Rain and Books

Manal Al Sharif went to the States for a year and I found it amusing reading her reactions to what she came across there because I totally relate to a lot of it the opposite way around living here:

Manal:

I enjoyed the weather. I had not seen rain for three years before I arrived in New Hampshire, and the first time it rained, I was so excited. When Saudis see rain, our first impulse is to run outside. I jumped up and down in the office, yelling, “It’s raining, let’s go outside.” My coworkers looked at me as if I were crazy. In Saudi Arabia, we pray for God to send us the rain as a great mercy. In New Hampshire, people wished for the rain to go away. I never stopped loving each rainy day.
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We soon learnt here that when it's raining you don't- in a very British way- moan about the bad weather, rather you celebrate it and are very happy for any rain, however inconvenient it might be.

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For the first time, I saw people reading in public. They would sit with a book under the trees, in subways, in cafés, in waiting rooms, on the bus. I was mesmerized. I started carrying a book with me everywhere I went. I found the public library in Nashua and signed up for a library card, which I still have. I borrowed many books; it was the first time I had ever been in a public library.
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I could count on one hand the number of times I've seen anyone here reading for pleasure. A K friend of mine who studied in England couldn't get over the fact that people seemed to always be reading- on buses, trains, sitting in the park etc.

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I could not believe that I had to pay for garbage collection—to pay for the ability to throw something away. And I was very puzzled by the taxes. In Saudi Arabia, we don’t have taxes, but my friends who lived in Boston paid as much as thirty percent of the money they earned in taxes.
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Tax? What's that? (Always interesting telling the story of the Pharisee and tax collector, both of whom require quite a bit of explanation as to who they were!)

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I went home and turned on the news. CNN was breathlessly reporting on Tiger Woods’s mistresses. It was like that night after night. When I watched CNN in the States, I would think, is this really the news? It seemed more like gossip. The real problems were completely neglected, and people were kept in the dark. CNN International is entirely different. There I would learn what was actually happening in the world.

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But there were other things that truly opened my mind. I read about Rosa Parks, the black woman who refused to move to the back of the bus. She had lived for a while on Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama. Because it was a federal military instillation, it did not permit racial segregation, and Rosa Parks could ride on an integrated trolley. As I read this, I thought about Saudi women and the Aramco compound [the oil company compound she lived on]. Aramco was like Maxwell, a place where outside restrictions did not apply. Of course, when Rosa Parks left, she would want to ride in the front of the bus, just like everyone else. I saw so many parallels between what I’d experienced in Saudi Arabia and the American civil rights movement. Saudi women and African Americans were both victims of segregation, unable to have any say in the most basic aspects of their lives.