I know this isn’t sharp at all, but I am posting it anyway to show how things are changing here. Three years ago you rarely would have seen a Saudi woman with such a showy abaya in a shopping mall, yet now you do – not a lot of them, as it’s very daring, but certainly many with more subtle decoration. So much for them wearing plain old black.

My excuse for the lack of sharpness is that I had to take it quickly as I’m not really supposed to be photographing people without their permission (although I don’t think they’re recognizable), and it’s just hard to do that surreptitiously in a place like this. On the other hand, the railing that I cropped out looks OK so maybe the camera just focused on the wrong thing ;-).