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Saturday, November 26, 2005 - (see all news for this day)
driving at night & machine gun man - 09:18 AM
(filed under 'bahrain')
the other day when i went for my first drive here in bahrain, i went out twice in the daylight hours to run some errands. the third time i went out that day was later in the afternoon to pick up shroom from work. i left at 5pm which is when it's starting to get dark. i'd done so well that day that i was confident i'd do well enough for my last trip of the day, especially since all i had to do was follow the airport signs. perhaps i underestimated how different it is once the light has gone.
i did well most of the way there, faithfully following the little aeroplane symbol, but when i was only five minutes away from the airport (shroom's workplace is situated at the back of the airport) i missed one of the signs & headed straight on instead of turning. i drove for about ten minutes, looking around me in the dark on a strange highway, thinking to myself, "i'm almost sure i've never been this way before," & realised that i hadn't seen a sign for the airport in a while. i wasn't too worried, but i was a tad stressed about picking shroom up on time since we had to go to the bank on the way home & they were only going to be open for another half an hour.
i saw a rare space on the right where i could pull off to the side of the road & ask some people who happened to be walking there, so i quickly changed lanes, stopped beside them & asked if i was going the right way for the airport. they indicated, just as i'd suspected, that it was in the opposite direction. i got back onto the highway, did a u-turn & started back the other way.
i was a little bit put off from getting lost, so when i then did find the airport & drove past it to find the turn off to shroom's work, i got a bit nervous & took a right turn too early. i ended up at a barricade guarded by a man with a machine gun! he was nice enough & didn't point it at me when i told him where i was trying to go, & then lifted the barricade to let me all the way through to get back onto the road.
when i drove through though, in the dark it looked like a dead end & i wondered if i'd misunderstood his instructions. i turned the car around again & went back to machine gun man. i'm sure he must have thought i was completely stupid, but he just indicated again that i was to drive all the way through, so i turned around once again & gave it another go.
on my second time through, past the door to the building, a man in the traditional arabic thobe (pronounced with a hard 't') called out to me sort of angrily, "hello!" as if to say "what the hell are you doing in here, strange white woman who doesn't look as though she belongs in a place guarded by a man with a machine gun?!" he made me more nervous than machine gun man & so i pointed to the exit & quickly drove on to find that it wasn't a dead end at all, but a wall with a right turn, just as the man with the machine gun had told me.
so i got back onto the road & took the correct right turn to shroom's workplace, seeing ahead of me the large red on yellow DHL sign glowing in the dark like a beacon. i was so relieved to find it. i knew i would have found it eventually, but after dark highways & machine guns, i was feeling just a little bit rattled. when shroom saw me drive up, only five minutes late after all, he began to hop into the passenger side until i practically flew out the driver's seat & said, "you can drive!!"
you did right. always follow the directions from a man with a gun. lol
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Oh Coralie, I would have been really panicing. Well done, can't believe you were so daring.
No wonder you got Shroom to drive back