Robert de Niro and Russian dolls

So before we gallivanted around the Eastern Mediterranean (more of which later), Mr A’s brother, H, came to visit. We showed him all the highlights of this fair city – pointing out the skyscrapers (H: ‘Do you think they’ll turn to each other in 20 years and say “Mate, do you think we went a bit over the top?” ‘), ordering Indian takeaway, lying on the beach etc.

We took him on the compulsory visit to the souq where I found an Arab-family Russian doll: Gulfi man splits in half to reveal his black-abaya-ed wife, who reveals her son in a little white thobe, who has a sister also in an abaya who, finally, seems to have swallowed a capsule shaped camel. You have no idea how excited I was, and am.

I dragged him to a shopping mall where he loved the gondolas, but was particularly taken by the LARGEST SHOPPING TROLLEY IN THE WORLD outside the next door mall.

Of course we also took him to brunch, ate far too much, then rapidly moved in to action as we prepared for the party we had rashly planned that evening. After a speedy zoom round the supermarket and a trawl of backstreets to find the ice factory (cubes, chips or block?), we were ready to set H to work cleaning the kitten room and stocking the fridge while I made dips and Mr A tidied the entire flat. Having not had a party since we arrived we decided to kill many birds with one stone and invite pretty much everyone we knew. I had visions of either a) a fantastic mixture of ages and backgrounds as lots of people milled around our tidy flat sipping chilled white wine or delicious fruit mocktails whilst having fascinating conversations, or b) 6 people standing in our spacious flat trying desperately to find something to talk about since they had nothing in common. Luckily, after a minor blip where Mr A got an urgent work call just as the party was about to start, it all went well. Lots of people came throughout the evening with the mass exodus of parents leaving at 9.30pm replaced by our younger more carefree friends. I drank enough wine to overcome my neurosis about the balcony collapsing under the weight of hoards of people, and found H in the kitchen at 1am teaching an Italian diplomat how to make Seabreezes. A Qatari friend drank copious quantities of red wine (haram) whilst chatting up European women (haram), and everyone ate lots of cake (halal). All in all it was a great success except that my squiffy catering arrangements meant we had 12 leftover baguettes to plough though the following day.

During that week the Museum of Islamic Art finally opened. I will no doubt write more about this later as it is almost impossible for you to imagine how excited we are about this. Not only does it mean there is now a museum in Doha (the ONLY open museum), but it’s actually filled with beautiful things. Really beautiful things. That are more than a couple of decades old. In an amazing building which is well built, and well designed, and open every day, to everyone.

We watched the huge firework display at the VIP opening from the corniche. There was so much gunpowder involved (or whatever the explosives are) that a huge black cloud almost obscured the entire building, but it was still one of the most dramatic and most expensive firework displays I’ve ever seen. One thing this Museum doesn’t need to worry too much about is a lack of funds.

We were lucky enough to be invited to a Symposium during the opening celebrations where the architect I.M. Pei (he of glass pyramids at the Louvre fame) spoke, along with Sheikha Mayasa al Thani (who kept her sunglasses on for the whole event) and her mother, Sheikha Moza (wife of Emir). My name badge was nestling next to Robert de Niro’s on the way in but he didn’t seem to make it.

We went again the following day for the opening of a temporary exhibition, where the Pisa Griffin has been united with another metal animal, both of which are stunning. Apparently this is a Very Big Deal in the Islamic art world. Our friend took us on a little tour of the permanent exhibits and I almost wept at the joy of being in a gallery. I wouldn’t let her take us round all of the galleries because I didn’t want to see too much at once. We’re going to go back on our own and it’s going to be amazing.

So, after a week of almost overwhelming cultural stimuli, manic work for both of us as we tried to clear everything up before going away and mourning for the sleeve of a brand new jumper that the kittens ATE, we jumped on a plane to Cyprus to met Mother and Father Ajnabiya, woefully ignorant of Greek-Turkish issues [to be continued].

Serbians and Serena

Unfortunately we haven’t been to any unconventional animal races since I last wrote, or acquired any new animals. The kittens continue to grow (absurdly quickly) and cause chaos. They climbed up our curtains TO THE CEILING.Curtains which we do not own and will have to give back.

What we have been doing for the past two weeks is working and eating. Mr A had a Very Very Important Visitor passing through, was busier than he has ever been in his entire life, and I suspect has some sort of permanent brain malfunction due to having a mobile glued to his head 24 hours a day. He appears to no longer listen to anything I say, and tells me the same stories three days in a row. The visit went well, and he has been told he probably won’t have to organise anything so complicated for the next ten years. We’ll see… Meanwhile, he got to travel in motorcade at over 100km/h, straight through roundabouts and traffic lights, which appears to have been the highlight of his entire professional life. I’m just pleased we don’t get woken up in the middle of the night by people in London who don’t understand time differences.

We did go to watch tennis last week to admire how long Venus William’s limbs are, and to realise that every other woman ranked in the top 10 (apart from Serena) is either Russian or Serbian. Serena got injured so pulled out during the tournament, but came out to the court in some extremely ugly tracksuit bottoms to apologise to us, her fans. Ivanovic also withdrew due to a ‘virus’ but she wasn’t going to make it through to the quarter finals anyway and Mr A thinks she’s a ‘spoilt brat’ which seems harsh for someone who’s probably done nothing but play tennis since she was 4.

Between the games they played extremely loud music to the assorted crowd, which hadn’t necessarily been checked for cultural sensitivity. In a country where drinking in public is illegal and you can be arrested for snogging on the Corniche, the Arctic Monkeys were happily singing about sex tips and some woman had had too much red wine. On the way out, we caught the closing minutes of the entertainment show near the burger bar, which appeared to involve a semi-naked woman (in a sheer gold catsuit) writhing around an oiled man, to loud rousing music. Most of the male spectators had conveniently chosen this moment to purchase their burgers.

Now Mr A has gone off to South Africa for ‘training’. This means he gets to hang out with our friend Chris, visit townships, drink beer outside, look at trees, witness proper rain and learn about computer systems. I am eating quiche for one and wondering what we do with our time? I went to bed at 9.30pm last night for the first time in years. What do we normally do in the evenings at home? (I already know the answer to that. We watch West Wing, drink wine and talk about work). The lack of a husband leads me to wonder what I’m going to do over the next few days. I’m thinking sunbathing, shopping and Jane Austen DVDs.

Meanwhile our year anniversary of arriving in Qatar has led me to ponder the pecularities of this country. I have been spending a lot of time working with a large local company and working from their HQ, where everyone has an individual office and even the Document Controller has a man who stands nearby ready to do his photocopying for him. Where it’s not physically possible to make yourself a cup of tea – you have to phone a waiter who brings you a lukewarm cup of brown liquid with powdered milk in it. And where you have to wait 10 minutes every time you want to move floors because there aren’t enough lifts.

I am further mystified by why a significant proportion of all drivers in Qatar have their headlights on full beam all the time. Or how places decide what music to play? Loads of restaurants have hideous bands playing way too loud – Croatian crooners looking as though they’ve already died, Filipino men with their Casio keyboards, Ukrainian women wearing inappropriate clothes. The common theme is that none of these people are native English speakers, but all sing English songs. Badly. Yet they were playing Hot Chip and the Ting Tings last time I went to the supermarket, and a sunglasses shop had the 4 Non Blondes blaring out this evening. The only time we hear Arabic music is if we listen to Arabic radio stations in the car, which we have to because the English language radio station is beyond dire. And why Virgin Megastore doesn’t sell any of the CDs you want, but does have lots of dreadful R+B and plenty of Hezbollah DVDs? And why does every hotel have security scanners at the entrances which beep when you walk through them but no-one cares?

I am hoping that by the time Mr A returns from his African trip I will have persuaded someone to finish repairing our ceiling, where a leaking pipe meant water was dripping onto our furniture for a couple of weeks without us noticing. This will involve some nice men not coming to the flat when we arranged and taking at least twice as long as they said they would to paint something white. When I say I have to leave to go to work, they will look utterly surprised, ‘you WORK, madam?’, and then carry on taking forever. It seems builders are the same the world over. Wish me luck.

(I leave you with some photos of the growing kittens, just because I can’t resist)

Camels and cats

These days it’s all about animals.

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. Doha has a split personality – wandering around that area is much like I imagine parts of Pakistan would be: everyone is from South Asia, living in crowded old housing, washing lines, lots of little shops, no pavements. Where we live is probably more like the (dustier) US: tower blocks, everyone driving 4x4s, shopping malls, 5* hotels…….

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….

Khartoum and Kayaking

So Eid was called on a Monday night – contrary to the expectations of several important Qatari astronomers and most of the general population who thought it would be Tuesday. We’d chosen that evening to Iftar on the corniche – far enough from the cannon to avoid hearing damage, close enough to know when it was allowed to sip a little water. The call came through that Saudi spotted the moon and had declared the start of Eid, but that Qatar hadn’t announced anything. A bug bit me between the eyes, my face swelled up… still no news. Mr A called a contact at the Emiri Diwan who wasn’t certain. We waited. Finally we gave up and came home, turning on the TV to find a long bearded man announcing the end of Ramadan in Qatar. It turns out that Sudan, Saudi, UAE and Qatar were able to see the moon on Monday night. Odd then that Egypt (geographically between these countries) didn’t see it until Tuesday night, but then who am I to question religious men with very good eyesight and large telescopes?

This news meant our flights to Sudan no longer fitted with the national holiday. We split up – Mr A headed to the Airport, walked straight through the queue with a quick flash of his pass, and rebooked our flights within 10 minutes. I on the other hand was responsible for getting hold of US Dollars printed after 2003 – the only way of buying things in Sudan – so I joined the end of a queue for the Exchange. Where I stayed for over an hour, while the Ramadan ‘entertainment’ belted out beside me from a 3-storey high fake castle, several Qataris jumped the queue and two Filipino guys started a fight. By the time I got to the front I had totally forgotten about the whole 2003 thing and bought $200 we wouldn’t be able to use in Sudan.

This experience may have traumatised me a little. Back at home in holiday mood, Mr A prepared me a Tinto Verano (aka red wine with lemonade) which I spilt all over my dressing table, my packing and several extension leads and plugs. I then screamed at Mr A to help me clear up and lay on the bed weeping for a while.

Convinced it would be chaos with thousands of Eid travellers (the result of having believed doomsaying colleagues), I made us get up at 4am to get to the airport, only to find it quieter than we have ever seen it. Deserted in fact, apart from a chirpy little bird in the lounge.

Our half full flight (strangely Khartoum didn’t seem the most popular of destinations) was an amazing mixture of striking, tall African ladies in jeans, small Arab women entirely covered in black from the top of their heads to their fingertips, ladies swathed in huge lengths of multicoloured fabric and men with wide white turbans and flowing white robes, all of whom clapped when we landed. We were in jeans.

In Khartoum we found airport security somewhat keen to scan our bags, which was not ideal as Mr A was carrying some contraband champagne, a present for our hosts. He did some hasty negotiating, offering his rucksack as a conciliatory prize for not looking in the offending bag, and then finally a Boss agreed with our view of things. Hurrah for champers in a dry country.

We did some hanging out in Khartoum – Mr A and F talking about politics and any other topic they could both pretend they knew something about, and Z and I sharing our thoughts on being a ‘trailing spouse’, home-baked bread, luxury chocolates and Claudia Roden – and took surreptitious pictures of the “Mugran”, the point where the White and Blue Niles converge, from behind the tinted windows of the backseat of the car (taking photos without a licence being one of the numerous illegal practices in Sudan).

Then we headed south to camp by the White Nile, which is really wide at that point and feels almost like a sea. The drive took just over an hour and took us out of Khartoum via hectic, bumpy roads with competing tuk-tuks, cars, buses and people which then fell away to one, straight road with occasional mud-built villages either side.

We put up our tents and had a lovely swim in the river at sunset, hoping the occasional brush on our legs was a Nile perch not a crocodile.

The boys laboriously made a fire (‘careful we don’t run out of matches’) for very tasty supper, only slightly disturbed by the large squishy insects that began dropping onto us from the trees above us. The next morning the girls took control of making a fire. We quietly collected some kindling (avoiding the enormous thorns poking out of anything resembling twigs), screwed up some newspaper, and loaded on some charcoal. One match and a little judicious blowing later and we were away. Ah, the warming feeling of being better than men at things they think they have a caveman-like monopoly over. A feast of sausages, bacon, eggs and tomatoes, eaten while avoiding huge dung beetles and a small scorpion (‘the smaller they are, the more dangerous’), was delicious.

After brunch we took some kayaks out on the river. Mr A had a few problems and only made it one metre from shore before he violently capsized, depositing his sunglasses somewhere on the riverbed (half an hour after waxing lyrical about the benefits of sunglasses in sunny climes). I, in an identical kayak, paddled off quite happily. We were the only people around and the river was so calm. Mr A was a little miffed at my obvious superiority and threw himself out again a little later, muttering something about his left leg being numb. A likely story – his leg seemed to recover rather speedily once we were back on shore.

On our last day we were woken by birds chirruping outside our window, and then wandered around the markets of Omdurman which felt more African that Arabian. In a moment of reckless abandon we stopped for fresh juices at a stall, only to realise that it was made with tap water – after a couple of sips we scarpered like the dirty-water-fearing-foreigners that we are, leaving the juice-maker to ponder what he’d done wrong. We also popped into a museum to admire very old British guns (it’s interesting the pride people can take in showing you the guns your ancestors used to shoot at theirs). All in all it was an unlikely but thoroughly enjoyable city break. Coming from Doha it was refreshingly green and colourful, though if you’d come from anywhere else you might think it looked rather dusty.

Now we are back in Doha which has returned to its pre-Ramadan ways – all the bars are open and people are doing some work. We have made friends with our neighbours and their daughter gave me a beautiful fossilised stone for my collection, and I’ve been reassuring newly-arrived, culture-shocked Londoners that there really are nice people to meet and things to do in Qatar. Time is flying; next week we will have been here for one year…………..

Much Autumnal love to all,

A xxx

Melons and Moons

Hello,

Ramadan continues here. There’s about 5 days left, though no-one is certain. The end (like the beginning) is marked by the sighting of the new moon which will mark the beginning of Eid Il Fitr (cue a lot of family celebrations, presents, sweets and money for children, all round chaos). It seems the moon isn’t as predictable as one might like so maybe Eid will start on Tuesday, maybe on Wednesday. And no-one will know until Monday. It seems extraordinary to me that the whole country (and the whole of the Muslim world) will come to a halt for at least 5 days (Government organisations will get about 10 days off) but no-one’s willing to declare when it’ll start, even though one presumes some very clever astronomer types have super-duper computer models to sort these things out. Anyway, Mr A has lined up a special trip for the holiday so fingers crossed that our Eid days off work coincide with the plane tickets. We are headed to….. wait for it…. Sudan. As you can imagine, he had to really fight for our tickets – Doha-Khartoum is a pretty popular route what with all those tourists heading out to soak up the Sudanese vibe. No, no, jokes aside, we will get to spend (fingers crossed) five days with lovely friends so we are really looking forward to it.

The place to go in Doha to experience the Ramadan thing is to Souq Waqif. The Souq is constantly expanding as they build more and more ‘traditional’ buildings to look like they’ve always been there. Whilst this may not sit well with my thoughts on architectural pastiche, it is undoubtedly one of the nicest places to spend an evening in Doha (and happens to have a bookshop which sells some of the only contemporary Qatari books we’ve seen).

It’s one of the few places in Doha where they have put up Ramadan lights, rather tastefully done I think.

Loads of people head down there after breaking their fast and it cannot be denied that sitting outside a cafe, drinking juice and smoking shisha with Muslim friends as the world goes by on a Saturday night is an extremely pleasant way to spend an evening. As is sitting outside a cafe, drinking juice and smoking shisha as the boats go by on a Friday night. Can you tell how we spent last weekend?

Conversations with an Iraqi / Australian friend over mint tea reminded me of similar chats in Syria. We were talking about tipping (which her husband is inordinately fond of doing, to anyone and everyone, in large quantities) and she said that she always tips people 5/10 Riyals (about 70p/£1.40) so that ‘nothing is left in their hearts’, a translation of an Arabic phrase that doesn’t make much sense in English, meaning that the person that has served you feels appreciated and you are no longer indebted to them. Arabic (and Arabs) are full of these phrases which so perfectly sum up small feelings or moments that English sometimes doesn’t quite cover. I also like the one about marriage being like a watermelon – no-one can know what it will be like until the melon is cut open….

A feature of the Doha Ramadan scene is The Iftar Cannon. Every night the setting of the sun, and therefore the breaking of the fast, is marked by some soldiers firing the eponymous cannon on a patch of wasteland near the Post Office. Dropping in to see it on a Friday evening, we arrived early and added our car to the huge circle of cars parked around the aforementioned cannon – kind of like people around a campfire but larger and vehicular. There were loads of kids happily climbing all over the cannon as their parents took photos. Soldiers milled around trying to stop cars from parking directly in front of the cannon mouth. Adding to the general solemnity of the occasion, the mascot from a local Football team (looking suspiciously like a badger) embraced surprisingly enthusiastic grown men while being mauled by kids.

As it got darker, the soldiers gently removed the kids and began to look anxiously at their watches, as everyone headed to their cars where children hung out of windows, sat on roofs of Landcruisers or stood through sunroofs to get a better view.

The tension was palpable. Everyone waited. Then the soldiers agreed by their synchronised watches that the time had come (I made that bit up), one fired a starting pistol, and off went the cannon.

Which was really bloody loud, made the car shake, and produced an impressive amount of smoke (possibly the most military action the Qatari Forces have seen, I'm guessing). But the assorted crowds seemed to have forgotten they were there for the cannon and only registered the starting pistol which was their cue to reverse, turning their wheels, at high speed. If one goes back to the campfire analogy one can see that this might produce a certain amount of 4x4 chaos, which it did – not dissimilar to a gigantic game of bumper cars in which having kids head poking out the car definitely helps your cause.

My personal admiration was reserved for the zen-like Qatari who had parked his yellow Ferrari round the corner from the cannon (close enough to hear it going off but far enough away to avoid the smoke, ear damage and ever-present threat of a collision) and sat cross legged on top of it, in his white thobe, gazing out to sea. Wish I had felt brazen enough to photograph him.

I’m off to eat the dates that a very kind man stuffed through my car window as I waited at some traffic lights at sunset last night…… And reminisce about the dinner party we went to last night where the main course included chorizo.. mmmmmm… (and where we met a Catalonian independent filmmaker who got arrested in Tehran for filming women flirting with boys, but that’s another story……….)

xx

Fasting and Feasts

So we are in the midst of Ramadan. This is the Muslim holy month – a month of fasting (like the Prophet did when the first verses of the Qur’an were revealed to him), spiritualism, mediation, tolerance and giving to charity. In practice, for non-Muslims, it’s a month of living in fear of forgetting it’s illegal to eat, drink or smoke in public during daylight hours, and trying not to get stuck in horrendous traffic jams. Most people work fewer hours, but my boss takes the view that if you’re not Muslim, why should you work less when the pay’s the same? Annoyingly faultless logic.

So I’ve removed any chewing gum from the car and my handbag, just in case I forget. Apparently two blokes who were staying at the Four Seasons hotel last Ramadan left the hotel mid-afternoon drinking cans of Coke. They were picked up by the Police, put in prison, and not released until the Eid that marks the end of Ramadan, 3 weeks later. And they had to fast in prison. That does not sound like fun.

Meanwhile, the most immediate Ramadan effect is shops being closed whenever you need something and the standard of driving deteriorating. I’m not convinced a young man not eating, drinking or smoking all day then eating loads, drinking sugary soda and puffing on shisha before taking control of a Porsche is the best idea. The resulting sugar rush seems to encourage weaving between lanes of traffic at 100 km/h which is absolutely terrifying. Other men drive their Landcruisers one-handed whilst holding their toddler on their knee. Luckily I didn’t personally witness the guy who decided to visit the Cigale Hotel Food Hall in his car, through the glazed façade (I didn’t take this photo – it was sent to me by a friend), where once there were tables and chairs.

And there is no alcohol in Qatar during Ramadan. The only alcohol shop is closed for the entire month. No restaurants serve alcohol, no bars are open. Mr A stocked up last month in preparation for this, so should anyone want a can of Strongbow, pop round.

One should also be more sensitive to cultural norms during Ramadan – not baring too much flesh (damn, a month without hot pants) and no public displays of affection, heavy petting etc. I bumped in to a male friend in the supermarket who greeted me by kissing me on both cheeks. Surrounded by Qatari shoppers, I was momentarily paralysed by the inappropriateness of it all. Then I realised that no-one was taking the slightest notice of us. Perhaps because it was 2pm which meant all the Muslim shoppers hadn’t had anything to eat or any water (in 40 degree heat) since 3am that morning, yet were surrounded by mounds of fresh fruit and vegetables. I can’t imagine anything so excruciating and tempting, and can perfectly understand their indifference to two heathens air-kissing hello.

The fast is broken by the Iftar meal at about 6ish. My office is surrounded by restaurants so when I leave work the place is packed with cars and men walk between them offering dates to the drivers who can’t find a parking space in time to break-fast inside the restaurant. The Prophet was big into dates. I feel like an utter fraud accepting them when I had lunch four hours previously, and have just finished my late-afternoon cup of tea (we eat and drink relatively freely in our largely non-Muslim office). In face the whole atmosphere of Ramadan makes you feel like it would be fun to be part of it – kind of like Christmas going on for a month.

The later meal is Suhour, which is eaten between 9pm and 3 am (before dawn). All the big hotels have large ‘Ramadan tents’ (Disney-style decorated ball rooms) with ‘traditional’ entertainment and huge buffets. Dervishes whirl to Allah-themed music, as the diners help themselves to huge mounds of tempura prawns and sirloin steaks. I’m not sure the Prophet was big in to all-you-can eat buffets, but I would recommend it. You can get mini lemon meringue pies.

Off the Ramadan theme, Mr A and I celebrated our third wedding anniversary yesterday. In a brave move, he offered to cook me supper at home so that we could drink a bottle of Champagne between us through the evening. Not a natural cook, he had carefully planned the menu in advance (at least 4 hours ahead) and had settled on a smoked salmon with salad for starter. Opening up the expensive packet of rocket he’d found in Carrefour, he was hit by an overwhelming smell. 10 minutes later I entered the kitchen to be hit by an overwhelming smell, and we decided the rocket was definitely not a go-er. Buying overpriced, rotting food from French supermarkets appears to be our thing when it comes to special dinners (see here). Next time we’ll stay clear of any posh lettuce, or shellfish. Once we’d flushed out the poo-smell and opened the Champers, we sat on the balcony where the temperature was pleasant, the light breeze refreshing, and being 20 storeys from the ground meant no-one could tell we were drinking banned liquids in public.

I bought him some expensive wine glasses as an Anniversary gift. So, despite no alcohol being served in the whole of Qatar, you can still go in to Waterford Crystal and purchase two ‘Red Wine Glasses’ from a friendly lady in a hijab.

The temperature does seem to be coming down a little bit, or we’ve got very used to it, but it’s still too hot to really go out during the day which makes us feel a little claustrophobic. We broke our usual routine of watching DVDs, reading, drawing and sleeping last weekend to visit the Catholic Church. The first of the churches to be completed, it sits in the middle of nowhere just outside Doha surrounded by other churches (Indian, Coptic, Anglican, Orthodox – ‘Church City’) in various states of completion. None of them are allowed to look too Christian from the outside but it’s a big building so you can tell what it is if you know what you’re looking for, which is lucky because any map you may have will no longer bear any relation to the roads.

Inside it’s a striking space, not least due to (or perhaps despite) its most extraordinary paint effect – kind of blue sky, with clouds, and angels/trees/mystical figures hovering in mid air then fading out as they get closer to the divine. Bold. And a little bit dreadful.

Finally, I went to Marks & Spencers last week to buy some pants (some things never change wherever you live) and was queuing behind a niqab-ed lady (black abaya, black hijab covering her head, black panel over her face so all you could see were her eyes) who was returning some rather risqué underwear. Another niqab-ed lady came up as I was contemplating the chocolate biscuits next to the till, and queue-jumped in front of me. At that very moment the first lady had walked away to check something, so the (Eastern European) shop assistant starts talking to Ms Niqab 2 about knickers, under the mistaken impression that this was the same woman….. Obviously it is somewhat difficult to differentiate when you can’t see someone’s face. I was the only one who realised the hilarious confusion, and took the opportunity to clarify the situation whilst asserting my position at the front of the queue. You cannot make these things up.

Happy Ramadan,

Ms A

xx