Week 44: Bahrain

This week I had the opportunity to travel to Bahrain for work. We definitely stayed busy during the day with work events, but were able to do a little exploring in the evenings.

I didn’t land in Bahrain until 2am, so my first look during the day was after I woke up later in the morning.

We had dinner at the hotel on the first night. There were probably over ten tables of food on offer. I was so hungry, I only got a picture of the sushi table but this should give a good idea of what the other tables looked like.

For dinner on the second night, we went to a traditional Bahraini home in Old Manama, which had been converted into a venue space. We had more traditional middle eastern food while a Bahraini musician played.

A falconer brought a falcon that we took turns holding. The falcon was blindfolded and as I was told, would bite your face off if it wasn’t wearing it, so it was pretty scary to handle it.

On our final full day, we drove to downtown Manama to the souk in the afternoon.

After running lots of errands around Bahrain, we made it back to our hotel around 7. We quickly ran across the street to the mosque to check it out. The mosque was closed but we did finally get to catch the Call to Prayer. We had heard it intermittently the whole trip from our hotel, but had not been able to catch it uninterrupted until now.

After that, we grabbed a quick dinner and nap at the hotel and headed to the airport around midnight for our trip back.

I got home around noon on Friday and spent the rest of the day sleeping. Saturday, we went to a wine tasting at our favorite Italian store, Da Marco’s. Marco’s girlfriend, Bea, owns a men’s clothing boutique and she brought some of her clothes for a “sip and sample.” Needless to say, a wine tasting along with clothes shopping is a great business idea and much money was made by both Marco and Bea. 🤣

Matt modeling some of Bea’s clothes on Oma’s scooter

Sunday, while the kids and Matt caught up on schoolwork, I went with some friends back to my favorite local town, Esslingen. This time we got a tour of the crypts below the city church, as well as a detailed tour of the church itself from its minister. We finished off with another huge pizza from L’Osteria.