Frankly Shankly,
there are two types out here. The likes of critical winge and TwinJock who will never be satisfied with anything (and thankfully leave to contaminate our neighbours' airlines with their attitudes) and the likes of Panama Jack, brassplate, and B. Bonger who tend to make the best of whatever's out here and possess a pragmatic positiveness about them.
Bahrain will never compare with our lifestyles back home. So you make your own lifestyle, surround yourself with the right friends, engage yourself in your favourite pastimes, then it's quite good.
Gulf Air is good airline...well structured, experienced (55+ years of it), excellent flight standards, good pilots. If you can make do with a bit of self help and initiative and not expect everything to be handed to you on a silver platter, you'll do fine.
At the moment, it is going through important transitions, the biggest of which is going from a multi GCC state owned carrier to full Bahraini ownership. Bahrain became the sole owner at the start of November and with this, some issues are to be expected.
Another important transitional move is an order of quite a few more aircrafts, to be announced on the 11th November at the Dubai Air Show. Rumours abound of several Airbus as well as Boeing aircrafts. With this, new routes are bound to be announced.
I'm expecting some disagreements (and indeed flak) from this post and quite frankly don't really care. I enjoy being here.