4x4s and the Four Seasons

As we near 9 months in Qatar it becomes increasingly clear that we have got entirely used to things which initially seemed strange, ridiculous or infuriating. These things sneak up on you…. one minute you’re giggling at the idea of Education City, the next it trips off your tongue…..

• When we first arrived in Syria 18 months ago we were so horrified at the lack of recycling that we kept every plastic water bottle we used, thinking that we’d eventually find an ecological method of disposal. We didn’t, and finally dumped the entire lot in a number of bins. We did recycle glass, but one load of wine bottles filled the entire recycling bin which was so embarrassing we could only drop them off in the dead of night during Ramadan. By the time we arrived in Doha we were comfortable with throwing everything in the bin. We have now started recycling paper and cardboard, will do glass soon, but the water bottles still slip through the net. The most action our Lambeth Council recycling bags have seen is as an impromptu apron…

• When we were initially looking to buy a car, I told the second hand salesman I was looking for a Peugeot 206. I ended up with a 4x4 and cringed at my petrol consumption and general arrogance. We are both now not-so-secretly in love with the huge car, and find ourselves looking at other 4x4s as rather small. In fact perhaps we should get another one just for the flexibility…

• The Four Seasons is a 5 star hotel, and as a result costs a small fortune. Since it is our local bar, we no longer seem to notice the prices. Or at least not as much. £30 for the house white still seems a bit steep, but we’ll pay it without complaining. Visiting competing hotels for champagne brunches on Fridays is de rigueur. It would seem rude not to.

• It is apparently about 48 degrees during the day at the moment. It is quite hot, but presumably we have acclimatised a little because it’s not at all unbearable. Cars that have been sitting in that heat all day do tend to be a bit toasty and we are not yet used to burning ones skin on the seatbelt and being unable to touch the steering wheel until the aircon has been blasting it for 5 minutes. I ate a Babybel the other day (it’s a local delicacy, ok?) and the wax skin had melted by the time I’d finished the 15 minute drive home. But despite all this, perhaps the oddest thing we’ve got used to is having to remember a jumper on any trip to a mall or an office, where the air conditioning can be so fierce you begin to shiver in your thin cotton slacks. The cinemas are legendarily Arctic, which can be tricky when you’re sitting still for 2 hours. I lost feeling in the end of my nose last time.

• It is almost impossible to walk anywhere. We walk to the aforementioned Four Seasons and are treated as rare biological specimens when people find out. There are no pavements, or they’re continually being dug up, and there are rarely crossing points on 6 lane roads. We find ourselves genuinely considering whether to drive the 100m (as the crow flies, not as the pavements run) to our local Mall.

• Mr A speaks Arabic all the time at work. I never do but am soldiering on with my lessons nevertheless. Because everyone comes from all over the place, language is entirely confused. You find yourself listening to Arabs talking to each other in French, Pakistanis speaking to Philipinos in Arabic, and Germans talking to each other in English. Mr A says I should speak Arabic more often. I say he should shut up and leave me alone.

• Apart from a humanitarian delivery of chorizo and pepperoni from my sister, we haven’t had proper pork since December. We find ourselves thinking veal bacon is okay, beef pepperoni really rather tasty. I still don’t understand why if pork is haram, it’s entirely acceptable to eat another meat that has been dyed and flavoured to taste as similar to pork as possible. Mr A had a dream about pork pies the other day.

• The serviced apartment thing means we haven’t put up a curtain, changed a light bulb, or fixed ANYTHING since we arrived. It is physically impossible for us to clean our own windows, and the supermarket shop gets put on a trolley by a very, very nice man in a red uniform. The days of DIY seem to be firmly behind us, at least for a bit.

• Meeting anyone new inevitably involves the exchange of business cards at some point. I have two – one from work, one personal. My personal one doesn’t actually say what I do on it which mystifies people – why would you not put your profession plus every conceivable letter after your name? Why not your middle initials while you’re at it? And perhaps some gold embossing? Also neither card has my married name on it, which I think leaves Mr A feeling a bit miffed….. He always his forgets cards when we go out and asks if I have any of his. I often do, which is sadly extremely wifely and probably more than makes up for the name thing.

• On a more upbeat note, we are used to the call to prayer now but still love it. Even more so when sitting drinking cocktails on a rooftop bar just as the final call of the day goes out from the surrounding mosques… (I’m ambitiously trying video here. Apologies if this is a technical step too far).

Now I just need to get used to my work colleague cutting his fingernails at his desk……

Beaches and booze

In an effort to be more snappy and less self-involved, this will be relatively brief….

It’s been unbelievably windy for the last week or so, which means you get lots of sandstorms, low visibility, bad hair and an exfoliation every time you walk out the door. We were therefore slightly fearful of our planned outing to the beach last weekend. We had been invited by some friends to Gin and Tonic Rock. Before you check, this landmark will not be shown on any maps but is rather a place of folklore, the location of which is only divulged to those who deserve the privilege, or those who happen to be invited along one Friday afternoon. We drove to the West of Qatar (which takes under an hour – this place is really very small), hit the coast, then drove North. Lots of driving along sand beaches, rocky terrain and seawater inlets. Mr A enjoyed that bit a lot. We finally reached a beach where everyone parked up, undressed, headed in to the sea, and cut their feet on the lethal rocks. The landscape is weirdly beautiful there – perhaps similar to the moon. Nothing grows, but the ‘cliffs’ (think Dover on a miniature scale) have been worn away to make mushroom shapes.




As the sun began to set, we headed up on the Rock, cracked open the Bombay Sapphire, opened up the tupperware of sliced lemon and the box of ice cubes, and watched one of those sunsets where it disappears behind some cloud on the way down so you don’t really see anything. We then decamped back to the beach, made some fires and ate lots of barbecued meat. We were very proud of our newly acquired cool box, which we thought meant we were definitely grown ups and VERY organised. We were rather eclipsed by not bringing a single plastic chair with us, or a fold-down table, or a rack thing to put over the fire. And it turns out our cool box is the baby of the family, as others are large enough to fit your entire kitchen in. Also, I hadn’t baked anything, but we enjoyed talking about dentistry provision in Qatar with some friendly people while eating home-cooked muffins and stroking someone’s dog, which reminded us how much we like dogs. After a quick dip in order to admire the phosphorescence (and a few more cuts on our feet) we followed another car to find our way back to the bright lights of Doha. Since we live on the East coast, it was our first sunset in Qatar and whet our appetite for the great desert outdoors. Though apparently you must be careful if you camp – there’s always the danger of getting run over by a dune-bashing-Land-Crusing Qatari at 3am.


Our other recent beach experience was somewhat different. As part of Mr A’s birthday celebrations, I booked us in to Sealine Beach Resort for the night – pretty much the only place to stay outside Doha. All I’d heard was that it was a 70s throwback, so I was expecting an amusing, if bizarre, mini-break which if not that enjoyable would at least be good material for stories. We arrived on Friday afternoon to a place heaving with people of every nationality you can imagine – Gulfi women in abayas, Lebanese women in string bikinis, Phillipino ladies with their boyfriends, African men showing off their six-packs. One pool appeared to be solely for young male wankers while the other pool looked a little like a Magaluf in peak season, so we opted for the beach. A good choice, as long as you were alert when swimming to the clear and present danger of being killed by a 10 year old driving a jet ski. As the sun began to set, Mr A spied a small building that looked suspiciously like a bar and within seconds we were looking out to sea, Corona in hand. Whilst we spend a lot of evenings out here not drinking (because so many of the good restaurants are unlicensed), there is something uniquely satisfying about sitting on a beach with an alcoholic beverage in hand.



That evening, we had supper in the hotel – insisting on sitting outside in the humidity rather than inside the fun-vacuum that was the buffet. It dawned on us that apart from the German woman on the neighbouring table feeding her food scraps to a cat, all non-Qataris seemed to have left and it was just us and the Qatari teenage boys. They all rent rooms there, pile in with their stereos, instruments and barbecues, and while the night away. This makes for delightful Arab music to listen to whilst eating one’s supper and having a post-prandial snifter. Unfortunately, it also makes for being woken up at 2, 4 and 6 am by the dancing and singing in the room above where you are ‘sleeping’. We consoled ourselves with the thought that should 10 British teenagers stay in a hotel room for the night unsupervised, we probably would have died in our sleep from the Marijuana fumes, and if we’d survived would wake to the sounds of a drunken scoundrel falling off the balcony. Expecting to have to fight for the sunloungers the following day, we emerged quick smart to find that no-one in Qatar goes to Sealine on Saturday, silly.


Sometimes we go to the beach and only drink water. I promise……
xx

Pottery and Palestine

It’s all about Palestine of late. The 60^th Anniversary of the Nakba (meaning “catastrophe”, the Arab term for the creation of Israel) has loomed large. Al Jazeera gave it 14 straight days of coverage. A friend of ours made a documentary about it for the English channel and got Darren Jordan, who used to be Mr 6 o’clock news, to do his voice-over – very smooth. The Qatar Red Crescent put on a ‘film festival’ which showed an unashamedly propagandist short film about East Jerusalem and a slightly better documentary called 9 Star Hotel about young Palestinians sneaking across the wall to work on new-build Israeli towns whilst camping in the mountains, occasionally being pursued by Israeli Army or Secret Police who send them back to the West Bank, where there are no jobs.

Fittingly we spent an evening last week with a Palestinian Al Jazeera journalist and his family at their house. We were thinking supper. We got there, sat around on the huge, dark velvet sofas that Arab families love so much (with very bright overhead lights on) and chatted in Arabic which was testing (for me) after so long of doing everything in English. After a little while the maid bought us all plates of fruit. Interesting, we thought. Not the usual starter, but let’s go with the flow. So we munched some melon, a few plums, thinking that we mustn’t eat too much because these things so often progress to you being offered enough food to feed Ethiopia. Fruit disappeared, but rather than the expected hummus, out come huge slabs of chocolate cake, with mint tea. Ah, so it’s not supper. We work our way through the cake, and move on to cups of coffee. I don’t drink coffee. I never have drunk coffee. But what can you do? Luckily this coffee had so much milk and sugar in it that it tasted more like hot chocolate, but unluckily a thick skin formed on the top of it and both Mr A and I flopped the skin all over our faces when we drank it. Later, Mr A said our host had sounded hesitant when he suggested 8pm - presumably they’d eaten their huge meal a couple of hours before we arrived. In the end we ate big bowls of chilli con carne at home at 11.30pm. Anyway, the 14 year old daughter of our host spent the evening showing me Palestinian Debki dancing and almost salivating over (admittedly quite hot) young Palestinian men.

The Qataris love a bit of Middle-East peace process action too: only last month the Israeli foreign minister was rather controversially here. But this week we got up close and personal with a co-founder of Hamas, at a BBC World “Doha Debate”. Interesting questions asked by the audience, a wide range of attitudes, but almost every answer he gave involved giving a lengthy description of what the Israelis had done first, before saying anything about Hamas. All a bit depressingly repetitive. So maybe that concludes our Palestinian focus for a while. Or maybe not – the Palestine/Israel issue is always around when living in the Arab world…

In less heavy news, we have been busy as bees. Since my last post, we had a friend to stay from London and took him to Dunestock – Qatar’s answer to Woodstock. Only it’s in a desert, solely attended by foreigners and the bands playing could charitably be described as enthusiastic. The set-up was actually pretty amazing, but sadly, it was also at the epicentre of a sandstorm which meant we were pelted by painful winds for an hour, listened to a dire man with a guitar and then left. I think we gave our guest a unique experience.

We celebrated HM Queen’s Birthday at a big party where only two guests accidentally submerged themselves to waist level in landscaped water features; otherwise it was a great success. At the end of the evening, we gave a lift in a taxi to two guests with no other transport. Since there five of us fitting in to a small car, I had to sit on Mr A’s lap, squashed in the back with these two men who I hadn’t yet met. As I attempted to look as small as possible so we weren’t stopped by police, I turned to them and asked ‘so, are you guys journalists?’. Reply from older gentleman on other side of back seat: ‘um, no, actually I’m an obscure backbench MP’. Argh…

Continuing my education in the ways of the establishment, I’ve now also been to a cocktail party on a British Navy ship, a slightly bizarre event – so many sailors, all in their white uniforms which just always look a little teensy bit camp. We drank gin and tonics, advised them on the best drinking places in Doha, and admired the helicopter on deck. Someone blew a loud whistle whenever anyone important came onboard. Weird shit.

Then we went to Muscat for a couple of days for my very late Christmas present. We stayed at the Chedi hotel which is THE most amazing hotel (and the most expensive) we have ever stayed in. Everything about it was beautiful – the buildings, the food, the pools, the beach, the way they fold your towels on the sun loungers, the way they bring ice to your room at 6pm for Gin and Tonics, the dressing gowns, the massages. I could go on.

We went on a boat and saw loads of dolphins but the splendour of the hotel meant we found it quite difficult to leave. We were determined to visit the Grand Mosque, but left it too late and failed. We did get to the souq, and marvelled that we must have acclimatised since we found the 41 degree heat manageable.

Less beautiful was the major eye infection Mr A contracted, which meant a visit to the doctor and a huge white bandage over one eye – disabled-pirate-style – for 48 hours. Or the stomach bug and bladder infection that I developed, leading to a temperature over 100 and some strong antibiotics. Luckily, the infection didn’t really take hold until we returned to Doha and I went to see a doctor who gave me a magical injection in my bum which made everything better. My sister arrived as the fever was subsiding, just in time to make me numerous cups of tea and watch endless episodes of ER. This helped me to forget my frustration at having read 90% of a Boris Johnson novel before leaving it on the plane. I was going to ask for it at Lost Property, but then couldn’t bring myself to explain I was reading a book about Islamic terrorism called ’72 Virgins’. Serves me right for reading Boris in the first place.

Sister stayed for 10 whole days so got to experience Doha in it’s fullest – shopping malls, fast food restaurants, beach (taken there by Mr A who made her walk up and down rocky outcrops before finding a small cove adorned with rubbish and sandflies), drunken dhow trips (with Al Jazeera people where she failed to follow a single conversation about Middle East politics), swimming in the sea in her pants, brunches with men dressed as elephants. She was an awesome guest – getting shopping from the supermarket, cooking us supper (for some reason wearing a Lambeth Council recycling bag as an apron). She was here for my birthday, and I was allowed to drink champagne after speaking to Doctor Dad who advised ‘one or two glasses shouldn’t be a problem’. Hurrah. We went to an Italian restaurant where the Phillipino waiters (in white jump suits) sang Happy Birthday while a huge fire cracker on top of a slice of cheesecake burnt away. I took sister to the fabric souq where she tried to buy some of the ugliest fabric I’ve ever seen and we bartered away with the Qatari ladies. We bought keffiyehs as presents for people in London ( cheaper than Topshop - email me your orders) and she came for a drink with some friends of ours to be told she was ‘as cute as a button’. All in a days work for mini-Ajnabiya.

I’ve been taking a pottery class every weekend with a friend, where we’ve been very carefully making pots that look like the work of 5 year olds. It was fun though – the class was small, a mixture of British, American, Lebanese and Qatari. The Qataris are a lovely young couple: the husband got really into it and bought books on the internet about building your own kiln, which he may do later in the year on some of his ‘spare’ land.

On a more cultural note, we went to an exhibition of photographs of Yemen in a little-used Palace. It had almost no publicity and was only on for a month so we weren’t expecting much. The palace is a little worn down, and we were the only visitors when we went but, as is typical in Doha, when the authorities decide to do something, they do it properly. Stunning photographs were beautifully displayed in specially constructed rooms, with (expensive) lighting, projections, sound effects. It made us desperate to visit Yemen if only it was a little less unsafe at the moment. On our way out the security guard asked if we’d like to see some photos of Qatar, and led us across a deserted courtyard with abandoned pavilions to a specially built room with loads of historical photographs of Doha from the last 70 years, and presented us with specially printed books about the exhibition. Obviously barely touched since it was put together for the Asian Games in 2006, some of the photos are peeling off the wall. It’s so peculiar that places like this exist, ready to go, yet they aren’t open to visitors, in a city with NO museums.

We continue to observe the progess of the Pearl – the ‘rediscovered island’, about 20 multi storey towers being built on reclaimed land – from our balcony.

We went to the beach last weekend and, miraculously, managed to have a lovely afternoon with a light breeze and minimal jet skis racing past. A Phillipina and her husband Mike, who is possibly feeling a bit unloved, had obviously got there before us.

At work, I have realised that I shouldn’t visit sites mid-morning as all the workers have a nap, or sit in big circles eating their lunches out of tiffin boxes. I always come across little packages of food waiting to be eaten in side rooms. At one site, they seem to love writing on various building materials……

On a more immediate note, I’ve just come back from the hairdresser where my request for a quick trim has resulted in full-on Lebanese-style coiffure. The man spent at least half an hour blowdrying, hairspraying and titivating. I noted four different potions, at least half a can of hairspray, and a lot of backcombing. It now feels like a wig and the cloud of toxic hairspray encircling my face is making me feel nauseous. Better get in the shower……

We’ll be in London mid-July for a couple of weeks. Hope to see lots of you then…

Xx

P.S. My resolution for June is to write less, more often, so it hopefully won’t be almost two months before the next post…..