With its plethora of shops, offices and small hotels, the center of Jeddah between the Red Sea Palace Hotel and the Central Post Office is a lively place most of the time, and the big-city feel is unmistakable. But on Fridays, its crowds grow remarkably as thousands of Asians gather in the area to spend their weekly day off to meet countrymen, to shop, or just to see the world go by.
“We come here to see friends, and this place is very convenient because it is in the middle of town,” says a man from Bangladesh sitting in front of an exchange and remittance office next to the Mahmal Center on King Abdul Aziz Street.
The big square stretching down to the Central Post Office begins to fill up with expatriates every Friday at noon, with the Bangladeshis usually arriving first. The Filipinos show up in force in the late afternoon. They are the only contingent with a significant number of women.
Apart from being downtown, the area has much else to attract foreign workers on their weekly day off. The twin buildings next to the Central Post Office are home to a South Asian bazaar selling everything from Indian tobacco to the latest DVDs from Bollywood. The complex also houses “Far East Cabins for International Communications” and a “Korean Shopping Center.”
At the front of the Central Post Office, a string of mailboxes tell their own story. Five of them are marked Philippines, Pakistan, Egypt, Thailand and Sri Lanka respectively. Another just marked “outgoing” takes care of mail to the rest of the world, much to the chagrin of a well-dressed man posting a letter to India. He says his country is surely entitled to its own slot.
The area has street vendors like the segment-conscious Saudi from Jizan who has a wide selection of Pakistani, Indian and Bangladeshi music cassettes spread out on his piece of pavement on King Abdul Aziz Street.
“On Friday, I sell these cassettes, but tomorrow the tapes here will all be Arabic,” he explains, waving his hand over his wares.
In addition, the city center has several shopping malls ranging from the posh to the popular. There is a fair number of shops specializing in travel bags and suitcases, and on the other side of the Mahmal Center, there is a plaza where you can sit down and smell the sea breeze while enjoying a coffee or a sandwich supplied by one of several kiosks.
But these practical considerations only seem to be part of the explanation why the square and the surrounding area attract such massive numbers of expatriates every Friday. The men gathering here do not readily talk of homesickness, at least not in conversations with a stranger. Nevertheless, the feeling shows indirectly in many ways. A man from New Delhi politely steers the exchange away from talk of his hometown and its many famous sights. Instead, he launches into a monologue about his work as a personnel manager of a fast-food restaurant. A Filipino electrician whose remittances help keep two siblings in college back in Manila, needs no prodding before enumerating the companies here that employ large numbers of his countrymen.
The fact that most only go home on the employer-paid holiday every two years, seems to be regarded as a painful subject. Conversely, a Sudanese truck driver is proud that he is able to visit his family every year. “This is no problem because Sudan is just half an hour away by air,” he explains, no doubt exaggerating to make his point.
Longing for home may also be detected in the way some expatriates stress that their work here enables them to save money. For them, their work here has the purpose of enabling them to set up a business back home, like the Pakistani taxi driver who plans to start a dry-cleaner’s when he returns to Lahore.
However, many Asians claim to be unable to make savings, all their remittances being spent to provide for their families. It should be added that this often includes paying for the education of relatives. The Filipino electrician is a typical case.
A colleague and countryman of his is Ferdinand, encountered in the Filipino restaurant on the ground floor in the Corniche Commercial Center. Ferdinand says he is married, and that his wife and two children live just outside Manila. A wiry, cheerful man, he is accompanied by a friend who leaves most of the talk to him, but laughs at his frequent jokes. The two openly admit they are homesick. The popularity of downtown as a meeting place for Jeddah’s foreign workers may also be due to less tangible factors than easy transport or attractive shops. Atmosphere could be part of the explanation.
The mixture of old, new and ultramodern buildings and the unmistakable throb of a big city may contribute to make the area a home away from home for Asians on their weekly day of rest. The central square is itself a fascinating, somewhat eerie jumble of the dashing and the decrepit. Separated from the polished stone and glass building of the Mahmal Center by the narrow Karantina Street stands a three-story Arab-style house which seems to be in for either urgent renovation or for the wrecker’s ball. A peeling sign in Arabic says it is a municipal library and documentation center.
Many of the street vendors catering to the crowds on the square and the adjoining King Abdul Aziz Street are themselves expatriates. There are a couple of shoemakers, all from Afghanistan, and Pakistanis and Bangladeshis selling sunglasses, leather goods and music cassettes. A tiny boy from Somalia sells half-liter bottles of mineral water. He is so short he can hardly reach the bottles displayed on a couple of upended cardboard boxes. However, he is only standing in for the owner, a jolly Saudi who turns up and explains the boy is the son of a neighbor.
Whether Saudi or foreign, these street salesmen, like their colleagues elsewhere in the developing world, use business principles that have only lately been adopted by big multinational corporations. As for the idea of lean production, it is hard to imagine anything leaner than the water seller’s couple of upended cardboard boxes or the audiotape vendor’s square yard and a half of cloth spread out on the pavement. Strict adherence to the just-in-time doctrine pioneered by Japanese corporations in their heyday is evidenced by the spartan inventories kept by the Afghan shoemakers. Just a dozen soles and heels seems to be what each of them expects for this Friday’s turnover.
Finally, street vendors here — and indeed everywhere — are famous for keeping a sharp eye on their cash flow. So famous, in fact, that international business schools teach their students to imagine that the company they are going to manage is a pavement seller’s limited stock of goods, the so-called wheelbarrow principle.
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(Lars Moller-Rasmussen is a journalist with Danmarks Radio. He recently visited the Kingdom.)
