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essays | places

Bahrain

lower-key Muppety gulf kingdom

 

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   Bahrain was one of those layover destinations for me. Don’t trip over that oxymoron. Layovers can be destinations if done right. And this one was done so right, it almost felt wrong. When I waltzed out of Manama airport, I was some 45 hours into a 65h beast of a journey. And if you think the next sentence is way too long, well, so was the trip. I’d left my room in Nong Khai, Thailand almost two days prior, killed an innocent day by the Mekong river, “slept” in a third-and-last class seat on a night train to Bangkok’s Don Mueang airport where I splash-showered in a bathroom sink to look stellar for my role as transfer passenger, a show I put on to catch a free ride with a shuttle that crossed the city from airport to airport, munched some more time at BKK – mostly watching funny cleaning robots over breakfast, but also spontaneously linking up with my doofus of a partner in the transit zone after she’d casually forgotten to mention her layover that very same day at the very same airport – before embarking on my flight to Bahrain for a midnight arrival, “slept” some more in a fancy chair, ready to leave Manama airport around first light, unencumbered by the luggage that was being checked-through, to be back ten hours later for another sink shower in preparation of my flight to Cairo. Trippy.




 

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With less than 10 hours in my daypack, I plunged into the island kingdom. Lives can change in 10 hours, but mine didn’t. And to claim with full confidence that my meanderings turned me into a highly decorated authority on Bahrain would make me an expert on claiming things at best. Well then, I will keep this essay and its implications adequately short. Take everything with a grain of sand.





 

places / stories

 

Manama / Do doo do doo do

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   The temperature that morning was one of the finest to ever touch me – outside and inside. My mood acclimatized to it instantly. It was a temperature that can only be felt in a very specific microclimate zone: outside the main terminal of a desert country’s airport by the sea, right near a neatly arranged patch of greenery that is flecked with a few lilac or pink blossoms and includes between one and three palm trees. And it has to be daybreak. It’s a big coincidental puzzle coming together, so I was tremendously lucky to be there. You can actually smell that temperature. Smells like early sun rays slicing shallow turquoise waters with hints of balmy palmy leaf-breezes sweeping neatly cut and polished concrete blocks of light colors. It doesn’t last longer than an hour and that’s known and makes it all the more precious.






 

"As a pedestrian you look exactly like an alien in those cement lands."

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The modern morning bus made the trip for exactly one tourist – M to the E – and a small sample size of the working population. As it approached downtown Manama according to my GPS, I got ready to hop off. I’d told the bus driver I was going to the city center, so he recommended a later stop because the city center to him was the City Center, one of the many malls. That he thought I meant a mall called City Center and not the actual city center, was telling of the country and culture we were in. So was the doubtful look in his eyes when I said I’d walk from there. As a pedestrian you look exactly like an alien in those cement lands. Turned out that Manama was certainly not pedestrian friendly, but neither full-on pedestrian hostile like its cousin and apparent role model Dubai.