I was very fortunate that my friends A' and S' were happy to take me in and that their fully furnished apartment was huge with 4 bedrooms. I was slighly less fortunate with the actual city as to be honest there is very little here either for a tourist or even for locals.
The kingdom of Bahrain is a small island, around 60 km long by 30 wide, and was originally just a huge sand spit off the coast of Saudi Arabia.
The whole place is full of construction sites, with at least six new tower blocks being worked on within view no matter where you are on the island, yet meaning no disrespect to the locals or authorities it is being managed by people more detached from reality than even a British politician.
Bahrains population is very small and so there is absolutely no need for all these multitudes of tower blocks to be built and so close to each other that unless you are on the top floors you have no view except of other blocks around you. You cannot even feel safe if you are on a side that is overlooking the sea or ocean, as with each year they are reclaiming more and more land by dumping tons of sand and rubble into the sea and so what was the sea front three years ago is already one tower block away now, with even more being planned in the near future.
There are no buses or trains that take you around the city, but then again there is precious little to visit. A handful of museums that are mainly just to show off their past rulers, with only a couple of rooms full of actual artifacts and even the souveneir shops are lacking both substance and quantity. There are no guide books or guides for the museum and when I went even the cafeteria was closed due to lack of interest, on whose behalf I am not sure, but it just meant that you wander around for an hour and then regret telling your taxi driver that he should return to collect you in two!
The malls are surprisingly affordable, and almost all of the apartment blocks have their own mini gymnasium and swiming pool, but these luxuries only beguile for a few weeks before you realise that you are trapped in a place where you will spend almost all of your time in either your office or your apartment.
The wage might be one of the highest in the world, but their immigration rules are a fiasco and stories abound of workers having to return home or send their families away for months at a time while waiting for the sluggish beauocracy to get off their buts and do something are enough to put off all but the most determined of workers.
Despite having my own laptop, the internet security policies of Bahrain, much like Dubai, are such that pretty soon I realised that the whole network was under thier nanny state scrutiny, meaning that unless I am a hard core hacker my ability to surf the net and dig up any dirt or good information is heavily hampered.
Apparently there are a few cinemas and even a water park also on the island, but none of the people I spoke to knew about them and if it wasnt for seing the movie listings in the local newspaper I would have sworn it was all in my head.
Finally stories of Saudi's crossing over the bridge border to bed local women on the bonets of their humvees before honking loudy at 3am in the morning announcing their triumph as they return back over the bridge, if proven to be true, show a distinct difference between the clean and pure image that the modern day Muslims portrays during the day and the more sleazy reality that are many Muslims at night.
The worst story I heard was of a reputable hotel bieng closed down after it was discovered that some of the locals, maybe staff / maybe guests, were seen herding groups of teenage and young women into the hotel late at night for either a sex gangbang or maybe longer term prostitution, keeping them locked in a room five at a time and forced to service several men a day in order to pay for their 'accomodation and food'.
Having spent a few days here with my friends, despite their very generous and friendly company I was under the distinct impression that Bahrain was a most perverse warping of capitalism, where the locals were using their money to lure the best of the talent from around the world but offering them nothing in return except cold hard cash, and always keeping and treating them as a second rate immigrant one step away from deportation, never as a valued employee or equal.
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