July 2012 – Page 3 – robinchartier

bright spots

I think I’ve figure out what my problem is (at least one of them): I was expecting to soothe my disappointment at not going home this summer with a fun introduction to Bahrain. Sightseeing, eating out, discovering new favorite spots . . . and my expectations haven’t been met.

Poor sweaty, tired baby in the middle of her 10 minute cat-nap as we ride the shuttle

The plan (see my mistake there?) was that Josh would check in so we could start looking for a place to live, then take leave and we would enjoy exploring the country together, just as if we were on one of our trips. I’m still waiting for leave to happen. He arrived, they piled on work, and he’s been working 11 hour days. So while I’m waiting for the fun to start, here’s a little of what we’ve been doing:

It took me a while to figure out that these signs aren’t actually adversing a toilet.
(For Kristy: it’s a For Rent sign — ‘To Let.’ I’m not sure why so many of them have the words run together)

OK, I can be happy here. They have my favorite cookies (a 3 pack for $5 is a bargain!)

Grocery store games — trying to crawl out from under a moving cart. See all the water? A source of dispute here. Josh keeps telling us to drink tap water, but none of us like it and when the bottles run out we all slowly dehydrate until we get more bottles. It’s not environmentally friendly, but not much here is. When we’re in our house we’ll have bottled water delivered in the big 5 gallon reusable jugs.

A ramadan special: buy a 2 liter bottle of coke and get a free bag of macaroni? Cause that’s always what I crave when I open a Coke . . .

The bright spot of every day is when we go out to dinner at night. It’s a chance to get out of the hotel and walk around in the not-so-blazing heat. Oh, it’s still hot and humid, but at least the sun isn’t baking our skin. We’ve tried a bunch of different restaurants in the neighborhood around our hotel. This night we did schwarma (the meat on a spit that is shaved into flatbread along with tomatoes, lettuce and sauce.) Cheap and really good. Like Oman, food is expensive here, but schwarma can be had for about $2 each.

Walking the streets — it feels much more like a big city than Muscat

Stopping at a juice stand for an after dinner drink — fresh fruit goes in the blender with ice.

A bunch of red grapes tossed in the blender = Grape juice

Totally unrelated, spotted in the Navy Exchange: it says “Cruelty Free, Tested on Humans First.” It wasn’t cruel to those first humans who tested it?

Another evening, walking by the Grand Mosque.

In the huge dirt lot, men are playing games of cricket and football (soccer)

All these tall buildings are much different than what we would see in Oman — I don’t think there’s anything over 4 stories there. Most buildings are only 2 stories.

Another day, another dining adventure. (Not very adventurous that night since we ended up at TGIFriday’s.) So far it seems like the only thing to do here is eat out. If my Arabic-speaking tour guide ever has time to explore, maybe we’ll find a different side to the island. Hoping that time comes soon!

More limbo

I keep meaning to post, but there’s not really anything new to share. I’m sure there are plenty of things that are blog-worthy, but I’ve seen too much of the middle east for them to stand out much anymore. Guy driving in reverse down the road? Yawn. Seen that (many times) before. Big family crammed in a car sans seatbelts? Not only have we seen it, we’ve become it. We borrowed a car last night and my attempt at safety was wearing Camille in the Ergo and sitting in the back seat (less chance of getting thrown our of the car) since the seatbelts weren’t working. It was an improvement over the day before when the kids and I crammed in the back seat of the shuttle (a town car) along with a random man. Poor guy having to share space with the 5 of us!

All that to say that there may be some craziness in my day to day life, but I’ve become sort of immune to noticing it. Crazy has become the new norm. Also not helping: a general monotony to our days that doesn’t seem interesting enough to blog about.

1. Wake up exhausted from bed sharing with a baby who is all elbows and knees.
2. Run an errand on base — get hot, sweaty, and flushed from all the walking outside. Baby misses regular nap time and falls asleep in the Ergo on my back.
3. Back to hotel, baby decides 10 minute back nap was enough, spend the next hour unsuccessfully trying to convince her otherwise.
4. Kids all watch too much TV, which I allow because it cuts down on the fighting, at least temporarily.
5. Josh comes home and we have to figure out where to go for dinner even though no one is hungry but him.
6. Walk to nearby restaurant/schwarma stand/grocery store. (my favorite part of the day)
7. By the time dinner is over and we’ve walked back home it’s late (after 9) and Camille is overtired. She ends up thrashing around in our bed and fights going to sleep for the next hour.
8. I stay up too late — clinging to the hope that if I just keep changing the channel, I will find something great to watch. It never happens.

Repeat.

Every day, I'm shuttlin'

Right after I posted yesterday, Josh sent me a message saying that the work vehicle we were using had to be returned — something about how the policy that allowed people moving to Bahrain access to a car for 30 days had expired and hadn’t been renewed. I’m sure the paperwork will go through eventually, but not in time for us. Oh well, 10 days is better than nothing. Josh looked into renting a car until the Montero arrives (it still hasn’t left Oman), but the rental company is charging $650 for a month’s use of a Toyota Camery-ish sized car and I’d rather have a latte every day for the next 5 months than pay for a tiny car that we’re all going to have to squeeze into anytime we want to go somewhere.

Besides, we don’t really have to drive anywhere right now. We’ve already finished our house hunting, there’s a shuttle that runs every hour from the hotel to the base and back, we can walk to a neighborhood full of restaurants near the hotel, and if we have to travel beyond that, then we’ll grab a cab.

Today was our first shuttle experiment — Caleb is panting because he runs up and down many, many flights of stairs every time we leave or come back to our room. He and Carter have started racing the elevator and they take off while we’re waiting and then they hit as many call buttons as they can on the way down trying to stop our elevator as many times as possible between our floor and the bottom.

Killing time, waiting for our bus . . .

The shuttle came and we made it to base in time for the movie. Free movies on base = cheap way to keep cool and entertained.

She takes her entertainment very seriously. At least for the first 10 minutes. After that she wandered around the back of the theater and climbed up and down testing all the seats. I could tell she was getting tired so I put her in the Ergo on my back and she slept through the rest of the movie.

And was still sleeping an hour and a 1/2 later when we met Josh at Taco Bell (in the base food court) for a late lunch.

Another day, another lunch with Dad. Since it was crowded we ate outside in the heat.

The nice thing about being close to base is we can still get together for lunch — even without a car.

In limbo

It’s like we’re on vacation, but without the touring. Josh is working every day so we’ve been hotel bound. Not because we don’t have a car, but because I have no idea where I’m going.

I took the boys to register for school yesterday and I was really glad I had Carter with me. Even though we’ve driven by it a million times I still needed help: Go down this one way street and where you see the graffiti, turn left . . . No photos of the outside of the school for security reasons (it even says no photos), but it’s not much to see from the outside anyway. It looks like a prison with high cement walls and barbed wire fencing. The school is in a Shia area (or borders a Shia area — not sure, just that there is a lot of graffiti and tire burning going on) so they aren’t messing around.

I’ve been bouncing between contentment and feeling disorganized and unmotivated. It’s not like there’s anything I *can* do, my only job right now is to keep the kids from tearing up the hotel room and each other. And really, both of those are pretty impossible tasks.

I invented a new game for myself because I have to find some way to entertain myself in spite of all the stupid movies they show on the English language channels here. It’s more of a compulsion actually — I can’t help but try and figure out what is playing. With my best friend Google I haven’t been beat yet. Even the vaguest details like: “young Reece Witherspoon wild horses song” gives me “Fear” (poor Reece makes out with a scary Mark Wahlberg). Or “George Michael arrested” gets me the actor’s name and then it’s a quick “Michael Cera blue haired girl movie” brings me right to “Scott Pilgrim vs the World.”

It’s not like I want to watch any of these movies, I just keep flipping channels in hopes of finding some American tv that isn’t According To Jim or Rules of Engagement and like a train wreck, I can’t look away from the B movie until I figure out what movie Katie Holmes was in with that guy who looks familiar . . . (“Katie Holmes movie sitting against tree” — The Romantics — isn’t Google amazing?)

While I’ve been playing stupid tv games the boys have been building a fort in their bedroom, creating monster bubble baths using all the hotel shampoo, and working on an art project. They aren’t always this motivated, it’s the result of a 48 hour electronics ban.

around town

One thing that is easier about living in Bahrain is Saturday here is actually Saturday. Josh had the day off so we spent the day exploring some other areas of the city. But first breakfast at our new favorite restaurant, Lilou’s.

It’s this adorable french styled cafe with great food and coffee.

Fresh juices — not like in the states where they just squeeze the juice out of the orange. Here they take the entire fruit and it goes through a machine that crushes and squeezes the entire fruit. This way you get pulp and orange oil from the rind and it makes for juice that tastes more orangey than anything I’ve ever had. They also do strawberry, lemon mint, pineapple mint, pomegranate, and more.

The boys love the pain perdu (French for French Toast). Who wouldn’t? It is covered with fresh whipped cream, strawberries, blackberries and even a chocolate twirl.

We came for dessert and coffee the other night. Everyone picked a chocolate dessert from the case and we shared them all.

My favorite was the chocolate dome with the gold ball on top. Inside the chocolate dome was cake, custard filling, more chocolate . . . it was divine. The triangle cake on the left and the hazelnut trifle on the far right both rocked too.

Caleb, picking out his favorites for next time

After breakfast we decided to drive out to see where one of the churches meets and to go to the animal shelter that is nearby. Cause you know, this International move thing isn’t challenging enough. I really need to throw a new pet into the mix to keep me on my toes.

This area of town has a lot of the Shia protests, as evidenced by all the graffiti.

Really, really beautiful villas — the walls marred by ugly protest messages. Josh said when he came in May at least they tried to cover it up with neutral colored paint. They must have run out of “sand tan” because now they are slapping any old color over the graffiti. Not pretty.

My favorite message (that I didn’t get a photo of because I was laughing too hard) was a spray painted message of “Stop Vandalism!” Hello, irony.

Yes, this is the animal shelter. Makes you want to take them all home, huh? At least any dog we get will be used to the desert heat since they are all housed outside. One reason I was OK with going to visit the dogs is because I knew we couldn’t get one today. Ha ha. Once we’re in a house, a trip out here will become much more dangerous.

The dogs looked well taken care of in spite of their shabby quarters.

Bob fell in love with this little guy named Fuzz.

The only problem is he’s a puppy and I’m not sure how big he’s going to get. We were trying to go smaller this time. Maybe if he’s still there a month from now we’ll have a better idea of how he’s growing. We got Jonah thinking he was 4 months old and when it turned out he was only 8 weeks, we knew we were in big dog territory (he ended up being 95 lbs big). His paws don’t look that big, so maybe he’ll be a good size for us. I’m already calculating how much it’s going to cost to fly him back to the US. The bigger the dog, the bigger the price tag.

Some other puppies — wadi dogs. We call them wadi dogs in Oman (the native dogs that run wild). I am trying to avoid a wadi dog because they tend to be wild and somewhat unpredictable. I have enough unpredictability in my life — I need a calm, relaxed dog. I’m sure Fuzz is part wadi dog, but he looks less so than these guys.

Trying to keep cool in the pool . . .

Posted on each kennel were laminated cards with info about the dogs: name, age, sex, how long they’d been at the shelter and a photo so you could pick them out of the crowd. I don’t expect to get into our house for several more weeks, so who knows which dogs will be at the shelter next time we visit. (Unfortunately for them, probably most of them.)