Two Trips to Bahrain

Last weekend a group of us from the office got a taxi and went to Bahrain for the day. It was a nice outing, my first trip away from Aramco since I got here ten weeks ago.  We started at an American restaurant called Rick’s Kountry Kitchen, which bills itself as the best American food in the Middle East!  For my group, the important thing was breakfast with bacon, and Rick’s delivered!  Eggs, fried potatoes, biscuit and gravy, and a big pile of bacon made a terrific breakfast! (yes, sorry, the picture is sideways - haven't quite mastered how iPhone codes picture direction!)

After breakfast we went across a large sand lot, and across a busy street to the Grand Mosque, the largest in Bahrain and one of the largest in the world! It is a modern building in the classic style – the dome is fiberglass, and the largest of its kind. The architecture is impressive, with loads of open space – a wonderful place to be still. Here are a few shots, scattered below; there are more on my Facebook page (www.facebook.com/mark.gieringer ).

Yesterday I came back to Bahrain to get a new Saudi visa. The visa process is a little peculiar in Saudi Arabia – they seem very careful about who they give a visa to, but also totally inconsistent on how long the visa may be.  My initial 90-day visa expires on Monday, so I had to leave the country before then or be deported – and they are very serious about that. Many consultants came here with a 90-day, then went home to reapply and got a 5-year visa! 

 For some reason, though, this year they stopped giving long visas, opting for 6 months instead. So we come to Bahrain, and a local agent takes passport and official invitation letter to the Saudi consulate here and comes back with a new visa and I’m good for 6 months.  Except I will have to come back to Bahrain (or somewhere out of the country) every 30-days and come back in to Saudi.

It’s been a quiet trip after a rough start. Yesterday a taxi was supposed to pick me up at 0600 to bring me here, but they didn’t show up. I spent the next two and a half hours scrambling to find another taxi, but it is a holiday weekend and they were all booked.  I ended up at my office after a half-mile hike with loaded backpack, 95˚F temp at 0730, and a badly bruised right foot from a photo shoot two nights before (more on that in another post!!).

After quite a few phone calls and the assistance of several staff members, at 0820 I was finally in another taxi on my way to Bahrain, which lies across a 20-mile causeway from KSA.  In the center is a customs and immigration station, which normally takes an hour to get through, often takes 2-3 hours to get through, but today we hit the traffic perfectly and it took 10 minutes!  I was able to call the visa agent and he met me at my hotel to collect my passport, and then all I had to do was wait. BTW, I’m at the Ramada Hotel in Bahrain – very nice!!

So here I am, in a beautiful city, with many opportunities to explore and adventure and shop and see movies and eat! Sorry to disappoint, but no big stories here. I mostly stayed in my room.  Remember my bruised foot? By the time I got here it was swelled so big I couldn’t stand to keep a shoe on it and had to hobble to walk. I just couldn’t convince myself that traipsing around the mall or a fortress would be of any value or pleasure to me in that condition, so I stayed in with my foot elevated! I couldn’t find any ice, so I just had to rely on my good healing properties to get me past this.  I worked on some pictures, read part of a good book, did some work on a project for a client at home, and just took it easy. Enjoyed a lovely meal in the pub downstairs, and got a one-hour sports massage in the parlor by the pool – my big extravagance for the trip, which cost $32 U.S. – something I’d hoped to find in KSA but it just isn’t available there. I have regular massage at home for neck and shoulder problems, so this was a lovely surprise. Got to watch a great soccer match (Brazil v Uraguay, and topped off the day with a short but sweet talk with Dana (God bless the guys who came up with Skype!!). 

This morning almost all the swelling is out of my foot and I can wiggle my toes again! I made it downstairs and enjoyed an omelet, bacon, juice and coffee at the free breakfast buffet.  I will stay barefoot as much as I can and continue the stay-off-it therapy while waiting until this afternoon when I expect to get my passport back, then will taxi back to Dhahran for the rest of a three day weekend. It wasn’t planned to be, but last week the King decided it was time to change the work week from Sat-Wed, to Sun-Thu, starting next week, bringing KSA in line with the rest of the Gulf state’s business week.  It’s a good change, but will wreak havoc on a lot of travel plans this summer!

More soon on a some other architecture in Bahrain, and couple of recent, terrific photo shoots!