The Portuguese footballer and his family are settling into life in Saudi Arabia
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Cristiano Jr wearing a traditional Saudi-style thobe and his grandmother. Photo: Maria Dolores dos Santos Aveiro / Instagram
Cristiano Ronaldo and his family appear to be settling well into life in Saudi Arabia, if an Instagram post by the footballer’s mum is anything to go by.
Maria Dolores dos Santos Aveiro shared a selfie with her grandson Cristiano Jr, who is wearing a traditional thobe.
Having recently arrived in the kingdom and joined her family, she captioned the image: “Already with my boy”.
In the photo, Cristiano Jr, 12, is wearing a thobe in the Saudi style, with a two-button collar, teamed with a baseball cap.
A thobe, or thawb, is an ankle-length robe with long sleeves, commonly worn by men in the Gulf region. In the UAE, it is known as a kandura, while in Kuwait, Iraq and Oman it is sometimes called a dishdasha.
There are also subtle variations in style around the Gulf. The Saudi version is cut to be slim-fitting and has a collar with two or three buttons. It has sleeves with cuffs, so is designed to be worn with cufflinks. Kuwaiti men wear a similar slim-fit thobe, but the collar is normally only one button.
The Emirati version is collarless, as is the Omani thobe, and both instead have a tassel, or tarboosh, that can be traced back to Bedouin culture. Both are cut to be slightly looser in fit.
The Saudi, Kuwaiti and Emirati thobes are teamed with a headscarf, called a ghutra or keffiyeh, which can be worn in many colours. The most famous are red and white or black and white. Authentic checkered keffiyeh are now only made in the Hirbawi factory in Hebron, as The National discovered on a trip to the West Bank last year.
Omani men, meanwhile, wear an embroidered hat called a kuma that comes in many colours. In winter, it is typically switched for an embroidered wool headscarf called a mussar.
Ronaldo and his family relocated to Riyadh in January after the footballer signed a contract with Al Nassar.
source: thenationalnews.com
