JEDDAH, 22 June 2006 — A rural tribal chief that was visiting kinfolk in the big town probably now wishes he had stayed in the comfort of his more rural surroundings, the daily Okaz reported yesterday. Or perhaps it was worth coming to Jeddah to learn a valuable, or perhaps better described as expensive, lesson on the difference between gold and fools gold. The chief’s first mistake might have been to admire the wristwatch of a stranger in an area coffee shop a little too enthusiastically. The stranger, applying the legendary principle ascribed to the famous American showman P.T. Barnum that “there’s a sucker born every minute,” told the man that he had bought the watch in Dubai for SR30,000, but for a mere SR10,000 he would sell it to the man — a discount he said was based on his admiration for the Kingdom’s noble tribal leaders. Without even haggling for the price, a big no-no in this part of the world, the tribesman eagerly counted out SR10,000 of his travel money and quickly purchased the item he so deeply coveted. The hustler then told the tribal leader that he admired the man so much he wouldn’t even bother to count out the money given to him by the old man. Perhaps the customer would have been happy to live the rest of his days in ignorance of the real origins of his new prize, but instead he took a walk through one of Jeddah’s downtown street markets and discovered the exact same watch being sold for SR200. It was then that the man probably learned the biggest lesson, one described by the famous Irish proverb: “A fool’s money is not long in his pocket.”