Youth Talk

As with most people my age, I get up early in the mornings and get driven to school. Any of you who happen to be driving by the British School of Bahrain (BSB) between the hours of 7.30am and 8am will know that it is a battleground for space and supremacy that stretches all the way to the Saudi and Janabiyah highways.

These tremendous traffic jams do not only affect students with conflicting feelings about the benefits of getting to school early, but they also affect unlimited numbers of humongous freightliner trucks slowing creeping their way into Saudi.

Whether or not I run into said traffic is merely a matter of where the dice fall. For example, I could leave at the exact time I did the day before and yet arrive 20 minutes later.

However, unlike most, I do not let the immense traffic get the better of my temper. Instead, I spend the time observing those around me. What I find the most amusing are the freightliner truck drivers, most of whom have a rather hilariously apathetic approach to the traffic.

I have seen numerous men get out of their trucks and converse with each other as they wait for the traffic to start moving again. This is usually followed by a dissonant symphony of car horns once the traffic starts moving again. However the most entertaining of all was: a young man driving a 7up truck who had decided to take a nap to pass the time, only to be startled awake by the angry car horns.
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For those of you who have been to the BSB, you will know that there is large sandy area beside it, which around morning time is inhabited entirely by cars and dust clouds. To me this scene is both bizarre and amusing: as there are no allocated parking spaces, which leads to cars parking and driving in every direction while they climb, creep, nuzzle and descend down mounds, in a manner that I can only describe as being eerily animalistic.