 As I was planning my second trip to Saudi, Abdulaziz texted his plan: "You must come for dinner at my family's house. My family would love to meet you."
I remember staring at my phone for a full minute, a strange mix of excitement and panic rising in my chest. I was being invited into someone's home. Not a restaurant, not a café, not neutral ground — a home. And with that invitation came a hundred silent questions. What do I wear? What do I say? What if I do something wrong?
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  The Flight Home, Looking Back, and the Feeling of “When Can I Go Back?”
The bridge was still beneath us. King Fahd Causeway, stretching its 25 kilometers of concrete and ambition between two countries. The Gulf below us had turned that impossible turquoise again, the one I still didn’t have a word for. The sky was doing something soft and orange at the edges. We didn’t say much. We didn’t need to. Somewhere in that silence, I understood something: the trip hadn’t ended in Bahrain. It ended here, on this bridge, driving back toward Saudi soil. Every kilometer we crossed now was a kilometer closer to the end of something extraordinary. I felt it settle into my chest — not quite sadness, not quite joy. Gratitude, mostly. The specific, heavy gratitude of knowing you’ve been given something you didn’t deserve and can never repay. Then the bridge ended. The passport stamps happened. We were back in the Kingdom. And just like that, the logistics began.  Abdulaziz looked at me. There was a glint in his eye — the same one I had learned to recognize over the past two weeks, the one that always meant something was coming.
“What if…” he said. And then he stopped. He let it hang there. He knew exactly what he was doing. By now I understood that Abdulaziz didn’t tease by accident — he teased with precision, like a chef plating a dish he already knew you’d love. I waited. I had learned, somewhere between Jeddah and Riyadh, that rushing him only made the silence longer. “Bahrain,” he finally said. “The causeway. We’re going. Now.” I laughed because for a second I thought he was joking. He wasn’t. Saudi Diaries: Part 13: A Day in Dammam — Rest, Rain, and the Friendships That Keep Giving7/15/2026  I woke up to silence.
Not the silence of an empty room, but the silence of nowhere to be. No engine idling outside. No alarm set for a sunrise drive. No map open on my phone, no border to cross, no next stop waiting for us. After the steak dinner the night before — the kind of meal that makes you sleep like you’ve been poured into the mattress — I opened my eyes in Dammam to something I hadn’t felt in days: stillness. Abdulaziz had an appointment that morning, the actual reason we’d come to Dammam in the first place. He left early, quietly, and for the first time on this trip, I had a morning that belonged to no one but me. I did the only reasonable thing. I went back to sleep.  I have never in my life been so asleep and so awake in the same ten minutes.
The night before, Abdulaziz and I had rolled into Riyadh after twelve hours on the road from Al Ula — a drive so long it had rearranged something in my brain. We didn’t unpack. We didn’t talk. We just fell, fully clothed in spirit if not in fact, into the kind of sleep that swallows you whole. I remember dreaming in sand. Dunes shifting behind my eyelids, the hum of tires on asphalt looping endlessly, gold and rust and pale yellow bleeding into each other like a watercolor left out in the rain. And then, at 7 AM, someone was shaking my shoulder. 
Saudi Diaries — Part 10: — The Bites, The Sips, and 20 Kilograms of Dates (Foodie Adventures Pt. 2)7/7/2026  This blog is called Bite&Sip. Nine parts in, and I’ve barely stopped to talk about the food — which, if you know me, is a little absurd. So let’s fix that.
Because if I trace the shape of this trip so far, it runs straight through my stomach. The overwhelming breakfast spread that nearly defeated me in Part 4. The shawarma stand in Yanbu that I still think about, dripping garlic sauce down my wrist somewhere on the road to AlUla. The tiny cups of Arabic coffee that kept appearing — in shops, in offices, in the back seat of a car — like punctuation marks between one adventure and the next. And the dates. Always, always the dates.  I woke up before my alarm, again.
For a moment, I didn’t know why. Then I saw the light coming through the gap in the curtains — soft, gold, almost liquid — and I remembered where I was. AlUla. I got up and pulled the curtains open and just stood there. A few palm trees swayed lazily in the courtyard. Beyond them, rising out of the earth like they’d always been there and always would be, were the rock formations. Massive. Ochre and rust and pink, depending on where the light hit them. Standing guard over a valley that looked like it had been waiting millions of years for someone to notice it.  The towers of KAEC were still visible in the rearview mirror when Abdulaziz said it.
“Now you’ll see the other side of Saudi.” He said it simply, eyes on the road, as if he were mentioning the weather. But the words settled into me with weight. I had seen the ancient — Al Balad’s coral-stone alleys, narrow enough to touch both walls at once. I had seen the future — KAEC’s glass towers rising out of reclaimed coastline like a promise not yet kept. Now, apparently, I was going to see something older than both. Something that didn’t care about either. The cranes shrank first, then the towers, then the neat grid of streets that didn’t have buildings on them yet. And then there was just the road. Flat, grey, endless, with heat shimmering off it in waves that made the horizon look liquid.  King Abdullah Economic City, Saudi Arabia Before visiting the city, it is recommended to pre-register for entry. You can do that online or even at the city gate.  The gate appeared first.
Modern boots rising from the flat earth — clean lines, steal and stone, the kind of architectural confidence that doesn't ask for your approval. We passed under it, and then: nothing. Empty road. Empty sky. The desert pressing in from both sides, patient and unbothered, as if the gate were simply a mistake someone had built and abandoned. I looked at Abdulaziz. He kept his eyes on the road and smiled the way you do when you already know the punchline. |
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