The McArabia

Sunday was an exhausting day but there were some highlights. In the Arab world calendar Sunday is like Tuesday for us, the second day of the work week, so someone decided that being in three countries - Oman, Bahrain, and Kuwait - in one day would be a grrreat idea. We started the day by leaving Oman and flying an hour and a half to Manama, Bahrain. The school visits were in Bahrain, an independent kingdom and small 260 sq ft island with 1.2 million people in the Persian Gulf 17 miles off the coast of Saudi Arabia. So, I was less than 20 miles from Saudi Arabia, a country you can only enter with a business visa (they do not even have tourist visas), and it was somewhat surreal seeing directional signs to the kingdom like this on Bahrainian highways:

Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, while separated by 17 miles of sea, are connected by a causeway. Bahrain is generally more liberal than its neighbors, most notably when it comes to alcohol (Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are dry countries) and on Wednesday afternoons (beginning of the weekend in Arab countries) many Saudis pack into cars and drive into Bahrain to drink and party - apparently the traffic is quite a site. Oh Saudi Arabia, so hypocritical.

Anyway, we landed in Bahrain and had two scheduled school visits, but before the first visit we stopped at a shopping mall to grab lunch at a food court, and that is where we discovered McDonald's over here have something on the menu called a "McArabia."

Apparently this is the most popular item at McDonald's in the Middle East and it is basically a grilled chicken sandwich wrapped in a pita. It isn't bad, pretty standard McDonald's fare, no exotic heat of actual Arabian cuisine, but one of the those querky McDonald's things you see from time to time around the world. The McArabia, who knew?

Bahrain was uneventful other than experiencing the McArabia. I guess if you can drink anytime it just isn't that amazing as it probably is to the Saudis. We visited the schools and I snapped some pictures of the capital and only city - Manama (we kept calling it manamana like the muppets: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTXyXuqfBLA) - and is was more modern like Dubai:

Yes, that last pick is of a Chili's in a strip plaza with a DQ and a Papa John's Pizza, great huh? Nice to see that the Middle East hasn't been sucked into our sprawl strip mall concept... We also saw a Macaroni Grill and a TGI Fridays in Bahrain. They don't even celebrate TGIF, it is more like TGIW here, and as I mentioned before the Saudis coming to Bahrain want more than some potato wedges and shrimp poppers.

After we boarded the second plane of the day, departed the second country of the day, and an hour later we were touching down in Kuwait City, Kuwait, just an hours drive from Iraq.