You know you need to listen to your fellow expat's advise when you're told something at least 5 times in your first week. That advise was to install the Athan App on my phone so I know how to plan my Saudi life around prayer time.
Prayer time occurs six times per day and varies depending on the sunrise/sunset schedule. There's also supposed guidelines on how many mosques need to be built: one per 500 men and they need to be able to walk to it in 5 minutes or less. I've haven't validated these requirements but it makes for a good story. There are a lot of mosques here - a few Jubail ones are pictured below.
They also have prayer rooms in lieu of mosques. In a work environment, prayer rooms exist at several locations including right beside the Isocynates control room in my building. In public, I've seen one in the Fanateer mall.
Portions of these prayers are broadcast on loud speakers (beginning and end of it??). Depending on where you are, you may hear prayers from several mosques. Cathy Williamson pointed out that we were hearing 3 or 4 different prayers at once as we were waiting for the restaurant to open after prayer time. Click here to hear a clip of a prayer I recorded as I was walking along the corniche (pathway by the water front) in the Fanateer area on Friday.
In the summer, I'm told your wake up alarm can be the prayer loud speakers at 3:30 if you happen to live by a mosque. I think they put Alreem (the posh expat compound) in the middle of nowhere (well beside a dump) to keep us from shocking the locals - but as an outcome of that, I do not hear these prayer loud speakers at Alreem.
As far as I can tell, the way life operates around prayer time is this. If you happen to be in a store or restaurant at prayer time, they either ask you to leave, put the window coverings down, dim the lights and close down the cashiers. You can most of the time stop, there's just no service. It seems to last anywhere from 20-30 minutes. Couple this with the fact that there's a closure period between 12pm and 4pm, it's hard to get this accomplished here. At work, prayer time is available to the muslims but it hasn't interupted any activities I've been involved with yet. That being said, if the taxi driver knows I'll be waiting for several minutes, he'll ask if he can go sneak in a prayer while he waits. So far, I've been stuck in Lulu's (Arabic equivalent of Walmart) waiting to pay for my groceries, asked to leave the Starbucks and we fit our supper date with my fellow Canadians between prayer time. (FYI, we were having such a good time, we chatted right thru the second prayer.)
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