Bahrain, Briefly

I had wrapped up my time in Mongolia and flew to the next country on this trip, which was Kuwait. You may be thinking what I was when I came up with this preposterous itinerary, which is, “Kuwait is nowhere near Ulaanbaatar.” And you would be right. After deciding to visit Mongolia, I wanted to visit another country that I had not been to before, but there wasn’t much around Mongolia, so I looked West and decided it was time to time to hit up a couple of Gulf microstates. Next stop Kuwait.

Almost every blog or social media post I see from people who have been everywhere and feel the need to rank countries, ranks Kuwait near the bottom. Boring is the consensus. No problem.  I didn’t plan to spend much time there and, in my experience, everywhere is interesting for a day or two. I would be in Kuwait for about 36 hours.

I landed in the middle of the night and took a taxi to my hotel, the ibis Sharq (so called because it is in the Sharq district). Uninspired, but it was cheaper than a lot of options. I have no idea if there is a better area to stay in Kuwait City; something walkable and affordable.  I feel like it does not exist, but I am open to suggestions. The ibis was fine.  I slept for a few hours and headed out.  I wanted to get an early start because I was there only a short time and I knew the afternoon would be hot.

I wasn’t sure what to wear in Kuwait. I heard mixed things about how covered up and conservative I should be, so erring on the side of caution, I wore a light black abaya and matching headscarf with some black beading at the hems and underneath I had leggings and a t-shirt.  I don’t know that it was necessary to be so conservative, but I think I would have felt conspicuous walking around without it. But the thing was, it was very hot. It was at least 45°C and I think at one point it went up to 48. It was not pleasant for walking. Throughout the day, I kept tucking into air-conditioned establishments or sitting on the sidewalk in the shade and drinking lots of water trying to get my temperature down. It was intense.

My main stop, and I think every tourist’s main stop in Kuwait City, was the Kuwait Towers. Three retro futuristic spike-like towers built in the 1970s. Two of them pierce blue spheres. One sphere is a water tank, one is a café, and one is divided in its lower half as a water tank and its upper half is a restaurant. I did not pay the money to go inside and I don’t regret it. But they were cool to see in person. They are blue and white but at night they are lit up in different colours.  I was able to walk there from my hotel and took a bit of a stroll along the bay, again until the heat overtook me.

Thankfully they have Uber in Kuwait, and I called a car and asked it to take me to another area of town so I could visit a big mosque and the souk area.

A couple of problems with Kuwait: One problem is that it is a car culture. It’s not designed for walking, so the streets don’t have much life them. The distances are long and there’s not a lot of things to engage with along the way. Also, it’s hot, so walking isn’t great to begin with. The other problem was that I was there on a Saturday; a Saturday being sort of like the equivalent of a Sunday in a Christian nation and pretty much everything was closed. So a city that wasn’t super exciting to begin with felt even more quiet. The business district was a ghost town.

I did wander over to the souk and that was a little bit interesting although most of the shops were closed. Fortunately, some of the cafes  were not, and I found a café (Dalalwa Café) with lots of outdoor air conditioners and men lounging outside, drinking tea and smoking shisha in crisp white thawbs (locally called dishdashahs). I joined them and drank tea and smoked a cigar. They refused to take my money.  I attracted a lot of curious looks, but they were polite and no one was no one made me feel unwelcome. (I’m not sure if the looks were due to my gender, the cigar, or the face that my face was so red and sweaty.)

The mosque I wanted to visit wasn’t open. All I could do was walk around the outside. I walked around some streets and took in more of the atmosphere, such as it was. I tried to visit the museum, but it was closed, as was the aquarium. There really aren’t a lot of designated tourist attractions in Kuwait.

What Kuwait lacked in museums, it made up for in cigar lounges. I was able to visit two. Both were in commercial buildings: one, simply called No.21 high up in The No2 of the two Pearl Towers; a bit difficult to find, but worth it. (UPDATE: since I was there it has relocated to the 4th floor of the Four Seasons Hotel Kuwait at Burj Alshaya.  The other, the Cabinet Club on the second floor of Salhiya Mall. They were nice lounges. Very well appointed and with excellent selections of cigars. Not cheap. Nothing in Kuwait is.

I enjoyed the respite from the heat, and I was able to chat with the employees of the two lounges. It wasn’t easy to engage with people in Kuwait because there weren’t a lot of them around but the people working in the lounges were all from other countries and spoke English and were happy to chat for a bit. I was the only woman in the two lounges. The others there were men, again dressed in gleaming white dishdashahs with designer sunglasses and perfectly groomed facial hair. They looked very fancy. I felt bedraggled by comparison.

At some point in the day, I started to feel a bit unwell. I wasn’t sure if it was heat stroke or if it was the subtle food poisoning that I had been experiencing yesterday at the Istanbul airport, but my stomach just wasn’t right. I went back to my hotel to have a bit of a rest before dinner. Because I had some big dinner plans.

The most interesting thing about going to Kuwait was that I was having dinner with someone that I have been working with for over 10 years but had never met. If you don’t know, I’m a lawyer. In 2015 we took on a case involving members of the Kuwaiti royal family and their deceased father who had invested in some properties in British Columbia Canada. Several of the children ended up suing each other including in British Columbia and we became lawyers for one of them. (I’m able to write about this this because there are several reported decisions in the Supreme Court British Columbia, so all of this is public information.) At the time of writing, the case is ongoing. Anyway, I had never met our client, the Sheikha, and I was excited to have dinner with her and her daughter. A Sheikha is effectively the equivalent of a Princess. She and her daughter selected the restaurant and picked me up at my hotel in a black window tinted SUV. And we went to a restaurant called Dar Hamad in Salmiya, which is its own city, but really seems like part of Kuwait City.

Again, to be respectful I was wearing my abaya with my headscarf loosely draped over my shoulders. The Sheikha was also wearing a black abaya with her hair covered but the daughter was wearing a more western style outfit, although still quite modest. The restaurant we went to was gorgeous. Beautifully designed and fancy. We had a table that looked like it was meant to seat ten but it was just for us. I didn’t understand why we had such a large table until they started bringing out all the dishes. The Sheikha had ordered a feast. Not a veritable feast but an actual feast of different things for me to try. She knew ahead of time that I was a vegetarian so most of the dishes were designed to be vegetarian.

This would have been heaven, except that by the time I went to the dinner I was feeling extremely unwell. I had been suffering from terrible bouts of nausea and feeling like I was going to throw up. I hadn’t eaten anything all day, but I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to keep anything down. I politely told them that I wasn’t feeling that well but that I was excited to try all the food. And I did have the smallest nibbles of all of the different dishes but every time I did, I felt really ill. On two occasions during the meal I urgently had to leave the table and I went to the bathroom to violently vomit. This was not the first impression that I wanted to be making, but it was a very enjoyable dinner and I felt very privileged to be able to experience it.

They drove me back to my hotel and I went to bed. I had a flight early the next morning.

Apart from my dinner with the Sheikha and the cigar lounges, I didn’t love Kuwait. It wasn’t the most interesting of places, however, I think being there on a weekend was a bad decision. For that reason I would like to go back and get a better sense of what the country has to offer.  So while it’s not high on my list of countries that I’ve visited, I’m not sure I gave it a fair shot. But that was my visit and my next flight would take me to another new country of similar size, Bahrain.