shoe shopping night swimming

not always adjacently placed, but always thematically linked, tall double doors for the owning family, low single door for the staff. (see note at the bottom of this post.)

a cat introduces Qasr al Hokm metro station:

further and better photos of the foregoing:

interesting zone, this, souqs and the old part of Riyadh, including Al Masmak, the central public square, a walled cemetery, commercial life and cool arcades, and, empty spaces, making for little comparison with Türkiye where every corner is, you might say, activated (this would relate to the social construction of space as such, the desert here enters into buildings as what in Japan is called Ma

but it differs from it for being untended, 'blind' space, accepted, accepted as the neat and uniform piles of rubble are beside the Ascott, little deserts, internal and external, everywhere), stores operating between 9 and midday, reopening at 4pm until 10pm.

(and, returning to this post, now I come to think of it, in my calligraphic encounters with Arabic—space—particularly in street-signs and other signs on the street, a graphic space that can be intentionally elongated along the horizontal axis. An intentional and habitually accepted space but, at once, a non-signifying space, What does it mean, asked, Miles, a colleague of Jo's?

(Nothing, but that, writing, there is space for it: a space for signwriters to attenuate the horizontal lines of letters to their maximum extent; then, it's not a big deal, neither an imposition on the language or its clarity of expression nor to the detriment of legibility. . . to make the line under the baa ب, in its initial position, since the symbols change shape according to where they are in word, whether at the start or end or in the middle, carry on, and on, the only indication that it's a baa and not a noon ن the dot, below for b above for n, so that noon in its medial position becomes ــنــ and baa ــبــ.I am not here noting the similarity but the horizontal conformation of the symbol which conventionally permits elongation, a space significantly not reflected in how it is said or understood.

(Many words are short in Arabic, three symbols where Latin might have five, which is also due to vowels being symbolised only if they are long in common scripts, and, as in Hebrew, vowel sounds indicated by diacritics, for example, قطر, Qatar, so they may be said to lack horizontal extension but then that tail on qaaf, ق, which at the start of the word is قــ, note also the absence of capital letters and the universality of cursive, then, the signs are regularly long and rectangular, not upright and squarish. Street-signs in particular, which seem to follow the French model, but against a green background. I will at some stage be adding some examples, at this, let the observation suffice: little deserts in the letters . . .

(although I hesitate to call them letters, because it Latinises the language and because the morphology of Arabic symbols is mutative, in the way I am indicating, as well as, as also noted, according to position, but also from context to context. Think of the symbol for Al Jazeera, a single symbol composed of all the symbols for those words piled up.

(Arabic really is the first language of tagging, it offers amazing scope for graphic design, to be shaped and individualised and form, as in this example, brand signs.

(. . . Little deserts. . . in the symbolic architecture and then when I survey the horizon out my window I find it cannot be seen. The city sort of drops away and linear perspective does not function. Yes, the houses and so on get smaller, but only in the sense of becoming indiscernable, of blending in the distance; while the sky, dirty at its fringes, lifts above a line not the horizon, that is never less than the composite of the built environment of Riyadh.)

Commercial activity at street level seems cut along ethnic lines. The shoe salesman in the mall with the dome, more pictures below, for example, was originally from Mumbai, 20 years before, an Urdu speaker; and many of the staff, likewise, at the Ascott. The rapprochement between Riyadh and Islamabad might indicate otherwise, but most of the service workers I've met and talked to have been Indian, their English prepared from and preserved after British colonial influence. Hence also the delicious Samosa bought at the booth below. The proprietor didn't take cards (in breach of a law about universal availability of card transactions) and all I had was SAR100, he took the 100 and disappeared into the mall, an expedient we'd met with in Türkiye so that it didn't seem so risky here, returning with 98, then asked if I wanted a drink. I did. A Kinza, which he sold as Pepsi, the pistachio latte unavailable. An English-speaking couple were trying to pay after me with, unused to dealing in cash, similarly large denomination notes, and said proprietor took from my hand of notes what he needed, swapping out the 50 for something I didn't check, I would've in most other countries.

In the evening, with views from the pool:

Love from Riyadh,

Best

الرياض

Simon