Many people ask how is life in Saudi Arabia and of curse there are as many answers as there are people. But one the observations that comes to mind having been here for a while now is that there is a barakah in money but not in time. The word barakah is an Arabic word which stands for blessing. Though headline salaries may not compare as well with Western countries the expenditure here is less. Hence the proverbial buck or riyal lasts longer, food is cheaper, costs are lower, hidden taxes are very low and so on.
The down side is that as the country lies on the high end of the spectrum of regulation and bureaucracy things take time. Work hours also tend to be longer than in the West and perhaps this also contributes to the lack of spending as people have less free time to roam around. by the time the weekend comes (if you are lucky enough to have one in your job) a lot of people spend time sleeping and catching up with missed sleep during the week. Hence things that take a few hours in the West can take many days especially in the beginning.
People across the spectrum in general tend to spend long hours catching up on sleep on the weekend. Their productive non-work lives tend to be consigned to dreams and there is a general soporific effect to the weekends. This is nicely captured in the followng quotation that I came across in an article on sleep on the BBC.
"You speculate on the luxury of wearing out a whole existence in bed, like an oyster in its shell, content with the sluggish ecstasy of inaction." Nathaniel Hawthorne
