A tourist travelled to Abu Dhabi, after which he booked a room in a hotel for a few nights.

When it came time for him to leave, he realized that he had larger debts to the hotel than he could pay at the time.

The owner of the hotel, however, wouldn't let him go, and he chose instead to offer the tourist an alternate method of paying off his debt.

The owner told him "Either you solve the following riddle in the next two days, or you will have to work in the kitchen of the hotel washing dishes for one week afterwards to clear your debts."

The tourist asked the owner of the hotel what the riddle was, and the owner answered "which person is the child of my mother and father,
but is neither my sister nor my brother."

The poor tourist worked on the riddle for three full days, but he could not arrive at the solution so he went to work inside the hotel's kitchen for one full week afterwards.

Finally, before he left, he asked the owner of the hotel what the answer could be, so that he could ask the riddle to his friends when he returned home.

Laughing, the owner replied, "It's me."

After the tourist returned home, he immediately called on all of his friends to join him so that he could ask them the riddle as well.

When they had all joined him, he asked them: "which person is the child of my mother and father,
but is neither my sister nor my brother. "

His friends gave him all types of answers but none of those answers were correct.

Exasperated and wanting to know the answer, they asked him what the solution to the riddle could possibly be, at which point he answered:

"Seriously, Is it really that hard? Who else could it be? Of course, It's my friend, the owner of the hotel that I stayed in when I was in Abu Dhabi."

This joke is as old as king solomom

Seriously

It is a native Lebanese/Syrian joke, if you never lived in the Middle East, how likely are you to have ever heard of it

The riddle no hard sef. That tourist should have been flogged before leaving and he and his friend flogged again when he told the joke a second time