Finding a Different Bahrain Than the One I Expected MANAMA, Bahrain - The Bahrain Grand Prix is history. To the astonishment of many, the event not only took place, but there were actual fans in the stadium, many of them. Sebastian Vettel drove his Red Bull car to a strong, if not entirely dominant, victory, crossing the finish line 3.3 seconds ahead of Kimi Raikkonen in a Lotus. But the race was, with the exception of Sunday, somewhat of a sideshow here. Tomorrow I'm going to write about three men that I and two journalist friends met to discuss F1 and life in Bahrain. In the meantime, though - and to keep this post from being extraordinarily long - I thought I would write about some of the things I learned here. For myself and many of my fellow sports reporters, our feelings about life in Bahrain, the uprising here, and the wisdom of Formula One coming - despite calls from rights groups, race fans and politicians abroad, as well as local demonstrators - changed once we were here. Editors back home, and friends and families, all thought we were in a war zone and would be lucky to get out alive. That idea had been in our own thoughts before coming to Bahrain. But it was slightly askew, it turned out. Moreover, my own experience in the Iranian Revolution in 1978 - my only personal reference to this sort of situation - turned out to be extraordinarily different. In Iran, I had seen tanks and troops in the streets everywhere. I had once been stopped for 25 minutes at a traffic light on the evening of Sept. 7, 1978 as thousands upon thousands of demonstrators passed through the intersection. I knew and Iranians told me that this was a social revolution in which a majority of the country was tired of the Shah and the inequalities of his regime. But Islam, the domain of the Ayatollahs, was the only thing that they could all share and take power from and come together around to create their revolution. The battle here in Bahrain is sectarian: Sunni vs. Shiite and therefore Islam is not the unifier of the people against the ruling regime as it was in Iran. Here in Bahrain, I was seeing an even more apparent contrast. You had to go to look for the demonstrations to find them. In much of Manama, life went on as usual. I saw no troops in the streets of Manama, and only a few on the way to the circuit. Life was so normal in the sectors of the city where I stayed at my hotel that I was even able to participate again in an open musical jam session at a local bar where I had done the same thing two years ago when covering the race, before the revolution. The French Canadian band leader told me that life was completely normal for them in their bubble of a world in Manama, even if they knew there was an uprising going on. Although we knew there were demonstrations and violence going on, we felt that the coverage in the news media, and what our friends and family had as an image of the country, was feeding on itself to produce an image of disaster that was not like the life we were encountering here - despite our knowledge of atrocities and demonstrations. So it was with great curiosity that I and my friends Joe and David wanted to hear what these other "men in the middle," had to say about this uprising. So whether the trio were some kind of government plants or not - and we decided they almost certainly were not (although I remain open to the possibility) - we decided to hear them out. To be continued...