The Al Rashid Mall

John had told me the mall was big but after the Trafford Centre and Vegas I didn't think this one would suprise me. It did though. I would put it at double the trafford centre and it even has a Carrefour supermarket inside! The stores were all the typical latest fashion boutiques you'd expect to find everywhere else, albeit with Arabic names written on the opposite side of the signs to the English. A lot of them were high end jewellery, more than a few were mobile phone outlets or computer game shops, and a lot were clothes and make up. All the kind of places you wouldn't walk into back home because you knew you were never going to pay that much for whatever it was you wanted to look at.

We took a stroll around but John was eager to get something to eat. It was 7pm after all and all he'd had was a KFC wrap this morning, which was a KFC wrap more than I'd had all day! Our Romanian friend whose name neither of us have yet to find out decided he wanted to walk around a bit first so off he went and so did we. I could barely believe what was there. A Burger King next to Dominoes, next to a KFC next to McDonalds with several other smaller but similar chained fast food outlets inbetween surrounding a common eating area. Obviously there was a family section should females with to eat separately, but plenty didn't. 

It's just occured to me that I mentioned about the high proportion of females wearing the full niqab at the airport and haven't come back to it since. I would not say that about 20% of the total females I have seen have their face fully veiled. The rest choose to leave their face uncovered and I have seen one or two with no headress at all. On contrast however, there are now a significant portion of men who wear robes andheaddresses.

Anyway, back to the mall. I decided to buy a new phone for my Saudi SIM and after asking the guy in one store what the cheapest phone he had was and him showing me one for about $400SAR I went to a bigger place around the corner where the guy had one for $250SAR. It's only a Nokia 206 but it does the trick for what it needs to do here and keeps my UK phone free still for the friends and family to contact me on.

After me insisting on not making my first meal in Saudi anything I could have easily got back home I decided to be as authentic as I could given the choices in front of me and have a lamb kofta. I'm glad I did because it was lovely although the bread that came with it was a sort of soft greasy poppadom which tasted lovely but made me cringe at what it would be doing to my arteries - not that KFC would have been much better. Anyway, I made the effort and it paid off. We wandered around for a while more and eventually decided it'd be a good idea to go to the Carrefour and pick up a few supplies for our rooms. Initially I was picking up stuff to make some cheese and ham sandwhiches until John pointed out to me that we couldn't get ham! D'uh. So in the end we decided the ready made were the best way to go when we could get half baguettes with cheese and chicken for about 90p anyway. John decided to get some non-alcoholic beer so I thought I'd give it a go and I got a few different kinds of fruit juices to put in the fridge.

We got back to the rooms and ditched our stuff, meeting up again 10 minutes later in the lobby because we decided to have a wander and see what, if anything, was around there to do. We'd had a phone call from the Al Hoty rep to tell us we would be picked up at half 2 the following afternoon for our official welcome and introduction so there was no need to retire too early and after getting up relatively late neither of us were tired then anyway. We walked about a mile along a main road away from the hotel, being beeped at by several taxis slowing down and gesturing to offer their services. Clearly, like Dads experience in Houston when he decided to walk to a local mall and got stopped by the police, it's just not normal for people to actually walk anywhere - probably best explains the state of the pavements too. 

We found nothing. Not a thing that would be classed as entertainment. We stopped at a take away jiuce bar and bought a couple of smoothies to drink as we walked but after a few sipfuls were just too sickly and we ended up throwing half of them away as soon as we found a bin. We were back at the hotel again by about 10pm so decided to go and try the other direction which again led to nothing and again we doubled back on ourselves to head home. Once back at the hotel my legs were aching (I didn't have the best shoes on for walking) and decided I was going to go back to my room, catch up on typing this blog (which I had no idea would be so time cosuming!) and call it a night...