Small Community Living

Living in a small, enclosed community like an expat compound, has benefits and many drawbacks. It is good to know all your neighbours and comforting to have them to turn to if you need help - for anything from that vital ingredient for your dinner party dish to looking after one of your children as you have to take the other to the medical centre. 

The main pool and meeting place

Flash floods

Our local pool

However there is no anonymity after a bad day at work for your spouse - because they all work together when one makes a decision it tends to affect everyone else. Resentment brought home from work can spread to their wives and before you know it you're being ignored for something that happened to their husband at work! Living in a closed community where the majority of wives cannot work also leads to bored women with nothing better to do than fill their time with coffee and gossip. Combine this with a culture that forbids women from driving and you have a recipe for a hotbed of gossip and misunderstandings as there is no escape and very little opportunity to find a different group of people to do activities with. Hence the pleasure and escape of the internet. Here I can visit different worlds and be anonymous.

Escarpment west of Riyadh

The first thing that hits you here is the heat, especially if you arrive between April and September. The weather is quite pleasant Oct, Nov, Feb and Mar. But it can get quite chilly over Dec and Jan.




The heat reaches 50 degrees C and is almost suffocating. Everyone scurries from air-conditioned cars, to air-conditioned malls and air-conditioned houses. The pools are welcome places to cool off. At least we can do that in a relaxed western atmosphere. It must be harder for the locals as the majority of their houses are behind high walls, with little garden space and no pools - only the well-off have the space and money.

Faisel's Finger

Coffee pots are popular

Just in case you forget where you are!

Old Diriyah - the original settlement of Riyadh

You are never meant to be more than 800m from a mosque!

Some people are trying to break with the norm and bring colour to the streets

The sun bleaches all colour from the sky and ground. It is all a hazy orange, sandy colour with the strip of pollution adding its own orange haze. I think one of the hardest things I have had to adjust to is to the lack of beauty in my surroundings. Everything is concrete or desert covered in lumpy rocks. There are no beautiful sunsets, sunrises, or even expanses of blue sky to break the monotony of man-made grey. Sometimes on low days I just wish I could witness beauty in nature to give me that little boost to remember where we are in the universe.

First Steps

Forget people crossing - look out for camels!

This is the first day of my first blog. I am feeling nervous and at a bit of a loss for words. Let's start as to why I am doing this. I want an outlet for my emotions and experiences of being an expat in a very alien environment. Hopefully there'll be others out there who are going through or have gone through what I'm experiencing and who can then perhaps offer words of wisdom or just encouragement to get each other through the current rough patch.

The magnificent Escarpment west of Riyadh on the road to Mecca

Modernity and Tradition - they are uncomfortable bedfellows in this country

 For that is what I have learnt in my 18 months in this alien culture. I have some brilliant times and then some not so very brilliant times where I struggle to try to understand what on earth we are doing here and question if it is worth it and what we as a family and individuals are actually achieving. I live with my family in a western environment in an alien culture. There are times when it feels that we are in a holiday resort with constant sunshine and beautiful pools. 

Camel training at Tabuk NW Saudi Arabia

 I came here from another overseas location so have been pretty used to not living in my own country. I knew that there were restrictions on the fairer sex in this country but thought "Others have done it, many for 10 or 15 years, so how hard can it actually be?" The answer for me is, a lot harder than I had imagined.

Madain Saleh - Saudi's Petra

Water server at the Janadiryiah Cultural Festival

The ordeal for camel and herder to get camels loaded

She was a proud mum having just given birth as we arrived!