Monday, March 7, 2011

Minor Clothing Crisis

I'm having a minor clothing crisis here lately.  When we packed up and moved to Saudi Arabia, we both had to pare down our clothing significantly so that we could fit everything into two suitcases plus one carry on each.  For me this ended up being about 25ish shirts and tops, 5ish jackets/cardigans, a dress, two pairs of jeans, a couple pairs of shorts, and some capris along with some other minor items.  I got a few of the shirts in Jeddah when we were preparing for our trip to Athens.  This is significantly less than I am used to having and quite honestly I have become so bored with the clothes I brought.  This was rarely if ever a problem back home because I didn't actually wear all of my clothes on a regular basis whereas here, the few dress shirts I brought are the only ones that I don't wear regularly.

At this point, I really only have two options: suck it up and deal, or go buy some new clothes.

Suck it up and deal
I really can live with what I already have and I just need to accept that being slightly bored with clothes right now is temporary and will most likely go away once we're back home and I can cycle clothes less frequently.  This is definitely the easier option, since it just requires that I get over myself and stop whining, but might not be so easy to accept.

Go buy new clothes
The other option is to try and add a few items into the mix.  If I want to be able to try on the clothes before buying them, that means I'm limited to the one clothing store on campus.  This pretty much limits the options to solid polos or screen printed tees.  I've never actually been a huge fan of decals and decor on the front of my shirts because it flat out looks funny when curved around boobs.  So, not so much a super option.

Route two is to haul down to Jeddah and hit one of the nearly five million malls that grace the metropolitan area.  Downside is buying clothes without trying them on, scurrying to the bathrooms to try them on, and then returning anything that doesn't fit or is ugly.  This also means I need to check out the store's return policy before we go buy anything, because when we picked up some clothes for our trip to Athens, one of the stores overcharged us and it was a bit of a fight when we went back and pointed it out because apparently their policy is not to give cash returns, just store credit. Obviously I don't want to get stuck with store credit when returning clothes, so this might be tricky.

I wish this country could give their men some credit and trust and then realize that every man isn't going to go stark raving crazy knowing that women might be changing in a dressing room.

No comments:

Post a Comment