Bahrain 4th and 5th of September 2006

The hotel manager hesitated upon being asked to book a wake call at 4:30 am so that I could be back at the airport for my 6:00 am flight. I barely paid any attention to it at the time and I woke up at 3:15 am anyway. I thought perhaps it would be change over time, perhaps the taxi drivers would be swapping shifts and it would be difficult to get someone to pick me up. Then at exactly 4:00 am the morning call to prayer filled the city.
There is something totally sublime about human voices playing the city like an instrument. Reverberating through its streets, filling its arcades; words slip in and out of sync as they bounce of the concrete and stone and glass from the network of minarets across the city.

You cannot walk for 50m without walking into a sunglasses shop. Buying sunglasses is taken to another level here. Of course this is a practical measure at first, the sun here is so intense that your vision flattens into a hazy blur, but since traditional Islamic dress for both men and women narrows the opportunity for overt variation at the scale of the ‘type of outfit’, the variation is confined and intensified into the details.
The two most important details are jewellery and then sunglasses. In Bahrain city there are plenty of sunglass stores, but there are countless more jewellery stores. The gold jewellery in particular is of such an extraordinary quality, it is quite unlike anything I have seen before.

The malls here are gargantuan, Bahrain and other gulf countries have yet to fall out of love with the mall, as is claimed to be happening in some western cities, again the heat means that air conditioning is a necessity, even wandering around the shaded souks in summer can be oppressive because they are not air conditioned.
In fact the malls have grown so large that they have started to connect to each other, sometimes it feels like entire suburbs of malls sitting on 40ft of rock reclaimed from the sea by dragging millions of tonnes of fill and compacting it for ever more construction.
Its boring to say it but the coastline in the entire gulf is becoming increasingly plastic, elaborate tendrils curl into the sea where they hold new landmarks, skyscrapers and other architectural wonders built only partially by petrodollars on 24 hour work sites staffed by sub continent workers in sub human conditions.

Anybody who loves David Lynch would appreciate the hotel I stayed in. The mid sixties was a good time for my hotel, actually a lot of that goodness had clearly been absorbed by my carpet. The once were blood red but now heavily faded velour furnishings, the amber light fittings, the heavy dusty curtains and the worn out carpet, made it feel so precisely dated, especially because almost nothing had been renovated since. Anyway it was not so bad as my taxi driver finally informed me, ‘it was not as bad as some other hotels in the area that were reputedly filled with women and booze’, .