Salaam Aleikum (that's the standard Arabic greeting; it means peace be upon you)

Everyone:

As many of you know, I accepted a job teaching English to women at a private college in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. I'm sending this to people whose emails I have and who I thought might be interested in hearing about my "adventures" in Saudi Arabia. My sister did this when she lived abroad, and I know I liked reading the emails and knowing what was going on, so I'm going to do the same while I'm here. Also, I will have oodles of spare time since there's very little a single woman with no connections can do here, so I figure I can write long emails about all the mundane things I'm doing.

I arrived in Saudi last night and ran into my first problem before I even left the airport; the problem was they wouldn't let me leave the airport. Actually, they wouldn't let me leave the customs area to get to where someone was supposed to be waiting for me in the public area of the airport. Many people have said you don't need to know any Arabic to live here because "Everyone speaks English." It's a lie!!! The security guards who stopped me didn't speak English, although they were able to effectively communicate their message: they weren't letting me take one step further. Eventually they found a man who worked at the airport who spoke English, and he said that because I had never been to Saudi before, they couldn't let me leave customs without someone coming to get me. Let me pause to point out that the MALE teacher who made this trip with me, who has also never been to Saudi, was not stopped. So there were other reasons why they wouldn't let me go anywhere. I told him there was supposed to be someone at the airport to get me. He asked if I had her phone number, and luckily the woman I met over the weekend while I was in NYC for a workshop the college paid for me to attend gave me the number of Jennifer, the director of the women's division, who was supposed to meet me at the airport. He called the number, but she didn't answer.

He thought for a minute, then told me to go get my luggage and come back to him. I guess to make sure I did this, he kept my passport. Leaving my passport with random people really worried me, but I had no choice. I did as I was told, and when I got back to him he suggested I send her a text message because perhaps she wasn't answering because she didn't recognize the number. I had a hard time writing the text msg on his phone because it kept switching into Arabic, so the message looked something like this: JENNIFER TarabicarabicarabicarabicHIS IS arabicarabicarabic ELIZABETH. But it was good enough; she called his cell phone, and he talked with her, then told me and the guards that he would escort me to her. After we left the guards, he told me that had he not intervened, they would have sent me to sit in a room for 4-5 hours till the decided to do something with me. Those of you who pray, say a little prayer for Zaid, who was so kind and helpful, and without whom I would've been crying before I even left the airport.

We found Jennifer, who looked like every other woman there--covered in black from head to toe except for her eyes. It was the frantic waving that caught our eye and made us realize that was Jennifer. Jennifer and her husband took us to the hotel, and we had a nice chat in the car. Jennifer is Australian, and they talk so cute! She brought an abaaya (the black cloak Saudi women wear that covers everything but their head) and veil for me, but I didn't have to put it on to go to the hotel. It was only after I got to the hotel and tried it on that I realized it didn't fit. At all. This was problematic since it is actually illegal for a woman to be in public without an abaaya and veil covering her. She said she'd tell Human Resources and someone would do something...she assured me it would be ok for me to be in the hotel without it, so I could still go out and have breakfast and lunch in the hotel restaurants the next day. But there was NO way I was leaving that hotel room without an abaaya, so I sequestered myself there and ate the protein bars that I had the foresight to bring with me. This morning I called the college to tell the people at HR, and the man I spoke with said he had one in his office for me, and the drivers would bring it with them when they picked me up, which they did. I went back and put it on, wrapped the veil around my head to cover my hair, and left. Unfortunately, no one showed me how to wear the veil, which is just a really long, wide scarf, so it kept falling off my head.

From the hotel we went to a shopping center that had a huge walmart-like store in it so we (the male teacher and I) could buy the things we needed for the apartment and food. We won't be taken to the store again for a week, so we had to get enough food to last us a week. Since I usually go to the grocery store every other day to get what I feel like eating, I have no idea if I actually got a week's worth of food, but hey, that's one way to lose weight! It was my first experience walking around in the abaaya and veil, and it was not a good time. This abaaya is actually not long enough for me because it shows a little ankle (shocked gasp), but I still managed to step on it and trip over it several times. Between that and the veil, which I had to rearrange every 30 seconds, I began to forget what on earth made me want to come here in the first place. I really wished someone would've actually gone shopping with me (I couldn't stay with the male teacher while we shopped--illegal), shown me what to buy, and just in general made me feel less alone. But I guess the college figures we're all adults, so we don't need anyone. In the grocery store I noticed that EVERY other woman there had her face covered, not just her hair. The only thing the Saudi women don't cover is their eyes, but actually I saw several women who covered their eyes too. It's no longer required by law that women cover their entire faces like that, but I'm pretty sure it used to be.

After shopping, they brought me to my apartment, which is amazing. It's waaay bigger than any apartment I've ever had, and it's very pretty. It's air conditioned--central air, not just a box in the window--2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, TONS of mirrors all over.... My mom says it's important to note the "moments of grace" you have in a day, and doing that has helped me through some really hard times, so I'm going to end this email with some notable moments of grace from today:

1. My laptop picked up a wireless internet connection, which is how I'm able to email now. I've gotten to talk to my sisters Dita and Hannah online today, which made a big difference. The minute I got the message from Hannah online, I started crying. But I think it was a good cry.
2. I discovered that I have a roommate--this cute, tiny lizard. Again, it may not seem like much, but when I'm here alone and I don't know anybody and I don't have a phone to contact people at the school or anything, knowing that there's another living being here is really comforting. I don't know what his name is yet--we're having some communication difficulties because he only speaks Arabic. :)

Well, that's all for now. I hope you're all doing well, and I'd love to hear from you!

Salaam,

Lizz Alezetes