The Pound I Treated as a Riyal!

I left the school during the lunch break, eating a sandwich as I walked. I had only one hour in which to attend an appointment to view a flat, then return before the break ended.

A few weeks earlier, I had walked like a tourist, contemplating the people, streets and buildings, and reading everything around me. Now, however, I walked and thought without seeing what surrounded me. I was worried; my mind was occupied with my studies, the search for accommodation and the money I had left. Only then did I feel that I had truly entered the experience of living abroad.

After completing my registration at the school and the residency procedures with the Home Office, I began searching for somewhere to live. At the time, I was staying in a hotel that cost seventy British pounds per night, while one pound was worth approximately six and a half Saudi riyals.

I knew that calculation perfectly well, but I was new to the country. In my daily spending, I therefore treated the pound as though it were a single riyal! Five pounds felt like five riyals to me, when in reality they were worth more than thirty-two riyals.

Every additional day at the hotel meant another seventy pounds, on top of the cost of eating in restaurants because I had nowhere to cook. Finding accommodation therefore became a race against my money running out. I was still waiting for the Ministry of Education to issue my scholarship decision, and I was paying for everything myself.

The available accommodation was either far too expensive, too far from the school, or situated above pubs and nightclubs where the noise never stopped.

I resorted to using my lunch break because most estate agents closed by the time classes ended, and because every viewing required an appointment.

This continued for around a month and a half: the hotel charged me for every night, I ate in restaurants every day, and my budget diminished day after day.

At last, I found a small flat, more like a studio, in the city centre on King Street—the Street of the King. Its rent was six hundred pounds per month, and it was only an eight-minute walk from the school.

I finally left the hotel, and the daily seventy-pound meter stopped ticking. I thought the struggle to find accommodation was over. I did not know that the true challenge would not be finding the flat, but being able to remain in it!