After my last few posts on my childhood growing up in Saudi Arabia, many readers wanted to know a little bit more about the country that I called home as a child and my time spent in Saudi Arabia.
I thought it might be beneficial before I delve too far into my childhood home in posts to come, if you all knew a little bit more about the kingdom of Saudi Arabia
to understand that part of the world a little better.

Saudi is a place that many know the name, but few really know much about it.

It’s a land equal parts mysterious & sheltered,

yet incomparably & irrevocably linked to the West.

Here are a few things about the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia that you might not have known:

Mecca is the birthplace of the prophet Mohammed

(in Islam the words “Peace be upon him” would follow the prophet’s name.)

Mecca is also only allowed to be entered by Muslims and is home to the Kaaba, where Muslims travel often for pilgrimage.

Medina (named this by the Prophet himself) is the home of his burial place and is the second holiest city in the Islamic world.

Both are located in Western Saudi Arabia.

Now, while as expats on ARAMCO compounds we practiced different faiths, the whole of Saudi Arabia is an Islamic nation.  That means that the call to prayer (known in Arabic as adhan) rings out across the country 5 times a day from mosques throughout each city.

When I lived within the kingdom, shops always closed during prayer call, restaurants shut down,

TV was interrupted with the prayer and an image of the great mosque would appear.

The whole world stopped, Muslim men would stop on the corners of streets to stop and kneel down and pray to Allah.

I’ve always found this particular part of Islam pretty powerful and to see public devotion like this is truly a unique experience unknown to us in the West.

Now when I was in Morocco last year (another Muslim country), prayer call still resounded 5 times a day but life didn’t stop, no one paid it any attention in public so I think it totally depends on where you are and how traditional the country is.

In the 1700’s the Al Saud family grew to become the Saudi Royal family and helped to put Saudi Arabia on the map.

Today the Saudi Royal family is vast and numbers in the hundreds.  Because many of the princes take on more than one wife (as allowed in Islam), there are many families within
even the smallest royal circle.

A large peninsula, the Persian Gulf on the East was where I grew up.  To the South of Saudi are the nations of Yemen, Oman, the UAE and Qatar to the East as well as the island nation of Bahrain.

While I’ve heard from friends still there, that it’s gotten better, Saudi Arabia is still enormously hard to get into as a tourist.  Unless you have a connection there, a direct person you’re visiting or you’re working for ARAMCO, it’s virtually impossible to enter many parts of the kingdom.  Visas are very hard to come by and when I lived there, even incredibly difficult to get family inside.

So when we left, we really left.  We knew we wouldn’t be able to visit easily again.

A huge landmass, Saudi Arabia is mostly desert but the climate varies greatly throughout the kingdom.  While most of the country is dry and very hot, I grew up directly on the Persian Gulf where our humidity levels most often were higher than the temperature (which could reach into the 120’s), never feeling dry like the desert.  The geography of the country varies greatly as well, from mountains in the West to huge stretches of desert dunes to ocean beaches.