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.