EDITOR'S NOTE

The Saudi-American Forum is very pleased to present "Honey and Onions" by Frances Meade.  This delightful memoir of the early days of Americans working and living in the Kingdom - in ten chapters - will be presented one chapter per week.  

We hope you enjoy it and you will join in a discussion of the book [Click here].

Previous Chapters:

• Author's Foreword & Chapter One

• Chapter Two

• Chapter Three

CHAPTER FOUR

It's been a busy shopping morning on a very hot day, but the air-conditioned mall at Akariya is truly an oasis of consumer delight. It's prayer time now, and I'll be on my way home without having done the grocery shopping, but Safeway will be open again in half an hour, and I can come back after lunch at my leisure.

To visit the souk, the central market, was to go straight to the heart of Riyadh; the one place, where as a foreigner, one felt as much a part of the city as any of its permanent residents; where there were only merchants and customers going about the necessary business of daily life.  I shall always remember my introduction.

I remain grateful to this day to my first guide, the wife of a British advisor to the Saudi National Guard.  They were old Middle East hands, and she was quite accustomed among other things to playing hostess to passing Bedouin who came to visit her husband who had ridden with Glubb Pasha in the Arab Legion and had been known to the tribes for many years.  Their villa was near the Camel's Eye, a barren rock except at sunset when it swarmed with people gathered for maghreb prayer.  At its base, was a semi-permanent Bedouin encampment.  My friend could often be found in an outside kitchen at her home stirring up huge pots of rice and meat for Bedouin visitors, while indoors, her own cook was preparing dinner for the family. I am still in awe of her.

I had shopped carefully in the States for appropriate souk attire according to the company handbook's instructions so I decked myself out in a skirt well below the knee, a blouse with modest neckline and sleeves at least elbow length -- the black cloak known as the abaya that enveloped all Saudi women was not worn by foreigners -- and I was all set for another adventure. 

At the time, I did not realize how fortunate I was in my companion, but I soon found out.  She swept through the souk dispensing Arabic greetings like alms and was in turn greeted by all the shopkeepers.  I trotted along at her heels innocent of the fact that my presence was being noted and that she was effectively bestowing her sponsorship on me; all who knew her would know and remember me henceforth as her protégée, and I could expect to be treated accordingly. I fear that I never lived up to her, however, since I turned out to be a lily-livered bargainer on my own, out of her class completely.

But that day, I saw the souk through her eyes -- marveling at the range of goods, both practical and picturesque, the sounds, the smells, the exuberance of the shoppers and shopkeepers in their ancient game of offer and counter offer. It was a comprehensive tour, covering all of the Dira area, the center of the city.

On the northwest side of the square, was the wholesale souk with huge sacks of rice and other staples piled high throughout the depths of its dimly lit passageways and storehouses.  Just inside the entrance, stood a great wooden scale, the arbiter of any dispute that might arise in the course of wholesale commerce.

Kilted Yemeni porters, backs bowed under massive loads roped to their foreheads, padded along the earthen passages on short mountain-muscled legs toward the trucks backed up in the street.  These tough little men could carry hundreds of pounds suspended from their braided brow bands; on one memorable occasion, I watched one of them literally run up a short flight of stairs carrying a refrigerator in this fashion. They were the workhorses of the souk, and on this first visit, I relished the chaos as the Yemeni were directed to the appropriate vehicles by loud exhortations from gesticulating buyers.  In time, I noticed them less and less as they became part of my daily life -- in fact, I cannot remember when, how or why they disappeared -- but for many years they were a vital element of the Riyadh scene. 

The wonderful aroma of the adjacent spice souk drew us in, and I was initiated into the mysteries of all the colorful and fragrant bins filled with the fabled spices of the East that I had read about for years.  But dried lemon?  Whole cardamon?  What did one do with these strange condiments?  They went far beyond the boundaries of my rudimentary culinary skills, and it took me years and a cook to learn their names much less their uses, but their scents are as evocative as snapshots in bringing back memories of the early days.

The next stalls held bins of dull, colorless and surprisingly expensive lumps with no odor at all which turned out to be, good heavens, frankincense and myrrh. They really did exist outside of books, but the look belied the legend.  Not until I had experienced them in actual use did I appreciate the value of these and the other aromatics that play an important role in Saudi aesthetic tastes.  It is unthinkable that any important Saudi occasion would be properly celebrated without clouds of incense wafted toward the guests to be swept under hair and skirts in the case of the ladies and beneath the head coverings of the men.

At the vegetable souk, we were joined by a young Yemeni boy obviously known to my mentor. They exchanged greetings as he fell into step and accompanied us for the rest of the morning. She explained to me that he was her basket boy, in much the same way that the Yemeni who had greeted us at the airport was Dick's baggage boy.  The souk boys tended to be younger than the airport porters, but the system was the same as I discovered when I made my solo debut in the souk, whoever saw me first became mine forever -- or I became his -- and there was no poaching by the rest of the fraternity.  In my case, it turned out to be a sleepy-eyed youth named Yahya who became my escort.  Like all the others he carried a round straw mat about three feet in diameter with a handle on either side which, when clasped together, transformed it into a large basket very like a log carrier for the transport of my purchases.

But today, I was simply an attachment to my leader and didn't merit a boy of my own.  Just as well, since I was learning how to deal with them from an expert in great lady behavior.

The expected reimbursement for an hour in the souk was 10 qursh -- the riyal was not a decimal currency at that time, and there were 20 qursh to the riyal and four and a half riyals to the dollar -- so, an average morning's work netted them the equivalent of less than fifty cents, and on this wage, they remained a generally cheerful lot.

I cruised along, all eyes and ears, marveling at my companion's ease with the bargaining process and the astounding triumphs of persuasion that she racked up as we went along.  She never bought anything at more than half the offered price and never had to leave anything behind.  I wondered if I would ever match her style.  I never did, and to this day, I can lose my cool at the crucial moment and easily be impaled upon the barb of the seller's determination.  My lack of haggling skills were made up for by my daughters who had fewer inhibitions and managed successfully to bargain with the best.  I'm still trying.

The vegetable souk convinced me that I was going to have to come up with some very interesting recipes in order to create variations on the recurring themes of tomato, potato, carrot, and the ubiquitous green squash known as marrows. There were beautiful melons and grapes from Qassim, but salad makings were sadly lacking, and on future Stateside vacations, we often got sick from gorging ourselves on fresh greens, which our digestive systems had forgotten how to deal with.  The measure of this deprivation is the fact that many years later, I went to work for the United States government for the express purpose of obtaining lettuce from the commissary.

My experience of the poultry souk committed me to the purchase of any kind of protein that did not require having its neck wrung and carcass plucked.  A sense of adventure could go a long way, but I couldn't look a chicken in the eye knowing that it was about to be decapitated for my dinner table and, coward that I was, I averted my eyes from my companion's purchases until they were safely stowed in the souk boy's basket.

The slaughterhouse did nothing to encourage further menu planning, and I was beginning to get a bit queasy until we went outside and around behind it, and there was the souk of my dreams.

The harim souk, as it was known, was unique in that all the vendors were women.  It occupied two narrow dirt paths winding into the old neighborhood of mud houses, and the ladies sat either inside open stalls in the old buildings or under magnificent black Bedouin tents displaying an amazing variety of wares.  Dresses and jewelry dominated the scene, but looking beyond, one could find lovely little palm leaf fans and baskets as well as strings of fat patchwork pads that made perfect potholders. There were cosmetics, henna and kohl and all the traditional containers and applicators, but above all, there were the ladies.

Black-veiled, they sat surrounded by their treasures, eyes sparkling above their masks, laughing and calling to us and offering tea.  This was truly the social center of the souk, and they seemed overjoyed to find another strange foreigner in their midst, particularly one whose obvious delight was a pretty fair indication that she was going to turn out to be one of their best customers.  I longed for the day when I would be able to do more than sit and smile, for here was the key to life in Riyadh, women who might share with me some of the fellowship that would never be possible with the men.

I couldn't take in more than impressions; individual items melted into the mass of color and texture spread out in such profusion.  It took time and many visits and a good deal of Arabic before I came to appreciate the wonderful tradition of Bedouin adornment and what it represented, but without any understanding at all, it was love at first sight.  I soon started what has turned out to be a collection that cannot be replaced although it didn't occur to me then that I was conserving something that was already disappearing.  Arabia, its places and its people, seemed to me to be fixed in time, to remain forever as I first saw it.   Fortunately, my interest made up for my lack of foresight, and a small part of old Riyadh is still mine in the things that I acquired during many happy hours with the ladies of the harim souk.

I hated to leave, but courtesy demanded that I follow my guide as we made a quick circuit around the south of the square, pausing briefly at the stalls where the money changers sat cross-legged, various currencies clipped with clothes pins to a cord above their heads and the most popular denominations displayed between their toes. 

That brought up the subject of money, and to my joy, I discovered that just like the queen of England, I need not carry it; I had only to take my purchases and send the driver later.  What a great way of life I had stumbled into.  I had always known there had to be something more imaginative than the supermarket, and here it was.

On we went past the Governor's Palace and the Palace of Justice.  Had we turned right, we would have come to the old gold souk, a labyrinth of dirt paths festooned with gold -- at 35 dollars an ounce -- but we turned left across the square to the mosque, and the warren of stalls and passageways huddled against its eastern wall.  Here was a grand conglomeration of everything from stacks of brass-studded Kuwaiti chests to coffee pots, camel saddles, spice boxes, used furniture and carpets, and the wondrous stall of Aboud, who kept in old biscuit tins magnificent secondhand jewelry and watches, castoffs from various members of the royal family in old biscuit tins.

He was much too much for me; I simply couldn't believe that the huge emeralds and diamonds he offered for sale could possibly be the real thing.  How naive I was compared to my more sophisticated contemporaries whose purchases were later sold abroad for many times the price negotiated with Aboud. He operated in an atmosphere of absolute openness and trust and customers often bought something from him on condition that they first take it to Beirut for appraisal.

That's the way the souk operated.  A final price agreed upon was a contract to purchase, but there was no restriction on returns.  If one tired of the size or design of a particular Kuwaiti chest, no problem, there was a brisk business in trade-ins.  And in the same vein, once you bought the first chest, that price was your price and you could count on subsequent purchases for the same amount with only a token haggle.

I came home dazzled by that first excursion and determined to become as accomplished a shopper as the intrepid lady who had shown me the way.  But shopping was not really the main purpose of going to the souk, not for me nor for many of my friends.  To us, it was a daily diversion, a hobby, a way to expand our knowledge and experience of the country and its people.

The souk was frequented by a true cross-section of the population.  No matter what was needed by rich or poor, that's where it had to be obtained, and that's where everybody went.  Looking at the magnificent buildings that have replaced it, it's hard to reconcile them with the sights and smells of the old.  It became an addiction -- the day wasn't complete without a quick trip down to Dira.

My own souk routine was quickly established.  Any day, any time, Yahya was either waiting for me or magically appeared within a minute or so of my arrival.  I was always amazed at the flawless operation of the souk grapevine and how quickly he materialized at my side.

Quite often, if I had come for some specific item, the first shopkeeper of whom I inquired would sit me down, hand me a glass of tea and dispatch Yahya with instructions for locating what I wanted and bringing it back to me.  If I was browsing at random, the two of us would walk along together.  Even though Yahya appeared to be asleep on his feet, in addition to carrying my purchases, he was tireless in his efforts to help me find what I needed.

It was a wonderfully companionable procedure, and I learned much from Yahya and the merchants, not only in Arabic vocabulary, a genuine necessity,  but in the ways and customs of the souk.  Customers became guests after a certain period of time, and the ubiquitous glass of tea poured from an enamel pot was an unfailing gesture of hospitality.  Many years later, long after the basket boys and their estimable services had vanished, I accompanied my visiting mother-in-law to the present antique souk, which she was most anxious to see. The shopkeepers were horrified that a lady of her age should have been brought all the way downtown to do her own shopping.  A chair was produced for her, and she was settled with her tea while various items were brought to her for her approval.

I couldn't help but feel that on that occasion my tea must have been offered grudgingly since it was obvious that they considered me something less than a dutiful daughter-in-law, but courtesy overcame disapproval.  In Saudi Arabia, it always does.

Although the Dira area was the most popular, we also frequented the Batha area.  The market there, the terminus for the trucks that ran between Riyadh and Kuwait, was known as the Kuwaiti souk.  If you needed to hire a truck for any purpose, that's where you had to go.  These were purely commercial vehicles in the sixties, but in earlier years, they had also served as transportation from one city to the other.

I imagine that the coffee houses that proliferated in the area had their genesis as handy places to conduct the business of travel and commerce. A large number of them were outdoor establishments, some on the roof tops, all featuring high woven benches on which the customers lounged, drinking coffee and smoking water pipes.

The open canal that gave Batha its name ran down the middle of the roadway effectively dividing the downtown area in two.  East of Batha were the tent and pottery souks, and heading south, you turned left at the only petrol station to go to the camel souk to watch the camels being loaded in and out of trucks.

It was a marvelous sight as a big beast was winched up in a canvas sling with hobbled legs dangling awkwardly accompanied by mournful bellows at the indignities it was suffering.  We were obviously not customers, but the dealers treated us cordially, offering rides to the foolish foreigners, some of whom accepted the offer and wished they hadn't.  A rising camel is a precipitous perch so many a would-be Lawrence of Arabia fell off long before his mount had lurched to all four feet.  The photo opportunities were unbeatable and the atmosphere lively, so the camel souk was a great favorite with everyone.

Souking became a habit with the children as well as with me.  When they were home from school, they would go off in the morning with Ali Harbi and come back with all manner of acquisitions, treasures to take back to school, camel or horse trappings to decorate their rooms and tales of the bargains they had struck.

Now that we had become householders once again, shopping became a major preoccupation.  I had already discovered that the day's activities were punctuated by the prayer calls, but scheduling my own endeavors around them had not been necessary during our market-less weeks in the Yamama, and it took a bit of getting used to.  Particularly difficult was the afternoon closure of every shop of any kind while the city napped from noon to four.

I knew all about Wazir Street, the block of shops downtown, not only from our furniture shopping foray but from the daily trips to Khazindar to pick up the International Herald Tribune, the only English language newspaper available.  The fact that it was usually five to seven days late in no way diminished its impact; we simply lived a week behind the rest of the world except for the VOA and BBC broadcasts.

The newspaper run was part of each day's ritual that included a halt at the post office to pick up the mail and enjoy the Riyadh vignette of the scribes who were headquartered on the steps offering their age old services.  Still to be seen were the pens and ink boxes, but a few typewriters had come into use and in time would displace the intimacy of the hand written personal letter.  The post office stood at the junction of Wazir Street and Batha on the way to Khazindar, so renewing our daily contact with the world outside was only a matter of two quick stops.

Wazir Street also featured some fabric shops; the National Museum Store with a variety of items from baby clothes to desert boots displayed in very cramped quarters; and Batok's store, a melange of glasses, dishes and pots and pans mostly from Eastern Europe and very cheap.  The centerpiece of this, the only shopping street in the city, was Raji's market where on any morning one could count on meeting most of the western community laying in a supply of canned food and staples, picking over his meager supply of produce or plumbing the depths of his freezer for the same products that we usually preferred to buy firsthand from the frozen food store on University Street.

This was a freezer warehouse with a small retail outlet  consisting of a room with three or four freezer chests, most of whose contents were various meats from Denmark, all packaged with attractive illustrations that bore no resemblance to the much thawed and refrozen contents.  There were also some objects that looked to me like old Indian war clubs, but which turned out to be whole beef tenderloins of unknown provenance and unpredictable flavor.  I ultimately developed a recipe for beef that utilized a great deal of ginger jam to mask the distinctive taste of freon and incidentally learned that no matter what the experts say, you can live on food that has been repeatedly refrozen without dire consequences. It’s just a matter of taste.

They did have some wonderful frozen Sealtest milk concentrate that, with the addition of water, could be reconstituted to the consistency and taste of fresh milk, an unexpected luxury that soon disappeared never to be seen again.  From then until the importation of dairy herds in the eighties, we lived on powdered milk.

Food shopping was serious business and the slightest rumor of something new on the market produced a run on the supply with a resulting similarity of dinner tables throughout the western community.

Bread, despite the company handbook's findings, existed not only as the delicious local variety obtained hot and fragrant from the little neighborhood baking ovens, but as western style loaves from the Automatic Bakery, an establishment recently opened at the point where the Airport Road became Batha.  The automatic aspect of its operation seemed to be the slicing machine, which did indeed zip right through the loaf, but had several teeth missing resulting in very irregular slices.  In any case, it was singularly tasteless and speckled with hard to identify inclusions reminiscent of the Yamama’s breakfast toast.

An attempt at bread making on my own was a disaster -- a dense, yeasty lump that defied the most robust digestion.  Mohammed disclaimed any knowledge of the art himself, and we settled for a combination of the automatic variety for toast and the good neighborhood product for sandwiches. Eventually, I did obtain a foolproof recipe for dinner rolls, and we managed to turn out quite respectable ones, but the homemade loaves of my Jeddah counterparts never saw the light of day in my kitchen.

The girls had already discovered the fast food specialties of the souk.  Committed as I was to the super sterilization of everything that went into our mouths, I was dismayed at first when they came home with various newspaper wrapped delicacies half-eaten on the way.  Tamia, a variety of filafel; sambousa, deep-fried pastries stuffed with meat or cheese; you name it, they found it and ate it with absolutely no gastric consequences.  When I finally worked up the courage to do some tasting and found out how good they really were, these local specialties became part of our diet.

Shwarma, seared bits of meat shaved from a large chunk on a rotating spit was a particular favorite -- at least as it was made then rather than the Lebanese style that prevails now.  It was usually mutton, occasionally beef, and always prepared with fresh vegetables and yogurt, nestled in a long roll that had been toasted in a hot press resembling a waffle iron.  But, it was our discovery of muttabaq that opened up a new era in picnicking.

On cool evenings, we headed east out the Dhahran Road to a garden coffee house where we could watch the muttabaq being made. The cook would throw a small ball of dough on a marble slab until it was tissue thin, place a thin rectangle of bread in the center and pile on ground meat, chopped greens, spices and finally a raw egg to bind it all together.  After folding the thin dough over the filling, he would toss it onto a hot oiled grill where it would immediately puff up and brown.  Turned once, it was then cut into six pieces with a flourish of what appeared to be a pair of putty knives.  A sweet version, made with bananas and sugar and egg was a perfect dessert and we would order batches of both.  We took them away heaped on a huge enamel tray, garnished with whole lemons and tomatoes, and carefully covered with newspaper for insulation, the tray to be returned on the way back into town later in the evening.  It is my personal recommendation for a perfect impromptu picnic.

We had better luck on the local market with food than we had with clothes.  Most clothing purchases were best left to vacations in the States or Europe or trips to Beirut, but the girls and I loved the dresses from the harim souk, which were made of brightly colored and patterned cotton, all one size with long tight sleeves and no opening for the head.  One simply cut a hole halfway between the shoulder seams, turned the material under and stitched it into whatever shape fit the head and seemed the most pleasing.  The length had to be adjusted as well, but since the dresses cost only ten riyals, even the most inept seamstress could afford to make mistakes.  They were wonderfully cool in summer for lounging around the house, and the girls took them to school for dorm wear as well. Men's sandals were popular purchases as they are today, and white ghutras were in demand as tablecloths for the inevitable bridge-size tables, made in the carpenters' souk, which were the feature of every outdoor dinner party.

Having brought nothing in the way of home decorations or accessories from the States, I bought all manner of things to make the villa a little more home-like.  Soon, we were awash in coffee pots, spice boxes and camel trappings and I still kept an eye out for something new and different.  In the course of this, I learned a lesson about bargaining that I have never forgotten.  I was offered a sterling silver coffee pot in the traditional shape, embossed with the palm and swords emblem -- the hallmark of the the palaces -- for 60 riyals.  Immediately, I countered with 30, at which point a thobed arm reached over my shoulder, handed the full amount to the seller, and a Saudi gentleman made off with his prize.  Yahya shook his head at me disgustedly.  Bargaining may be a way of life, but when you really want something, pay the man.  If you don't, someone else will.

I do regret never having bought one of the painted panels, which adorned the sides of the old open-topped Mercedes trucks.  These were colorful naif renderings, both realistic and fanciful, that made the trucks look like lumbering carnival wagons decorated right down to the mudguards, but I just didn’t recognize truck art when I saw it just as I failed on so many occasions to see through the simple context of a find to the aesthetic that transformed it into a valid expression of folk art. However, on one of the rare occasions when Dick was driving me to the souk, I saw two men turning down an alley dragging a lengthy piece of what appeared to be wrought iron shaped into a beautifully elongated arabesque.

"Stop the car," I shouted, "I've got to have that."

He took one look. 

"It's a truck spring," he said and drove on.

I still think it would have looked great over a fireplace.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Frances Meade is an American who has lived in Saudi Arabia since 1965.  Born in New York, she and her family moved to Arizona in the '50s and still call it home.  She has a degree from Mount Holyoke College and has written and edited educational texts as well as a monthly magazine column.