Jeddah before Hajj

In the days before Hajj, Jeddah belongs to somebody else, and everybody who lives there knows it.

Hajj is expected in the last week of the month, so this is roughly that week. The airport road fills with buses. The white of the pilgrims' dress is on every pavement near the old quarter and in the queue at the bakery. The traders along the highway clear their windows for prayer mats, luggage straps and pallets of water, and whatever they were selling in April goes to the back. Families who can leave drive up to Taif for the cooler air. The ones who stay plan the week around roads that are not theirs.

I grew up with that week, and nobody I knew resented it. A city that receives the world once a year arranges itself around the arrival, the way a household rearranges itself for guests, and the residents step back with some pride in it.

Watch what the brands that understand the place do. They go quiet, which is not silent. The billboard on the airport road stops selling a sofa and says something plain about the season, or says nothing and stays where it is. The delivery app moves its promise on the map rather than promising forty minutes into a road that has been closed since dawn.

Then there are the ones running a cheerful weekend offer into all of this, on a schedule agreed in February by somebody who has never seen that road in this week. The offer is not offensive. It is just not addressed to anyone who is here.

For one week the city is not for its residents, and they know it, and a brand that belongs here steps aside with them. A brand that is visiting shouts over a week that was never its own.