Steve of Arabia?

Have we really "gone local"? Considering that I know maybe 10-15 words of Arabic after living here for over a year, and that even Ella is a long way from fluency although she is studying hard and knows much more Arabic than I do, I wouldn't think that anyone could mistake us for Arabs. However, we've had a couple of experiences in the last 24 hours that have made me scratch my head.

Last night we needed to do some grocery shopping for our excursion to the beach and desert today and wanted to combine our trip to the local supermarket with dinner in the same shopping mall. By way of background, our nearest shopping mall has exactly three (oops, make that four*) sit-down restaurants. The first one is Pizza Express, a branch of the UK chain but unfortunately not nearly as good as its sister restaurants in London or even the location across town in Doha. The second (I don't recall its name) is located inside The One, a modern furniture store. We also think that sounds bizarre, but the food is actually quite good (international, with several strong North African dishes); unfortunately Morgan hasn't found anything on the menu she likes since they discontinued the excellent lentil soup they were serving a few months ago. The last one, which is usually our choice by default when we need to combine dinner out with shopping, is none other than T.G.I. Friday's. Anyway, last night we were welcomed back by the always-friendly Filipina hostess, who now recognizes us and always greets Morgan in the same, uniquely Filipino, way: "Hi, baby." We were immediately seated in a comfortable booth and given our menus, but I noticed there was something different right away--the name and logo were on the back. Initially puzzled, I flipped through back to front and saw that, sure enough, we had all been given Arabic menus. Even though we kept them open whenever the server came back, he never noticed and we pretended nothing was amiss since the names of the dishes are in English; otherwise there could be a lot of confusion since there's no guarantee that one of the Filipino servers would understand an order in English. Of course, we pretty much have the menus memorized at this point, so just seeing the pictures as a refresher probably would been good enough.

Tonight's experience was stranger and, I think, funnier. I was driving down a dark side street to pick up Morgan from gymnastics when I saw a young Arab man in traditional garb gesticulating wildly by the side of the road. (In case you're wondering, no, I normally would not stop under those circumstances in the States, but since violent crime is virtually non-existent here I saw no reason not to.) When I stopped the car and put down the passenger's window, the gentleman instantly greeted me with "salaam alaykum" (literally "peace be upon you," but used in the way Americans would use "hello"). I instinctively responded with "alaykum salaam" (the standard reply) and when he asked "kaif halak" ("how are you") I answered with "zain" ("fine"). It wasn't entirely surprising that the guy greeted me in Arabic--he probably saw my Land Cruiser, the preferred vehicle of locals, and assumed I was an Arab. However, since he could see me at this point, wearing a Gap ball cap, t-shirt, and shorts, and with my fair Scots-Irish complexion, I expected that we would now have the inevitable switch to English. Instead, the gentleman rattled off something that I could not possibly understand and I confessed that I'd used pretty much all the Arabic I know. He smiled, said "shukran" ("thank you"), and waved good-bye.

*Thanks, Sybil. I completely forgot about Opera having a cafe--we had lived here for at least six months before we realized it was up there, and always forget about it when we're thinking about where to eat. Guess we should expand our horizons and give it a try sometime, since I know that at least their desserts are good.

Photo effects courtesy of Sybil - Thanks!

One year down . . .

As my Facebook friends will already know, yesterday marked a major milestone for us--it was exactly a year ago yesterday that our flight from Dulles arrived in Doha. It may say something about the extent to which we're becoming part of Doha life that the reason I didn't post yesterday is that I was attending a board meeting of the Doha Players, our local community theater group. They needed someone on the board with experience in drafting constitutions, bylaws, and generally doing the nitty-gritty legal-type stuff involved in governing such an organization, so I stepped up to put my legal skills to work in a different setting.

Hitting the one-year mark caused me to reminisce a little about our first night here. To back up a bit, we were fortunate to be flown business class by my employer on Qatar Airways from the DC area to Doha. That meant getting to relax at the Virgin Atlantic lounge in Dulles International Airport; as it happened, we were flying out on Oscars night and managed to catch almost an hour of the show in the lounge while enjoying the free food and cocktails. Fast forward 18 hours or so, after a very restful flight with excellent food and on-demand videos to make the time go faster. We managed to get through the Doha airport in very little time, thanks to the VIP meet-and-greet service that Qtel gets for its new employees; this means sitting in a lounge and taking advantage of free snacks, juice, etc. while someone else deals with immigration formalities. The Qtel driver was there as promised, and drove us to the Somerset serviced apartments, which we would call home for about two and a half months.

Since we got into Doha in the evening and hadn't eaten on the plane for a few hours, we decided to check out the American Grill, a sit-down casual place located inside the Somerset and a bit like Friday's or Ruby Tuesday's. As we sat down for dinner, an American woman at the next table over changed channels on the TV on the wall, and lo and behold, it was the Oscars being broadcast on tape delay. In fact, the show was within a couple of minutes of where we had left it in DC, so the whole trip seemed rather surreal . . . it was like we had teleported from in front of a TV set at Dulles to the same TV set in Doha. (Jet lag undoubtedly colored our perception in this regard.)

Now it's time for a candid assessment of this place after a year, at least as candid as we feel that we can be when I still want to keep living and working here for a while. Following a vote of the family, here are the top 10 things that we like about Doha:

10. The fact that we have Chili's, Applebee's, and T.G.I. Friday's for when we want a taste of home
9. Juice stalls - these are little hole-in-the-wall places that serve up fresh, delicious, and cheap fruit juices (more like a fruit puree) in nearly every imaginable flavor
8. Weekend brunches at the hotels, especially the holiday brunches, which are even more over-the-top - I had never before seen a buffet with caviar and foie gras stations!
7. The desert
6. The fact that high temperatures are in the 80s while our friends back home are shoveling snow
5. The Museum of Islamic Art
4. Morgan's school, International School of London in Qatar - it's nearly as good as Washington International School, where she went to two years of preschool plus kindergarten, but costs less than half as much; plus we think it's way cool that the 20 kids in her class represent at least a dozen different nationalities
3. Souk Waqif
2. The fact that we can get to some really amazing places for a week, or even a weekend, that would be completely unrealistic destinations from the States for anything less than a two-week trip
1. Six weeks of paid vacation per year, plus two week-long Islamic holidays!

And here are the things we really don't like:

10. Having only one place, located all the way across town, to buy booze (at least it's available, though!)
9. The fact that the highs are in the 120s here while our friends back home are enjoying "normal" summer temperatures, which are more like spring here
8. The fact that Ramadan is strictly enforced in public on Muslims and non-Muslims alike with the exception of a handful of hotel restaurants; in a place where there isn't much to do other than going to restaurants anyway, this means that the place pretty much shuts down for a month
7. The fact that road trips outside of Qatar require passing through Saudi Arabia; since Qatar is about the size of Connecticut and we have no interest in experiencing the "hospitality" of our southern neighbors, that doesn't leave a lot of places to go by car
6. Lack of cultural stimulation -- there's only one real museum in town, the Art Center closed in December, there's no ballet and not much theater. The philharmonic is trying, though!
5. Housing costs that are kept at artificially-high (and ludicrous) levels due to protectionist restrictions on property ownership by foreigners--is a three-bedroom bungalow here really worth over twice what we paid for rent on a large two-bedroom flat in London overlooking Hyde Park just a few years ago?
4. Infrastructure that is not at all in keeping with a country ranked first or second globally by GDP per capita, depending on whom you ask; public transportation and roads are a joke and driving is a nightmare (see #1 below)
3. The sense of entitlement/superiority on the part of a certain segment of the population here, who treat everyone else as either an unimportant nuisance who should get out of their way or as their slave
2. The dust - I've missed more days of work and Morgan has missed more school due to illness here in twelve months than in the three previous years combined.
1. The drivers (this wasn't even close!) - the same people who stroll at a leisurely pace through the shopping malls, four or five abreast, and fail to show any sense of urgency in their work, seem to be the same ones who like to get six inches behind you in their Land Cruiser and flash their high-beams at you until you move out of their way so that they can get to the coffee shop two minutes faster.

As always, your comments are welcome.

Bumper Stickers

The other day on my way to Arabic class, we circled a roundabout behind the colorful van emblazoned with a message similar to "Want to learn more about Islam? Stop me to find out how." At the time, Steve and I were listening to "Personal Jesus," which in my mind was somehow morphing into "Personal Allah." I've been thinking a fair bit lately about similarities between the Islam practiced here and the prevailing type of Christianity found back in the Bible Belt. I think the bumper stickers here can pretty well summarize the direction of my thoughts. Far more prevalently than even back home, one sees cars plastered with bumper stickers of a religious variety (almost exclusively, except for those goofy cartoon boy outlines or sometimes some sort of a national pride sticker). The most common are "Masha Allah," which I'm going to translate as "Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow," but also conveys a sense of divine fate akin to "Thy Will Be Done," and "Alhamdulillah," which apparently comes from the same root as "Hallelujah" and is "Thanks Be to God." A third phrase that nearly always makes me think of home when I hear it is "Insha'allah," which in my mind becomes "Good Lord Willing." This one is also the root of the Spanish "Ojala." It implies that nothing in the future is certain, but all is dependent on God's will. (Of course, sometimes it has a particular usage trending more toward whatever is being discussed is only going to happen through divine intervention! Context and user intent are key ...)