Dear Saudi Friends

Dear Saudi friends, I have actually never been to Saudi Arabia.  I spent a few hours in transit at the Riyadh airport, another few hours at the Jeddah airport. I booked those flight specifically to see what your airports looked like. Field research, they call it. In a couple of days, while on my way to France, I’ll do that again. But that’s it. I have never been able to step out of your airports and that’s really a shame. At this stage, honestly, I am waiting for the visit visas as if my life depended on it. I want to see what your country is like, in the flesh. I hope nobody will be offended if I say this, but I wasn’t too impressed by the offer at the airports. Except for dates, there wasn’t anything much typically Saudi to buy. Not even a book to look at. Certainly if there had been a good book about Saudi Arabia, I would have bought it. I can think of a lot of books about Saudi Arabia that I would like to buy. I have researched, it seems those books have never ...

My name is Nadine, I am 42, I am French, I live in Dubai.  A few weeks ago, I started a blog in French to talk about my life as a French living in the Gulf. I have been living in the region for almost a decade, but only now I feel I understand the Gulf countries enough to write about them. It wasn’t exactly my objective at the beginning, but I started writing a lot about Saudi Arabia. I just can no longer comfortably read all the misconceptions French have about Saudi Arabia, and do nothing about it. I am not really sure though, that my articles about Saudi Arabia are interesting the French very much. I see the stats of my blog and my other articles, about the real life of an expat living in the Gulf, are much more interesting to them. Saudi Arabia is not a popular topic but I continue, hoping that at some point a mainstream media will pick up on my blog. You might want to ask how I got interested in Saudi Arabia. Well, as it turns out, your Crown Prince caught m...