Wipers up!

As I meander up the various side streets of Riyadh each day from the Fortress of Solitude where I live to the Institute where I teach, I’ve been noticing an awful lot of cars with their windshield wipers up, or rather, one wiper blade up.

Then suddenly, it came to me.

In a place like Riyadh, which is essentially a city of 5+ million people in the middle of a bunch of sand, car washing is second only to feet washing (OK...and making U-turns).

Consequently, there’s a sort of cottage industry of entrepreneurial car washers. A bunch of them hang out behind the Obeid Specialty Hospital but you can find them all through the neighborhoods.

I guess this won’t be much of a breaking news story to locals, but apparently the car washers lift the wiper blade up to signal to the owner that the car has been tended to.


Wiper up, car clean.
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