​Saudi Diaries: Part 12 — The Whirlwind: Riyadh’s Morning, Dammam’s Night

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.

“Wake up. Wake up, we’re going to breakfast.”
I opened one eye. Abdulaziz was standing over me. Dressed. Awake. Coherent — three things I was not.
“What? Now? Who—? What??”
“Khalid. He just finished his night shift. He’s on his way.”
I had no time to ask follow-up questions, and honestly, no functioning part of my brain to ask them with. I was still standing at the bathroom sink, toothbrush in mouth, staring at my own half-formed reflection, when the phone rang. Reception. Our guest had arrived.

The Surprise
Let me be clear about the state I was in: disoriented, blurry-eyed, hair doing something structurally impossible, still not entirely convinced this wasn’t a continuation of my dune-filled dream. I stumbled into the lobby the way you stumble into a surprise party you didn’t know was happening — grateful, confused, and slightly embarrassed about your appearance.
And there was Khalid. Someone I knew, in the strange, modern way you know people now — COVID-19 years of online living and gaming, headsets and late-night matches, a friendship built entirely out of a shared internet connection and never once in the same room. This was the first time I was seeing him in the person, and he had just come off a night shift. Sleep should have been the only thing on his mind. Instead, here he was — alert, and smiling — because he’d seen on Instagram we were passing through Riyadh and had decided, without being asked twice, that we were not leaving without breakfast.
We piled into the car. Khalid gave directions from the back seat like a man who’d done this a thousand times, and within minutes we were sitting in front of a spread I recognized immediately — the same feast I’d fallen for back in Jeddah. Warm bread. Foul, rich and earthy. Shakshouka bubbling in its pan. Eggs, beans, cheese, a small mountain of dips I still dind’t have names for. Sweet minty tea, poured generously.
I sat there, still half-asleep, and thought: I have been in this country for a week. I had seen Al Balad’s crumbling coral-stone houses, the Corniche at sunrise, the sandstone cathedrals of Al Ula. I thought I understood, by now, what Saudi hospitality looked like. And still, it found a way to surprise me — this time in the form of a tired stranger-turned-friend who came straight from work to feed us before we hit the road. This wasn’t politeness. Politeness doesn’t skip sleep for you. This was something else. This was karam — generosity as instinct, not obligation. Funny, too, how a friendship built entirely on a screen — years of shared matches and voice chat, never once in person — turned out to be just as real as any I’d made face to face. Maybe more so, if this was how it showed up the moment we finally met.

Riyadh, Before It Wakes
After breakfast, we just went on a tour, unplanned, unhurried, born entirely out of the fact that we’d been too exhausted, until this exact moment, to actually see the city we were standing in.
We drove up and down Kind Fahd Road, past the Kingdom Center first — the “bottle opener” tower, all glass and sharp angles, cutting a clean silhouette into the pale morning sky. For me this was the image of  Riyadh-Skyline.
​Then the Al Faisaliyah Center, its golden ball perched at the top like something out of a Riyadh-specific mythology. Somewhere in between, the twisting form of the Al-Majdoul Tower caught the early light and threw it back at us in gold.

It was early enough that the city hadn’t fully woken up. The light was soft, almost apologetic. The streets, usually — I would learn — a battlefield, were quiet. Construction cranes stood still against the skyline, waiting for their shift to start, and everywhere I looked, there was the unmistakable feeling of a place in the midst of transformation: glass towers rising next to empty lots. Cranes beside completed skylines. A city visibly, almost impatiently, building itself into whatever it’s going to become.
“This is the only time to see Riyadh like this,” Khalid said. “Wait a few hours.”
He wasn’t exaggerating. This was 2023, and Riyadh’s public transport was still very much a work in progress — a new bus network being tested, metro lines under construction, tracks and stations rising alongside the towers but not yet open.

It wasn't us! This is how we found ti! :-)

 Which meant one thing: cars. Cars everywhere, and everyone driving them with what I can only describe as dynamic confidence. Aggressive lane changes. Gaps closed with millimeters to spare. Every merge a negotiation, every horn a sentence in a language I didn’t speak yet but was starting to understand. Abdulaziz, unfazed, would later tell me this was simply Tuesday.
But at 7:30 in the morning, none of that had started yet. We had wide, empty boulevards and a skyline lit gold, and for twenty minutes, Riyadh let us see it as a city of possibility rather than a city of horns.

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We returned to the hotel, and Khalid was about to go home for his well-earned sleep. The goodbye was quick — the kind of goodbye that doesn’t need to be long because nothing was left unsaid. He’d come straight from a night shift to feed us and show us his city, and now he was going home to finally sleep. I stood there for a second, genuinely humbled. This is the Saudi Arabia I was starting to know: a country of people who give without doing the math on what it costs them.

Back to Bed, Briefly
We had a few hours before checkout, and since neither of us had unpacked the night before, there was nothing to do but fall back into bed. This was, without exaggeration, the best sleep of the trip — the specific, bone-deep sleep that only comes after a twelve-hour drive followed by a 7 AM breakfast summons.
This, I was starting to realize, was the actual rhythm of this trip. Chaos, then rest. Surprise, then recovery. My body was slowly learning to keep up with a country that apparently did not believe in slow mornings.

Five Hundred Kilometers of Sand
By checkout, we said goodbye to Riyadh and pointed the car east. Dammam — and the Gulf coast — was another 500 kilometers away.
The city fell away quickly, and then it was just desert. Not the dramatic, sculpted rock formations of Al Ula, but something quieter and, somehow, just as hypnotic: an unbroken sweep of sand in every direction, shifting color as the light moved across it. Pale yellow that looked almost like sugar. Deep reds and rust-browns that could have passed for dried clay, or something older. Streaks of gold. Ochre in the low dips between dunes. I don’t think I saw the same shade twice over 300 kilometers.
I couldn’t stop looking. Every ripple in the sand felt like it had been placed there on purpose. I was watching a slow, patient masterpiece unfold at 120 kilometers an hour, nose pressed almost to the window like a kid on a school trip.

Abdulaziz, meanwhile, was doing what any local does on a road he’s driven a hundred times: focusing on the road, checking the time, thinking about the destination. My wide-eyed narration of “look at that one, that reddish one over there” was met with a polite, amused nod. To him, this was simply the drive to Dammam. To me, it was a museum with no walls.
And that’s the strange gift of traveling with a local — the landscape is brand new to you and completely familiar to them, and somehow both of those things can be true in the same car at the same time without any tension. He’d seen this desert a hundred times. But he was seeing it with me, one more time, through my eyes — and I think that mattered to both of us more than either of us said out loud.

Steak on the Gulf
We reached Dammam in the evening, the city that marks Saudi Arabia’s edge on the Arabian Gulf. We booked a place to stay parked at the gas station in Dammam, last second again — apparently we hadn’t learned much from the AlUla incident — and before even checking into the room, went looking for dinner.
Abdulaziz found a steakhouse. Familiar menu. A good cut of meat, cooked exactly right, and sides that did their job well. Nothing exotic, nothing that needed translating.
And somehow that was the point. After crossing an entire country in two days — Riyadh’s glass towers, five hundred kilometers of shifting sand, a breakfast built on tradition — I sat down to a plate that could have come from almost anywhere in the world, and it felt like a small revelation. Saudi Arabia, I realized, doesn’t just have depth. It has range. Local cuisine, yes, in staggering variety. But also every fast-food chain you could name, fine dining, and everything stacked in between — available, it seemed, no matter the hour or the city.

Back home in Europe, I’m used to limits. A small town means limited choice. Even in a big city, sometimes there is only one or two fast-food options after a certain hour. Here, the options never seemed to run out, wherever we landed, whatever time it was. There was always a decision to make, a craving to answer.
The steak was, simply, perfect. A small, familiar pleasure at the far edge of a very unfamiliar day — proof that even a country wrapped in ancient tradition leaves plenty of room for the ordinary comforts, too.

We collapsed into bed that night full of steak and memories, legs still humming faintly with the rhythm of the road.
I came into this day expecting a long drive and not much else. Instead, I got a breakfast built entirely on someone else’s exhaustion and generosity, a private morning tour of a city still deciding what it wants to become, five hundred kilometers of a desert that refused to repeat itself, and a steak dinner that tasted, oddly, like home.
We drove from the heart of the kingdom to its eastern edge in a single day. We said goodbye to one friend and arrived to meet another. We ate shakshouka and foul for breakfast in Riyadh, and steak for dinner in Dammam. And somewhere in between, in the endless, shifting sands of the desert, I found a piece of myself I didn’t know I was looking for.
Tomorrow would bring more adventures. But tonight, we slept. And the desert waited, patient and eternal, for the next traveler to cross its sands.