Memoirs of a Saudi Ph.D. student: So much for vacations

I’ve just arrived after a two-week vacation from my beloved country Saudi Arabia. Well, to be honest all the time during my preparation for the vacation I felt very excited but slowly and gradually I began to realize that things are not always as shiny as they appear and I ended up in a complete mess.
To clarify the picture to you my dear readers, I will tell you that we start the vacation with, for example, five pairs of trousers packed for each one of my sons and then when I pack back on my return I could only find one and that too ripped apart.
I faced the problem of messy stuff after the first vacation we had after I started my Ph.D. in the UK. Since then I’ve been trying strategies that may save our clothes and stuff from being lost but still to no avail. During my first vacations, I had initially planned to spend half of my vacations at my family’s house and half at my husband’s and I packed accordingly, and we ended up torn between the two houses with half of our clothes at the laundry basket in my family’s house and the other in my husband’s. And when it was time to go back we started gathering our stuff and I tend to spend the last two days collecting and searching drawers of my sisters in case some of the stuff was put there mistakenly. Oh that’s not fun at all (hey stop searching, why would we take your stuff?). So then I decided to adopt another approach. It doesn’t matter where we are staying, I will unpack all the stuff in one place and then pack small bags for the children if they want to stay at their granny’s, auntie’s or uncle’s and this strategy also proved terribly unsuccessful. So instead of collecting the stuff from two places, I ended up collecting trousers, shirts and socks from several places and it was very embarrassing (oh Hi, please could you double check if my son has left his red trousers at your place when he stayed over the other day? No! You couldn’t find it, mmmm would you search again?
No! Oh am I being so greedy and demanding? Please accept my apology. And needless to say, we never found the red trousers.
As I stayed in Makkah and needed to travel on a daily basis for a commitment in Jeddah, so literally when I am asked where did you spend your vacation? I would confidently and truthfully answer. “I had a lovely time on the Makkah-Jeddah road.” As we are still banned from driving, I was forced to hire a driver for two weeks and ended up paying a big chunk of cash to him and I had to put up with him being late and sometimes leaving me waiting on streets. Well, this is nothing new. Women in Saudi Arabia are living like this since a long time. But at least I spent time with my dear family specially my mom and dad, may Allah keep them safe and sound all the time.
And now I am back and I need to make a good start on my data analysis, can I tell my supervisor that I need a vacation from my vacation without being killed? I don’t think so.

@ HatoonKadi