female perspective...

Bahrain is very car horn friendly...or rather drivers in Bahrain are very car horn friendly. People honk their horns for a wide variety of reasons. One of these reasons is because they see a woman walking along the side of the road, on the side walk, or across a dirt lot. I get this a lot regardless of my modest dress and occasionally wearing a hijab (head scarf), I still get honked at. It doesn't bother me so much anymore, I've gotten used to it. The honking just reminds me a little too much of college aged males back in the States that would 'cat call' when I would go on my evening walks. I'm convinced that it won't matter where I go, this sort of thing will happen to me it just takes a different form in a different country.

Inside the Grand Mosque...

First off, Eid Mubarak (essentially Happy Eid). Second of all, I lucked out by being able to take these pictures, I did this with permission of all parties involved and if I accidently get information wrong, I do appologize in advance (I am an infidel). The Grand Mosque is hosting an open-house type of event for Eid geared tward ex-patriots and tourists to explain Eid, Islam, and Ramadan. That's how I got to take pictures of the place (and they said up front that it was ok, if not encouraged to do so for this event only but not when they were having prayer and certainly not on Fridays)

Ok, Explaination of these pictures--if it looks like a pulpit, it is a pulpit, a very nicely decorated one at that. Arabic is a very artistic language. The red and white boarder looking artwork is also Arabic. It's passages of the Qur'an written in stylized Arabic called kufi (don't shoot me for bad spelling on this post please).



Mosques have domes--this one is no exception. It's rather pretty. There is a lot of geometric art everywhere. In Islam there are no icons, no picture of living creatures within the mosque or in much of the art for that matter so they have lots of geometric art and stylized Arabic. Personally, I think it's beautiful within it's balance of simplicity (geometry) and it's complexity (Arabic).

The pic with the pulpit on the wall with people to show scale also shows the spot that is the direction of Mecca and more specificly the Ka'ab (very holy site in Mecca- for more explaination e-mail me).

With our tour of the Grand Mosque, we were shown the proper way to pray and such. I got a lot of reading materials on the in's and out's of Islam. Very interesting. Sorry, I'm not converting, but I do like some of the philosphies that Islam professes.

If ever Colombus could see this...

This is just one 1/4 of the spice section in the big supermarket/Wal-Mart like store. The spice section is set up in a big square with people to scoop, weigh, and put price stickers on bags of spices, nuts, and other things like dried coconut. Needless to say, it smells great!

Food is a strange thing...

So, I was having dinner with two of the other teachers tonight. I was eating a very interesting thing called a shawarma. Basicly it's a flat bread wrap with meat, cheese, sause, and other fun addatives such as frenchfries in my case, and well, involved in my dinner were pickles... Pickles in the states are pretty regulated and when you think of pickles, you've got skin and meat of the pickle. Well, not here. Apparently pickles in shawarmas are a lot like those carrot shavings that you get in salads in resturants, only they are pickles. I found it interesting.

I guess the best thing I find about shawarmas are that they are pretty fresh and best eaten warm. Shawarma stands are found all over the place and basicly they have chicken and beef on a huge warming spits and they carve off the meat right infront of you for your shawarma and then put things like cheese and other goodies on it for you. They are about the size of Taco Bell soft tacos but a little more filling and a bit healthier.

no, it wasn't as funny at the time...

what you are seeing is a beautiful little 2 door after it met the buisness end of the bus that gets me home from school everyday. No one was hurt and I was not too far from home. Everone on the bus literally got off the bus and walked home while the driver and the people in the car stayed and had to do car wreck buisness.

Bahrain's big fountain

This is not the greatest picture of this huge fountain. Literally, it's a firehose shooting straight up. As I said, this isn't the greatest shot of it, but at night it is far more impressive.

there's a fort on this island...

yep, there's a fort on this island. Built by the Portugese when they had control of Bahrain before the British did. In this picture you see (from left to right) Me, Jenn, and Krisvell.