Riyadh: City of Malls, Pt. 1

We arrived in Riyadh on Sunday night, and after a painfully-slow customs experience that made the efficient and organized Canadian in me want to scream, found our driver, and made our way to our hotel.

The education fair didn't start until Tuesday, so Monday was our first day, and also our only free day, so my colleague and I decided to make the most of it. The Canadian embassy in Riyadh was hosting an event Monday evening that we had to be back for, so what was a pair of foreign women to do with a day free in Riyadh? Well, go to the mall. ( The historic city centre was also on our list, but the old souk closes at noon, so it wasn't an option.)

Riyadh is INTO its malls. You've combine a country with lots of money, a culture that loves finer things like luxury and foreign brands, and scorching hot climate where the air conditioner is king and the mall becomes the place to be. Also, in terms of gender roles, it's a place that's outside the house but is not the street, where women and can go and hang out. Although there are separate line-ups and seating areas in the food court for men and women, both genders co-exist in the mall.

Our first stop was a more everyday outdoor-style mall, which my colleague had been tipped off was a good place to buy gold. My colleague was after some rose-gold both for herself and her daughter. After a quick stop there (and realizing that the jewellery was serious bling with serious prices), we headed to Al Faisaliyah Centre. We got there just before prayer time, meaning everything was about to close. You can stay inside the mall, but can't buy anything, so I made sure to get a strong, cardamon-scented Turkish-style coffee before prayers started, and we sat in the food court people watching ( which was more of our reason for being at the mall than shopping in the first place.)

We were in the "Family" section, which in Saudi means women are allowed, as opposed to the "Singles" section, which refers to men only. So if a man is alone or with other men, he sits in the singles section, but if he's with his wife  and/or kids he sits in the family section, as do groups of women unaccompanied by men. We were surrounded by black-veiled women with their kids in strollers, or groups of teenage girls eating fast food, or pairs of women having dessert and coffee. Basically, the same thing you'd see in any mall food court, except the rowdy groups of teenage boys were nowhere to be seen.

Liverpool

I like Liverpool; well, the bits I've seen of it between conference sessions, anyway. My impression of the city is the following.  At some point in the last few decades, Liverpool, a traditionally industrial city based around shipping, realized that its industry was dying. So it decided to reinvent itself into a city attractive to tourists, and it did so quite successfully, managing to spruce up the city centre while preserving its historic character. The docks have all been renovated and a long promenade has been added along the water. Restaurants, hotels and shops have been tucked into the old-school brick facades of pumphouses and drydocks. Strikingly modern towers have gone up beside heritage buildings, adn they've even erected a ferris wheel! The city's easily walkable, there are maps and signage everywhere. It's a tourist's dream.

As I took a taxi to my hotel from the train station, the driver remarked on how I was going to be staying close to the mall, and I gave an ( internal, non-audible) groan. "Big deal," I thought, "so what if my hotel's close to some big disgusting big-box mall; that's not what I came to another continent to see." Now, Liverpool 1, the shopping centre to which he was referring,  is indeed a mall. But it's this neat, architecturally daring, open air shopping neighbourhood consisting of a bunch of pedestrian streets, parks, and shops on several levels interconnected by steps and escalators. The downtown core around the mall is a sprawling pedestrian zone, and so Liverpool 1 kind of blends into its surroundings. I am not a huge fan of malls, and I do acknowledge that this is just a bunch of chain stores, but that being said, it's really neat and a much more attractive way to bring chain stores to your downtown instead of just building a big box mall i the suburbs somewhere and gutting your inner city.

Edgeware Road and Pho Mile

Visiting a metropolitan city like London can in reality be a trip to several different countries for me. London, Toronto and Montreal, all cities of immigrants, have ethnic enclaves where you can eat the food, visit the stores and hear the language of the country of origin of those who live there. So not only do I get my cuppa strong English orange pekoe tea, but mint tea, spiced chai, jasmine tea and bubble tea...

My first morning in London I walked (through the snow) down Edgeware Road, home of a large Arab-speaking community from all over North Africa and the Middle East. Despite the unseasonably low temperatures, the dozens of restaurants and cafes I passed had their patios out, with those small tables and typical red and beige wicker chairs aligned so that everyone has a view of those passing by. Shisha pipes and pots of mint tea were being shared to help stave off the cold and humidity.

Later Thursday night I visited the "Pho Mile" on Kingsland Rd. in Shoreditch. It's not what you'd call a Vietnamese neighbourhood, but there are dozens of restaurants along this road serving pho noodle soup, grilled meats, nice noodles and other Vietnamese dishes. I love pho, but a good bowl is hard to come by in Halifax, so I headed straight to Song Que, at the end of Pho Mile, and ordered a bowl of rare beef pho and a pot of jasmine tea.

To make pho, they take rice vermicelli noodles, onions, mint and cilantro, top it with razor-thin slices of raw beef and pour boiling hot broth over it all. The broth cooks the meat. You top the soup with bean sprouts, basil leaves and a touch of lime before digging in. The broth is what differentiates pho from restaurant to restaurant, in my opinion; a mix of bones and herbs and spices and who-knows-what is simmered for hours on end, creating a subtle base for a soup that's seemingly simple, yet delicious. That's what's wonderful about Vietnamese food in general--the straightforward combination of fresh meat, rice, noodles and herbs.

This weekend I also had late-night Peking Duck in Chinatown,  a heaping plate of Turkish meze in Camden and a feast of curries and naan at a hole-in-the-wall Indian place near St. Pancras station. And of course a few full English breaksfasts. Good thing I'm doing so much walking around...

Underground

You have to hand it to Montreal for being so straightforward with how they've named their metro lines. You look at a Montreal metro map and ask yourself, "Am I on the green line, orange line or yellow line?" Colours. Then you come to London or Toronto or Madrid ( or like anywhere else) and are trying to find your way through the metro and have to remember some  line name or number in addition to the station.... COLOURS, people. Make it easy for your tourists.

London- Liverpool-London-Riyadh 2013

Aka. Working vacation. A conference in Liverpool and a recruitment trip to Riyadh broken up by two short spurts of vacation in London. The known and the unknown!

Genarín

It was almost a year ago that I got to witness the world's best, and most blasphemous, Easter celebrations. León, Spain--for a town whose centre is dominated by an imposing cathedral, and whose citizens are so devout the days leading up to Easter are a stream of hooded processions, they sure mix things up with wild, debaucherous festivities paying hommage to... a dead drunk.

http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genar%C3%ADn

Hammam

I knew I couldn't leave Morocco without visiting a hammam, or public bath house. A tradition from the days when not everyone had running hot water at home, the neighbourhood hammam is where people would go to bathe, with a little socialiaing thrown in for good measure.

The main hammam in Chefchaouen is open in the afternoons to women. You come armed with a special exfoliant glove, a type of vegetable oil-based gooey black soap, as well as your normal shampoo and body wash. I'd never been, so instead of washing myself, I opted for a massage and gommage for my first time the the resident bath attendant lady.

Who ever would have thought that sitting there half naked, being scrubbed and exfoliated and massaged and having buckets of water poured over your head in a big communal steam bath by a toothless lady would have been so great? Skin like a baby's is a cliche description, but it's an apt one.

I bought a glove and some black soap to take home with me, but unfortunately the hammam lady couldn' t come with me.

Chefchaouen - Akchour and stuff

When you travel alone, if you're doing it right, you're never actually alone unless you want to be.

I knew that just outside the city walls of Chefchaouen's medina there was a trail that led to an abandoned mosque on the mountainside. But walking alone in the woods didn't appeal to my sense of fun or of security. I'd seen a girl drinking coffee alone in a cafe in the town square, and figuring she was another solo traveller, decided to introduce myself and see if she'd be up for the hike to the mosque. And she was!

Myrthe was Dutch and had been travelling solo through Morocco for 6 weeks. She'd done and seen it all--the desert, all the major cities, and lots of smaller villages. As we had breakfast and hiked up through the medina gate and out of town, she answered my questions about a bunch of the seemingly baffling local customs.

The mosque was on a hill with a spectacular view of the blue and white of Chefchaouen's medina. As we wondered out loud as to how old the mosque was and why it was abandoned, Lamia, a Moroccan girl from Marrakech on vacation with her mother and uncle, stepped in to tell us the history of the building. [It was built by the French during their occupation of Morroco, but the locals didn't trust their colonialists' intentions in building them a house of worship, so no one would go, and so they were forced to board it up.]

We got to chatting with Lamia, and in a perfect example of Moroccan hospitality, invited us to come with them that afternoon to visit Akchour, a nature park 30km outside of Chefchaouen.

The plan was to drive to the entrance of the park, then hike up to the Pont de Dieu, a natural stone bridge connecting two mountains that's supposedly quite striking. The drive into the countryside surrounding Chefchaouen took us through the green hills of the Rif mountains, the road winding through small villages. More than once we came across kids who had to herd the family's goats or chickens off the road so the car could pass. Our soundtrack was a tape of Emirati Arabic pop music.

But about two kilometres before the park entrance the road abruptly ended. Heavy rains this past spring had brought on a mudslide that had destroyed 50 houses and cut off the road. The group of men lounging under trees with their dogs at the end of the road told us it was still possible to get to the park, but we'd have to do a few more kilometres on foot.

We set off, first climbing through the rubble of the landslide, walking on top of destroyed houses and ducking under downed powerlines. We then got onto a path with gorgeous views of the river valley below. But by the time we got to the park entrance, we only had time for a glass of mint tea from a stand just inside if we wanted to be able to complete the hike back before sundown. Le Pont de Dieu will have to wait for my next visit.

Chef Chaouen Day 1

Morocco is in some kind of weird time zone, which means while it gets dark relatively early, the sun is beating down by 9am. So getting up at 6am to catch the 8am bus to Chef Chaouen felt like much later. I had breakfast- Moroccan pita bread, cheese and mint tea- in a hole-in-the-wall roadside cafe on the way to the bus station while chatting with Ikbal, a computer science student waiting for the bus to the university. He translated my order from French into Arabic for the waiter, and also let me try some of the bread he was eating, which seemed to be made from couscous then grilled. Mmm.

Four hours of winding mountain road later and I'm in Chef Chaouen, pop. 40 000, sleepy mountain village-cum-tourist town. Let's see how well this town walks the line between welcoming to tourists and tourist trap.

And now I'm off into the winding streets of the Medina to find an excursion into the Rif mountains for tomorrow.

Fez Pt.1

Sunday evening seems like a calm and quiet time to arrive in a new city. But not Fez. Sunday's not the day of rest here, after all, and this fact was obvious from the buzz of activity in the streets of Fez's Ville Nouvelle as I made my way from the bus stop to my hotel. As night fell there were errands to be run, walks to be taken by couples and families in the Jardin Public, dinner to be eaten in the open-air restaurants along the main drag. And of course, the call to prayer from the nearby mosque that periodically punctured the air and sent streams of men in its direction.

Though I'd planned to leave the next morning for Chef Chaouen, three soldout busses meant a change of plans and an extra day in Fez. I'd been planning to come back to Fez after Chaouen anyway, so it was just something to take in stride.

A day to get my bearings in one of Morocco's most ancient cities. I started off wandering around the Ville Nouvelle, the modern new city, before heading to the winding streets of the Medina.

But first I had to cross the street. Many times in fact, and the seeming absence of stoplights meant that I had to stealthily wait with old ladies on the curb without their noticing and then follow the, across the street as cars whizzed by on either side.

I wandered up and down the wide and elegant Blvd Hassan II a bunch of times, getting my bearings before deciding to jump into the medina. Without a guide. Or a map, really.

Before you get to the medina, you have to cross through Fes Al-Jdid, the old Jewish quarter. I seemed to get there at some kind of rush hour, or better put chaos hour. Busses, motorbikes, pushcarts, animals, jaywalking pedestrians and bicycles jamming the narrow street; horns honking and people yelling at each other; street vendors blasting Arabic pop music to entice passersby to take a closer look at the dried fruit, or cushions, or raw sheep's wool, or plastic brooms or fake Nikes they were selling. A definite "just in case you hadn't noticed, you're now in Morocco" moment.

The Medina almost paled in comparison. But more about that later...