I remember a while ago, someone read my palm and told me I would be leaving Bahrain for a long long time. I sort of figured out why over the past few days.
It's getting really crappy here. Yes, we have F1 weekend coming up, woohaa. But that's about it. A few days before the beautiful event that brings millions of eyes upon Bahrain, and brings in tourist to have a good time and their dollars in to spend, the Ministry of Information & Culture decides to ban one and two star hotels from serving alcohol, and bringing in musicians.
Oh, and with a one day notice, ie; "Hellowwww, we just came up with this rule yesterday, so shut up and deal with it", thus basically screwing up half the hotels around here. I'm guessing the concept is supposedly done to get rid of the sleaze, but then we still have sleaze in the 3, 4 and 5 star hotels. Oh trust me, i've seen it. It's just classier sleaze. So all we've ended up doing is screwing up a bunch of hotels in the middle of a recession. Lovely.
Anyway, besides destroying about 40% of the hotel industry here and forcing them out of business (because we all know it's not the super-expensive room rates that are getting them their money) and screwing visitors over, they decide to screw over the local population too. Remember our little friendly internet ban? Well now we've moved from banning porn sites, political garbage and rubbish like that, to actually banning big bank websites, and other government websites. Duh. No seriously, the expensive auto-blocking system they bought to basically search for and block banned content ended up blocking the biggest e-banking website in Bahrain, and the e-gov website. Of course people complained and these have been re-opened, but that just tells you that not only are the people responsible for the blocking trying to restrict freedom of speech, they're actually doing a bad job at it.
Anyway, besides that we have the millions of other things going on, such as traffic jams that keep getting worse, mosquitos that end up biting more, and desert that so beautifully seems to get more dusty by the year. Plus newspapers that publish rubbish and can't seem to tell a word of fact, MP's that can't solve a real case if their beard depended on it, and car agents that won't admit that sales are crap and keep increasing their prices.
Ah yes, from the looks of it, that palm reading might just turn out to be true.
Take it easy dude, you're old enough to know.
ReplyDelete:( and here I was looking forward to, no actually dying to come back.
ReplyDeleteAll the things you mentioned suck. The internet ban is crazy... you'd think government around the world learned it's not something to do!
ReplyDeleteIt must be a nice place, I'm sure, but you may need a change of scenery. Go travel, explore the world... and come back if you feel like it.
Yes, let's all do it, let's leave the country forever. I barely here someone saying he/she'd stay here.
ReplyDeleteReally sucks!!
Aww..Chin up Mr Ammaro. Bahrain can't be that bad? Perhaps it's just a cyclic thing? And please don't do palm reading - mess you up.
ReplyDeleteHang in there! I might pop over for a visit and I need you to take me on a tour of your beautiful city!
ReplyDeleteThere's 2 ways of looking at it (other than the way you're looking at it right now), this $hit you're seeing could be said in lots of countries around the world.. even in the UK (did you know London has the crappiest mayor right now? everyone's complaining over there!) every nice place has issues.. so what do we do? we deal with it and move on.. heck if you're smart try to take advantage of the situation and make some money (and yep people in Bahrain made money in the most weirdest ways, it's just not the conventional way we're taught to make money).. so the world's full of $hit.. other countries worse than others (relative to Bahrain living, other countries are dying!) ..the 2nd way of looking at it could be worse.. we all wish for ourselves our own ideal version of a 'good life' but trust me you'll get exhausted and waste soo much time to find such a term and lifestyle that you defined.. just live with the day that comes at you and measure how you did as opposed to others within that environment.. trust me, the amount of stuff you got into is not a waste.. it's above and beyond the average Bahraini is doing at the moment.. so be proud about THAT!.. blogging, magazine, talents, traveling, family, etc... so look at it in a different way yeah?
ReplyDelete