Hello and welcome back to Riyadh where it’s another day of sun and the temperature is nudging 42 degrees.
You do acclimatize to it – however we do spend most of our time in air conditioned cars, malls, at the office or at home. It is really too hot to sit outside and the sun is too harsh even if you wanted to for any length of time. And even in the evening it is still too uncomfortably warm to sit outside – people in our compound with patios are looking forward to the cooler autumn nights when they can BBQ and use their outdoor furniture again!
Anyway I thought for this blog I would share two interesting outings I enjoyed recently in Riyadh – one was perfume shopping the other was to the Riyadh Metro Visitor Centre.
Saudis love heavy perfume/aftershave fragrances. The women in the malls sweep by you in a cloud of expensive perfume (and the men also love their aftershaves). The women will liberally scent their abayas and both men and women like to carry their scent with them and have quick spritz before they leave the car, go into the office, go to a friend/family’s house.
My husband has a Saudi work colleague who has an array of designer aftershaves in his office and will invite people to help themselves or he might even just spray an unsuspecting colleague himself in a gesture of goodwill!
I went to a famous Saudi perfumery called Bassem al Qassem with a friend to try out the range.
Perfume presentation box 
Perfume bottle display
Bassem al Qassem is a global brand selling luxury French perfumes from Grasse with an Arab flavour. The perfumes have numbers rather than names and you have to smell them to decide which one you like – there are so many to sniff they provide little pots of coffee granules so that you can reset your nose every so often so that you become overwhelmed with the heady fragrances. You can buy anything from just one bottle to a whole luxury trunk of perfume containing 57 litres for the knock down price of $10,500 (I resisted)!
Perfume trunk with 57 litres of perfume 
Me posing with the perfume trunk for scale!
The service was lovely and I chose a delicious fragrance which I have been spraying liberally ever since – Saudi style!
After the perfume shopping my friend wanted to get a couple of new abayas so we went to the Royal Mall which specializes in abaya shops. She bought two – one in navy with a white trim and one in black with a teal trim (I forgot to take photos…). The shops also offer an alteration service so we were able to go off and have a coffee for half an hour while that was carried out and then go back and collect them.
Mall view – gleaming clean! 
Abayas for the discerning customer…
Both shopping events were really interesting and a glimpse into Saudi life – my friend is Western but married to a Saudi so she was took me around. The mall was also almost exclusively Saudi – on average Saudi women will have around 30-40 abayas and there are always new designs coming out – so there is always abaya shopping to be done!!
On a different day my husband and I took ourselves off to visit the Riyadh Metro Visitor Centre. Riyadh is currently building an extensive metro system due to be fully operational by 2021. It will have six lines, 85 stations and will cover 176kms. The entire construction is estimated to cost SAR22.5bn. The aim is to reduce car trips by 250,000 a day with a total capacity of trains carrying 3.6million people. We also learned at the visitor centre that there up to 17 deaths a day on the roads across KSA – (that’s over 6,500 a year) so they also hope the metro will have a big impact on reducing that statistic.
Construction is currently taking place simulanteously across Riyadh with road diversions and road closures in place everywhere – which doesn’t help the already heavy traffic situation across the city…
The metro system will be complemented by a local bus service with over 1000 new buses to make it easier for people to reach the metro stations without taking their car. The stations have all be exclusively designed and have signature undulating roofs which (we were told) are based on the rise and fall of the desert sand dunes – a nice touch!
The new metro lines are all colour-coded with the trains and their routes all branded in their line colours. The trains will also have women only carriages and first class carriages.
Displays of the gleaning new metro trains 
On a side note, when we arrived at the Metro Visitor Centre my husband was wearing (long) shorts and the security guard told him he couldn’t go in (!) so he went off to Starbucks and I carried on in – at the desk the receptionist asked me where my husband was (I don’t think you get many women going on their own) so I explained he hadn’t been allowed in – but the receptionist obviously thought it was better for me to have a shorts-wearing husband rather than no husband at all, so I was told it was not a problem and to go and get him. The security guard was still not happy, but the receptionist placated him – but as my husband said, men will be using the metro wearing shorts in 40+ degree heat, so it was a bit odd not to allowed into the Visitor Centre wearing them!! But it all ended well :0)
And one final mention for this blog which I have to include is the announcement earlier this month that Saudi women over the age of 21 will no longer have to obtain permission from their male guardian to travel. They have also been given the right to register births, marriages and divorces. These are very welcome developments for women and there was a huge positive outpouring online to the news. One woman was photographed embracing a portrait of the Crown Prince in reaction and the photo went viral – it was also featured on the front page of the Arab News:
And that’s all for this blog – I hope you have enjoyed sharing an insight into some of our Saudi experiences.
Until next time – stay cool!
Anne :0)
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