Moving on from Manama

I love the way time stretches like elastic.

Some days seem like weeks, some months seem like days. A minute can stretch for an hour, or an hour can go past in the twitch of a cats' whiskers.

It's a kind of liberation, to be at the mercy of time in this way. And there's no way of knowing which way it's going to go.

My time here in Bahrain is coming to a close - I've less than a week left at this point. Three months has gone past faster than I ever imagined it would. I've lived in the porno palace for 12 weeks. I've had my little Nissan Sunny for 12 weeks. I've bought 12 years' worth of fabric and shipped it home to My One True Love.

I've visited Lebanon, the UAE, and Egypt - and next week I'm off to Qatar, and then Ethiopia for 10 days before coming home to Melbourne.

I wonder if I'm going to miss Bahrain? I'm going to miss the friends I've made, that's certain. I'll miss the porno palace and RAMEE SUITES-2. I'll miss having my flat cleaned twice a week, and the man who parks my car for me in the carpark. I'll miss the glare of the Middle Eastern sun. I'll miss the sense of excitement of being here.

There are some things to do before I finish up here, though. I have to pick up my abaya from the tailor in the souq - and I'm trying to find a niqab (the veil that cover your face but not your eyes). There is boozy brunch tomorrow at the Movenpick hotel, with some of the girls. There is Moroccan bath and massage at the salon on Saturday. There is breakfast on Sunday with my Syrian friends, and there is farewell cake on Monday!

I can't work out whether I'm sad about leaving, or happy about what comes next. I think it's a bit of both.

The sad story of my magical Aladdin slippers

Ah, shoes. Shoes, wonderful shoes. You all know I love shoes - I am the woman, after all, who has a shoe cupboard occupying the space in her master bedroom where the fireplace once was. Certainly, it was My One True Love's idea, but he did it for me. He ripped off the mantlepiece, pulled out the framing, removed the fireplace itself, hollowed out the cavity properly, and now I have a shoe cupboard in the cavity, and it reaches almost all the way to the ceiling.

So you might not think I need any more shoes. My One True Love would agree: he'd say Shoes! You don't need any more shoes! And I always laugh indulgently and admonish him by saying, It's not about need, My One True Love.

It comes as no surprise then, that I have been on the look out for some Arabian slippers since I arrived. You know the ones - Aladdin slippers, with the toes turned up and beautiful beading and embroidery all over them.

I love their gorgeous jewel-like colours - so pretty! I love the delicate stitching, and the metallic threads that are used to pick out the patterns.

I love the different fabrics - striped, spotted, or simply plain.

I love that they are perfect house slippers; definitely not the sort of thing you'd wear outdoors. No, these are for inside, for wearing in the afternoons and evenings, just because they're beautiful and you deserve something beautiful. Something that's just for home.

And it's for all those reasons that I am devastated to discover that these slippers Do Not Fit Me. I am not Cinderella when it comes to these shoes. I am the ugly stepsister in the fairytale, who would have to cut off a toe or a heel in order to slip her foot inside.

I must have tried on over thirty pairs in the past three months. But it's clear, they're all cut from the same mould, and their shape just doesn't fit my feet. They cramp my toes, or pinch my instep, or rub against my arches. I don't have massive feet, by the way, I'm a European size 37 (Australian 6.5). I don't have bad bunions or pointy heels. I have an odd toes on my right foot, for sure, but it's not the reason these shoes don't fit. They just .... don't.

So I will return home in three weeks, sadly slipper-less. My One True Love will no doubt be pleased, and the shoe cupboard will be glad not to have to find extra space behind its almost-bursting doors.

But I have these photos to comfort me, at least, and in my dreams my dainty feet will be shod in delicate, magical, fairytale Aladdin slippers.

Picturing Dubai

 The pictures show the rules of the 7 individual emirates that make up the United Arab Emirates - an emirate is like an independently ruled State - and logically, it's ruled by an emir. Abu Dhabi is the capital, Dubai is perhaps the best known. The other emirates are Ras al-Khaimah, Sharjah, Fujairah, Umm al-Quwain and Ajman.

 Gorgeous lamps .... I'd fit out our whole house with these if I could!

 This painting shows a woman wearing the traditional face covering, which was originally made out of camel leather and then gilded. It's not her face that she is covering up - no, in fact, it is the area of the upper lip that cannot be shown to anyone. It's very sensitive and extremely private.

An extreme "I Dream of Jeannie" moment with all these lamps ....

A beautiful Arabic coffee pot and cups.

Behind the camel is the image of Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai.

 I quite fancied this handmade Iranian hallway runner ... until I discovered it was priced at $50 000!!!

Shopping for clothes, Arabian-style.

The Emirates Towers, at sunset - I used to work here.

A Day in Dubai

One of the great things about living in Bahrain is ..... being able to visit Dubai so easily!  

In the eleven weeks I've been here, I've flown over to Dubai half a dozen times. The flight takes about an hour, and it's easy to go just for a day trip. So I've been doing exactly that - mainly to visit my tailor, with suitcases full of fabric and pictures of clothes I've pulled off the internet. And boy, has my wardrobe increased spectacularly as a result. 

Dubai feels like home to me, because I lived there a few years ago; so walking around is just like being in my old neighbourhood. A lot of my favourite haunts are still there, though the city has also blossomed like an algal bloom - it's so much bigger than it was when I lived there. I can see the skeleton of the old city I used to know, but now it has a lot more meat on its bones. 

And public transport! It has a metro skytrain that is the best I've ever experienced. The trains come every five minutes on the dot, and a trip costs between $1 and $2.50. I love it. 

So yesterday I took the skytrain to the Burj Khalifa - the tallest tower in the world. "Burj" means tower in Arabic. It's located at the Dubai Mall, which is about the biggest mall in the world, too. I had to take two photos of it, because I couldn't fit it all in the viewfinder - the tower that is, not the mall.  

Omg, words fails me

I wandered around the base of it, and saw a dramatic water fountain show, where there are a thousand water jets all choreographed to music - it sounds tacky, but it's actually quite amazing. I had lunch, and I saw a movie - Burlesue, with Cher, and Cristina Aguilera - and I did a little shopping, before heading off to visit Vinayk (my tailor) for a wardrobe update. 

Ah, Dubai, I love you!

A Tim Gunn haunting

I had a Project Runway nightmare last night. I don't mean this metaphorically - I had an honest to goodness nightmare, set right in the middle of Project Runway - and it was terrifying.

I'd been thinking about the series as I went to sleep. You know those thoughts you have when you're dropping off - kind of all over the place, but somehow linked? I was thinking about my mum, and how I've gotten her addicted to the series, and about my credit card (which was compromised and then cancelled last week so now I'm without funds over here), and about Amazon, which says I can order series 8 before it's released in February, and about my sewing machine which is being packed up this weekend .... and then I drifted off to sleep. And into my dream.

I was sitting in the audience of a live taping of the show, and halfway through it, Heidi Klum announced that six contestants had been chosen from the audience for a special challenge. These contestants, she announced, had previously submitted audition pieces; garments they'd created that show their own "unique point of view". (We know how Project Runway likes designers with "a unique point of view"!)

She read out a list of names, and to my utter surprise - mainly because I knew I had never submitted an audition piece - I was among them. Dear god, totally, TOTALLY out of my depth. And desperately afraid of being found out. And our challenge?  It was one of those ones where you have to make a dress using unusual materials.

She sent us off to Lincraft (Lincraft! Oh, the irony!) to get our supplies. We had to take two taxis - this is where the dream started to resemble The Amazing Race a bit, clearly I watch too much reality tv, but I am unashamed of this - and our taxi took a shortcut but somehow we ended up blocks away from where we were meant to be.

But we bought all our supplies and I was raring to go, planning that I would make a dress out of black and white segments of stiff cardboard, like that famous dress years ago that was made out of gold American Express cards (there's the credit card reference, never mind that mine's a Visa!) held together with chain links - does anyone remember that dress?

I was thinking a cardboard version using a similar construction - but much more "mod" in style, like a Mondrian painting - would work on a skinny model, never on a real person of course with all her curves and bumps, but on those skinny Runway models it would be fine. A little strapless sheath, with contrasting handstitching in the seams as a design feature. Or covered in petals made from gorgeous Japanese wrapping papers, only Lincraft didn't have any in stock, and I was desperate for my wrapping paper box at home in Melbourne which has so many nice papers in it, but it was in Melbourne, and somehow this competition was taking place in Alexandria, in Egypt ....

The other two contestants with me wouldn't let me start on my piece, and decided we had to go to Lincraft where everyone else was. We got there somehow and I was stressing about how to create a pattern for my piece, when someone told me we'd been given a pattern block to work with. Everyone else was diving into the pile of patterns and opening them, cutting out the pieces, and as I ran over to get mine I saw that one young male contestant had already started piecing together his fabric - he was using striped French canvas, big pieces cut on the bias in green and white stripes and purple and white stripes. Another contestant was using yellow and white stripes and I realised I couldn't go with my original idea because it was too close to what they were doing, and they'd started first - if only I could have begun my piece when I wanted to, instead of letting my competitors hold me back! I was angry at myself for not trusting my instincts.

I started to get panicked. Time was slipping away, and I couldn't even open my pattern envelope and everyone else was getting so far ahead of me - well into the construction of the piece when  I hadn't even cut out my blocks. I was so worried, I knew it was useless to even try and start a piece because everybody else was so far advanced, and I couldn't get the envelope, and my hopes were fading and I knew it was useless.

Then my pattern envelope sank into a bookcase, the books actually ate it up and I was reaching inside trying to pull it out - and it flew out suddenly, and a huge gust of wind came up and blew all the tissue pieces everyone, and suddenly Lincraft was a paddock, with tufts of grass and a cold overcast sky, and I was scrambling over the rocks trying to collect all my different block pieces and then Tim Gunn was saying "de-SIGN-ers, talk to me".

I showed him a drawing of what I planned to make, and he narrowed his eyes and looked it up and down, and my heart beat faster in my chest and I started to catch my breath and it began to hurt in my lungs, and my ears started to ring and then I woke up.

I woke up, and my heart was pounding, and I was actually panicked. The sensation was so real that it startled me into a full awakening.

I checked the clock, and it was 555am - so I didn't even have the luxury of trying to go back to sleep and forget it. I had to get up right away, feeling unbalanced and worried and stressed. It took me half the morning to shake the feeling.

Wow, it gave a whole new meaning to the idea of waking up with Tim Gunn. Shudder.

Wot I did on my New Year holiday

I made ellyfumps! 

There are six photos here, but there are only three elephants ... each one has different fabric on either side. 

Love this psychedelic retro fabric I got in Beirut ....

....along with this mercerised cotton I got too

All pinks and blues and tiny florals ....

....make this ellyfump perfect for a little girl

While this one here is going....

to my Syrian friend who's expecting a boy in March

This is practically my last burst of sewing, as my sewing machine gets packed up and shipped home on Saturday this week.

I felt an obssessive need to fit in as much creativity as possible before it disappears from my life for three weeks. Is that an oxymoron? Forced creativity?

Seeing in the New Year in style

In the end, I decided to see in the New Year in style. I might be here on my own, I might be missing My One True Love and the pussins with an ache that feels like a broken bone, I might not have any parties to go to because all my friends have gone home for the holiday - but dammit, that doesn't mean I have to sit in the porno palace on my own, I thought.

So I picked myself up, dusted myself down, and drove off to the best spa in town.

There's something very special about pampering yourself for no particular reason. I decided that I deserved a Moroccan bath, because it sounded especially decadent and exotic.And it was - oh, it was.

A Moroccan bath is similar to a traditional hammam experience. An Arabian hammam is a complex of rooms, with walls, floor and ceiling made out of marble, stone or tiles, and filled with steam. Traditionally there are three rooms - hot, breathlessly hot, and incandescent. You move from one to the other, sitting in wall niches or even lying on the floor, as the steam relaxes you and sweats you out and loosens all your horrid dead skin (uck). There are recessed bathing pools of water (they range in temperature from arctic, to cool, to hot, to scalding) that you plunge in an out of to wake yourself up/restore feeling to your limbs/boil yourself in. Then you can have any one of an infinite number of treatments - scrubs, rassoul, aloe vera, massage, etc etc.

I figured that after the week I've had, a massage was in order. So I got there early, put on my swimmers, and opened the door to the hammam- where the air was so thick with steam that I couldn't actually see, and I had to feel my way around by putting my hands on the hot, wet walls, a la Marcel Marceau.

I blindly found a wall niche and lay down to relax. The only sound was the slow drip of water from the ceiling to the marble floor, and the hiss of steam from the floor vents, and the heat was so extreme that I drifted into a sort of relaxed delirium, with my limbs like logs of pudding and my brain turned gently to "simmer". There was so much water pouring off me I couldn't tell what was steam, condensation or sweat. I was not capable of a single lucid thought. It was heavenly.

I spent the next 40 minutes alternately steaming myself silly at 49 degrees and plunging in and out of the hot and cold pools to recover and/or shock myself back into awakening. I was the only person there - no doubt because every other citizen in Bahrain was out having fun at a party - and it was fantastic, because I literally had the place to myself.

My masseuse eventually came and got me, and guided me into the massage room - she actually held my arm like I was a little baby, and put her hand in the small of my back, as a safety measure I think, explaining that after steam you can feel "like you fall down". Too true.

It's a wet room, because of the scrubbing, and they pipe steam in to keep you warm and open up your pores, and it was just magic. I had to strip off completely, and then she gave me a skin scrub so vigorous that it felt like it took off five layers of skin, followed by a shampoo and conditioning treatment, massage, and wash from head to toe. 

After an hour and a half of being scrubbed, pummelled, massaged and washed,  she stood me up, disappeared for a moment, came back with a bucket of iced water perfumed with rose oil, and doused me completely in it! I actually squealed like a little girl as the cold water hit me and took all the breath out of my lungs. She laughed at me and explained it was good for my pores and to smell nice. Which is no doubt true.

Then I got to put on a giant fluffy robe and slippers, got guided into a relaxation room like a baby again, was fed ginger tea and fresh fruit, and dozed happily for half an hour in the candlelight until I felt capable of actually standing up and getting dressed again. It was perfect - just what I needed.

And then I went home, watched a dvd and had my first alcohol-free New Year's Eve in ... well, perhaps my entire adult life, actually. And went to bed at 11pm because I couldn't keep my eyes open, so in the end I actually missed midnight.

Thus did I pass the New Year - and it was wonderful.