Riyadh · Community · Expat Life
I did not go to Saudi Arabia looking for a relationship that would shape the next seventeen years of my life. I went for an eight-week internship. I was 25. I had a formula for exploring new cities. I had no particular reason to think this one would be different.
The formula was simple. Find the old city. Find the Grand Bazaar. Find the places where people gathered on weekends. It had worked in a dozen countries. In Riyadh in 2009, it failed completely. The old city was boarded up. The Batha market was not what I had pictured. The mall turned me away at the entrance because I was alone.
My first week's photos went up on Facebook. Friends in Mexico and Singapore asked if I needed rescuing.
And then Rodolfo sent Sultan a message.
Rodolfo was a friend in Mexico who had met a Saudi named Sultan at an English course in Connecticut a few years earlier. When Rodolfo saw my photos online, he connected us.
Sultan's reply: "Please furnish him with my mobile. I will be honoured to get in touch with him, as he is a friend of yours."
That register. That speed. That generosity extended to someone Sultan had never met, on the basis of a mutual friend neither of them knew particularly well. I did not yet understand that this was not exceptional. That this was just how things worked.
Sultan took me for lunch. Three weeks later I was at an istiraha an hour outside the city with around 25 Saudi men, most of whom had spent years in the United States and come back. Dates, Arabic coffee, Isha prayer, dinner. Talking until 3am.
That night, and the nights that followed through the rest of that summer, gave me something I had not expected. Not comfort exactly. Something more like home.
I had lived in several countries by then. I had not used that word quickly anywhere. I used it about Riyadh in the summer of 2009 because there was no other word that fit. My Saudi friends picked me up after work. They took me to their homes. They included me in their lives with a completeness that was disorienting in the best possible way.
The first time they hosted me and I let the guard down and felt taken care of. I thought: I'm home. I'm good.
3am in Riyadh with no alcohol, completely absorbed in conversation, having the best night of my time in Singapore, Dubai, London, anywhere. The comparison was not even close.
Over two years, I personally guided more than 200 Western expatriate families through their arrivals in Riyadh. The ones who came in focused on the compound, the villa, the pool, the amenity package, were not the ones who thrived.
The compound is the easy part. It is the container. What goes inside it is your life, and your life in Riyadh is determined by the relationships you build outside the compound, not the square footage inside it.
I watched this pattern repeat more times than I can count. Families who optimised for the property and neglected the social architecture spent year one counting down. Families who arrived asking "how do we meet people, how do we find our people" built something they did not want to leave.
The variable that most reliably predicted who thrived in Riyadh past the first year was not the compound or the school or the salary package. It was whether they had found, in the first month or two, one relationship that felt genuinely warm rather than proximity-based.
Not an entire social network. One person, Saudi or international, with whom the connection was real. One person who texted on a Friday afternoon to ask if they wanted to do something. One person whose home felt like somewhere they were actually welcome, not just invited.
In this market that person is available. The Saudi hospitality I experienced with Sultan is not a relic of 2009. It is structural. It is how people here relate to guests, to newcomers, to anyone who arrives with genuine curiosity and genuine respect.
Mine arrived via a Facebook message from a friend in Mexico. Yours is probably one introduction away. The difference is that in 2026 there are a hundred more paths to that introduction than there were in 2009.
Go to the things that are not on the expat circuit. Show up to events that are not designed for foreigners. Accept invitations you are not entirely sure about. The istiraha I went to in 2009 was not on any Riyadh guide. It was just a Friday evening with people who were curious about the strange Mexican who had wandered into their city.
The key to finding the magic of living here is you get out of the compound, you get out of your bubble, and you go experience it. Ideally you make some friends here. That is what changes the whole dynamic.
That is the whole thing. Everything else is logistics.
If you are preparing to move to Riyadh and want to think through what the first few months should actually look like, read this on the first 90 days and what to avoid locking in too early.
LISTEN · FROM INSIDE SAUDI, PART 1
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