In today’s Saudi Arabia, convention centres resemble palaces.
The King Abdul Aziz International Conference Centre was built in 1999, but inside it feels like Versailles.
Some might call it kitsch, but it’s a startling reflection of how far this country has come – the growth of a nation from desert bedouins to vastly wealthy regional power-broker in just one generation.
At a bar overnight, over mocktails and a shisha, I listened to one young Saudi man tell me how his family had watched this transformation.
His father, now in his 60s, had lived the change.
He was a child born in a desert tent, brought up in a dusty town, fought the Soviets in Afghanistan with mujahideen in his 30s and spent his 40s in a deeply conservative Riyadh.
Now he watches, wide-eyed, the change supercharged in recent years…
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