Like other concrete oases that pop up wherever a few barrels of oil fertilize the desert sands, Manama was one big construction site with vision-airy towers sprouting all over to reach for a taller tomorrow. Wherever I stepped, photography was prohibited, as though buildings were something they had just invented there. I never really knew who’d told me off – a security guard, a foreman, a humanoid – but they were all friendly to the point of apologetic when they hijacked my photo ops like Muppets. The whole place was a bit Muppety. Manamana, do doo do doo do. Like a Muppet version of the UAE, but in the very best possible way. I’d already realized on the way in that Gulf Air was no Emirates and now I saw that Manama was no Dubai. But that was good, because the blatant, glossy, adult version of oil mania is nothing to aspire.

The sun around noon was criminal. Looked like it had kidnapped every last cloud. Fortunately, those towers came with built-in shade. I mostly kept to the waterfront because, well, as they say: when on a desert archipelago. Some Kuwaiti RVs had set up camp along the concrete shores to cement their front row seats onto the concrete vistas.

At some point I crossed a highway that had more lanes than cars, and hopped a barrier on the other side in search of a beach Google Maps had lied about. It was a desert wasteland at best, a gigantic construction site at worst. Fortunately, it was too vast for anybody to notice my trespassing. If you walked far enough, the skyline started to look like toy towers. I’d hoped that lowkey-ish Bahrain would treat its migrant workers better-ish than its gulf neighbors, but one of the laborers defecating in the middle of that flat whiteness didn’t speak to great living and working conditions.