Bread and Butter – I’ve been thinking about it, both figuratively and literally.

Dave has estimated, that over the 22 days of this holiday so far, he has eaten over 100 portions of bread.

Mostly he has eaten bread rolls. Sometimes it has been in the form of toast. On a number of occasions it has been freshly sliced Italian ciabatta. Over the last few days, warm flat bread, straight from the tandoor oven.

Sometimes, but not often in Australia you are served with complimentary bread at a restaurant. In Europe, you seem to always be served with bread and it appears in the Middle East you are too.

And bread can be great, really great. The bread on the cruise ship was freshly baked, not just once or twice a day, but all day every day. The bread from the outside stone oven, where we enjoyed tonight’s Egyptian restaurant, was soft and warm and fluffy, as opposed to last night’s crisp and salty Iranian flat bread.

Italian ciabatta crust is to die for, especially when you dip it in a fresh grassy local olive oil. Tonight’s flat bread was used to scoop up the excess sauce in a slow cooked Egyptian lamb and okra dish. Both useful and tasty.  The toast self-cooked on the turnstile at a roof top breakfast buffet in Venice was smothered in a very good peach jam. Yum yum.

But the reason Dave and I have both enjoyed bread in Europe so much is actually about the butter. Good European salted butter. The individual President portions served on the ship definitely became our favourite. It is made in France. It is salty and creamy and, well, fatty. Nice fatty, that is smooth on your palate and tastes like fresh cream. The 10g portions were the perfect size to smother thickly on a dinner roll. More like bread with your butter than the other way around ;). I’m glad sugar is now the enemy not fat!

I have also been thinking of bread and butter figuratively. Tomorrow we start our final leg heading for home and therefore back to work – the thing that provides me with my ‘bread and butter’.

Dave and I both have the immense privilege of loving what we do for our ‘bread and butter’. We both love our jobs and the people we work with. TAFE used to have a slogan: ‘love your work’ and I thought it was a great phrase to describe what we should all aim to do.

I have however, really enjoyed this pretty sizeable break from work. I don’t remember ever having four weeks off in one go before, and even with a week to go before I return, it has been very restful, refreshing and encouraging to have this leave.

 There is lots going on at work at the moment, and I’m really looking forward to sinking my teeth back into it again. But for the next week I’m going to continue to enjoy this break and gather my strength for what will be a very busy few months ahead.

Today we decided to have breakfast in the hotel. Just a simple omelette each, a tub of yoghurt and a very ordinary coffee. And, on todays theme, brown toast!

We then caught a taxi to the largest shopping centre in Bahrain, the City Centre. It was very upmarket, lots of the usual fancy worldwide retail chains and THE MOST AMAZING supermarket I have ever been to.

I covertly took lots of photos – I didn’t want them deleted by store security again like they did in Bosnia.

The supermarket, called Carrefour, was at least ten times the size of my local, Woolworths at Kooringal. There was a whole aisle, about 25 metres long, of just oils. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Each aisle was so spacious, about four metres across and wow – it was all just so neat. There was five aisles of fridge and freezer goods and when we went to the fresh fruit and vegetable section, I could barely see the other side! What a way to finish our supermarket tour of Europe and the Middle-East 🙂

I finally managed to find Will some shoes he might like and then headed back to the hotel to finish packing and check out. The flight back to Qatar was nearly as quick as the one over, just over 30 minutes this time. Which is about 30% of the time it took us to pass through customs at Doha airport.  We have had smooth entries and exits to each country we have visited, which is a total of 10 by the way. Not today. Today we came round the corner and saw two VERY VERY long lines. Of course we choose the one that took the longest, but either way it would not have been good. The free internet connection kept me vaguely amused, but 90 minutes in a queue is definitely not my idea of fun!

We did get to the hotel by sundown. This hotel is part of the ‘Souq Wakif’, a very traditional market made up of mainly gold and textile stalls. We had a quick wander, then dinner at the Egyptian restaurant I mentioned earlier.

We are now headed for bed.  We don’t fly out till tomorrow evening, so bed time reading tonight will be a little online research on what we should do in Doha tomorrow. If you’ve ever been here, suggestions in the comments ASAP please!

If I don’t work it out we will just do a ‘Recce’ (like we did in Venice three weeks ago) and take it from there.

Ciao.

PS: In case you were wondering after my post a few days ago… the toilets at Bahrain airport have change a lot since I was last there neatly 40 years ago. Two ply toilet paper, a bottom washer and sit down toilets. No more holes in the ground. Progress hey!