Hooch, Booze, Sid And Eth

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This genteel post over at super-smashing expat blog The Displaced Nation started a chat on Twitter today about the demon drink, particularly as relates to its consumption in the country Americans, for some reason, like to call 'Sordi'.

My first exposure to expat drinking habits in the Krazy Kingdom came in 1986, just after Her Majesty had intervened in the case of a number of 'nuns and strippers' who had been lifted by the gendarmes after a party in Jeddah had been busted in an action that ran contrary to accepted norms. Usually, the police knock on the compound gates, the watchman tells them to hold on a minute and rings around to tell everyone to jettison their stash. Result: squeaky-clean compound and a lot of very happy fish.

This time around, they dispensed with the niceties and (if memory serves me right) about fifty expats were facing eighty lashes each for consuming alcohol. I don't remember if there was any additional punishment for dressing as a nun or a stripper, but I have always had a fond image of the chase across the desert sands in my mind's eye. After Brenda got involved, they were merely deported - and deportation, rather than the traditional punishment meted out to Muslims, became the norm in such cases.

So it was, just after this had all blown over, I found myself in-Kingdom. A chap called Graham was my first introduction to expat weekends in Saudi. Based in Khobar, he was having a party that weekend, would I like to come along? It was a raucous affair and Graham's villa had a bar upstairs, complete with dartboard and a variety of 'lifted' bar accessories such as ashtrays and beer mats.

There were four drinks on offer: 'white' or 'brown', Dr John's blackberry wine or 'beer'.

Now 'white' was 'siddiqi', Arabic for 'friend'. 'Sid' or 'Sin' to some was basically ethanol, whether produced in a bathtub or by a laboratory for medicinal use (a friend was a physics teacher in Kuwait and used to have to keep the ethanol under lock and key. 'Eth' is a popular libation in that place). Ethyl alcohol, cut 5:1 with water, is a potent drink but doesn't induce a hangover as there are none of the impurities you'll find in less direct forms of inebriative condiment. You can lam some juniper berries into it if you fancy 'sin and tonic'. On the other hand, 'brown' was sid with oak chips added. This made it look like whisky, even though it tasted like methylated spirits that had been dripped through rabbit bedding.

An important life tip. You always test a new bottle of sid or eth (or even their close relative, the wonderful Irish libation poitin). Always. Burn some on a spoon, if it burns with a clear, smokeless flame, you're good. If it has any colour to the flame or gives off black smoke, one sip will have potentially lethal consequences. Please don't try this at home.

Dr John's wine was actually delicious, although very strong and sweet. Unlike the sid, its consumption carried  appalling consequences the next morning. And the beer, as all home made beer in desert kingdoms is, was just appalling stuff. You skip down to the supermarket and buy trays of 'malt beverage' (for a short, halcyon, time, authorities were unaware of what tins of brewer's wort looked like, but they copped on pretty fast. Thousands of expats suddenly presenting themselves at the airports carrying huge tins with 'beenz' scrawled on them in magic marker might have had something to do with it), sugar and baker's yeast. Now you put it all in a dustbin and then place on the roof of the villa for a couple of weeks. Bottle the resulting noxious brew and consume at leisure, ideally chilled to the point where you can't taste it.

The following morning saw me awake and staggering out into the blazing sunshine where my kind hosts were barbecuing T-bone steaks for breakfast and downing kiloton-spiced bloody marys. The strongly emetic consequences of Dr John's wine combined with a hammering in my head and a powerful dehydration that made me feel as if I had been steeped in lime overnight. I couldn't take it. More to the point, my liver couldn't take it. Lightweight that I am, I fled for my hotel.

In the intervening two and a half decades or so, I have frequently found myself in the company of chaps enjoying the illicit pleasures of the grape in a number of places and situations, sometimes in highly imaginative ways. But that first encounter with the expatriated liver remains a clear and formative memory.

Kuwait

I stayed at the Sheraton Kuwait the other week. It’s the first time, oddly, that I’ve stayed in that particular hotel and I would recommend it most heartily as the best business hotel I’ve ever stayed in: everything you need is there where you want it, from a printer in your room to free, high speed wireless Internet throughout the whole hotel. It’s truly excellent.

I do remember seeing it as a burned out hulk. Together with the Ramada Salaam, which was a boat, the Sheraton was one of two hotels, and in fact very few buildings, destroyed by the Iraqis as they legged it out of Kuwait. Apparently what they found scariest was the pinpoint accuracy of the cruise missiles and smart bombs, which is one reason why they didn't have the time or inclination to set off more of the explosives they'd wired up across the city. The speed of the US pincer-movement advance was the other reason, of course. I can attest to the accuracy claim, having seen the neat hole punched in the 9^th floor of the telecommunications Ministry building that led to the vapourisation of the Ericsson-made international switch. The operator positions on the other half of the floor were untouched. I have the photo to prove it. (well, actually I don’t. I lent it to Motivate for their Gulf Business 10^th anniversary of the invasion issue and forgot to get it back, but you know what I mean).

I had a minder for the week, provided by the Ministry of Telecommunications, because I was working on a supplement about the remediation of telecoms in Kuwait following the occupation. His name was Jaafar and he was a nice bloke, although one of life’s natural victims. Stuff just happened to Jaafar and it was never good stuff. He never expected good stuff and so was rarely disappointed. He went to university in the States and the kids thought it would be real fun to put a tab of acid in the Kuwaiti guy’s tea. He tried to describe the consequences to me, but I felt he fell far short of the reality – all those years of repression and trammelled thought suddenly bursting into a horrifying technicolour unleashing of everything, everywhere altogether.

He must have been a complete wreck for months afterwards.

It was thanks to Jaafar that I got a tour of the national museum, the other damaged building, which was closed to the public. The Iraqis had made a tremendous mess of it, taking most of the exhibits and burning the rest. The lady that showed me around was at great pains to show me the fireproof carpets that hadn’t burned. These were made in the UK, she kept telling me, as if this built an association between us of some sort. British people were in vogue right then, everywhere you went kids would shout out ‘Boosh good, Thatcher good!” at you.

The worst thing was the big hall in the museum. The soldiers had hanged pigeons by piano wire from the rafters as a sign that peace was dead. They couldn’t find doves, you see.

As we were driving to some telephone exchange or another from the museum visit, Jaafar took a wrong turning and ended up in a narrow dead end. There was no way he was going to be able to turn his enormous American car and I watched him just slump at the wheel. As he dejectedly surveyed the latest evidence that God had it in for him, it started to rain. He turned to me, his face a picture of misery, as the fat drops started to spatter on the windscreen.

“You see, Alex?” He said. “Zis is ze story of my fcuking life.”

I did like Jaafer.

Worse? How can it get much worse?

The following is reproduced from the Arab Times in Kuwait via blogger Moocherx but I can't give you a direct link to the Arab Times piece as it has mysteriously disappeared from their online edition.

When things are bad, reflect that they could, indeed, be much worse...

‘Organless’ Indian tries suicide: The Asian man who cut his organ three weeks ago following a dispute with his wife who had allegedly informed him that she planned to divorce him and get married to another man tried to end his life by jumping from the third floor of the Adan Hospital, reports Al-Qabas daily. The man wanted to end his life after doctors informed him that they had failed to stitch his genitals back in place. The man who survived the fall is recuperating in the intensive care unit of the hospital. A case of attempted suicide has been registered against him.