no women

So I'm here in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, getting towards the end of the stuff I came out here to do for my job. After two days of back on forth on points of detail, the dust is settling. Settling everywhere. On every surface: every window pane, every inscrutable shouty shop fascia, every horn-honked ripoff taxi; and in every fold of my fried brain.

So I'm sitting in the the lounge part of my dusty little hotel suite, on a turqoise sofa and in font of a burnt orange wall. My torso is warm and my feet, crossed before me on the bright brown table, are cold in the down-draft of the noisy air conditioning unit. It's about 40C outside, I think. My winter weight suit is resting on the back of a chair.

So much of what we've glimpsed out here is entirely alien, and it may be that there's a longer piece to be written about all of that when time allows and when the muse strikes. In the meantime, one feeling wants to get out and make itself known. It's the very peculiar feeling I got when seeing a woman, wrapped from head to ankle in black at lunchtime. Her face was not covered, but her sunglasses were big black ovals hiding her self somewhat from the watching world. Her feet were dainty in jewelled sandals and she stood on the step of a shop opposite the restaurant where we were sitting down to a Lebanese meal. A realisation struck. She was the only woman I'd seen properly since emerging from the airport terminal on Monday morning. Other than this lady, I had only fleetingly glimpsed scuttling black figures in the far distance and several stories below me when I was by the grimy picture window of the hotel dining room last night.

Every hotel desk clerk: male.

Everybody who has served me food: male.

The staff cleaning the hotel rooms: male.
Every driver and every passenger of every moving vehicle: male.
Every single pedestrian on the teeming pavements of the busier streets: male.
Every shopkeeper seen looking out from his premises: male.

It's another world. Really. It's a strange feeling suddenly to see a woman, having not spotted one in a city of millions for many, many hours.