The Nelson Family

In 1994 Roger Schenk and others wrote a book titled, Inside Case-Based Reasoning. Without getting into the details of the book, I want to mention something he called scripts. Scripts are things we have in our heads. Scripts structure information that is relevant in the context of a particular situation and help us to organize new information and events. To demonstrate what scripts are and how we use them, Schenk described a “restaurant script”, where a customer can go to a restaurant, order something, eat it, leave a tip, pay, and leave. When you walk into a restaurant you can draw upon your script to know what to do and when to do it. We have a restaurant script. More specifically, when I say McDonalds, we westerners have a fairly common understanding of the McDonalds experience—we have a McDonalds’ script.

Since I have been here in Saudi Arabia, I have noticed some major differences between my western restaurant script and how Saudi Arabian restaurants function. Our lunch today at McDonalds brought the differences together in one experience.

Men’s Entrances and Family Entrances

Every restaurant discriminates among patrons. Here in Dhahran and Khobar I have seen just two distinctions: Male only (one or more), and female only or family. These distinctions affect the design of the restaurant. There are two separate entrances and two separate seating areas in every restaurant. The distinction is so pervasive, that even at the food court in the mall, where there is one counter to walk up and order at, there are two lines, side-by-side, one for men only and one for families. (In other cities, further west in the country, like Riyadh, there appears to be a third category: Unescorted women. The distinction is used to actually deny patronage to unescorted women. So far, I haven’t seen this in person.)

Each time I have gone out to dinner, the choice has been obvious, either Jen and I have gone out with friends and we use the family entrance, or I have gone out with guys and we use the male only entrance. Today at McDonalds, my script fell short. Jen was off on a trip with friends and Josh, Joseph, Jordan, and I went to lunch. Without Jordan, we would clearly have to use the male only entrance. Did the inclusion of Jordan make the family entrance a viable option? I was left to wonder. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think the repercussions of choosing incorrectly would have been significant, but it left me a bit apprehensive. We entered the family entrance and everything was fine.

This picture shows the two separate at a McDonalds. The red signs above the doors signify the type of entrance. This is not the McDonalds that we went to. It is a photo I found on the Internet.

Private Booths

The McDonalds we ate at was two stories tall. You walk in on the bottom floor, order your food, then walk upstairs to eat. While waiting for the food, I asked Josh to head upstairs to find a table. He returned about 30 seconds later. “Dad, I think I will wait for you. I am not sure what to do. There are curtains everywhere. It is like a maze.” Sure enough, when we went upstairs, the entire area was sectioned off into 20 or 30 private booths, each with a privacy curtain. It was like being in the emergency room at the hospital where each patient has a bed and a privacy curtain that can be pulled closed.

We picked a booth, walked in, sat down, pulled the curtain closed, and enjoyed our meal. My guess is that the privacy allows for women to be able to remove their veils, scarves, and/or robes while eating.

Prayer Time

The last major difference is prayer time. If you happen to get into a restaurant before prayer time they will seat you, take your order, and you can eat during prayer. When prayer starts, the employees lock the doors, turn down the lights (if it is evening), and pull down the blinds over the windows. If you arrive during prayer time then you need to wait until prayer is over before you can enter the restaurant. Depending upon the prayer (there are five each day) you can wait from 30 to 45 minutes. Timing becomes an important issue when choosing to head to town for a meal. Today, the midday prayer was at 11:45 am. Unfortunately, the kids were hungry at 11:45. Since I couldn’t get to McDonalds in time, I needed to preoccupy them for another 30 minutes until prayer ended. Since prayer is broadcast, it is pretty easy to tell when prayer has started and ended. So, at 12:15 we drove over to McDs.

After we sat down to eat, Joseph said, “Hey, these chicken nuggets are just like they are back in the States.” Josh said, “Of course they are! This is McDonalds.” At least some parts of the script a standard.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 26th, 2009 at 5:50 pm and is filed under culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.