Beit al Jasra, Bahrain

I am so glad that we visited this wonderful house in 2007, for when I returned for another look on a subsequent visit in 2010, the doors had fly screens over them and it was not possible to enter the rooms. It is Beit al Jasra, the birthplace of the late Emir, Sheikh Isa bin Salman Al Khalifa. He was born in the 1930s and died just in late 1998. The Al Khalifa family is still popular with a sizeable proportion of Bahrain's citizens (most of Muharraq and Riffa, for example) and expatriate residents.... the 'other side' gets most of the news coverage!

What I remember about this day, nearly six years ago ( I am writing this in late 2012) is the striking colours inside the house; the dates; and that my batteries were playing up! Those red and yellow things that you can see in the traditional basket in the centre image are in fact dates, and we saw a date processing room that had channels on the floor for catching the juice or syrup of the dates that were crushed on the floor! There is a coffee set behind the dates. Now I worked in a food hamper packing factory in the 1990s and my first job was on the date-line, so I was still not fond of dates, and my sister seemed to have no great love for them either! I have to say that I have since recovered my date-love; the aversion only lasted a decade, it turned out. Deglet nour is my favourite variety. Sometimes I really miss the more ethnic shops, as found in UK cities.

The pottery lamps in the top left shot are from A'ali pottery, or A'ali bottery, as it calls itself ( I think, roughly speaking there are no unvoiced sounds in Arabic, so when Arabs speak English, the English p becomes b; k becomes g, and so on, because the p and k would be almost impossible for them to pronounce. I speak as a former student of Linguistic). The pottery is beautiful, but made of biscuit dough, so rather fragile. I didn't buy lots of stuff because of the problem of transporting it, but there was plenty to admire.

At Jasra village there is also a centre for traditional Bahraini handicrafts, including gypsum carving and straw weaving. I have a beautiful gypsum carving that my sister TMLhereandthere, who used to live in Bahrain, gave me on another occasion. Perhaps I shall blip it some other day.

More about Beit al Jasra here

This is most likely the last of the Bahrain backdated blips. Please take a look at some of the others if you are interested; they are all in Feb 2007. I still blip every day (it's now Nov 25, 2012) so you can catch up with my later life, too, if you are still tuned in! I don't suppose Bahrain is on the tourist map since the Troubles of 2011 began; it was only really on the map for Formula One tourism...