23 March

The Second Attempt

Normally we explore abandoned buildings but at the time, we had no knowledge of any within our reach so we decided to explore buildings soon to be destroyed and those under construction.  Restricting ourselves to these parameters, we left at sunset to explore some buildings we had in mind.

At the first site, it was almost empty yet there were 2-3 people buzzing around. I spotted the Haris(watchman) and we had a choice to make; should we leave or simply ask for permission to take a look around? In the end, we decided to take the latter as the view from the the building would have been of the whole city. 

Walking up to him(the haris), we were confused at first about his nationality, exchanging some broken words in Arabic. Soon we realized that he was Bangladeshi. Failing at my attempts to speak in Bengali, we just showed him our cameras and equipment which made him assume we were engineers of some sort. We had access to the building now and had an undisturbed view of the entire city. 

Heading upwards, we walked around a bit. We even managed to see the Jeddah flagpole(50m), the tallest of it's kind on Earth. 

Since we were new to urban exploring, we didn't mind that we were simply exploring construction sites at that point. The views were amazing though.

Heading on to a second site we planned to explore, this one was 20-30m higher than the previous building and was much harder to explore as it was pitch dark. What made it worse was the occasional random perfectly shaped rectangular holes in the building, possibly for piping, etc. They were around 4x3m and were hard to see in the darkness. T nearly had a close call at one point. Dazed, he asked me(A2) to film "dude, it's gonna be me recording or me saving my life". To which I asked him to follow my footsteps and not to deviate as I wanted to give a bit of commentary. Needless to say, I too nearly fell into the cavity for the elevator. 2 flashlights didn't seem to be enough.

Once we reached the roof, we managed to take a few long exposure shots of the city, the flag in full mast about 1km away.

Experimenting with long exposure and a flashlight

Later that night, we headed towards a building abandoned a few decades ago in order to explore it. Entering the building was quite a difficulty as there were people around, including a security guard but we managed to get in nonetheless. It had an eerie calm to it, the one that demanded one speak in whispers. The one that raised your hair on its ends. Climbing to the second floor, we saw a white cat casually staring at us with an intensity I cannot define. T froze and I tried to get closer but it didn't move an inch. It just craned its neck towards my face.

At that point we were running out of time as soon it would get too crowded outside to exit safely so we decided to leave, spooked by the cat. Though we were not quite fazed, Jinns are said to take the form of cats and are said to engage in eccentric behavior if so.

Later, we visited the apartment building on separate occasions, one to explore and the other occasion for filming a video, this time at night.

The video is up here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ING96t4tZmg

-WATA