2000 November 12: Thou Shalt Not Photograph Greetings yet again from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia! First things first: I suppose I could go on a tangent discussing the current political impasse in Florida, but I shan't. There's enough talk going on already *without* my input. So I'll just let that horse lie. I will, however, tell you about a little "run-in with the authorities" I had downtown on Friday. As you may recall from my previous email, it had rained on Wednesday night and the weather cleared up on Thursday and was beautiful by Friday, so my two co-teachers (Jeff and Everett) and I decided to go out for a little drive that afternoon to snap some pictures of the Riyadh Museum and to stroll around town. Well, as always seems to be the case with me, I was unable to chain my drama-inducing shadow upstairs in the apartment when I left and, of course, managed to drag it along with us across town. . . Now, picture this. . . (dream sequence commences) It was a beautiful, breezy day with temperatures in the high 70s (27C) and the sky was bright crystal blue. 'Twas the perfect day for a happy little drive into downtown Riyadh in order to enjoy the fruits of this modern city. Little did I know, as we drove, was that Riyadh's fruit often bear poison.

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So we travelled down the Mecca Highway from the VinnellCompound into downtown and got off on the Olaya Boulevard exit and headed east toward the Museum, which is located in a newly renovated part of the city. The Museum itself is built of regionally sourced, light colored sandstone and has a modern glass and stone clad Islamic themed exterior. Surrounding it is a lush, green park and a series of large, public courtyards replete with artificial streams and rows of trees. The perfect place to be on the week-end holy day with your family and wive(s). Anyways, we drove down Olaya Street east of downtown, hooked a right on Al-Imam Abdul Aziz ibn Mohammed Shaari' (The Prayer-Leader Abdul Aziz, Son of Mohammed Street), admired the gardens and greenery on the left side of the vehicle, and the museum on the right. We turned into the parking lot on the right and found ourselves a nice little parking spot, without difficulty. What a perfect convenience for us on this perfect little sunny day! We got out of the car and mentioned what a shame it was that the museum was closed that day (Friday is the holy day here, like Sunday in the Christian world) and noted the inconvenience of not being able to visit the museum, since the hours to visit the Riyadh Museum as a single (unmarried) man were only on Thursday morning from 8 to 10 a.m. Since Jeff is a worthless lump on a log come the weekend mornings, we joked that we'd never be able to see the inside of the museum lest Everett and I drove ourselves. As we meandered through the parking lot, with cameras in hand, we started shooting pictures of this and that. An old wooden door. The squared edge of a stone corner atop a building. The meticulously hand laid pieces of polished granite in the walkways around the museum. As always, we made sure not to point the cameras toward any of the people (especially women!) walking and sitting around here and there, and continued our stroll through the grounds of the museum complex minding our own business. After taking some really *choice* pictures of the architecture, the three of us split up and went our own ways. I ended up walking toward the western side of the museum which was a beautiful showcase of rolling knolls, manicured lawns, and rows of date trees. Along the way I was happy to see families sitting around everywhere with their children laughing and playing and having a wonderful, perfect little time. As I sauntered my way past the waving hills of grass and date trees by the museum, I noticed this nice, sizable sandstone arch chiseled with sharp, stony angles towering up behind one of the green hills that was just *BEGGING* to be photographed! So, of course, I walked up to it and fulfilled my duty as a journal-entry/webpage story creator by getting down on my right knee and snapping the corpulent tower with my little digital wonder! I thought of how nice this would all look on my upcoming series of webages and how I could even print up a high-resulution file of the image on a color laser printer and frame it up on the wall in my apartment when suddenly I noticed a short, slender man wearing a security officer's uniform dart into the corner of my right eye off in the distance. And he didn't look very happy. All I could think was, "Shit! Maybe if I just ignore him he'll go away." Well, like a bad dream, the situation just got worse. As I stood there, halfway turned away from him while still facing the tower, I noticed that he was starting to say something to me from afar. "SHIT! SHIT!! SHIT!!! He's *still* coming!" I repeated to myself. "It must be family day *ONLY* in the ENTIRE park today! SHIT!!!!!!" Then I suddenly realized that I had my camera in my hands and that he must have seen me taking a picture of the tower, and as I looked around the base of the tower I noticed that there was a group of women sitting just behind it. "I am soooooooooooo TOAST right now, it's not even funny," I thought. "I've gotta get rid of all my pictures, like A.S.A.P.! If he sees *any* little black dots at the bottom of my tower-picture (i.e., women) I'm gonna be in SERIOUS DOO-DOO!!!" So suddenly I turned on the camera to "View Images Mode" and just started clicking "DELETE" "DELETE" "DELETE"!!! Everything I had photographed at the museum, gone! Everything I had photographed of downtown the day before, gone! Pictures I had taken of the compound, gone! GONE GONE GONE!!! All I could think of was, "GET RID OF EVERYTHING, *NOW*!!!" The security man's voice grew louder as I continued to erase all the pictures on my camera, except two, one of the museum facade and one of a wooden door. After all, I had to at least make it *look* like I had been photographing *something*. Suddenly I heard the man's footsteps approaching as he started ranting at me with a bristling tone in Arabic, so I turned to face him. "Blah blah blah!!!" is all I heard, but I knew *EXACTLY* what that translated to as he pointed his finger at the arch *and* the women *and* families behind it: "You can't take pictures here! There are women and families around everywhere! It's Friday afternoon, this is not a day for a single man without his family and wives!!!" In the middle of one of his ensuing "blah blah"s, I heard the word "sister" and I thought, "I sure has hell hope he's not speaking English because if he's asking where my sister is, I'm SCREWED because she is in San Francisco right now, and if this dude finds out that I'm here without one of my wives or a family member, this whole situation is gonna get real ugly, real soon!"

So I told him, in my *very broken* Arabic that my sister wasn't here, and I didn't have a wife, which I figured was his second question since he asked to see my "Igama" (alien resident passport, which would have all that information in it). All I could think was, "Alright Daniel, figure something out. Figure something out. Figure something out!" Well, the security man was two steps ahead of my own mind, which was already racing, and the guy suddenly demanded to see my camera. "Not my precious digital camera!" I thought! "There is *no way on Earth* this guy is gonna take my camera from me. Nope, not gonna happen."

So, as per his command, I switched on my camera and showed him the two pictures that I had taken. "Where are your other pictures?!?" he retorted in Arabic, or at least that is what the real-time gibberish-to-English translation mechanism in my brain was telling me. "I've only taken two pictures, and here they are. This is a digital camera, so if you like, I will erase them for you right this very second!" "Erase them immediately!" he commanded, or so I interpreted his sharp grousing. And just like Ali Babba, his wish was my command. Gone! Once I thought that I had averted a serious international crisis, suddenly the security man put his hands into the gesture of being HAND-CUFFED and got on his radio and called for back-up! At that point I was like, "I am sooooooooo dead right now. I'm going to be arrested, jailed and deported for trespassing the museum garden grounds on family day, of ALL crimes!" Like a bolt from the blue - SHAZAM! - the second security guard showed up faster than you could say, "What's the phone number for the American embassy, please?" As the second security guard stood beside us, all I could think was, "You better get yourself out of this, Daniel, OR ELSE!" So without a second thought, I suddenly decided to snap into confrontation-aversion mode and become JAPANESE!!! I mean, after living there for two years I did manage to learn *something*, specifically, the art of apologizing PROFUSELY! And with my 10-word vocabulary of Arabic, I just let loose: "I am soooooooooooooooooo sorry!!! I had nooooooooooooooo idea that it was family day today!!! I am soooooooooooo sooooooooooo soooooooooooooooooooo sorry!!!!!!!! Gomen nasai, ne!!!" Then I thought, "Daniel, whatever you do, you HAVE TO get this aggitated security guy's mind off of you and onto something else! ANYTHING ELSE!" so I blurted out in my crackly Arabic, "Ummm... excuse me sir, but, um... I understand suddenly that today is bad, but, when are single-men's visiting hours? I would like to come back then, when it's OK. Please tell me when that is." And the security guy just looked at me like, "Is this dude on crack??? I'm talking about arresting him, and he's asking me when he can COME BACK?!?" But it seemed to work because he suddenly shifted his mindset and started telling me, albeit hastily, when single-men's hours were! Then I threw in a whole slew of I'm-sorry's and started pointing toward the other side of the museum and just repeated, "My car is over there! I will go now. Right away! I am sooooooooooooooooooooo sorry!" And humorously enough, the second security guard who showed up - a Pakistani looking man - grinned ever so slightly at my theatrical display and began saying something to the first security guard in Arabic. As they jabbered briefly back and forth, I noticed that Everett was standing atop one of the neighboring grassy knolls viewing the entire production from behind a date tree! So I said to the security guards, "Oh, look! There's my friend. Our car is right over there. I will tell him that it's bad to be here today and we will leave RIGHT AWAY. I am soooooooooooooo sooooooooooo soooooooooooooo sorry! OK? OK? I go. Right now, I go!" And totally unexpectedly, they released me. Camera and all! So without hesitation I beat feet and got the hell out of there! As I shifted my rear into high gear and began my marathon dash back to the car, Everett came trotting down the hill - camera in hand - and asked politely, "What was that all about?" I shook my head and simply exclaimed, "Hide that damned camera and let's just get the hell outta here!!!" The crisis was averted, and we all managed to escape unscathed! Al-hamdu l-illah! ("All praise be to God!") And that's the latest of my adventures in Saudi! Daniel :-) PS: And in case you're wondering what all the hubbub with the cameras here is all about, you should know that strict interpretation of the Quran (i.e., the "Wahabistic" Saudi interpretation of Islam) holds that reproducing images of humans is sinful and should be subject to severe punishment, especially when the sinner is a lusty single male photographing hordes of women (apparently like me!). In any case, from now on I'm going to be sure to check for family hours and single-men's hours the next time I decide to go to any public monuments!