I lived in the Middle East for just over six months, and still I only caught small glimpses of a world and culture I never imagined myself visiting, much less living.
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After three nights at the Grand Hyatt Muscat, we traded our suite for an SUV and drove from Muscat into the nether, sans GPS. The road was straight and went on forever, dotted with feral donkeys and curiously constrained camels.
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The idea was not to linger in any one place, but to stay on the move, to drink in the never-ending panorama of the Muttrah Souq. Like most things, ideas are almost always good in theory; but they tend to wane in the most crucial of moments.
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The sun was long gone as Justin and I sat on a pier looking out onto the Doha skyline. There were four or five fishermen to our left, and a couple dressed in thobe and burka to our right.
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A little bit about Bahrain, a tiny island in the middle of the Middle East, opposite the bridge to Saudi Arabia. I had landed in Bahrain six weeks earlier on a flight from Sri Lanka, at the height of summer, when temperatures hovered somewhere around 114.
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I returned yesterday from a whirlwind trip that was somewhat last minute - and fantastic. We flew across the Gulf to celebrate a friend's birthday in true Dubai style - complete with pink limo, champagne service and a dance floor on the 43rd floor somewhere downtown. In a word: extravagant.
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