Two friends and counting
Enter Friend Numero Two.
His credentials are impressive: We went exploring all the dingy bars in our area (he lives close to me) on Friday night and discussed the American dream, the diaspora, Kundera, Delillo, Carver and a whole bunch of authors I didn’t know, but he reassured me he’ll introduce me, while drinking beer after beer, cheering France in the soccer and analyzing the Asian prostitutes’ mating rituals. I got home at 2:30am, the latest Cinderella hour since I’ve been here. He’s Nepalese but has just completed his masters in creative writing in North Carolina and smaaks Arcade Fire.
But oh man, the hordes of whores (say the last three words out loud for full effect). They just descended on this table of mostly men like flies. Surprisingly, they weren’t put off by the three or four girlfriends who were already there, and these girlfriends didn’t seem to mind. Instead, they were regaling the whores to tease their male friends even more. Prostitution here has a veil of propriety – no slam bam, dollar mam. No, you wine and dine your choice as though it were a real date.
They all seem to be known by all the waitresses and certainly by the cover band. After the soccer I saw my first Filipino cover band – of which there are many, so many that they’re having a battle of the bands at the end of the month. What do they sound like? Think U2 meets Destiny’s Child meets Backstreet Boys with a chink karaoke voice over, complete with camp, sexualised synchronised dance manoeuvres. They dragged this woman whose birthday it was, well not really, more like this deliriously excited woman ran onto stage to do the birthday chicken dance on half an invite. Strange people. But other than that, a sports bar is a sports bar – they even played Who The Fuck Is Alice.
We also talked about the insidious racism we’ve come across in Bahrain. He told me about an Indian waiter earning BD50 a month, who is trapped here by some agency agreement ala Dirty Pretty Things. The waiter’s Bahraini equal earns six times more.
But, we decided the racism is more subtle than even such an obvious example. It’s not acted on that much, or even widely spoken, but it acts out in the different ways one is treated – me being mistaken for a prostitute and him not getting an email account at work for the first two weeks. Also, people wanting to be identified as from a specific race – its disrespectful to mistake a Bahraini for a Saudi, an Indian for an Arab and a Filippino for a Thai. This is evidence that there is some social pecking order.
There is also a classism inherent in this – like with it not being cool for the oil magnate’s second wife to be friends with a single mother. Only Bahraini nationals have a right to vote, even second or third level generations of expat families don’t get citizenship. So, despite this being a new country in that no one has roots here, it’s not growing in terms of governable diversity, nor is there a uniting cross-racial ideal
It is growing physically: They dump truckloads worth of sand they buy from Saudi Arabia into the ocean to physically broaden their island. The rest of the world is worried about global warming, rising water levels and tsunamis, but the Persian Gulf is slowly and methodically being displaced by man’s desire for more earth. The earth is then built up with office blocks, hotels and air conditioned residential skyscrapers, which will be filled with worker bee expats.
His credentials are impressive: We went exploring all the dingy bars in our area (he lives close to me) on Friday night and discussed the American dream, the diaspora, Kundera, Delillo, Carver and a whole bunch of authors I didn’t know, but he reassured me he’ll introduce me, while drinking beer after beer, cheering France in the soccer and analyzing the Asian prostitutes’ mating rituals. I got home at 2:30am, the latest Cinderella hour since I’ve been here. He’s Nepalese but has just completed his masters in creative writing in North Carolina and smaaks Arcade Fire.
But oh man, the hordes of whores (say the last three words out loud for full effect). They just descended on this table of mostly men like flies. Surprisingly, they weren’t put off by the three or four girlfriends who were already there, and these girlfriends didn’t seem to mind. Instead, they were regaling the whores to tease their male friends even more. Prostitution here has a veil of propriety – no slam bam, dollar mam. No, you wine and dine your choice as though it were a real date.
They all seem to be known by all the waitresses and certainly by the cover band. After the soccer I saw my first Filipino cover band – of which there are many, so many that they’re having a battle of the bands at the end of the month. What do they sound like? Think U2 meets Destiny’s Child meets Backstreet Boys with a chink karaoke voice over, complete with camp, sexualised synchronised dance manoeuvres. They dragged this woman whose birthday it was, well not really, more like this deliriously excited woman ran onto stage to do the birthday chicken dance on half an invite. Strange people. But other than that, a sports bar is a sports bar – they even played Who The Fuck Is Alice.
We also talked about the insidious racism we’ve come across in Bahrain. He told me about an Indian waiter earning BD50 a month, who is trapped here by some agency agreement ala Dirty Pretty Things. The waiter’s Bahraini equal earns six times more.
But, we decided the racism is more subtle than even such an obvious example. It’s not acted on that much, or even widely spoken, but it acts out in the different ways one is treated – me being mistaken for a prostitute and him not getting an email account at work for the first two weeks. Also, people wanting to be identified as from a specific race – its disrespectful to mistake a Bahraini for a Saudi, an Indian for an Arab and a Filippino for a Thai. This is evidence that there is some social pecking order.
There is also a classism inherent in this – like with it not being cool for the oil magnate’s second wife to be friends with a single mother. Only Bahraini nationals have a right to vote, even second or third level generations of expat families don’t get citizenship. So, despite this being a new country in that no one has roots here, it’s not growing in terms of governable diversity, nor is there a uniting cross-racial ideal
It is growing physically: They dump truckloads worth of sand they buy from Saudi Arabia into the ocean to physically broaden their island. The rest of the world is worried about global warming, rising water levels and tsunamis, but the Persian Gulf is slowly and methodically being displaced by man’s desire for more earth. The earth is then built up with office blocks, hotels and air conditioned residential skyscrapers, which will be filled with worker bee expats.
posted by Nadine at 2:02 PM
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