So Long and Thanks for All the Khapsa

It’s been nothing if not an eventful year. I carried on a long distance relationship for seven months only to have it implode upon that distance being closed. I had wild flings in the wake. I’ve seen France, Budapest (twice), Taiwan and Sri Lanka. I reunited with an old friend whom I haven’t seen in over ten years and met his wonderful family. I survived an entire year living in a strict Islamic theocracy, teaching some of the worst students I am ever likely to encounter anywhere. I’ve made new friends. I’ve picked up the basics of another language. I’ve experienced what it is like to be firmly middle-class, and have made enough money to pay off my student loan, at last. 

And now it’s time to go. 

Despite the adventure it is been, I am very happy to be moving on. I am looking forward to enjoying the liberties of my own country and Japan. But there are things I’m going to miss about Saudi Arabia. I’ll miss the evenings, which depending on the time of year, are either warm or cool, but are always good for walking. I’ll miss the cheap goods and services, and having more than enough money to buy whatever I want. I’ll miss the easy-going good-naturedness of Saudis. I’ll miss meeting people from a variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds that I usually don’t get to meet in Canada. I’ll miss studying and practicing Arabic. I’ll miss the weekend trips to Jeddah, Yanbu or the Economic City.  Most of all, I’ll miss my friends.

This last month, having the freedom to experience living here without the distraction of work, I think I’ve gotten some real insight into what it means to be Saudi. Although this country is probably the most strictly Theocratic place on Earth, outside of certain parts of Syria and Iraq, let me tell you, it’s only on the face of it. Young people here are just as wild and hungry for experience as young people in other parts of the world. They drink, they do drugs, watch movies and listen to music. They like to party and they have boyfriends and girlfriends. The only difference is that they are covert. It all has to be done carefully, in secret. 

Nor is the piety what you might expect from a county that is, on paper, one hundred per cent Muslim. As far as I can tell most Saudis do not pray five times a day—and some, I am sure, do not pray at all. Like in any country, there are good people there are bad people, and there are every shade of grey. As one might expect, depending on their own religious leanings, piety and quality of character don’t seem to have a direct relationship. There are pious Muslims that are wonderful, lovely people; and there are non-devout Muslims that are also wonderful, lovely people. Similarly, there are both devout and non-devout Muslims who are brutish and nasty.

Western media likes to paint a picture of Muslims in general as violent, irrational, freedom hating people, or at the very least, it focuses entirely on those Muslims that happen to be so. Of course, it’s true that there are these kinds of people all over the world, in every culture, in every religion. Even, as I am loathe to admit, within Buddhism. Of course, whenever a Muslim points out to me that in Myanmar, there are Buddhists, even Buddhist monks murdering Muslims, I am always quick to point out that these cannot be REAL Buddhists: that the first precept, even for lay followers is not to kill. Similarly, when the subject of the Islamic State, comes up in the office, they are always discredited for the same reason: real Muslims do not murder. Verses of the Quran are always cited to support this assertion. 

When crazy people storm into the offices of French cartoonists and shoot everyone inside, they don’t do it because they are “extremists”, they do it because they are crazy. Very, very few people within the Muslim community condone this kind of behaviour. I worked with a guy who, upon our first meeting told me I was going to go to hell for not believing in God and calls non-believers “infidels” behinds their backs. He gets into fights with the other Muslims over small matters of faith, doesn’t get along with anybody, and has threatened violence to several members of the staff. In short, he’s bat-shit crazy, and obsessed with the letter of Islam. But as zealous and mentally unstable as he is, I can’t imagine even him murdering people for his faith. It takes a rare bird indeed.

Saudi Arabia is a country that is changing quickly. Ten years ago people thought that women would never be seen walking around without head scarfs. But I’ve seen in numerous times—in King Abdullah Economic City (owned by Dubai investors), and even in the malls in Jeddah. 

Speaking of his highness, he does not appear to have much more time on this Earth, and his successor is likely to bring in more liberal legislation. Actually, King Abdullah himself has approved legislation that will, for the first time, make tourist visas available in Saudi Arabia. I don’t know, his decision may be motivated by him understanding the need to diversify the Saudi economy more than anything else. And granted: it is already easy to obtain visas for hajj and umrah.  None-the-less, it will open the county up to people of all walks of life, and with them, new perspective and new ideas.

To be perfectly honest, Saudis are in desperate need of a little insight into the way the rest of the world works—especially in the field of education. The quality of education here is shameful. Running a classroom here is a constant battle, and it’s exhausting. Frankly, after a while, you just stop giving a damn. A colleague confided in me today, “I’ve stopped doing all the things I used to try and make this a better place. Now, I do nothing, and nobody has noticed.” I could only nod.  The standards here are shockingly low.

I’m glad for having the experience to teach here, and I’ll be benefiting from the money I made for years, but I think it’s actually made me a worse teacher. Working here has made me complacent and lazy. I got paid very well, but there was zero accountability. Literally none of my students passed this last trimester. I tried. Oh God how I tried. But in the end, the utter incompetence of students who had only gotten to where they are because of cheating, coupled with an out-right refusal to learn on one side, and the incompetence of the administration, who refused to listen to, much less adapt things to instructor feedback made any hope of effectively English next to impossible.   

Which is one very big reason why I have decided to leave and teach in Japan.  I will be teaching adults. Adults who have had a proper education, and actually know how to learn. Gods be praised! Instead of spending classroom time reminding students to put their phones away, get their pens from their lockers, stop chatting while I’m giving instructions et cetera, I’ll be able to teach. I don’t care if I’m taking a fifty per cent pay cut—it’s going to be worth it. Also because I won’t be living in a country that thinks where I put my penis is government business.

So, it’s goodbye sand and palm trees; hello mountains and cherry blossoms. Goodbye camels and sweet dates; hello panda bears and sushi. Goodbye thobes, and shmougs; hello kimonos and baseball caps. Saudi Arabia, it’s been a slice, but it’s time for me to go. So long, and thanks for all the khapsa.

And thanks for all of you who have kept up with my blog this past year. Knowing people have been reading has kept me motivated to write. Doing so has enriched my life, and I hope it has in some way enriched yours.

Peace, Love, and Pizza

Brady  

Sri Lanka Pt. 2

Having done basically zero research before heading out on my adventure, I was unaware that I could not take a bus directly from Anuradhapura to Sigiriya. I had thought that Sigiriya was a town, and not just an ancient natural wonder/stone fortress. Then again, it might actually be a town after all. It's sometimes a little hard to tell in Sri Lanka...

Taking the mini-bus from Anuradhapura to Dambulla, it struck me that Anuradhapura was much more spread out than I had initially thought. There seemed no end to the road-side buildings, be they stores, houses, or whatever. Eventually, I realized, that's just how it was in Sri Lanka. Also to my surprise, the only road available for the entire journey was a two lanes; there was one lane for each direction. This prompted many hair-raising, and nearly disastrous passing maneuvers. I thought it was absurd that there was such a narrow road connecting Sri Lanka's two most important tourist destinations. Later I would learn that there wasn't even a highway connect Kandy to Colombo--Sri Lanka's two biggest cities!

In Dambulla, I stubbornly ignored tuk-tuks and resolved to walk out of the city center in order to find accommodation. Eventually I found a place with wi-fi for only fifteen hundred rupees. I got a tuk-tuk to the bus station and soon was on my way to Sigiriya: The Lion Rock. Sigiriya is a isolated pillar of rock, which inexplicably rises several hundred feet from ground, with a smaller mini-mountain to the east, but otherwise isolated in it's own little valley.  I must admit, it was pretty cool. I understand that a very long time ago it was a Buddhist monastery, then for a short time converted to a fortress by a usurper king...and then reverted back to a monastery once that king had been deposed. The weather was excellent the scenery was impressive, and the rock itself was a marvel. The only drawbacks were the ticket price, which at three-thousand-nine-hundred rupees was even more expensive than the Anuradhapura circuit; and the throngs of Chinese tourists which were want to impede the progress of those behind them by stopping every twenty meters for group photo shoots. 

By twelve noon I had climbed the rock, checked out a nearby temple, returned to Dambulla and hopped a bus to Kandy. Having witnessed the madness of Colombo, I feared the worst for Sir Lanka's second city. But actually, it was kind of nice. It was way up in the the mountains, there seemed to be a real downtown area, and it just seemed way more chill than Colombo. Someone even showed me where to find an internet cafe without asking me for money...although he did offer to show me the Temple of the Tooth after depositing me at the cafe. I found a decent hotel that overlooked the lake, that didn't cost too much. There, I relaxed on the top floor, an open-air restaurant and did my nightly ritual of drinking Lion beer and checking my messages. The only other people up there were a Dutch couple and the staff.  I chatted to with the owner. He told me how once every couple of days, then monkeys would show up and he would give them something to eat. As the sun went down, a colony of fruit bats made their way past the hotel. Later I went for dinner with the Dutch couple.

Upon  returning to my room, I finished reading the only book I had brought with me--a meditation guide by a Buddhist monk in the Theravada tradition. The book left a bad taste in my mouth that, combined with what I had so far seen of Buddhism in Sri Lanka, left me feeling disenchanted with the religion I had loved for so long. In the book, the end goal of the Buddhist path, Nibana, is described as a remainderless cessation of being. I was aware of this concept before--in fact it's at the very heart of Buddhism. It's sometimes described as a "return to original mind" or the cessation of clinging. But the author I was reading, staunchly denied all that as "making something out of nothing", and wrote it off as foolishness. However, he made no attempt whatsoever to explain why anyone would want such a thing (especially seeing as how the states leading up to enlightenment are supremely blissful), and did very little to explain the old Buddhist conundrum: if there is no self, then what is it that reincarnates? His explanation: the "doer" and the "knower" are both illusions. But then, I wondered, what is it that's aware that the knower is an illusion? How is any of this even possible at all? What vague explanations the author gave towards the end of the book were mostly just references to the suttas. And I thought Buddhists were above that kind of appeal to authority. 



By the next day, my mind was full of dissatisfaction with Buddhism, and I felt very much aggravated that I had put so much stock into this religion for so long. Such was my mindset as I approached the famous "Temople of the Tooth", a Buddhist temple, which houses a tooth taken from the Buddha's funeral pyre. I thought about skipping it and going straight to the bus station, but thought I might as well do something memorable while I was in Kandy. So I approached the entrance, and was asked to change out of my shorts into a pair of pants. As I did so, the man that asked me to change served as a human curtain. I asked him if he was Buddhist and queried him about why anyone would want nibbana. Like a good Buddhist, he immediately replied it was the end of suffering. I told him I didn't understand why someone would want that. He had no reply. Shockingly, when I made the gesture to shake his hand, he remained unmoving and it seemed to me that he was equally perturbed by the notion of nibbana.

I got another shock when I was asked to pay admission. I have been to dozens of temples and churches, many far nicer than this one, and I never had to pay a fee. Not for Heinsa in Korea, which houses the Tripitaka Koreana, nor for Notre Dame in Paris. Donations boxes yes, entry tickets, no. I begrudgingly forked over a thousand rupees, rebuked a "tour guide", who of course began to offer his service before asking me if I wanted it, and made my way into the temple...and immediately thought about turning back. Throngs of devotes clogged the temple, again carrying lotus flowers, this time to offer up to Buddha's tooth before praying to it. After fighting my way up the stairs, it soon became clear that I wasn't going to get anywhere near the tooth, or whatever container it was housed in. So I just continued on, and looked about the very forgettable temple. In another room, there was another relic, and with lotus flowers offer up to it. There was a sign that warned against smelling the flowers-ostensibly because they were for the Buddha only. Superstitious idiocy.

In yet another room, there were a series of paintings that told the story of the tooth--from it's being dug out of the Buddha's funeral pyre to it's present location. It turned out that it had quite a rich history, and that it had even been instrumental in sparking warfare. There was even a painting that claimed that it resisted attempts to destroy it, claiming it had withstood the impact of a sledge hammer then levitated into the air and shone like a beacon, for some damn reason. I went through one museum they didn't make me pay for, but skipped a second they wanted money for. I left the temple in disgust. I would never call myself a Buddhist again, as I was occasionally prone to do, in order to simplify my beliefs. Buddhism, it seemed to me then was no better or rational than any of the other world religions, which I has so often criticized.  

Making my way to the bus station, I had decided I had seen enough things for one trip. It was time to go to the south and enjoy the beach. I had to return to Colombo first, but there turned out to be a highway to the southern province. Hallelujah! I arrived in Galle by sunset, and by sheer coincidence ran into a fellow named Walter, with whom I had worked in Rabigh for two days before he was transferred to Jeddah. We decided to travel together and went to Hikkaduwa beach,which turned out to be a bust, and the next day went to Unawatuna, where I would spend my remaining three days, and Walter would spend his remaining two. I did very little of note during those three days, mainly sipping assorted alcohols on the beach and going for the odd trek every so often. By the time the three days were up I was thoroughly relaxed.

Before heading back to Colombo, I explored the fort at Galle, which was very nice indeed. I stayed at the hostel I had began with, watched a movie, had a final bottle of beer, and took a snooze before taking my 2 AM cab to the airport. One of the hostel workers asked me how I like Sri Lanka. I told him is it was nice. He asked me when I would be back, and I replied: never.