Horses and Hospitals

As I near the end of my last week in Doha in 2009, I pause to ponder the things I will miss during my time back in London as well as the things that I shan’t be heartbroken to leave behind.

Having resigned from my job, I finished work last week on a high with the Managing Director pronouncing his new office ‘mumtaz’ (excellent).  The very nice people at the gas company where I had been based for the last 8 months or so gave me a special plaque in the shape of their logo which has a gold model of the building I was working on and an inscription referring to my ‘creative fingerprints’ lingering on the building for years to come.  Now that’s something you don’t get when you leave a job in London - there’s nothing a Qatari company likes more than a bit of inscription and something to put on your credenza.  They also presented me with a huge bunch of flowers that our cats spent the next week nibbling on.  Not going to work every day certainly has its advantages, and not having to waddle around building sites avoiding noxious smells whilst 6 months pregnant is welcome, but I bet I’ll miss it soon and will no doubt start to reminisce fondly about my former life as an Architect.  The terminal benefit payment (where your final paycheck includes a lumpsum for every year worked – it’s Qatari law) has softened the blow of it being my last for a while, and Mr A is already dropping substantial hints about getting back in to the swing of things post-baby so this unemployment is unlikely to last long.

This means I’ve joined the Qatari army of stay-at-home wives though to really be part of this club I should get us a maid and spend a lot more time discussing supermarkets.  No doubt the imminent baby chat will more than qualify me for the role.  To get into the swing of things, I went to my last coffee morning for a bit (at which I never drink coffee).

We had our last Doha hospital visit earlier this week.  Sitting in the same waiting area every couple of weeks for up to an hour is not something I’m going to miss.  I am intrigued to see whether every scan I have in the UK will involve close focus on the baby’s willy.  Literally every time we go the hospital here we get a good look – often for much longer than we spend on the heart and we haven’t even glimpsed other organs.  I suspect this is partly because we are, of course, having the much wished for son (something that lots of people can’t help themselves congratulating us for) rather than a daughter.  I don’t think they like it when I start going on about how apparently sons wee in your face when you change their nappy (a rumour that has been substantiated by every mother that I’ve met – the lack of outrage can only be explained by such unconditional love that suddenly you don’t mind a face full of urine).  The doctor was running through what appointments we should make when we return in January with (insh’allah) the babe, and said I should see her to get advice on when we could ‘try again’.  I think I looked utterly horrified because she hastily explained that young Qatari women always want to know how quickly they can get pregnant again.  I guess if you’re going to have 15 children (like the relative of someone I met) then you need to get a move on.

We walked down to the ‘beach’ at the end of our road recently.  The quotation marks acknowledge that this is a vacant lot between two embassies which happen to be on the edge of the sea, and is more some rocks and rubbish on the edge of land, rather than a sandy idyll.  Shockingly, this was the first time we had turned right out of our building by foot in two years.  We see it every day from our windows.  I think waking up to a view of the sea every morning might be missed when compared with a rainy London street.

I will definitely also miss cheap-as-chips mangoes, pomegranates, avocadoes, pineapples… our friends F and Z, who visited from Sudan last weekend, highlighted the fact that we shouldn’t take this for granted. Coming from where they do, the availability of pesto and fresh vegetables seemed to over-excite them a little. Incidentally we have now got quite good at giving tours of Doha, even finding new stuff to see. At the souq we admired the police stables which have been cunningly designed to look very similar to the re-built old buildings nearby. The horses are extremely elegant though I thought the ones sleeping on the floor looked suspiciously dead - I guess that’s what happens if you’re a very hot horse.  A bearded man walking around with his retinue of fully-covered black-clad women took a shine to Z and made jokes about one of the horses hairstyle looking like Michael Jackson which wasn’t exactly what we were expecting.

Mr A also took our chums on a desert trip, driven by an experienced Qatari, and tried to enjoy spending hours in a Landcruiser with 50 Cent videos of writhing scantily-clad women on the three TV screens. Eventually they worked out how to turn off two of the screens and the driver was only a little bit offended.

And finally we all visited the fabric souq and tried to find any fabric that might have cotton content and not spontaneously combust at the first hint of a naked flame.  They sure are fond of brightly-coloured polyester here.  It’s a wonder they don’t all have yeast-infections in this heat.Talking of which, it’s been a little sticky around here. 

 It had been a fairly pleasant summer with the low-50s of July giving way to temperatures in the high 30s/late 40s through August (so cool!).  We’d even been sitting outside in the evenings.  Then the humidity arrived late and the last few days have been absolutely disgusting.  Being outside (or anywhere not fully enclosed) is an extremely damp experience and feels much hotter than it actually is.  For example, it is apparently 36 deg C today but with the 71% humidity it feels like 55 degrees.  That, my friends, is horrible, and leads to condensation dripping everywhere including from your own body.  I think it is these conditions which led to me opening a wardrobe in a spare bedroom and finding a wall full of mould.  Yuck.  That will not be missed.

After a bit of uncertainty about the sighting of the moon, Ramadan will start tomorrow.  The shopping malls have already installed their Ramadan decorations – maquettes of traditional Bedouin scenes in our local mall, as well as huge banners and garlands encouraging all sorts of celebratory consumerism.  I guess they’re desperate to try to educate the transient immigrant populations in the history of local culture, but do they all have to have such big noses?  Any displays of this kind always have people posing in front of them while their friend takes a photo on their phone – I think they send them back to friends and family at home.

In theory I really like the idea of being part of Ramadan in Doha – being given dates while you wait at traffic lights at sunset, going to Iftar and Suhour feasts.  It is the only time of year that you feel like you might be part of something bigger than just your own friendship group.  In practice, I don’t think I’ll miss the crazy driving (due to hunger/dehydration during the day, and then sugar rush/exuberance in the evening), surreptitious drinking and eating (as a pregnant women I would be exempt from the law against eating and drinking outside during the whole period, but in practice I’d feel really uncomfortable), restaurants only offering extremely expensive buffets, all bars being closed for the month and weird opening hours for shops and services.

Ramadan kareem.

 

 

Sultan Qaboos and Sweaty Doha

In my last post I forgot to tell the story of the first person outside immediate family to know I was pregnant. It’s an instructive story in that it reminds ladies in early pregnancy to eat breakfast. Having been lazing around in bed until mid-morning one weekend while Mr A went to the dentist, I went to let the cats out and found one of their eyes was all cloudy. Slightly panicking, I quickly pulled on some clothes over my pajamas, put the cat in its box and drove straight to the vet, who took Nimr out and started poking away at his eye while muttering something about a third eyelid.  It was at this point that I started to feel a little peculiar so excused myself and went to sit outside on the steps of the building – my brain was thinking ‘I need fresh air’.  What I actually got was some warm, humid air and a very dirty backside, none of which made me any less likely to faint. The receptionist said I could use the loo inside but unfortunately I couldn’t make it and was forced to sit down, as if in protest, on the corridor floor, in order to regain my composure. Clearly an experienced lady, she guessed I was pregnant and rather bizarrely became the first person to know the happy news.  She then kindly waited outside the bathroom in case I knocked myself out on the sink and gave me a banana.

The vet had by this point done all she could for the cat, so I sat in the waiting area eating Mrs Receptionist’s banana, stroking the cat, feeling a little self-conscious about baring my shoulders in a vest surrounded by abaya-clad Qatari girls (my jumper really wasn’t an option) and getting covered in cat hair.  I eventually got hold of Mr A who had to abandon the dentist’s chair with his teeth half-cleaned to pick us up. As a punishment for not being there in my hour of need, Mrs Receptionist gave him evil looks for having obviously left his wife and in utero child to deal with the cat while he played golf (or something like that). Needless to say, we all recovered. I am now a big breakfast person. The cat can see again, so he’s happy.

Last weekend we spent 48 hours last weekend in Muscat, Oman for a friend’s 30^th birthday, staying at the same beautiful posh hotel I bored everyone with last year .  It’s still beautiful.

This time we actually made it to the Grand Mosque which was built by Sultan Qaboos, the ruler of Oman, about six years ago.  It’s huge, with separate ladies’ (timber mashrabiya screens, carved stone walls, beautiful) and men’s prayer halls (huge with the largest diamond chandelier I have ever seen and a lot of colourful tiles and carpet patterns).  This marked our first visit inside a Gulfi Mosque, and total failure of documentation since our camera had run out of battery and I’d forgotten to pack the charger.  It turns out we have cameras on our phones, so we have a selection of slightly blurry, oddly-coloured photos.  I fashioned myself a really rather genuine hijab as required by the mosque officials, which didn’t help with extreme heat but did help to soak up sweat. All the Omanis we have met are incredibly friendly and relaxed people, apart from the scary man at the mosque who threw out a German tourist for being in shorts. He then marched off muttering about how “someone will have to bear responsibility for this outrage!”

Otherwise we lay in the pools at the hotel.  A lot.  We had a special GCC residents discount rate and we realised that this is probably because anyone who lived outside the Gulf wouldn’t go outside in late July unless they were bonkers.  A room upgrade with free mini bar (ah, the shame of not being able to take full advantage), free cocktails at sunset and free room service breakfast meant we just about coped, and sucked in all the memories as we realised that such jaunts are unlikely to happen once the babe makes an appearance. I collected shells on the beach and got chatting to an Omani guy who was a little more into the conversation than I was. Upon parting ways, he gave me possibly the most rubbish shell I’d seen on the whole beach.

So now we’re back in sweaty Doha, working our way through Season 4 of The Wire. Mr A’s been doing live radio interviews in Arabic – I think I find it more stressful to listen to this than he does to do them. I hear the cricket starts again today so that means he won’t be leaving the flat this weekend. Great news.  I’ll spend the days trying to squeeze my wedding ring on to my swollen fingers (pregnancy is non stop glamour).  Unlikely, but at least it’s something to distract me from worrying about Flintoff’s knee.  Or we’ll spend the weekend watching Edgbaston in the rain, which to us will be a surprisingly fun.  Believe it or not, I’m actually missing rain.

Scans and Smoke

What this blog has been skilfully avoiding for the past months is that I’m five months pregnant.  This meant that whilst we were bashing dunes and getting dehydrated back in April, I was feeling a little fragile.  And upon our return from a trip to London, the combination of an overnight flight, tiredness and morning sickness meant I vomited at the side of the road at 7am directly in front of a line of surprised workers waiting for their bus.  I haven’t done that since an ill-advised night of drinking some years ago, and then my only audience at 2am was a drunk Irishman who expressed his disgust.

Anyway, whilst I will try to avoid the blog becoming a detailed diary of developing stretchmarks, birthing techniques and swollen feet, there are a couple of things about being pregnant in Doha which may be different to being pregnant in the UK.  Perhaps not, since I haven’t incubated a child anywhere else, but maybe…

• I have been going to a private hospital for scans, check-ups and tests which is more like a hotel or office than a medical establishment.  You can’t have a scan without having a check-up, and you have to pay for both of those, and then the Doctor sends you for blood-tests that of course mean handing over a credit card first.  An afternoon there can set you back about £200, and that doesn’t include the refreshments between appointments at the stylish hospital café (peach smoothie while we wait for the scan results, anybody?). Nothing has made me appreciate the NHS more.

• It is officially illegal to engage in “intimate relations” with members of the opposite sex in Qatar, let alone have babies, out of wedlock.  So it is assumed that you are married when you go to antenatal appointments (though we’ve never yet actually had to produce our wedding certificate) and therefore when the nurse wants to know how long you’ve been trying for a baby, she asks ‘how long have you been married?’.  Which reminds me of being in Syria where every taxi driver would ask whether you were married, how long for, and how many children you have.  Trying to explain that you hadn’t quite got round to kids yet elicited a look full of pity since you had presumably been focussing on nothing else since your wedding night.

• No-one warns you in advance that you’re not meant to drink too much caffeine when you’re pregnant.  That means no more endless cups of tea which is, in my view, a tragedy especially since any child of mine will be brought up on the stuff.  On the upside, if you haven’t had any alcohol for months then Holsten non-alcoholic beer tastes like the real thing.

• As I was lying on a bed waiting for the nurse to spread gel on my stomach for our 12-week scan (the one where we found out if everything looked normal), the doctor started telling Mr A and I that sometimes when she does this scan there isn’t a heartbeat and then the woman comes in bleeding a couple of days later.  She is UK- and American-trained but perhaps missed some classes on sensitivity. It may be a Doha thing: a friend of ours here told us that at the same stage their doctor clapped his hands and announced jovially, “…and now we shall see if the baby is alive!”.

• At a later ultrasound scan, a hijab-ed Arab doctor who didn’t have great English told us the ‘tallness’ of our baby and giggled at the size of the bun’s willy.  At the end, she thanked us for the beautiful baby, gave us some test results including how much ‘liquor’ was swilling around in my abdomen (apparently just the right amount) and a CD with lots of totally unfathomable pictures.

• Pregnant women aren’t meant to change cat litter trays which is obviously leaving a huge void in my life.

• Mr A’s employer doesn’t recommend giving birth here so will pay for me to return to London for my ‘confinement’.  I’m wondering whether an elaborate gown is supplied for this 19^thCentury style practice?

• I didn’t tell anyone at work I was pregnant for the first 3 months (though really it’s only two months since you’re already one month pregnant when you find out, what a cheat).  In order to stall impending conversations about career plans, I had made up a story about not knowing when we might leave Qatar.  In the end no-one minded about this subterfuge.  In fact the senior Qataris were uncharacteristically excited by the prospect of a child, and at one point threatened to buy cake for the whole department in celebration (I was incredibly relieved when this never in fact materialised).  Qatari ladies quiz me in the toilet about my birthing plans, and reveal that they are 28 and already have four children.

• When we were in Damascus, we told the man looking after the decrepit old-town house that I was expecting and he began ululating, imitating how the baby would be greeted in the Arab world. He was very clear that the little one should be born in the UK so that it is ‘white’ rather than ‘brown’.

• Syrians say that you can crave sleep rather than food. That’s what my pregnancy is all about.

• A Philippina woman at work who I’d only met once before was talking to me when she stopped to ask ‘Is there…?  I mean, is it….? Are you….?  Is there someone in there?’ before stroking my stomach for longer than was strictly necessary.

• Last week I was at home when the fire alarm was going off intermittently.  I ignored it.  Then it started going off more insistently so I opened the door to our flat, smelt smoke, and headed out.  Grabbing keys and phone, I walked down 36 flights of stairs to the ground floor where there was predictable chaos with a few fire engines mixed in and lots of people with pet boxes which made me feel incredibly guilty for having abandoned the cats to impending smoke inhalation.  I walked around to the back of our building in order to be in the shade (midday, 40+ degrees, no sunglasses) and saw plumes of smoke coming out the second floor.  Luckily Mr A’s car was sitting in the car park so I sat in there with the air conditioning on full power, trying to ignore the aroma of his old Chicken Tikka sandwich which had been gentle warming for a while, awaiting his return.  Then we went straight to the hospital for a scan where the woman looked at me wearily when I explained that I didn’t have my appointment card because there was a fire in my building.  Apparently the men’s sauna went up in flames, which is probably divine retribution for anyone thinking they needed a sauna in Doha in the first place.  Our spare bedroom retains a faint whiff of barbecue.

• The American book I have about pregnancy began measuring progress in fruit and pulses.  A zygote the size of a pinto bean became a medium green olive, a large lime and then a peach.  Obviously they ran out of inspiration for large fruits at that point because disappointingly since then it’s been a fist and a softball. 
  

For now, the bump and I are expanding in the Doha heat and looking forward to returning to the UK for the NHS, long summer evenings and a larger selection of maternity trousers.  Meanwhile I made Mr A spend an evening reorganising all our books with me.  Apparently it’s called nesting.

Ms A

Seatbelts and Subtitles

As we head into summer we find ourselves struggling for daytime activities that won’t involve getting too hot, meaning weekends are mainly spent by the pool (with Mr A trying very hard to not let a single ray of sunshine hit his somewhat pasty skin), at a shopping mall or at home.  Within a mall one can obviously shop, or eat at a café (perhaps eating ‘outside’ in the piazza like thoroughfare of the mall – it’s almost the same as being in Italy), or go to the cinema.  A few weeks ago we went to watch The Reader in one of the thirteen screens of our local mall.  We presume that in the first half of the film, Kate Winslet must take her kit off a fair bit, but it was hard to tell. As a result of the stringent censorship, all we got was half an hour of confusing, disjointed scenes of her and her young lover getting dressed or undressed, out of or into bed, into or out of a bath.  Luckily she then kept her clothes on for a while so we were able to track the story of her history as a guard as Auschwitz, the lover growing up, Germany post-war, trials etc.  As you might expect, a key element of this was more than a few references to Jews and Judaism, which were, Mr A noticed, totally absent from the Arabic and French subtitles; slightly confusing for the non-English speaker. All things considered, a film with nudity and Judaism may not be one of the best film choices in a cinema in this part of the world.

We spent a long weekend in Damascus last week (where, talking of Jews, Israel doesn’t officially exist – but graffiti on a wall said ‘Death to Israel’ so I think it depends on your intent).  It was an opportunity to remember the crazy driving (though since we last were there the taxi-drivers have started making the front seat passengers put their seat belts on before pulling out without looking).  Such safety initiatives were slightly undermined by two fire-engines bringing the 3-lane motorway from the airport to a standstill by u-turning into the oncoming traffic of a sliproad. 

On arrival at the airport, a man in a surgical mask quizzed us on our swine flu symptoms.  While waiting for us to complete a questionnaire, he asked where we were from and then talked excitedly about the ‘six zones’ of London.  We were mystified and told him confidently him that there were far more than six areas in London.  Only as we picked up our bags did we realise that the poor guy must have meant the Underground zones. He was crestfallen – we have clearly been away too long.

Some friends from London were visiting Syria for a couple of days so had the pleasure of being shown around the Old Town by Mr A and me which distracted them a bit from thinking about their luggage languishing somewhere in an airport in Cyprus.  This involved me vaguely pointing out some things that I thought were interesting (ice-cream shops, women’s co-operatives with irresistibly expensive handmade goods, old buildings) while Mr A methodically quoted dates and expounded historical context (‘the oldest arch in Syria’).  We took them to mosques and courtyard houses, up Mount Qasioun for sunset and back to the Old Town for supper.  It was lovely wandering around relatively cool streets (a mere 38 degrees!) with smells of jasmine and abundant bougainvillea.  We restricted ourselves to buying huge amounts of mezze rather than any carpets, lamps, mother-of-pearl furniture or fabrics.

Whilst making our way to Beit Ananias (where Saul/Paul was converted – and where we came across a group of Chinese pilgrims weeping and ululating to the strains of acoustic guitar. Weird) I spied a courtyard house in the process of restoration and invited myself in.  Within minutes a friendly man arrived, whose job it is to keep an eye on the house during the building works that, luckily for him, have so far taken seven years.  Full of original plasterwork and niches, the building is supposedly on the way to becoming a hotel/restaurant and you could see sections of newly carved mashrabiya screens amongst the timber scaffolding and detritus.  The caretaker seems to spend most of his time looking after the cats (‘you must meet Lulu’) and tortoises that live there.  It is traditional for each courtyard house to have at least one tortoise, but Mr Caretaker brought another from his farm and from the two impossibly tiny baby tortoises we were shown it seems they’ve been keeping themselves busy.  We 

spent the next ten minutes trying not to crush them with a misplaced foot and graciously refusing cups of tea. [It seems appropriate to update longstanding readers that the tortoises from our garden in Damascus were last seen in rude health, though not having procreated].

The rest of our time was spent with Damascus friends which was, as always, brilliant.  Mr A smoked more shisha than he should and I ate my weight in cherries.  We pottered around the ‘suburbs’ of Damascus and refused to go to the Embassy bar. I remembered how much Arabic I’ve forgotten while visiting Syrian friends and admired their live prawn in a tank, and then we watched typically Damascene Russell Brand DVDs.

So, all in all delightful.  Now we can spend the coming weekends watching the very expensive TV package that Mr A has procured which appears to show every sporting match in the whole world as well as Holby City.  Ah, a summer of rugby, tennis and cricket.  I couldn’t be more excited.  Nor could the cats – they LOVE tennis so much that we are slightly fearful for our TV screen.

Italians and Ibsen

So June has been keeping us busy-ish.  Not overwhelmingly so since there seems to have been plenty of time to sleep at weekends and watch excessive amounts of State of Play, but busy enough.

An Italian diplomat’s reception proved a mixed blessing.  He had emailed us an invite some time ago, mentioning a ‘dinner’ with some friends, many of whom Mr A knows.  We naively thought this might mean a sit-down supper, so were unprepared to walk in to a room with more people that an average dining table would accommodate, with clear evidence of buffet preparations and apparently no-one else who spoke English or that we knew.  There is only so far ‘arrivederci’ can get you when trying to get to know new people.  Luckily Mr A was wearing his new brown blazer and jeans so at least we were looking suitably Euro.  We stood around for a while smiling enthusiastically at the mother of the host who was entirely uni-lingual.  We chatted to a former Qatar Airways stewardess about the advantages (international shopping) and disadvantages (customers, curfews) of being an air hostess.  Then we noticed that only half an hour had gone past. Luckily salvation arrived in the form of the Dominican Republic Ambassador and his wife who were perched on the same sofa as us wrestling with pasta salad.  A thoroughly dapper man, complete in cravat and hounds-tooth blazer, he entertained us thoroughly for the next hour or so with anecdotes until it was a respectable time for us finally put our Italian to use and bid a fond farewell to the host and his mother.  For the record, there was a bowl of Ferrero Rocher in the corner, which probably tells you all you need to know.

Playing the role of host for the first time in a while we had Mr A’s cousin to stay for the weekend and took him straight from the plane into the glory of the Ritz Carlton brunch where in line with Qatari tradition we showed him how to eat and quaff more than necessary.  I think we managed to divert him from dwelling on the cost of this decadence by arranging for the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al Thani, and his wife Sheika Mozah to walk past our table.  I happened to be looking up at the time and had a split second of thinking ‘wow that woman looks a lot like Sheikha Mozah’, before thinking ‘ wow, and that guy behind her looks a lot like the Emir’ before whispering urgently to Mr A ‘look, LOOK’.  They had one very chilled-out security guy with them, and sat at a table for two looking extremely relaxed surrounded by merry ex-pats celebrating birthdays with requisite singing and drinking.  This is the equivalent of the Queen turning up to tea at the Ritz in London one afternoon, only without the sniffer dogs, armed guard, close-protection officers or other palaver.  Also, he doesn’t look nearly as large (in the waist department) in person as he might appear in photos.  And he was pulling off a pair of Aviator-style sunglasses inside.  Stylish.

We also took our visitor to the restored old bit of Doha where we discovered the Bird Souq i.e. a lot of brightly coloured birds trapped in cages looking less than satisfied, surrounded by a mild stench of canary droppings and a hideous cacophony of noise, ate Haagen Dazs and admired a policeman on his horse.

Later that day we found our way to a nightclub in a new hotel which is VERY exclusive but we were able to walk right in with a well-connected friend, only pausing to hand over our ID (since a new law means you must show your Qatari ID card every time you enter a place that serves alcohol).  And then we were able to walk right out again as soon as we realised that, however exclusive, a dark, smoky club full of slimy Lebanese men groping semi-naked ladies may have lost its appeal some time in our mid-20s.  At least we can say we’ve been.  We just won’t mention that we didn’t even buy a (no doubt obscenely expensive) drink.

Whilst not hanging out at hotels, we have been to the screening of a film outside the Museum of Islamic Art which, incidentally, was cited as Prince Charles as one of his favourite modern buildings in a clear attempt to appease the Qataris since he’s screwed up their planning application for Chelsea Barracks.  Anyway, the screening was a ‘grand cinematic experience’ where a play by Henrik Ibsen and a poem by Mahmoud Darwish (very famous Palestinian poet) were set to images and music, narrated by Vanessa Redgrave.  It truly was as grand a cinematic experience as we have ever been to – utterly beautiful images over five huge screens set to hauntingly apt music, sounds and words with the Museum in the background on a beautiful warm evening.  It reminded me why art exists, and that I don’t see or experience nearly enough of it here. 

Talking of architecture, there has been much coverage here of a new Heart of Doha scheme which is a masterplan for a large swathe of central Doha by a British practice, involving a lot of demolition, a lot of new buildings and a lot of Culture apparently.  There’s an amusing piss-take of such masterplans here.

Meanwhile, Barack Obama has been touring the region giving friendly speeches to Muslims.  I was pleased to see that even (or perhaps especially) the President of the United States has to remove his shoes at the Mosque of Sultan Hassan in Cairo which is one of my favourite mosques in the world.  His security guys in the background kept their shoes on, so had to wear the little booties.  At least Hilary didn’t have to wear the usual ewok cloak.  That really would have been mean.