What Souvenirs to Bring from Saudi Arabia – Part Two of the Top 15 Ideas for Gift Shopping
Saudi Arabian bukhoors and oud.
While looking around in the store of Arabian oil fragrances, take a notice of chips of wood and little vases. Congratulations, you’ve located oud chips and bukhoors!
Incense stalls in Saudi souks
Bukhoor is a compressed powder of the Aquilaria tree sawdust and is traditionally rolled in small balls and soaked in pure fragrant oils. Both chips and bukhoors are used in the same way: burned in a traditional incent burner, which is a popular Arabic tradition and a gesture of hospitality. A small piece of bukhoor or a wood chip is placed in the burner on top of a charcoal tablet that should be already fired and turn gray.
Bukhoor offered by one of the Saudi brands
The scent of the burning bukhoor not only eliminates most of the bad odors in the house (fried fish, pet smell, tobacco, fried oil to name a few) but also creates a long-lasting aura of a magic kingdom. Good for the moments of procrastination!
Saudi housewives would wave their hair and clothes over the smoke, to absorb the aroma. I actually have seen a wooden piece of furniture that looked like a regular cloths rack with an incent burner inbuilt in the base of the rack. How cool is that!
So, if you are courageous enough, you might consider purchasing some bukhoor or oud chips, add an incent burner (can be bought from the same shop or elsewhere), don’t forget to throw in a pack of charcoal tablets (can be also bought in the same store or elsewhere, you might probably be able to restock the charcoal tablets in your home country) and you’ve got a beautiful Arabian set to enjoy when back home. There are two options of incense burners to choose from: a regular (wooden or ceramic) or an electric one (check if the plug is compatible with the standards of your home country: in Saudi Arabia it’s 230V, 60 Hz).
Type G power plug
My advice is to go for the regular burner (truly Arabian experience, remember?). Wooden burners have a metal dish inbuilt (for fire prevention and easy cleaning purposes) but if you use some aluminum foil in the dish, you will not have to clean the burner afterwards (just wrap the foil and throw away the ashes).
An insider tip: there are also small incense burners that look like a torch-type lighter with a little container on top, to place your bukhoor. Easy to use and so cute! Go for those that have a bigger switch button (see the blue burner switch button in the photo that rather looks like a small pedal), as you are supposed to press and hold it down with your thumb for about a minute to release the aroma.
The photo shows a beautiful Arabian gift set: a wooden incense burner and a vase of bukhoor (the little handy tongs came with the vase of bukhoor and were found inside the packaging box).
The next thing to look for in perfume stores is therapeutic oil. Have you ever heard of Habbah Saudah oil? You may know it by the more common name “black seed oil” or “black cumin/nigella” oil.
The oil comes from the seeds of Nigella Sativa flower and has been used as healing remedy in the Arabic world for centuries. It is said that it can cure everything but the death itself.
Nigella Sativa flower
Some scientific information about the healing capacities of this oil can be found here
Meanwhile, I have located this magic oil on the website of Alrehab:
Black Seed oil sold by Al Rehab
If you want to sound competent in the store when buying this oil, ask where the seeds come from. It’s considered that the better quality seeds come from Turkey and Jordan, and some other sources include India, Egypt and Pakistan.
The quality oil should be really thick, black and heavy, and the best quality comes from cold pressed seeds. Try moving oil inside the bottle to check the texture. The best quality check however is tasting the oil. It should be bitter and if you swallow one teaspoon of oil, you should burp in the next few minutes.
