DIARY
We are in Kuuru. It’s a dimly lit, too hip to handle Peruvian-Japanese fusion bar and restaurant. The decor is Inca bamboo; the drinks arrive with dark red ice sculptures the size of tennis balls that deliver a Beluga caviare flavour as they melt. The waiting staff, dressed in a St Laurent-Westwood fusion, all speak Spanish and enthuse about the freshness of the yuzu wasabi dressing on the crab and cured Highland Cattle salad. In one corner of our table, studded with an emerald-and-ruby fusion, they place a tiny metal barbecue and show us how to crisp individual sheets of nori seawood that we will shortly be rolling up into our own scallop temaki duvet.
And this, this here, this oh-so-immaculately here, is my first night in Saudi Arabia.
The trip has been planned in haste. A three-day visit, snatched from my supremely hectic but deeply fulfilling life as an award-winning broadcaster, is somewhere between an adventure and an experiment. Could my teenage son and I get visas in time? Could we make a long weekend feel like a holiday? Could I buy a half-way decent selection of clothes that would keep things simple but elegant, understated yet fiercely independent, throughout my Saudi sojourn? More critically, could I reconcile everything I knew about Saudi – the regime, its treatment of journaists, women, foreign labourers – with a place I wanted to hang out?
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