From Abu Dhabi to Bahrain, a time’s arrow blog.

Afternoon all.

OK, so I wanted to write this thing backwards, wanted to unearth the story by revealing effect prior to cause. But it’s hard. By way of explanation, consider the process of arriving home from the airport, your journey fraught with grumpy taxi drivers trying to rip you off, and you have the comparison of the drivers from where you have been, how nice they were, how they never tried to rip you off. In a time’s arrow style blog, what happened is about to happen as opposed to what has happened. So the past becomes the future, and you cannot predict it. I considered framing the taxi driver comparisons thus: That he paid us to sit in his taxi, paid us to shout at him and drive us to the airport at a million miles an hour. It was as if he was paying for the opportunity to scare us; a kind of roller coaster beggar that pimps itself for thrills: the thrill of frightening. Then, afterward, we flew to Abu Dhabi. Upon landing, we were paid once again, but this time, considerably less. And for our money, we got considerably less. No thrills. No spills. This taxi driver just wanted to soothe us, to take us quickly into the city and perhaps soothe his heart too by bring peace to the lives of strangers.

You see, it’s difficult.

So, it would appear that Heidi has laid down a gauntlet of some kind. This is an experimental blog designed to gauge our memories and what we choose to remember, or what of what we remember we choose to recount. See Heidi's blog below.

Well, in no particular order.

There was the club on our first night called Blitz. It was in out hotel, but no guests went there. Only us. Though detailed in the legend of our elevator, no mention of blitz could be found elsewhere. Going down to street level and round a corner, then, through a door and up some fire trap stairs, we entered a den - a cavern - of iniquity. We were the only white faces there. This was a place where the workers came to drink beer and dance. Except they don’t dance. No one dances in Abu Dhabi. They stand about, they drink a lot, they try hard to get in each others knickers, in anyone’s knickers - but they don’t dance. Instead, they had hired a clown.

Billed as: The greatest Michael Jackson impersonator in the Gulf, and announced with great fanfare and expectation and spilling of beer. A very tall, very dark man in a red leather jacket and hat appeared on the stage. Or, put more succinctly, a space between the hordes of boozy waiters and house maids. And how they whooped it up as he flung his hat to the crowd and executed the most rickety spin I have seen. And the high kicks, you know the ones where Michael would show off his socks; I had time to light a cigarette between, foot raise and foot fall. Impressive this man wasn’t.

But entertaining it was. Heidi hated the whole experience. She felt objectified and the leering she received was thoroughly unacceptable, and my presence beside did nothing to avert the stares or minimise the propositions. We didn’t stay long.

But I loved it. It was like the club in dirty dancing where all the staff go and have a good time whilst the guests get a little tipsy on light beer and whiskey sours. Except there was no dancing. Phrase of the evening: I carried the water melons.

On the third day, there was motor-vehicular fun. As Heidi has mentioned, in the morning it was all about F1, and in the evening it was 4X4 desert action. Some observations. People are mean. As the crowd swelled, and in all honesty, there of thousands of people, not tens of thousands, little kids who arrived late tried to get to the front to see the action without having to look at big peoples bums. But people let them through? Of course not. One particularly unpleasant Korean just said no, and let is father know that he was a particularly bad human being for bringing a child into existence that one day might want to see some racing cars instead of fat Korean thighs. Another couple, Lebanese we suspect, were more jolly about it but still refused to move for a different small child.

You have to ask yourself what these people thought they would miss by allowing a 3 foot nothing little person to stand in front of them. Evil evil people.

Later on, on the walk back - and it is a long long walk down the corniche; pretty, but long - we were trying to flag down a taxi, which were all full because, just like in Bahrain, only the crazies and the poor walk. Anyway, sat at a taxi lay-by thing - o, the sophistication, o the evidence of tree* - and up comes a group of Arabs and in tow is a man with a physical deformity. A bad one, his foot was skewed so badly that when he walked, he effectively walked on the top of his right foot. As such, he slowed the group down. But I couldn’t work out whether his companions were grumpy or just caring, Arabic is such a brutal language. But it occurs to me, so is every language when you don’t understand what is being said between friends. I wonder is this a characteristic of language or of fear in not understanding.

*evidence of tree. I have come up with a phrase to describe Bahrain. All bauble, no tree. It means that whilst Bahrain has the pretties - the five star hotels, the resorts and tall glass shiny buildings. But it is all held together with dirty roads and stray cats and the markings of poverty on every corner in Manama. Hence, all bauble, no tree. Abu Dhabi has tree. It is a proper city with the three P’s - pavements, public transport and parks. It was like going to the future when we arrived in Abu Dhabi. But, despite the taxi drivers, and despite the lack of the basics, Bahrain is home now. I kept confusing myself by talking about home and not meaning England.

What else? Hacking about in 4X4’s on the desert is fun.

The desert, the real desert, is like nothing else on earth. Bahrain’s grubby, scrubby and rocky attempts don’t even come close. I thought I would not attach a photo here, thought that I’d just put them up on flickr, but I can’t help it. The desert is just so cool.

The Desert; isn't it amazing? For more, see the video below.

There are more photos on Flickr. http://www.flickr.com/groups/40439813@N00

Friday brunch was wicked. When we arrived we asked for a table and were told that we should have booked. They could however, fit is in outside, would that be OK? Well, actually, that would be fine. It wasn’t cold, there was no wind and although the sun was not shining, it was hardly chucking it down. Being English after all, we could barely hide our glee. So we sat outside and witnessed the rudeness of Emeraties when confronted with a situation that is not panning out exactly as they had hoped they would. Rude, Rude, Rude, Rude. Anyway, eventually, it did rain. And then it rained some more. The rain eventually was like Wimbledon rain and I wanted to start singing like cliff Richard did that year. But we are English, after all, so we put up the brollies and let it rain. After a while, when the rain was coming down in sheets, there was just us and a French couple, eating our lunches between square walls of rain dripping from the terraces giant umbrellas.

It was fun, and the staff were so apologetic, like it was their fault that it had rained.

I’m gonna stop now. The problem with trying to document things that you have done, is that really, there is so much that is new that it becomes difficult to determine what is important, or even interesting. Yesterday morning, in a shop in a Marina Mall, Heidi was trying a dress and I was stood in the empty store wondering what to say to the girl who worked there. Or whether I even should. I started thinking about stuff and realised that although me an Heidi were on one level doing the same thing, there was probably 2 very different private monologues going on inside our heads. I thought that an exploration of that would make a really good start to a story or something; a device to introduce the protagonists.

You see, there is so much to tell, and way of deciding what is important. I need an editor.

Take care y'all.

BIG love

XxX

PS: again in marina mall, Heidi made me take her photo standing next to a teletubby. Which I did, badly. Thus:















PPS

For a blink and you'll miss it picture of a race car, click here:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6132871350395916023

for a panoramic vision of the desert, click here:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6770523658583024870