So, you thought we were stretched on what to do in Riyadh the past few days? Today is a whole other level. Our ticket to leave is tomorrow, and we can’t just sit around all day… so….? We did a bit of foreshadowing yesterday, we said we had gone north and south, and then we told you about our trip east. Well, that only leaves west, so west we go. 

We literally don’t have any clues on what to do today, we’re not just saying that and surprising our dear readers with a “secret plan” later on. No, we just walked. And the first thing we came up to was this. A busy, busy road. 

Not sure if you can tell, but this is three lanes coming towards us, then a wall, then two more lanes coming towards us, then two lanes going away from us, and finally another three lanes going away from us after another small wall. Why do we tell you? Because we need to cross this. But whatever, we’ve done this before… and then a guy calls us over and asks us how to cross. He has to get to that big building under construction in the background. We say we’re not from here and we don’t know, but we also want to cross. The guy tells us he will call a taxi, hahaha. We wish him luck and keep walking, maybe there’s an intersection further along. Luckily we did keep walking because then we found an underground pass to get to the other side. Not sure if the man paid someone to drive him across the street or not, haha. 

Now we will test our writing skills because we don’t have any pictures of the next bit of our walk. Why do we not have any pictures, you may be asking? We take so many pictures of everything… but not here. We are walking next to military things and government ministries with signs of no pictures. So, of course, we listen, haha. And since our Arabic is pretty much non-existent, we don’t want to explain to someone that we were actually taking a picture of that over there and not the thing with signs telling you not to.

So, we walk and walk and walk. The neighbourhood is similar to others we have already explored and shown pictures of, it seems like a normal residential neighbourhood with a base on one side and lots of important buildings dotted along it. We saw a similar setup as we walked to the Al Faisaliah Tower. As we walk we eventually get to some workers that are laying down a brand new sidewalk. We saw the same thing being done while we were in Khasab, Oman. So interesting to see that so much of this work is still done by hand. We’ve seen videos online of machines that lay intricate brick patterns as sidewalks, but maybe they’re more expensive than manual labour here? Who knows.

We keep walking until my partner decides that this is far enough. On the map we don’t see much else in this westerly direction, so I guess that that’s enough of a reason for him to start walking south. Also, towards the south there indicates that there is a tower symbol mixed in with green spaces. Usuuuually that means some sort of historic monument, so we were going to try to figure out what it was. So we turn at this intersection and start going towards the south. Here the buildings are all commercial with small restaurants, convenience stores, and things like that along the street. Makes sense since we have come to a busier street. And this is the first picture we took in a while.

Who knows what it is. Maybe it’s what we see on our map? It’s in the right direction… We keep walking and we approach a very, very important government ministry, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, definitely no photos, even if most ministries here have pretty interesting architecture. But then we see part of the green space we’re after. We cross the pedestrian bridge, and take our second picture in the area.

Also no idea what it is. (Later on the map we found out it was the Prince Saud Al-Faisal Institute for Diplomatic Studies with the Saudi Television Tower in the background). We’re essentially walking around blind, but that’s fine. We’re just exploring, walking, and enjoying the day.

Well, the other side of the street has this…

What is this? We have no idea. There aren’t any signs to explain anything here, there’s just this huge archway with a fence around it. There’s also a police officer in his car beside it… so we slowly approach while looking over if we will be told not to enter, but nothing. So we enter. Still nothing, must be fine then. Or they realize that we’re tourists and won’t cause any harm. But this looks completely abandoned.

Whatever it was, it was impressive at one point. Well, it’s still impressive today, just abandoned. The map indicates that this “historical site” is closed. And there’s a sign at the location that said something along the lines of “we are fixing this up for you” as if they’re preparing a public park. And behind it was that first building that we saw in the distance earlier.

Again, no idea what it is. But it seems important. Seems like there is security around it, so we don’t get closer than this. Maybe a ministry? All of the maps we’ve looked at don’t have this building indicated on them. But, time to focus on the gateway again. Luckily while we were there we took a picture in and a picture out, even if you may not be able to tell them apart that much.

The reason we show this gate again is because afterwards we did research online trying to identify what we saw… and it’s awesome! Apparently this is the Nasiriyah Gate, and it used to be one of the gates to a gigantic palace complex. Originally it was built for Prince Saud (later King Saud), with the first palace being built in 1951. Yes, you read that correctly, the first palace. After King Saud’s accession to the throne in 1953 it was deemed that the palace was “too modest” for a King as Saudi Arabia was rapidly growing in both population and on the world stage. A larger palace complex was constructed on this site befitting King Saud’s new position and importance. It is important to state that at this point Riyadh had a population of 125,000 people (now it has more than 7.5 million), so you can imagine that this palace was sort of on the outskirts of Riyadh. However, that would not last long. The palace complex was completely demolished in 1967, except for this gate and a few of the fountains around it. And now it seems like they want to recover this space to be able to make it a park for people to come and enjoy (and we have seen that Saudis love using their parks). So, for somewhere that we randomly stumbled upon, it ended up being really cool! Let’s see if we can find anything else like this! (Spoiler alert, we did not). [The information we gave was found through both arabnews.com and a riyadh-KSA blog post we found].

While walking further south we saw this interesting bit of infrastructure. We don’t remember seeing it in any other corner of the world we’ve been to… but we will try to explain it as best we can.

If you look at the above picture you will easily see that there is an elevated roadway. But what you have to pay attention to is that this is coming down to the road level and then it raises again. It’s a way to skip traffic lights! Maybe this is common around the world, but if not, we will explain. You drive along these elevated roadways, but they are humps. So, the way it works is that these elevated roadways come down to the roadway below between traffic lights. If you need to turn into the residential/commercial neighbourhood you leave this elevated roadway and turn at the next traffic lights. If not, just continue up onto the roadway above. Pretty smart. Definitely a city that has been designed around the car.

But, as we have mentioned countless times, we don’t enjoy walking along main streets, so we turn into a residential neighbourhood again with the tower in the background.

And weirdly enough, we start going down a hill. In our ignorance we didn’t realize that the Arabian Desert would have hills in it, but Riyadh does! Haha. We actually walk quite a bit in the winding streets of a residential neighbourhood. Some people look at us with curiosity as to what we’re doing there, but we just keep walking. And then we start noticing something else that’s interesting. Outside of the mosques (and there are lots) there are always baskets of food. It looks like they are usually potatoes, onions, and tomatoes. It is just a random Tuesday (for us at least) as we are walking around, so we aren’t sure as to why they’re there. We asked a friend of ours and he wasn’t sure either. Our guesses are that either people are selling to worshippers or offering them to people that need the food, as charity is one of the pillars of Islam. But this is just one example of the many mosques we saw like this in this particular neighbourhood. If anyone from Saudi Arabia knows the real reason, or can confirm our guesses, we’d love to hear about it!

And then we’re back around Al Masmak. You may recognize some of the buildings by this point.

We head back to the market to see if there are any auctions going on, but not today.

So, it’s getting time to get back towards the hotel. We start on our way, but stop at Al Masmak first to point something out that we had not been able to pinpoint the other day. In the door of Al Masmak you can see a mark that is said to be of the spear of the future King Abdul Aziz when he stormed Al Masmak Fort. Couldn’t leave without sharing that little bit of information with our dear readers!

Well, time to walk back to the hotel. We decide to go a different way to see a bit more of the city before we have to leave, and quickly find this.

This is Al-Thumairy Gate. It is part of the old wall and gates that used to surround Riyadh, probably around the same time as Al Masmak (the sign doesn’t give any more information, so it’s a guess). Still cool to find.

The rest of the walk was pretty uneventful, the streets aren’t as full as they were the other evening that we were down here. But, we still had to navigate the construction, just like most of the areas we’ve visited in Riyadh.

But, we really think that the city will be amazing once the metro is setup and running. Aaaaaalmost worth another visit. Probably, hehe (and my partner’s visa is valid for a full year, hehe). Well, we’re back at our mall to get some food and we’re quickly back at the hotel and ready for our last sleep in Riyadh. Tomorrow will be a travel day, and we’re not sure how far we will get. Let’s see! Good night from Riyadh!