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What is there for a nine-year-old American girl to do in Doha? Admittedly not as much as in DC, but more than you might think, and Morgan has had a pretty eventful couple of weeks. We thought her birthday would be a good chance to update everyone on what's new with her.
On the 14th, Morgan and a few of her classmates performed an adaptation of the Roald Dahl book Matilda for other Year 4, 5, and 6 students (the equivalent of 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade, respectively, in the U.S. system) and parents. They wrote and staged the play themselves, and pretty much did everything from casting to props and directing. (Ella did give them a hand with hair and makeup.) All of the kids performed beautifully, and Morgan seemed to be entirely in her comfort zone hamming it up as Mrs. Wormwood.
Five days later, Morgan and her teammates from the Gymnastics Academy performed in a competition with other local programs. As with the competition in which she participated last year, medals were awarded to all kids who received at least 14 points out of 20 based on their ability to perform ten skills. The judging was much tougher than last time, when all of the kids from Morgan's program--and one-third to one-half of the participants from elsewhere--walked away with medals. This time about half the kids in Morgan's gym received medals, and the other gyms received no more than two or three each. Morgan stayed calm throughout, did her best, and managed to score 16 out of 20. That means she will definitely be party of the contingent representing her gym in the next competition in April, and may be competing in May as well.
Next, Morgan had the good fortune of having regular classes canceled on her birthday for the school's sports day. She surprised us and herself by not only taking first place in the high jump among the Year 4 girls, but also beating the girls from Years 5 and 6, despite her rather unconventional technique. Who knew that doing an airborne forward roll over the crossbar would be an effective way to perform the high jump?
As for the birthday celebration, Morgan managed to stretch it out for three days:
Day 1 (Wednesday) - Morgan celebrated her birthday at school with homemade cupcakes and was serenaded with renditions of "Happy Birthday" in four languages--English, French, Arabic, and Dutch. A classmate also performed the song in sign language for her.
Day 2 (Thursday) - Ella took Morgan and a few friends from school bowling after sports day, and Morgan won with a 98. (Not bad for someone who barely weighs 50 pounds!) Then we had dinner with some friends at the Grand Hyatt's casual pizza restaurant, which uses a wood-fired oven to make pizza that is the best we've had in Doha and not far from our gold standard of Two Amys in Washington. The staff prepared a special birthday mini-cheesecake for Morgan, and she was serenaded again, this time with "Happy Birthday" in English, French, and Afrikaans.
Day 3 (Friday) - A dozen of Morgan's friends came to our house for a "Wicked"-themed party, most of them dressed as their favorite good or bad witch. Ella & Morgan taught them the song "Popular," with each girl taking just a few lines, and the girls did a performance for parents at the end. Some of the girls apparently don't like singing nearly as much as Morgan, but they generally seemed to have a good time anyway. Of course, the highlight for me was the excellent chocolate cake (topped with chocolate ganache) that Ella made from scratch; it was actually good enough to make the rest OK.
As many of my fellow Qatar-based expats can confirm, banking services here leave a lot to be desired. However, even by the low standards that I've gotten accustomed to, the events of the past 24 hours warrant special mention.
It started the 25th, which is payday each month at Qtel. The electronic deposit of my paycheck wasn't completed until after 6 pm--several hours later than usual--and the funds were still not made available as of bedtime.
This morning I checked, and finally QNB was showing that my paycheck was available. Good news. Unfortunately, I needed to withdraw cash and discovered that the ATM in our compound was out of service, and the ATM in Qtel Tower gave me a cryptic message about being "unable to process" my transaction. I called QNB and was told (thankfully) that there was nothing wrong with my card or my account, but of course no explanation was given as to why I couldn't withdraw cash with a properly-functioning card from an account that had plenty of funds.
After work this evening the compound ATM still wasn't working, but we headed out to do our grocery shopping assuming we would be able to use a credit or debit card. Unfortunately, the staff at Carrefour notified us that their machines weren't working for any credit or debit transactions due to an issue with QNB. Since we aren't in the habit of carrying large sums of cash, we had to leave our full cart at the checkout register, and exited the store muttering a few choice expletives about QNB.
Ella and I shared a chuckle about how well the term "qatarded" fit the whole experience--apologies to the mentally challenged, as this label is a bit unfair to them--and I started a mental sketch of a blog post that would describe the issues we've had with QNB. (It would be a very long post.)
Fast forward to later in the evening. I'm dropping off my shirts at the cleaners and chatting with a friendly, distinguished-looking Qatari gentleman who jokingly tells the Pakistani at the counter that I'm Steve Martin after I give the guy only my first name. (I don't think the store clerk got the reference.) The Qatari gentleman asks where I'm from, and responds "very nice" when I say I'm from the U.S. Then he asks where I work, and I say I work for Qtel. He then tells me that Qtel's network to QNB has been down all day so that no credit card transactions can be posted. Oops.
While I don't have a problem poking fun at QNB when I encounter a problem that arises out of their complete incompetence, it sounds like in this case there may be a bit more to the story than I'd thought. In any event, we'll just cross our fingers that tomorrow we can finally take out cash, buy our groceries, and do all of the things we used to take for granted.
For quite a while I had been mulling over a blog post about how technology continues to shrink the distance from home for expats. I would have described some of the cool toys that let us keep in touch with friends and family, access entertainment from home, etc., and how things have changed since our previous overseas stints. A future post may go into a little more detail on that, but today I had to share a lesson about how sometimes the simplest solution is best.
By way of background, getting American TV programming in Qatar isn't difficult at all, but finding what you want is like hunting a needle in a haystack. Some programs are listed in the daily newspapers, with varying degrees of accuracy. Normally when we do find a show we like it's at least a season behind and we've already seen it.
For these reasons, expats often go to great lengths (and expense) to get TV shows from home. One pricey option is the DVD boxed set, but that means waiting until the end of the season. For those of us who have U.S. credit cards and billing addresses, Apple TV offers a good but somewhat expensive option for keeping up on current shows. Otherwise, downloading or streaming shows from sites like Megavideo or Hulu is a low-cost but also low-quality way to get the latest episodes.
We have been using some of the download sites, which isn't easy since these sites don't usually allow downloading from overseas, and were proud that we had actually figured out a way to get American Idol onto our TV. First, we set up a VPN connection with a proxy server in the U.S. and downloaded the video. Then we converted the video since the download site uses a format that doesn't work with Apple TV, and transferred the file from the computer to the Apple TV. This all is less complicated than it may sound, but it's very time-consuming. From the time we start downloading a one-hour show until the time we can watch it is at least 5 or 6 hours.
As you can imagine, we don't actually watch a lot of shows this way. However, we wanted to catch up on this season's American Idol and had some free time on our hands for a change, so we managed to download and watch three episodes from last night through today. So far, so good. Then this evening we all sit down to eat our home-delivered pizza (courtesy of Pizza Hut), and just for fun I decide to check the local TV listings. Lo and behold, American Idol is on at 8 pm, but I'm thinking it must be at least a season behind . . . . Actually, it's the current season, and the very next episode following where we had gotten with our downloads. The Arabic subtitles were easy to ignore, and the Arabic commercials provided a bit of fun language practice for Ella.
So it turns out that we can go through the whole convoluted process above to watch a pixelated version of the show on our TV, or we can just flip on the set at 8:00 on Friday night. Guess which one we're going with from now on.
Last week was a busy one. Doha hosted some of the biggest names in men's tennis for the ExxonMobil Qatar Open, which took place from January 4 through 9. Morgan's school took a group of kids for an entire afternoon to see some of the early rounds, and since I managed to get two free tickets from Qtel, Ella and I joined Morgan to see Nadal play the much lower ranked Bolelli. There wasn't a lot of suspense in the game--Nadal easily won--but the evening temperature was pleasantly cool for Doha (low 60s) and we enjoyed the chance to see some world-class tennis. Unfortunately, a day in the sun had taken its toll on Morgan so we didn't get to stay for the Roger Federer match that followed, but at least we were able to catch most of it on TV when we got home. Here are a couple of photos.
The other big event last week was Doha's annual book fair. We showed up not knowing quite what to expect, but it was enormous--the dozens of book stalls completely filled Doha's sizable convention center. Over half of the books were in Arabic, but there were many in English, especially kids' books, and there was even a French section (see photo). The only minor glitch was that there were no credit card machines available for the merchants even though they apparently were expecting them, but QNB did its part to keep the registers ringing with an ATM truck parked right in front of the main entrance. We managed to walk away with our bag full of books and our wallets empty, so I suppose the evening was a success.
P.S. For those of you with whom I'm not already in touch on Facebook, here's one of those "only in Doha" things that I wouldn't have believed if I hadn't also seen it--a large cheetah riding shotgun in a Nissan SUV with its head out the window like a dog. I just hope it was fed well before its car ride.http://nickandjoce.blogspot.com/2009/12/cheetah-as-my-co-pilot.html
