How to tell my friend who lives in Saudi to stop bloody patronising me!

[SomeLikeitSnot]

My friend lives in KSA with her family and LOVES it. Loves having a live in maid, pool on site, glitz and glamour. Great- v happy for her! Shes in the UK over summer visiting and we are seeing her a lot and shes driving me INSANE.
Shes taken on this real 'aw poor you stuck in UK its sooo hard here' mentality and I find it so grating. I have no inclination to move to Saudi/the middle east and her acting like Im jealous of her life is becoming so tiresome.
When we are chatting she will keep saying 'sorry I'll stop going on about the sun and lifestyle it must be hard to hear!' when I honestly couldnt care less. Sounds great for her and I love the stories- I also love the UK countryside/weather/culture/all our friends and family. I think she feels me prickling and thinks is jealousy.
I remember from visiting friends in the UAE everyone is v anti-UK and thinks its a shithole and theres a real feeling of people 'escaping' to the ME but I really don't mind it here and I want to say something to cut out the comments.
She is a friend so I wont want to make a sarky comment about womens rights/death penalty etc just a 'please stop feeling sorry for me, I dont want your life'!

I don’t know why I put females… 🙄. Thats such a police officers thing to do.

That's so cool you have so many Saudi friends! How do they feel about the murder and dismembering of jamal khashoggi? Do you have chats about stuff like that?

I lived in the UAE for a few years. I liked it, but also didn’t love it. It’s so tiresome hearing people bang on about how awful the uk is, and likewise how awful the ME is. There are good and bad points to both. I concluded that some people are just whinging toss pots.

Ask her about the eight people who were executed on Saturday.

Just playing devils advocate… I always think when someone is blathering on and on so, “Who exactly are you trying to convince?”
I just don’t think happy people feel the need for that kind of validation.

This, it's always this. I had this from my friend who went on and on about loving being a SAHM and how dreadful I was for working part time and putting my kids in nursery - then she went back to work full time about 9.months later!

Similar with a friend who would bang on and on about how she loved being single and childfree all the time and then finally met someone and popped out three children in quick succession

Noone who is genuinely happy with their life needs to bang on about it that much and in a way that puts other people down

Oh gosh, sorry. Google 'Al Nakhla Riyadh'. Lots of videos.

Tell the cheeky bastard to give the maid 2 days off for starters. Does the maids kids live in the Phillipines? I could never sit back and benefit from a Mother being separated from her children like that.

Why on earth do you think she’s exploiting her maid? Her maid is not a slave and has presumably moved there voluntarily as she can make significantly more money than she could back in the Philippines and it doesn’t sound like OPs friend is holding her hostage, paying her below market wages or mistreating her. Agree with @DJStevesthat all the misconceptions and judgment on this thread is wild, coming from people who have no idea what life is like there and holding very simplistic views of Saudi/Middle Eastern Country bad/UK good.

Quite. How many people in the UK have £800 after board/lodging and bills are paid?

Time for a really honest conversation with her

sorry Jane but enough is enough. Please stop going on about poor me being in the UK. I love it, I love my life with my family, and how close we all are, I don’t need a maid or pool to make me happy and I certainly don’t want to live in a country that treats women the way it does

its obviously working for you but I have no inclination to visits such a country and would now like you to stop with your comments

then every time she mentions poor you just reiterate what you said

sometimes hardship words are needed

Admittedly from the early 2000s but I can’t imagine things have changed much since…

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-25729137

and more information about the same case (but more graphic)

https://redress.org/news/justice-denied-for-british-survivors-tortured-in-saudi-arabia-a-major-leap-backwards-in-the-fight-against-impunity/

and a screenshot of what they were actually sentenced to…

I wouldn't go there even for a holiday personally but I wouldn't usually feel the need to tell her that......although maybe if she pissed me off again I might!

That.

Most of my relatives emigrated to Australia decades ago. They love it, and they have a wonderful lifestyle there. I totally get why they are so happy there, and I love it as a place to visit.

But one couple who visited us here (they all come over regularly) spent much of a day at the coast mocking it in comparison to their beaches, and generally putting England down. I love them dearly, and they're not normally like that, but the seaside brought the worst out in them. In the end I snapped a bit. Not in a properly angry way, but I made it clear that I'd had enough, that this was a holiday place that we loved and that we didn't appreciate the country that we chose to live in being mocked.
They were abashed and never did it again.

Are you for real? Someone with a one year old baby should not have to work looking after someone else's kids for 6 days a week doing long days! When the fuck does she get to see her own kid??!! She's not doing it because she wants to, she is doing it because she feels she has to. Exploitation doesn't equal slavery. She is paid a low wage for working long hours. Say she's works 60hrs a week if you do the maths it works out at £3 an hour. She probably works longer hrs than that. Being a nanny/maid is hard work. She should be paid fairly.

I agree with you about hearing people's lovely news or seeing holiday & wedding snaps, but all the same, if those people then went on to insinuate that their life is so much better than yours, it would get on your nerves after a while.

To be fair, objectively speaking, life there at SA is pretty high standard compared to here. I have few friends and extended family who lived there at one point of their lives, or still live there, and they all shout about the high standard of living that they have over there and that they wouldn’t mind staying if they had the choice (company relocation etc… )and that SA is different and has changed a lot in the last 20 years.

However, your friend needs to stop bleating and showing off as no where is perfect. It is what works best for the individual at that time.

I’d tell her that You love living in England. Yes it has its faults as does everywhere but you like the English weather much more than 50 degree heat and living with perpetual air con and you’d find it hard to be away from family. But you get that different people like different things. But honestly she’s repeating the narrative so often she sounds like she is trying to convince herself because there is no other reason she would keep on saying the same thing over and over to you. Ask her if she’s ok or if she’s lonely answers support.

Yep, it's just such a lovely place to live, and the misconceptions from the west are just soooooo mean! 🙄

Yep, couldn't pay to live in the UAE.

Fook dat shit!

Quite.

Believe me the ex pat life gets very dull after a while. The same people, the same conversations and lots of people trying to outdo each other. They will all have awful wrinkles, crepey chests and probably ruined livers. Saudi is glitzy, but oppressed. You do not stray from the rules of the country and you are pretty much confined to the compound. Otherwise it’s head coverings on and knowing your place as a woman in their society.

I thought the same

They decapitate people, carry out abhorrent practices such as torture and you can be given the death penalty for apostasy. Your friend can live her "glitz and glam" lifestyle but she is a deplorable person for living the high life and not caring. Or she is a bit dim and oblivious. I wonder how much she is paying her maid.

This is true. But then surely you should be mad at the native country of the maid/nanny? If they could make a living in their home country, why don't they?

For transparency - we had a housekeeper/driver (male). We paid him the equivalent of £1200 a month for 5 days a week, plus 4 weeks paid holiday, plus double salary in December as a bonus, plus a return flight home each year - he could have had 2 return flights, but he didn't want them. We bought laptops for his college/uni age children back home. We loaned him larger amounts when he wanted to make a big purchase (vehicle back home for example). We loved him and he loved us. No, not all expats treat their staff like that. But a lot of us do, because we're not all exploitative wankers. We sponsored him personally and we never held his passport - in fact, that's now illegal, and an imprisonable act.

Saudi isn't the UAE. HTH.

I have a friend like this who moved to Brasil. Tells me what a dump the UK is, while telling me about having to shoot at (regular) home/farm invaders, his son getting mixed up with drug gangs, his pets all dying in truly horrific ways, not to mention all the corruption etc etc etc. It’s really tedious. I’m not sure how you deal with it when it’s in person!