Migrants and refugees

Update 2: see a later follow-on post here.

Update 1: see a story at this time that took me 20 yrs  to tell, Model United Nations 2004 Bahrain.

 Picking up where the previous post left of, on a possible origin of migrant worker patterns, let's rewind a few years to Bahrain a decade prior. While I had been to the Middle East in Oman five years prior, the ten days I spent in Bahrain made me fall in love with the region. Previous business visits where we were fêted and in group sessions, contrasted with attending a week-long industry show, solo, bracketed by two weekends. Our local fixer visited me and took me on a business daytrip to Qatar, but that was it. He appeared fidgety and uneasy, I was to learn why...

Weather and other Gulf novelties

 Having mentioned previously that so far north, Kuwait is more under desert than Gulf influence than, say, the Emirates, let me relate an experience. I was enjoying afternoon coffee springtime when temperatures are balmy in the shade of apartments near Ras Al Ard, the port at the tip of Ras Al Salmiya (map), Ras meaning cape or promontory. It was halfway along the Corniche from my flat (facing Arabian Gulf east) the Aquarium & Scientific Centre (facing Kuwait Bay north). I was actually admiring "l'ombre du desert", French for desert shadow cast on the eastern horizon by the sun lowering to the west. That shadow is made manifest by the dust or sand in the atmosphere in desert regions, but little did I know it was accentuated by a sandstorm or haboob approaching from the north! Sitting by tower blocks I missed it, and I was neither on my phone nor on the radio to heed warnings. 

Into the Levant

"Levant" comes from old French for "terres au-delà du soleil levant" or lands beyond the rising sun, the Middle East in the European Middle Ages. This blog will chronicle memories of a little over a year spent in Kuwait City from October 2010 to January 2012. This came at a hiatus in my career between a failed online oil venture called oilelefant.com and before my last gainful employment in the oil patch with a global integrator.