Saudi Diaries — Part 4: The Old and the New

​This day started with a decision.
It had been forming quietly since the moment I landed — I saw Abdulaziz in the morning in his white thobe, effortlessly elegant, looking like he had stepped out of somewhere timeless. I had watched the men around me in Jeddah move through the city in their thobes with an ease and a dignity that I found genuinely beautiful. There was something about the garment — the clean, unbroken line of white from shoulder to ankle, the way it moved, the way it seemed to belong so completely to the light and the heat and the pace of the place — that made everything else I had packed feel slightly beside the point.
Here is the thing: I had come prepared.

​Before leaving Vienna, I had done what I would do on every trip after this one: I brought a thobe. A white one, folded carefully into my suitcase between the dark shirts I had packed and used as strategic armour against my own eating habits.
I informed Abdulaziz that I had brought one, that I wanted to wear it, that I wanted to feel less like a tourist and more like someone who was making the effort to meet the place on its own terms. He looked at me for a moment, and then his face broke into a genuine smile of a man who finds the idea not just acceptable but actively awesome.

​I put it on that morning before we left for Al Balad. White, lightweight, clean and simple — and when I looked in the mirror, I was surprised by how immediately and completely right it felt. There is something about a thobe that imposes a certain posture, a certain ease of movement. You cannot rush in a thobe. 

You cannot hunch. The garment seems to have its own opinion about how you should carry yourself, and its opinion is: slower, taller, calmer than that.
I loved it immediately and completely.
​I have worn a thobe on every visit to Saudi Arabia since. It is, without question, the most comfortable thing I have ever put on my body — and there is something beyond comfort in it too, 

something about the small act of dressing like the people around you, of making the effort to meet a place on its own terms rather than arriving in it as a permanent tourist. Abdulaziz never suggested I do it. It was entirely my own thing. But he did help me. And the help was needed! You don’t just put on a thobe; there are rules, there is order to wearing it. 
And if you don’t do it right, you will look ridiculous.  The look on his face when I put my thobe on, and he fixed my shmagh — the quiet pride of a host whose guest has already understood something before he even arrived — told me it had been exactly the right instinct.

​I went to Al Balad in my thobe. And I am convinced, to this day, that it made me see the place differently. That dressing for a place is also a way of opening yourself to it.

​Now, back to the city: Jeddah shows you its future first.
That is the deal it makes with you from the moment you arrive — the highways, the towers, the ambition written in glass and steel and illuminated signage fifty metres tall. It is a city moving forward with a velocity that takes your breath away, and it wants you to notice. It wants you to be impressed. And you are. You cannot help it.
What it does not tell you, until you go looking, is that underneath all of that — underneath the Corniche and the construction cranes and the hyper-modern shopping districts — there is a heart that has been beating for a thousand years. And to find it, you simply drive away from the water, let the towers shrink in the wing mirror, and follow the streets as they get older.

​We went to Al Balad at noon.
In retrospect, this was either a mistake or a stroke of accidental genius, and I have spent some time trying to decide which. Abdulaziz mentioned the heat in a mild, informational tone, as if describing a weather fact rather than a safety warning. I had nodded and said yes, yes, of course, it's fine—and it was fine, mostly, in the way things are fine when you are too interested in what you are looking at to properly register what is happening to your body temperature.
But because we went at noon, when the sun was at its most vertical and most merciless, we had Al Balad almost entirely to ourselves.
The streets were quiet in a way that felt earned rather than empty. The heat had pressed most of the city indoors, into the shade, into the long, slow pause that the middle of a Saudi afternoon imposes on its inhabitants like a reasonable suggestion. Which meant that we walked those ancient alleyways with no crowds between us and the stones, no tourists, no locals floating over our shoulders. Just footsteps — mine on the old paving, and Abdulaziz's beside them — and the weight of a place that did not need an audience to be magnificent.

​The transition happens gradually and then all at once.
One moment you are in the city I had come to know over those first two days — wide boulevards, modern facades, the confident geometry of new construction — and then the streets begin to narrow. The buildings lose their clean lines. The materials change: less glass, less steel, more stone, more wood, more of the particular warm ochre colour that coral limestone takes on after centuries of sun. The architecture becomes organic in a way that modern buildings simply are not, as though it had grown rather than been built, each structure leaning slightly into its neighbour, the whole neighbourhood held together by proximity and time.
I stopped talking somewhere in that transition. Not because there was nothing to say, but because the place seemed to ask for quiet the way a library does — not through any explicit instruction, but through something in the atmosphere itself. Abdulaziz noticed and said nothing. He figured me out.
And then I looked up, and there they were.

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​The Roshan towers of Al Balad are one of those things that photographs cannot fully prepare you for, because photographs flatten the thing that makes them extraordinary: the way they lean. Not dangerously, not alarmingly, but with the easy, confident tilt of something that has been standing long enough to stop worrying about perfect vertical. The buildings rise four, five, six storeys above the alleyways, built from coral stone quarried from the Red Sea bed centuries ago — rough-textured, warm-coloured, carrying in its surface the memory of water. And projecting from every upper floor, overhanging the narrow streets below: the mashrabiya screens. Wooden lattice panels, intricately carved, some darkened with age to the colour of strong tea, framing windows that jut outward into the alley on carved wooden brackets, leaning out over the street below like neighbours gossiping across a fence.
The shade they cast was the most welcome shade I have ever stood in.
I pressed my hand flat against the coral stone of the nearest wall. It was warm from the sun, slightly rough, granular under my palm — and I could feel, faintly, the texture of individual coral fragments in it, the sea locked into the building material, the Red Sea that had shaped this city in more ways than one. It felt like touching something that had been here before anything I knew existed, and would be here long after.
Above me, through the carved lattice of a mashrabiya screen three floors up, the brutal noon sun was broken into something gentle. Light fell through the wooden geometry in shifting, dappled patterns on the alley floor — soft diamonds and lines and interlocking shapes, moving slowly as the light moved, as though the building itself was breathing.
I stood in it and did not want to move.

​We wandered without agenda.
This is the only way to walk Al Balad. Any itinerary would be a kind of violence against the place's logic, which is the logic of the labyrinth — not designed to be solved but to be experienced, to let you lose your sense of direction and replace it with something better: presence. We turned where the alley turned. We stopped when something stopped us.
The sounds changed the moment we left the main road. The noise of the city — traffic, construction, the ambient hum of a place in perpetual motion — was absorbed by the old walls with a completeness that felt almost physical, as though the coral stone had been taking in sound for so long that it had simply gotten very good at it. In the narrow alleyways, what remained were our own footsteps, echoing back from the walls on both sides. My shoes on the old paving. The occasional creak of a wooden shutter somewhere above. Once, somewhere deep in the quarter, the distant sound of water.
The smell shifted too. Old wood — a dry, ancient smell, faintly sweet — mixed with dust and the ghost of spices drifting from somewhere nearby, a shop perhaps, its doors open onto the alley. There was something underneath it all that I can only describe as the smell of age itself: not decay, nothing unpleasant, but the accumulated presence of time concentrated into stone and timber.

​We walked around just exploring. Eventually, we ended up next to one of the old mosques in the quarter. We left our shoes at the door. Inside, the temperature dropped by what felt like 20 degrees — multiple large AC units and the thick coral walls doing what they had been designed to do. I stood in the interior and let my eyes and lungs adjust.

The ceiling above was held by wooden beams, dark with age, running in parallel rows above our heads. And hanging from those beams, at intervals down the length of the room: ceiling lamps. Old ones, ornate, their brass fittings patinated to a warm green-gold, casting a light that was soft and directional and entirely different in character from the blinding noon outside. The effect was of something suspended between eras — ancient structure, ancient beams, light falling the way it might have fallen a hundred years ago, two hundred. I stood beneath one of the chandeliers, looked up at the wooden ceiling, and felt the particular silence of a place where people have been coming to be quiet for a very long time.
I found myself whispering without deciding to. Abdulaziz was already speaking at half volume. The building had made the decision for us.

​On the way back toward the main street, we passed a doorway that stopped me entirely.
The building was unambiguously old — coral stone, mashrabiya above, the worn threshold of something that had been walked over ten thousand times. But through the open door came the smell of fresh coffee. Not Arabic coffee, or not only — the particular, precise smell of specialty espresso, the kind that comes from single-origin beans and a precise grind and a barista who takes the thing seriously.
Inside: a café. Small, beautiful, the original coral walls left entirely bare and lit by pendant bulbs strung from the old wooden ceiling. Young Saudis sat at low tables with laptops and small white cups. A La Marzocco machine — the kind you find in the best coffee shops in Italy, Vienna or Copenhagen — sat on the counter with the quiet confidence of something that belonged exactly where it was.
I stood at the doorway for a moment, trying to process the combination. Four hundred years of wall. Third-wave coffee. A twenty-two-year-old in a thobe, earphones in, working on something on his screen in the light filtered through a mashrabiya window above him.
It should have felt wrong — the collision of centuries, the intrusion of the contemporary into the ancient. It didn't. It felt, somehow, like exactly the point. Like the answer to a question I hadn't quite formulated yet, about how a country holds its past and its future at the same time without letting either one destroy the other. Not preservation in amber. Not erasure in the name of progress. Something more difficult and more interesting than either: continuity. The old walls still standing, still doing their work, now holding something new inside them without apology.
Saudi Arabia, I was beginning to understand, is very good at this.

As we made our way out towards the new, we passed through a few more streets that kept the old and the contemporary woven together in a way I did not expect. Next to the old buildings of Al Balad, a few new walls had a series of really good graffiti. Despite the sun and heat, I just had to stop and take a few more photos before we left.
We walked out of Al Balad in the mid-afternoon, the sun beginning its slow descent from its noon apex but still entirely serious about its intentions. My thobe was damp. My feet knew what they had been doing. I was, in some way I could not immediately articulate, altered.
I had come into the quarter expecting history in the way that tourists expect history: something to observe, to photograph, to appreciate from a respectful distance. What Al Balad gave me instead was something closer to contact. The stone under my palm. The shade of the mashrabiya. The silence of the mosque. The smell of old wood and new coffee existing in the same doorway without contradiction.
In a country that had shown me its future so confidently — the towers, the highways, the grand ambition of a nation remaking itself at extraordinary speed — I had found, on a quiet noon with empty alleyways and borrowed shade, something that felt like its soul. Older than any of the glass towers. Quieter. More certain of itself.
The coral towers of Al Balad are not monuments. They are not museum pieces behind glass. They are storytellers — patient, worn, warm to the touch, leaning slightly out over the alleyways as though trying to get a better look at whoever has come to listen.
That afternoon, in the strange gift of an empty noon, I was lucky enough to be that person.
I walked out into the sunlight feeling like I had been trusted with something.