Arrived safely after almost 12 hours of traveling to Washington D.C. Here’s the view from my window at the artsy fartsy Helix Hotel. I’m glad they chose this hotel and not some Sheraton or Helton. I will stay at D.C. until 13/9; from 13-18/9 I will be at Bozeman, Montana; from 18-21/9 I will be at Montgomery, Alabama; from 21-23/9 I will be at NYC. More from here later.
When you read this post, I will most probably be at Bahrain International Airport waiting for my flight to Washington D.C. through Frankfurt. It is the first time for me to visit the United States as well as being my first trip to a non-Arab country. The two-week trip is a part of a long-running exchange program called the International Visitor Leadership Program. It is sponsored by the State Department and a number of prestigious NGO’s, and it has been running since the early 1970’s.
Last year, there was this American professor who was visiting Saudi Arabia to learn more about the country and its people. The professor has been reading my blog for a while and he wanted to meet me to talk about blogging and youth culture in the Kingdom. We met in a hotel lobby in Riyadh and talked for a few hours. Present at that meeting was an official from the US Embassy who was coordinating the professor’s trip.
In the middle of an answer to a question I mentioned that I’ve never been to the States or Europe. The American official was a bit surprised that my English was very good despite the fact that I’ve never been to the US or the UK. Later, she said they have this exchange program at the embassy and asked me if I would be interested in such thing. I said “yes,” although I thought she was just being nice, and shortly I forgot about the whole thing.
Few months later she contacted me saying that I was nominated for the program and they will need some information about me. Even at that point, I did not take this thing seriously. I was saying: there will be a lot of people nominated who are much better than me and they will certainly be chosen over me.
It wasn’t until the beginning of this summer when the embassy contacted me saying I was selected for the program so they should start arranging for my participation in the program. They have taken care of almost everything: I just had to sign the papers and show up for the visa interview.
However, visiting the US Embassy in Riyadh for the interview was not a very pleasant experience. One day in August, at 6:40 AM, I was standing in a quickly growing line outside the embassy building. Around 7:20, they started allowing people to enter.
I was somehow lucky because when I showed the security officer my papers he took me ahead of others. I went through the highly-guarded gates, took a number and waited for my turn. The process was relatively slow and the atmosphere inside the embassy was cold and dry.
Before going in, I thought the interview would go something like this: you come into a room and sit on a chair facing two or three people who would ask you some questions, chat with you a little bit and then you leave. Needless to say, that was not the case.
After waiting for about two-and-a-half hours, it was finally my turn for the interview. I went to the the interview window (yes, not a room, just a glass window) not knowing what to expect, and there was this blond lady who asked first me to put my fingers on a device to take my fingerprints.
She started questioning me in a rather accusing tone about my intention of the visit and who nominated me for the program. She asked me why I was nominated for which I did not have a good answer and it was a question she better ask to those who nominated me.
The way of questioning made me nervous and it felt to me more of an interrogation than an interview. After a long pause and some staring at me, she said my papers were incomplete and there was a missing form that I had to provide. I told her it was her colleagues at the embassy who prepared all the paperwork for me and all I had to do was to sign them. She said my application could not be processed until I provide the missing form. She gave me my passport and said someone from there would contact me later.
Few days later someone from the embassy called and said the missing form was still in Washington; as soon as it arrived they sent it to me. I signed the form and fedex’d it with my passport. After two weeks I had my passport back with a short visit visa.
Now that I got the visa, I have to admit that I expected the process to be smoother than how it was. I mean: the program is sponsored by the State Department and they were responsible for arranging the whole thing. In general, the experience was relatively good, but that’s maybe because I was expecting it to be worse, except for the interview part which really sucked.
I am looking forward to this program, and I want to make the most out of this trip. I will be joined by three other Saudis, two ladies and one gentelman, who were also selected for the program, but I have yet to meet them. I will be first at Washington DC and will spend some time at NYC later in the month, so if you would like to meet up just drop me a line and we’ll see if we can pull something off. Hope that I will be able to update the blog with more words and pictures while I’m there so stay tuned.
After we got rid of the notorious ISU for good, it seem that now it’s the turn of CITC to prove that idiotic internet censorship is still well and alive in Saudi Arabia. After blocking liberal forums and some small blogs, they have decided to go big this time and block the Guardian Blogs. Probably this has something to do with Al Yamamah scandal, but the BAE investigation file pages where you can find out about the deal are still available. It’s not that they usually have a good reason to block websites in the first place, anyway.
My brothers and I went this morning to the court here in Ahssa to finish some regular paper work. It was past 9 AM when we arrived to the court building. We entered the main hall to find a lot of people waiting while the court employees were chitchatting in different corners of their offices. None of the judges has arrived yet, we were told. The employees were sitting doing nothing because they could not turn on their computers. They told us if they turned on their computers the electricity in the building would blackout. (!) We were told to get back on Saturday, not even Wednesday! Some people blamed Amr Al Faisal when he ripped into the Jeddah court. Take that!
So, in what is expected to be yet another mockery in the Saudi legal system, Abdullah Al Hamed and his brother Isa were told to appear in a criminal court in Buraida next Saturday over their involvement in the women’s demonstration that was held in July. “The charge is that they incited the women to stage a sit-in, and tried to break through a security cordon,” Khalid Al Omair, a fellow activist, told AFP. These charges sound dubious, but with a legal system like ours anything can happen.
The only good thing about this rather disturbing piece of news is that the trial would be open to public. It will be a chance for those supporting the reforms to make a statement by showing up at the court on Saturday morning, and hopefully a big crowd would draw the attention of public and media.
Related Link:
Reading this piece from the NY Times about the Larry Craig case, I thought it was worth pointing to this quote by famous blogger Jeff Jarvis: ”A link is not necessarily an endorsement, but a way to say ‘you go judge for yourself.’ ”
Because blogging is still not well understood in this part of the world, there are some things that people don’t realize about this medium. Many people think that when I link to something it necessarily means that I agree with it. This is not true. In most cases, when I link to something I usually mean: “hey, check this out.” Another thing is that most bloggers here don’t know how to use linking properly to provide a better reading experience.
Old timers on this blog probably remember when I used to link to dozen of stuff everyday with short or no commentary at all. I stopped doing that, but I still provide a lot of links everyday to content that I think worth checkin out in right sidebar under the title Arabic Picks. I chose to make it all in Arabic because I don’t write in Arabic anymore and I thought this could be like an alternative to writing (I admit it’s not, but hey, at least I’m trying :-). I’d love to hear what you have to say about this, so kick things off in the comments.
British expat Margrave is starting a series of posts called Riyadh Favourites (RF). The aim is to help you find places to go and things to do in the capital. I think this is a very nice idea. If we started to post reviews like that and tag them with tags like Riyadh Favourites, Jeddah Favourites, etc. we might end up with a good collective Saudi tourism directory. I have already tagged some of my old posts about restaurants and other stuff in Riyadh which you can find here. On a related note, check out the Jeddah Food blog.
Blogger Khalid al-Nassir has been following the news since today’s afternoon regarding a second women’s demonstration in Qassim. The women were shortly moved to the governate headquarters for negotiation, which ended by detaining the mother of one the detainees. Reuters ran this story about the demonstration and reports that participants in the protest said the women carried placards bearing the image of King Abdullah and others saying “Ministry of Interior, try the detainees legally and openly”.
This is getting more and more intense. In a country where public demonstrations are illegal, two demonstrations during a short period like this should indicate that a significant change is probably taking place. Moreover, both demonstrations occurred in the most ultra-conservative part of the Kingdom. Some argue that these detainees deserve to be where they are, but I think that whether they were innocent or not, they have the right to a public fair trial immediately.
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