is based on poverty somehow doesn't offend me so much as dirtiness that is based on just plain carelessness. Oman is much poorer than Saudi Arabia, yet it looks like a place that is cared for...maybe because the people who are charged with cleaning it are the Omanis themselves, not poorly-paid and abused servants from other countries.

The run-down appearance of Saudi Arabia bothered me a lot. You look at an impoverished place like Indonesia, and you see that the people are still inspired to create some beauty in their environment. You look at a place like the UAE, which was nothing but bleak desert until Sheikh Zayed was inspired to plant and maintain beautiful green parks (of course, at a cost to the environment and the water supply, but still lovely). Then you look at the dismal environs of KSA and wonder....is this part of the Wahhabi war on pleasure of any kind?

(And my apologies to 007 in advance...this is not meant as any kind of attack on Islam in general. There are many places of beauty in the Islamic world, but KSA is not one of them.)

[Stephen Jones]

With regard to trash on streets it's the old question of feeling ownership of the public domain. Arabs and Indians among others, don't feel that the public domain belongs to them and thus don't feel responsibility towards it.

[Middle East Beast]

[007]

[Stephen Jones]