There was sushi on the menu and the staff wore Arab head dresses and spoke Chinese, Japanese, Urdu and Korean. The occasion? A gala dinner held on the eve of the Asian oil producers' and consumers' round table conference held recently in a ballroom at a five-star hotel in the Saudi capital Riyadh.
As guests, mainly male but with a sprinkling of women, tucked into raw fish and jumbo shrimp netted from the waters of the Persian Gulf to the east, multiple television screens around the ballroom were beaming down images from the Orient.
Saudi Aramco staff in Beijing, Tokyo, Seoul and New Delhi were providing the narrative in the languages of their host countries, apparently with little trace of an accent, or so we were told by the Japanese, Chinese and Korean oil executives gathered in the capital of the richest oil country on earth.
Young Saudi royals joined a parade of children from both flanks of the Asian continent to offer flowers and gifts to the assembled guests, a scene that brought to mind the Disneyland tune of "It's a Small World After All." Except this particular version would have been re-recorded as: "It's a Small (Asian) World After All."
And lest there be any geographical misunderstanding, we were now officially in a West Asian country, not the Middle East or the Near East mind you with its colonial connotations, but the western flank of a vast continent that one Saudi official recently said was turning into the "GMT of the energy world."
With demand for fossil fuels produced in the countries on the western rim of Asia growing fastest in the galloping economies of eastern and southeastern Asia, the dinner menu was just a taste of things to come.
"Did you see the film?" Saudi Oil Minister Ali Naimi asked the assembled journalists at the end of the meal. "There is a message there."
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