For anyone who has recently landed (or is packing up their life to move here), these are some of the things slightly random things it took me months to figure out as we navigated moving to Saudi with kids.
Setting up your home
1. Yes, the water here is different
Saudi water can be hard on skin and hair, but there are a couple of easy things you can try.
For the shower: Try using a filtered shower head. Blu, Hello Klean and Kuri Seoul are three options worth checking out.
For the bath: Try a Tubo to filter water as it comes from the tap (on Amazon).
And can you drink the tap water? Most families we know don’t drink straight from the tap. Depending on your home, you can install a drinking-water filtration system (check out Coolpex), or do what many families do and use a water dispenser with large refillable bottles (which, naturally, can also be delivered).
2. You can find more familiar kids’ toiletries than you think
Before filling half your suitcase with baby wash, check your local pharmacies.
You’ll often find familiar American, European and Australian brands like QV, Aveeno, CeraVe and Mustela — albeit at slightly higher SAR prices.
Aster, Nahdi and Al-Dawaa pharmacies are good places to start.
3. For the things you can’t find: try iHerb + Mumzworld
Both stores can fill a surprising number of gaps, particularly for baby and kids’ products, beauty and supplements, and harder-to-find household things.
Just check where your particular item is shipping from and the final checkout price, as internationally shipped orders can come with additional costs. It can sometimes be worth waiting until you have enough things to justify a bigger order.
And before assuming something simply isn’t available in Saudi, search online. I’ve learnt that “I haven’t seen it” does not necessarily mean “you can’t get it.” You might just not be looking in the right place.
4. IKEA, Home Centre + Abyat will get your house feeling like home pretty quickly
IKEA is great for the basics (and a familiar shopping experience, with a side of shawarma).
Home Centre is probably the closest thing to a broad department-store-like experience, and their online shopping and delivery is good. Abyat and Pan Home are some of the many other good mainstream options. Keep an eye out for the big sale periods around Ramadan and Eid.
And for children’s rooms, removable wall stickers are your friend. They’re one of the quickest ways to make a rental or compound villa feel personal without committing to painting or wallpaper — and you can take them with you if you move.
We have a selection of fun, removable children’s wall stickers at MishMish.
5. Before buying everything new, find the secondhand groups
This is particularly true if you’re living on a compound.
Join the compound buy-and-sell WhatsApp group early. Families are constantly arriving, leaving and growing out of things, which means there’s a steady circulation of kids’ furniture, toys, bikes, scooters, baby equipment and household bits.
Unless you need something immediately or want a very particular brand, it can be worth waiting a couple of weeks before buying it new. And if you’re looking for something specific, ask the group — someone may have exactly what you need sitting in a cupboard that they simply haven’t got around to listing yet.
Getting your life working
6. Download the boring-but-important Saudi apps early
Once you have your Saudi phone number and Iqama sorted, get Absher, Nafath and Tawakkalna set up. They sound like more boring admin until suddenly you need one of them to verify something.
While you’re in the App Store, download your Saudi banking app and the STC Bank app.
Then move onto the apps that will actually start running your day-to-day life. You’ll probably accumulate some combination of:
- Food delivery - HungerStation, Jahez
- Groceries and daily essentials - Noon, Ninja, Nana
- Getting around - Uber, Careem
You don’t need every app on day one. You’ll quickly work out which ones work best for where you live.
7. Riyadh is surprisingly good at delivery
Almost everything can come to you.
Amazon and Noon cover an enormous amount. Pharmacies deliver. Supermarkets deliver. Restaurants obviously deliver. And plenty of smaller Saudi businesses operate primarily through Instagram and WhatsApp.
For groceries, Tamimi, Danube, Carrefour, Panda, Spinneys and Lulu all have various combinations of their own apps and availability through delivery platforms like HungerStation.
In reality, most families end up with a slightly chaotic combination of supermarket apps + HungerStation + actual trips to the supermarket + whatever happens to deliver to their particular compound.
It works.
8. Sort out healthcare before you need healthcare
Choose a local hospital, download its app and get yourself and the kids registered before someone is sick.
The process isn’t complicated, but you don’t want to be figuring out logins, insurance details and patient registration in the middle of a medical emergency.
You’ll become familiar with names like Dr Sulaiman Al Habib, Kingdom Hospital and Dr Soliman Fakeeh, but ask parents near you for personal recommendations — particularly for specific doctors. It’s not uncommon to end up visiting doctors at different hospitals for different needs.
I’ve generally found the private healthcare system here surprisingly efficient once you’re registered. Getting the boring admin done in advance makes everything easier.
Learning the Riyadh rhythm
9. Google Maps is your friend — and your enemy
Riyadh distances are deceptive and traffic can completely change your day.
Distance means very little: a 5km trip could take 10 minutes or 30.
If you haven’t yet chosen a home or compound, actually map the school → home → office journeys at the times you’ll make them — NOT at midday on a weekday or on a quiet Friday morning. A beautiful compound 30 minutes away on a Friday can be a very different proposition during morning rush hour.
And if you’re looking up travel times in advance, make sure you change Google Maps to the time you’ll actually be travelling, and then add some buffer.
Riyadh is currently one giant construction site, so routes and traffic are constantly changing. Often, not even Google Maps can keep up.
10. Riyadh runs later than you might be used to
Friday mornings are slow. Some places don’t open until later in the day. Restaurants, shops, doctors, vets and children’s activities can all run surprisingly late.
And then Ramadan comes along and the rhythm shifts all over again.
If you’ve moved from Australia, Europe or North America, it may feel surreal the first (or second) time you find yourself shopping at 10pm on a weeknight or visiting a vet at midnight.
Soon enough, it feels completely normal. And then you find yourself missing it when you’re abroad.
11. Don’t underestimate how much WhatsApp runs your life
Compound groups, school class groups, mums’ groups, buy-and-sell groups, recommendations for cleaners, babysitters, activities…the list of potential WhatsApp groups for you to join is endless.
Ask a friendly parent at your new compound or school which groups you should ‘actually’ be in.
You’ll learn more from those groups in a week than you will from Google in a month. Trust me.
And perhaps that’s the main thing I’d tell a friend: ask people
Riyadh is changing incredibly quickly and a lot of the best information is still fragmented. Most information hasn’t made it onto Google yet - instead it’s sitting in someone’s WhatsApp messages, or (increasingly) in an instagram post.
Ask the mum at school. Ask your neighbour. Ask the family who moved six months before you.
One of the loveliest things about moving here is how generous people are with what they’ve learned. Most of us remember what it felt like to arrive and have absolutely no idea how anything worked (and not know how to find out!).
Those first few months can feel like a lot. But slowly you collect your people, your places, your apps and your shortcuts — and suddenly Riyadh starts feeling much easier.
And, eventually, it starts feeling like home.
If you’ve already made the move, is there anything additional you wish someone had told you when you arrived? If so, please share, as I’d love to add to the list to help others.
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New to Riyadh? Welcome, salam!
MishMish is a little shop for children’s gifts, cards and lovely things for family life in Saudi. Have a browse here.