First days on Al Nakheel

Well for a start this was a place unlike anything I could remember. I was about ten, and couldn't really remember the last time I lived in Saudi Arabia, so I guess it seemed more like a holiday. It was night, so I didn't take any notice of the guards, tanks and the big concrete walls with barbed wire. I was just loving the fact that it was really hot, that you could stand on the roof of our new house and that we were going to the pool at night, and would be going every day for the next eighteen months. We went over and met someone my dad knew, and he had a daughter my age, so I was chuffed. She turned out to be a total psycho bitch, but obviously I didn't know that then, so it was chilled. She was moving away soon anyway, but we still went out and bought matching dresses in the enormous mall, Kingdom Tower, for our welcoming barbeque. Living on the compound was a total novelty back then. In fact, it was a novelty the whole time. I was too young to want to go out any further, so living somewhere which literally had houses, a little grocery shop, a clubhouse with squash courts and a restaurant bar, too many pools to count, a skate park and a library was pretty much all I wanted or needed. Which was pretty handy, cause the only other places we could really go was school, our friend's compounds, Kingdom Tower to shop and then far away to Dahran beach. Once we drove ten hours to where we used to live, Khamis Mushayt, but that was about all. Saudi Arabia isn't really the place you wander round the streets if you're a family of RAF or BAE working for the Saudi's nowadays, and it certainly wasn't then. At the start though, I didn't go to school cause we were too late to start the school term (or something like that) so mum homeschooled me and my brothers for a while, then we'd spend the rest of the day chilling. It was the most relaxed lifestyle ever. And I loved it. As a kid, I had absolutely nothing to worry about, all the children as far as I know were relatively oblivious to what happened outside the walls, and we never saw any of the alert letters that were posted through the door. I would love to go back to Al Nakheel now, just see everyone again and take ten minutes to walk around the entire place. But hardly anyone in the RAF stays anywhere for more than a couple of years, so hardly anyone I used to know still lives in Riyadh. And any of them that do don't live on Al Nakheel anymore, cause it got demolished and every compound moved to one huge compound further into the desert. So I guess this post isn't even something I can go back and remind myself about. Theres practically no photos, so just contacts and memories.