A couple of weeks ago we went to the camel racing. Mr A had been once before and knew that the most essential component of spectating camels is a 4x4 so off we went with our saloon-confined friends. The roadworks around the track had us momentarily confused – I had the bright idea of following the pick-up full of camels, but it turned out they were going somewhere else.
Once we found it, we ditched the saloon in the carpark, piled in to the 4x4 and headed into the throng. We watched the first race from the startline whilst we figured out what the hell was going on: lots of camels are brought out from the paddock by lots of men in white robes, they are held at the start line, the barrier is raised, the men quickly run out of the way of stampeding camels, the 4x4s speed off, everyone disappears into the dusty distance. Then you wait around at the start line for 15 minutes whilst everyone else is off around the track.
So Mr A was brave enough to participate in the next race and joined the extreme sport spectators. Basically, there are two tracks. One which the camels run round, and an adjacent one which cars drive around. Some are spectators who drive in order to keep an eye on the race. Others are owners/trainers who are controlling their camels – they used to be ridden by Pakistani boys who were malnourished to stay light but someone realised that might be cruel so now their riders are robots (who still wear colours because otherwise the camels get freaked out). The robots have whips that are controlled by the people in the cars; apparently they use the equivalent of car-key beepers to get the whip to whizz. This means that there will always be a couple of cars drifting around at the back of the race longing their camel on. Everyone else is trying to be at the front, treating their Landcruiser much like a cross-terrain bumper car. So, Mr A toddled along at the back of the car-herd and reported that it was do-able.
Next race, we all jumped in and Mr A pretended not to be nervous about driving our 6-months-pregnant-with-twins friend around. Meanwhile we ate sweets and listened to the special camel-racing radio station which commentated on which beautiful beast was winning, and how many foreigners had come to watch Qatari traditional sports (in Arabic).
Having done the circuit a couple of times, we decided to withdraw from the moving dust cloud and hung out at the finish line with all the tired camels, the blokes who look after them and their robots. We had a chat (‘where are you from?’, ‘Britain’, ‘but you speak Arabic…?’), found out they were all from Sudan, told them we’d been to Khartoum for Eid (causing significant surprise), admired their robots, and showed them photos of themselves on our cameras.
At which point we realised the last race was about to end but we had wandered away from the finish line, so we sprinted off and made all the camel guys laugh a lot. Then we almost got run over by the speeding spectator cars and realised that camels literally foam at the mouth when they race.
Moving on to smaller mammals, last weekend we went to pick up two little kittens. A friend of a friends cat had unexpectedly given birth and we (I) felt the time had come to have some dependents in the flat (i.e. tortoise substitutes). We headed off on Friday morning with the extremely large cat box I had purchased to find that the Mosque adjacent to the guys flat was obviously pretty popular and not large enough for all of the men who would like to pray in it, so they’d spread their prayer mats out across the road. We reversed, drove round the block, and found somewhere else to park. Not wildly keen on walking amongst prayer mats with aforementioned cat box, we attempted to approach from a different angle. One wrong building, significant perspiration and a lot of long lines of men praying later, we found the kittens. I gave their human dad muffins in exchange for two bundles of joy, and we emerged into the sunlight to find all of the praying men had moved on before prayers even started so we could have just parked outside.
The kittens are utterly delightful – two brothers who are totally white and almost identical who are in the process of devastating our flat. One of them finally did a poo in the litter box yesterday which I celebrated A LOT. All subsequent excretions have been next to the litter tray, but compared to under our bed this is huge progress. Mr A can’t decide whether he’s totally freaked out by having kittens attacking his head as he watches TV, or enchanted by small animals that sit on his lap as he works. Certainly it seems I’m in charge of scooping poop.
A Qatari man we were talking to the evening that we got them suggested names which have stuck: Fahed (Panther) and Nimir (Tiger), although since Mr A is incapable of distinguishing between them their individual personalities are pretty academic. I have become predictably neurotic about their health. Apparently they can have their inoculations from 8 weeks old. They are 8 weeks old today so I’m taking them to the Vet this afternoon. You can never be too careful. I can pick up some overpriced cat accessories whilst I’m there. The only question is whether I really need one of those really ugly scratching posts. I’m guessing that since the boys can’t work out that the litter tray is the place to poop, they’re unlikely to realise the post is the place to scratch. They seem happy with our very expensive Syrian carpet anyway.
Right, I’m off to wash the bedsheets that seem to have got in the way of litter training progress….
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