Cekik Darah

A week ago I came upon a website on expatriates living in Saudi Arabia. It had interviews with a number of orang putihs and there was one which I found to be quite interesting. She's an American who apparently enjoyed her stay in Jeddah despite the many restrictions. That's fine with me. What shocked me is when she said her family spent between 4k and 5k riyals in grocery shopping monthly! and that amount, she said was "reasonably not bad!" And that was in 2007. Wow!

We spend WAY less than half of that amount and even that, we feel that it is too much compared to our spending back in KL. Here, one hour of grocery shopping can easily cost us SR300, sometimes SR400, double what we usually paid in KL. I have lived here 9 months already and I still cringe whenever I look at the receipts.

While I am on this $$ talk, the kids' schools are also ridiculously Pencekik Darah. One class photograph costs SR50 (for Amir) and SR70 (for Nina) and whylah the photos must be in 8x10 size?? To justify the crazy price tags?? Wouldn't it be easy if they just email us the pics and let the parents do the printing? You'd think this would be a better option in today's world but NO. They'd rather go a step backward so they gain a bit of profit for themselves. I mean seriously, do you really have to hire a professional photographer to take the photos? Surely, the teacher who teaches photography classes in THAT school can do it for free? Back in my school years, I think our photographer was our PE teacher, or was he our Arts teacher? Whatever, but I think we paid only 50 sen for the photos. Or was it free? Back in my kids' school in KL, the photos were FOC.

And then there is the exorbitant taxi fares. It just does not make sense. Their petrol price is lots and lots CHEAPER than a price of 500ml bottled water but a five km ride can easily make me SR20 poorer. That's like the fare for my 17km taxi ride from my house to Jalan Riong, Bangsar.