13^th October 2009 – Day 15 – Manama and Muharraq, Bahrain

Bahrain announces an outbreak of Flag Flu

I woke up at 7.30, probably the earliest I’ve woken up since the trip began. As I looked around to consider my surroundings I noted two things. Firstly, I was on a plane. Secondly, I was hungover. What the hell was going on?? Ah yes… I’m in Bahrain. My head is rattling, I’m falling asleep on my feet, and I have to entertain myself on a hot Gulf day in a country I know nothing about for the next 10 hours. Just in order to keep some sense of continuity now that we’re in a different continent, we check into a cybercafé for a few hours so that M can finish her thesis. It gets sent off safely to Helsinki, the world cheers, we breathe a sigh of relief heavy enough to set off this season’s typhoon season in the Bay of Bengal, and then we head off to an Indian restaurant where we get service the kinds of which we would more expect in a tourist market in Cairo. “This one? Take this one. No? Are you sure? It’s very good! I’m sure you will like it. Will you take it? No? OK, now there is this one. Shall I get this one for you? Shall I? One Chicken korma, OK. Now you must choose a soup. Here is the soup menu. Look at that. So which soup? And which bread? And a Cola? How about two Colas?” It went on like this for about 10 minutes until we managed to order something which didn’t include half of the menu, ate it and then wandered around, as one tends to do in a place where there is not much else to do.

Old and new rub shoulders in Manama.....

Manama is a funny place – it feels like a small village yet it’s quite big – One street can feature enormous, gleaming glass skyscrapers, some with typically Gulf-style modern architecture, and one block away you’ll find small streets with small shops, men in dishdashas sitting around on benches discussing not much, and tiny alleyways reminiscent of the Aladdin cartoons I watched as a kid. It’s also full of foreign workers – both South Asian and European, and this has brought a very cosmopolitan style to the city. Women is full abeyyas walk next to other women in saris and still others in t-shirts and shorts the likes of which you’d see in any European city (perhaps apart from Helsinki where it’s too cold for it). A city of contrasts, which in only a day, we didn’t really have time to understand. What I did understand was that when you’ve got a dodgy stomach, the worst thing you can do is to gorge yourself on Egyptian jungle juice and my intestines mounted an enormous protest which I needed to go to deal with urgently.

.....and in most places, new kicks old's butt.

Modernisation and oil money has brought great things to the Gulf. It has also brought with it an evil side and it was into one of these evils that I went to deal with my stomach – an outlet of Starbuck’s on the imaginatively named Government Avenue. Here was Bahrain in a nutshell – an American outlet, where Europeans came to buy coffee and tea from Filipinos and Indians. The amount of foreigners in Bahrain is pretty staggering and from what I saw, the foreigners did most of the work. Most of the shops are run by foreigners; the cafés are manned by foreigners, and so on. Only the state institutions were run by Arabs, it seemed – immigration control, and what I believe is the world’s most lethargic post office, where it took us about an hour to get to the front of the queue and buy stamps for the postcards we’d bought. We didn’t see any police or army – I suppose in a place like that no-one can be bothered to commit crime and in any case, most people work or have oil money thrown at them to allow them to continue sitting around on benches discussing not much.

Having wandered around the souq where we were greeted by salespeople with various South Asian accents, and gaped at the Bab Al-Bahrain gate (probably the only tourist attraction in the entire country which isn’t made of glass), we hopped onto a minibus across the bridge to Muharraq town where we took some pictures of the Manama skyline like good tourists and got on another bus back to the airport. I managed not to disgust the other passengers with my booze breath this time and snoozed happily until we landed in Muscat.