Things to Do To Help You Get Settled In To Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Here are some suggestions about things you can do to help yourself feel settled in and comfortable quickly.


How to Get the Lay of the Land

This country operates on word of mouth. Ask the hotel  receptionist / building manager, and hang out in the lobby of your hotel or apartment or in staff rooms at work to meet people and talk to anyone and everyone to find out all you can about tips and tricks for surviving and thriving in Riyadh, where to go and where to shop and what to do for fun.


Get a cell phone. More details about how to do this in an upcoming post. 

   Find out the local prayer schedule

It changes a few minutes everyday. Prayer time will affect your life even if you are not Muslim since everything shuts down during prayer time. You need to plan your outings around prayer time to minimize your frustration and downtime spent waiting for shops to open. Cell phones bought locally usually come with an app installed that tells you  prayer times (and is instantly understandable even if the app is in Arabic).


Bring a Book
 
I found it was useful to always have a book with me when for prayer time to end, when waiting for things to re-open after lunch, or when stuck in traffic. There is a lot of 'downtime' in Saudi Arabia, and unreliable access to the internet.


 If you are a fan of reading and books, a bookstore that carries English books is Jarir Bookstore (http://www.jarirbookstore.com/html/jarir_csc02.asp).  However, they don`t have a vast selection of English fiction, so you may want to bring books with you from your home country. By the way, Jarir Bookstore is a great place to get all your stationery and teaching materials and has a good selection of electronics and office equipment.
 
Advice For Women: Stock up on Abayas Soon After You Arrive

If you are a woman, make sure to stock up on a few abayas since sometimes you may want to send abayas out for laundering and may not get them back immediately. Or, you may want to change abayas frequently when it is really hot outside.  

It`s easier to buy once you are there since you can see what is in fashion (and it may be hard to find abayas for Saudi Arabia outside the country- every country is different in terms of fashion and acceptability.  You will wear abayas and hijabs everyday, so it’s worth it to find ones you like. Go to the markets (souks), not the malls, to get abayas, hijabs and niqaabs.  The markets have more variety and are much less expensive than the stores in the malls.


Find the Nearest Mall
Find the malls nearest your home as soon as possible.  This is a good bet for finding an ATM, and you’ll need to go shopping once a week, so you might as well find out the best places to go and where to find the best deals.




Make Friends With Someone With An Iqaama / Residency Status for Saudi Arabia

To send money out of the country, get a cell phone service contract, internet plan, and make other large purchases, it is extremely helpful to have someone with an iqaama go with you, and sometimes, make the purchase for you.

Get Your Financial Life Set Up

After you find an ATM ( or a few) that accept your bank card from home, you should figure out how you can send you money out of the country (unless you like stuffing your mattress).

To do this, find out where  Enjaz or Western Union is. Actually, it`s best to find out where a few of them are. These are easier to use than bank services. By the way, the Western Union website is blocked from within the country, so you have to go to outlets in person to transfer money. 

It is extremely useful to know someone with an Iqaama  or Saudi ID who can go with you to cash cheques and help you transfer money out of the country. Some banks and Western Unions and some Enjaz outlets get very sticky about allowing you to do this if you have a renewal stamp on your passport temporary work Visa for some reason. If one place refuses to serve you, y recommendation is to  just go to another one. A place that worked one month may refuse to serve you the next. 

Before you set out, ask around for advice about where to go since the Jazz and Western Union outlets are franchises and the service atmosphere can vary dramatically from one place to the next.
It`s helpful to do this before payday at work, when everyone else is scrambling to figure out how to cash their cheques and send money to their home bank accounts.


Find the nearest Decent Restaurant that Delivers  

Make the rounds of local restaurants and pick up  thier fliers with phone numbers and delivery / service hours. This is a take-away culture, and even McDonalds delivers, which is nice when it is hot outside. 





Find the Nearest Health Clinic and Pharmacy

Find the location of the nearest health clinic, go there, and pick up a card / pamphlet that has their location  in Arabic (with a map) and phone numbers listed, so if you get sick it’s easy to get yourself the help you need. It’s much easier to hand over a card or pamphlet in Arabic to a taxi driver than try to communicate  in Arabic / English when you are really ill. For the same reason, find out where the closest and best pharmacy to where you live is so it`s easy to tell the taxi where to go.



Get your own Internet Access
 
Access to the Internet is not as easy as in a lot of other countries, especially for women (women are not allowed to use cyber cafes, and it’s hard to find cyber cafes anyway). Note: Sometimes you need someone with an iqaama or permanent residence to set up the service contract for you. Your passport and work visit visa are enough to purchase hardware (cell phones and computers and TVs).

Don`t Waste Time: Get Out and Join Classes and Do Group Activities Immediately

Because of the heat, it can be tempting to settle in by staying home and resting. But beware: being a homebody which can quickly lead to getting in a rut and getting depressed. I highly recommend forcing yourself to get out and meet as many people as you can as quickly as possible. If you start a routine of social outings early on, it`s easier to get started and keep it up. The people you meet will make the different

Go to the Hash House Harrier`s outings (one of the best ways to meet expats from around the world)(ask around for a local contact person who can give you the details)

Go to Concerts and Reception Events offered by the Embassies  (check embassy websites, get on email lists, go to the Diplomatic Quarter and look for fliers and posters and ask around)







Take Classes  (ask for newsletters circulated around the expat compounds for class offerings and check out the 'links' section on this website for ideas of how to get patched into the local network of your choice). 

 Go to the Diplomatic Quarter One Morning
 
Visit the Diplomatic Quarter to connect with your Embassy, and greatly improve your quality of life.  See my upcoming post on this topic for details.

Getting familiar with this area, its services, and upcoming social and cultural events offered by the embassies there can make a big difference to the quality of your life, (especially for women, since you don’t have to wear your full abaya and hijab and niqaab while inside the Quarter and can enter all buildings freely).  Also, there are green spaces where you can walk around freely, a cafe,  a post office and a gym for women. It is an oasis in more ways than one.


Those are my top recommendations.

Things to Bring With You to Saudi Arabia

Although shopping is a national hobby, more like a national sport, in Saudi Arabia, and you can get some great deals since there is no tax on anything, they don`t have the same selection as you are probably used to.

There were a number of things I didn`t find in the stores in Riyadh, or not easily anyway, that I wished I had brought with me.  

Here is what I wish I had brought with me:

Raincoat or breathable waterproof windbreaker - I arrived in Riyadh in wintertime (Feb) and it rained everyday for about a month, drenching downpours in the late afternoon, instantly flooding the streets, and once we were caught in a hailstorm and rainstorm on an outing to the desert organized by the hash house harrier group, and I didn`t see rainjackets or outdoorwear for sale anywhere.

More exercise, workout, yoga, belly dance and dance exercise CDs and videos

Exercise wear for women (including running and hiking shoes- hard to come by in Saudi for women since exercise isn`t generally an encouraged hobby)

Music (mp3s) (couldn`t download things easily once there due to connectivity issues and blocked sites)

Accurate Maps of Riyadh or GIS based apps (Google maps wasn´t accurate or as detailed as I expected and I found I needed something in hand to show taxi drivers and others I wanted to meet up with). Print maps in English are hard to find once you are in Riyadh.

Guide books about Riyadh / information about travel companies that spoke good English and that women could book trips through. Surprisingly, tourist guides were hard to come by once inside the country.

Professional blouses and suits and outfits - it could be hard to find professional attire, let alone in western sizes for women, although it was easy to find long skirts and T shirts and casual wear or super fancy dresses and lovely dress shoes).

Teaching books / teaching activity materials, or digital files / scans of them. Stationery supplies were easy to find at Jarir Bookstore, but there were few teaching activity books or libraries for teachers where I found myself working. Digital scans of books work best since books are heavy to transport.

Saudi Arabian Arabic language learning materials (not just 'Learn Arabic', since very country there has quite a few dialectic differences). Learning as much Arabic as possible before I went would have been a great idea, especially since I had trouble finding materials that were basic enough for me once I had arrived. Since absolutely everything about the language was new to me, I really appreciated the kind of books for kids where you trace the letters following the dotted lines.

Fiction books in general – books I wanted to read for pleasure and about Saudi Arabia/muslim culture. Saudis are very sensitive and a lot of books were not available inside the country that you could easily find outside the country. I never had success buying anything from Amazon – either the site was blocked or the connection timed out before I could complete a  purchase.

Movies

Photos for posters and wall hangings (you can print out photos or make them into posters for your walls at local Kodak stores, but downloading photos once inside the country was problematic if the files were big since the connectivity was not great).

Things I was glad I had brought:

- Some teaching activity books and teaching materials (you can get whiteboard markers, paper and printers  at stores and photocopiers at stationery stores, but blu tack /non-adhesive gum, photos, images, and the white plastic film you can put on the walls and write on, then peel off and take with you, were hard to find). I didn`t see any decent teaching activity books for sale in bookstores in Riyadh and there were no libraries with a wide variety of books like I was used to back home.

- My favorite recipes (scanned to digital files from my favorite cookbooks)( I was impressed by the variety of 'international' food and ingredients at the supermarkets like Lulus Hypermarket)

- Some music

- Photos (saved to hard drive; accessing online galleries and downloading often proved problematic),

- A lot of exercise Cds and home workout routine info  (weights and exercise equipment could be bought once in Riyadh)

- Fiction novels ( but I wish I had brought more since I couldn`t access Amazon to buy any once in Riyadh and the local stores didn`t stock fiction I was very interested in)

- Hiking boots, running shoes if you like to jog,  walking shoes, a good wind breaker, sunhat, and outdoor clothes for hiking and desert outings ( they don`t have a lot of outdoor clothing stores, especially that stock things for women)

- Casual clothes and pants (they mostly sell skirts and dresses for women in Saudi, and they carry sizes for short and small people)

- Guide book for the region (they were hard to find in the stores in Riyadh)

- Things to give as little gifts. The Saudis are very generous and gift giving people. 

 Things that are easy and relatively cheap to get once you are in Riyadh:

- Electronics such as cell phones, TVs, cameras ( no import taxes on anything! Check out outlet stores and big distributors like Extra for good prices)

- Shoes

- Women´s dresses and skirts

- Household things and kitchen appliances and TVs and technology in general

- Jewelry

- Perfume

- Food in general (except pork products, as you would expect when in a Muslim country)

A Couple of Other Tips:

Make some local contacts (maybe made through couchsurfing.org or other international agencies) before arriving to make it easier to meet locals that speak good English and get answers your questions about what to buy, and where to buy things if they are available locally.

Set up a mail forwarding service (e.g. https://www.earthclassmail.com/Mail-And-Parcel-Forwarding) so you can ask people to send you stuff from home that you realize you can`t live without and desperately need. The general mail system was terribly slow and unreliable. None of my postcards sent from Saudi Arabia ever arrived at their intended destinations elsewhere in the world.

Pick a mail forwarding service that  allows you to confirm where to have things sent once you are physically in Saudi Arabia and know which courier outlet is closest to your home. You never know what courier or mail outlet might be closest and most convenient for you until you arrive and are assigned accommodation, and few buildings have street numbers or door to door delivery anyway. Best to use a mail forwarding service`s office address. The next best option is to use courier services like Fed Ex for all mail deliveries.

Bon Voyage!