Two months and counting . . .

It's late in the evening here, but I just wanted to post a quick note because today marks exactly two months since we arrived in Doha.  We now have residence permits for Ella & Morgan, which means that we can start exploring other nearby countries.  (You can't leave while the immigration process is in the works, or you have to start over.)  We will be sure to post updates as we finalize our plans, but I expect that we will travel both to Dubai (UAE) and Oman over the next month or two.

We've also received confirmation on the delivery date of our container, which will be May 3; we are supposed to finalize the paperwork on our lease in the next day or two and take possession on May 1 (inshallah).  Since we'll no longer be walking distance from work, that means that we'll finally need to break down and get a car, so we hope to rent one this weekend.

Here is a picture of the compound where we are planning to live. 

Catching up

It's been a busy week or so due to tax deadlines, our house hunt, etc., so we've gotten a bit behind in our updates. Last weekend we made a day trip to the desert, which was the first time Ella & I had left Doha since our arrival on February 23. Our driver picked us up at 9:00 sharp and drove us south of Doha to Sealine Resort, where we left the paved road and went dune bashing. To the uninitiated, dune bashing involves taking a capable 4 x 4 (the Toyota Land Cruiser is the vehicle of choice) with the tires partially deflated into the desert and driving at high speeds up and down the sand dunes. For anyone who enjoys a good roller coaster ride (I do), it's great fun, but it is not for the faint of heart or anyone with a weak stomach. The video clip at the bottom will give you an idea of what it's like, although it certainly won't convey the full effect. (Disclaimer: it's best to watch the video with the sound at a high volume to hear the revving engine, but I accept no responsibility for the choice of music that is playing in the background. Our driver was very skilled at off-road driving, but I can't say we share his taste in music.)

After a couple of hours of dune bashing, we took a break to swim in the Inland Sea, which separates Qatar from Saudi Arabia, and then went to the tour company's camp site for a leisurely lunch in their tents. Here are a few photos:



























This weekend also has been a busy one. I took Morgan to a movie Friday afternoon to give Ella a break from mommy duties, which was nice for Morgan and me, too. While we were at the mall, we ran into Morgan's new friend Yasmine, an eight-year-old who just moved into our building and attends Morgan's school. Yasmine's mom offered to take Morgan to the movies with them last night, so Ella & I had an impromptu date night and had our first dinner alone in at least three or four months. We went to The Spice Market, a new pan-Asian restaurant in the W Hotel across the street from the Somerset. The food was very good, and more than anything, we enjoyed being able to sit down with a bottle of wine and have a nice leisurely meal without that little person (as lovable as she is) constantly asking if we were ready to go.

Today we went back to the InterContinental for their Friday brunch again, this time with Morgan's new friend Yasmine, my colleague Bertrand (with whom I'd worked years ago in another job), and his wife and kids, who are visiting from Paris for the next three weeks. We took full advantage of the buffet (none of us left hungry), which had a nice mix of cuisines, from French to Italian to Lebanese to Chinese to Japanese, to name a few. After lunch we spent a couple of hours hanging out beside and in the pool, and enjoyed watching Morgan have a good time with her new friends.

Our biggest news for the week is that we've found a house. It's in a complex called Riviera Gardens that is close to Morgan's school and shouldn't be more than a 20-25 minute drive to my office at rush hour, which means it may wind up being a 15-minute drive by the time I come home most evenings. We are scheduled to take possession on May 1, and will be posting more details in the near future.

Where exactly are we, anyway?

Cowboys ain't easy to love and they're harder to hold
And they'd rather give you a song than diamonds or gold
Lonestar belt buckles and old faded Levi's each night begins a new day
And if you don't understand him and he don't die young
He'll probably just ride away

OK, if I had more advanced blogging skills like our new friend and fellow expat blogger Sybil (http://qatariadventures.blogspot.com/), I would have figured out a way to play some Willie for this post. Since that's not the case, I'll just ask you to imagine “Mommas Don't Let Your Babies Grow up to Be Cowboys” playing in the background--for reasons you'll soon understand, I couldn't shake the above verse after my experience last weekend.

For those of you stateside, LuLu is a chain of supermarkets, hypermarkets, department stores, and shopping centers in the Middle East. We made it last weekend to the LuLu hypermarket in Doha, which consists of a sprawling supermarket on the main floor, a beauty salon (ladies only, with fully covered windows to make the point), an abaya shop, an arcade, a travel agency, a post office branch, a coffee shop, and other stores, and a department store upstairs with everything from flat-screen TVs to washing machines to underwear to shoes. To cater to the Indian population, there is a whole room devoted to saris.

Just out of curiosity, I walked through the men's clothing department while Ella & Morgan looked at kids' clothes. It's not someplace I'll do a lot of shopping—the quality appeared to be somewhere between that of Wal-Mart and the dollar store—but I couldn't resist breaking the rules and taking the following photo:













Yes, you're seeing what you think you're seeing: a whole section of “American” belts. I laughed out loud when I came across this, because this isn't the kind of thing I'm used to seeing even in DC, much less Doha. (Back home in the Ozarks, that's another story!) Anyway, I'm still trying to figure out exactly whom the store is trying to cater to, but now we know where to shop for any good ole boys on our Christmas list.

Your response, Aaron

A couple of weeks ago, I was chatting on the phone with one of my oldest and dearest friends--as hard as it is to believe, we've known each other for over 30 years. Having known each other for so long, it's unusual for either of us to ask a question that stumps the other, but this time it happened in the form of a pretty innocuous question: "What has surprised you the most about living in Qatar"? I stammered for a few seconds and gave a response that was clearly not satisfactory to me or Aaron; I don't even remember what I said, but I think it was a banal observation about the availability of Western goods, which hadn't actually been surprising at all since I had seen the variety of shopping here when I came in October for my job interview.

In fairness to myself, we'd been so engrossed in all of the details of daily life here--everything from finding out where to get our blood typed in order to get our residence permits to shopping for PE uniforms for Morgan to looking for decent pizza--that I hadn't been able to step back and reflect on it all. The question started me thinking, and I finally have an answer: the thing that has surprised me the most about living here has been the extent to which religion permeates every aspect of daily life.

By way of example, the annual report of my employer, Qtel, starts off with the following: "In the name of Allah, most gracious, most merciful." It's hard to imagine seeing that in the annual report of a publicly-traded American company. It's even harder to imagine a company back home (apart from one with a clearly religious focus) that devotes several hundred feet of floor space to a prayer room, but Qtel does and I understand that this is pretty commonplace. Each shopping mall has prayer rooms, segregated by gender, and public restrooms contain basins for ritual foot-washing (they look a lot like bidets). And of course, you can't spend much time here without hearing the call to prayer, which happens six times per day. Not long ago, you would only hear it over the loudspeakers on the minaret of your local neighborhood mosque. Since it's impossible to hear the muezzin perform the call to prayer at a nearby mosque from inside a large, air-conditioned shopping mall, and shopping is the unofficial national pastime, the malls all pipe the call to prayer in through their sound systems as shown in the video below.

The things above are a few of the most visible reflections of the role that Islam plays here, but there are more subtle indicators, too. For example, when a Muslim talks about a future event, such as "let's have lunch tomorrow," the statement is typically accompanied by "inshallah" (God willing). I also wonder to what extent the view that everything is in God's hands may explain other things such as the "carefree" attitude (to put it nicely) that the locals take toward road safety. (At least they are consistent--they show the same lack of concern for their own children riding unbuckled on their laps in the front seats of their Land Cruisers as for the passengers in other cars that they cut off and tailgate.) It may be a stretch to tie the two together, but I'm not sure it's totally unreasonable.

I hope this answers your question, Aaron, albeit belatedly, and I hope it gives anyone else who reads this some food for thought.