Ajnabiya

Maa assalame

2010-05-09T23:00:00.002+03:00

I didn’t expect it to be over five months before I posted here again. So many things have happened since I wrote the last post in November.

Our son, S, was born in December 2009. He became distressed during his birth and was born very ill. After over a month in hospital, he was able to come home and is physically thriving. He has cerebral palsy which affects various reflexes and movements and will delay some developmental milestones. He is a feisty, determined little boy who is more beautiful than I could have imagined and has recently started laughing which is one of the loveliest sounds you have ever heard.

It is impossible to properly express how difficult the months since his birth have been. We have grieved for the son we should have had who wouldn’t have to struggle to do the most basic things; for the moments we should have spent with our newborn when in fact we weren’t able to hold him for five days; for a life where we wouldn’t have to feed him with a machine. It has been by far the most traumatic thing that has ever happened to us (we had lived fortunate lives) and we continue to struggle sometimes. Someone wrote to us when they found out and said it was times like these that made you realise what it was to love and be loved. I love our little one so much I sometimes feel my heart might burst. We could not have got through it without the support of our friends and family (and the NHS) and I wouldn’t have survived it without Mr A.

We couldn’t be certain S would get everything he needs (and is getting in London) in Doha and so we have moved back to the UK which meant I never returned to Qatar, S never got to visit, and Mr A had to pack up our home in a hurry. He now has a new job, we have a new flat, and our belongings are floating back to us on the high seas. It’s not all bad - we are near our families and old friends, have views of tall trees out of our windows and can buy as many Sunday newspapers as we like. But we miss the life we were meant to have for a bit longer in Doha, the friends with babies and the cooing in Arabic, the enormous flat and the swimming pool. At least we’d already found a comfortable home for the cats.

So, I promised myself that this blog would be predominantly about me being a foreigner in the Middle East rather than a blow-by-blow account of the minutiae of my life, and so it’s over. I could blog endless stories about how my son is the most adorable baby in the world (and did I mention how beautiful he is?). I could tell you about the woman waiting in the health clinic who was whispering Arabic to her baby – ‘mash’allah, mash’allah’ – or the car driving past our window last night with the call to prayer playing so loudly that I thought, just for a moment, that I was in the Middle East. But this is it for now. I’ll leave the blog here in the hope that we’ll return to the Arab world sometime in the future (insh’allah) and I can carry on where I left off…..

With best wishes,

Ms A

Autumn and Antenatal classes

2009-11-13T15:16:00.008+03:00

Apologies for the hiatus in blog posts. I have no excuse – I do very little these days except eat cake, gestate and get wider – except that I struggle to know what to write since I’m not an Ajnabiya in London.

I tried to predict in August what I would miss about Doha while I was gone. Some things I was right about – I do miss fresh tropical fruit and find myself buying criminally expensive pre-packaged pots of mango and pineapple from Marks & Spencers to compensate. I also miss working (not least because my brain appears to have turned to mush in the absence of any meaningful activities in my days) but not that much. It’s amazing how quickly one can become accustomed to reading the paper, eating a biscuit, meeting friends for lunch, visiting art exhibitions….

In terms of antenatal care, neither Mr A nor I miss sitting in the Doha hospital waiting area for hours. Here, my brilliant midwife (always the same woman) comes to my house and spends as much time talking to me as she does checking the baby. She then takes my blood pressure, palpates my bump (feeling to see what position the baby is in) and measures the bump from top to bottom as an indication of how big the baby is, asks me to pee on a stick and finally attaches a small monitor so we can both hear his (very rapid) heart beating away. This could not be more different to Doha where every appointment was in the hospital, my blood pressure was always taken by a nurse, and every appointment was with the doctor who never touched my tummy but rather checked the baby with an ultrasound monitor. There must be advantages to both methods (we haven’t seen the baby on a screen since our last appointment in Doha in mid-August – I miss seeing the little thing squirming away or hiccupping) but there is something reassuring about the low-tech approach of British midwives. The lack of imaging means we also haven’t seen the little one’s willy since August so let’s hope it’s still there.

The other advantage of late pregnancy in the UK is being in the bosom of the NHS that, apart from the wonderful midwives, also provides me with antenatal classes. ‘Meet the Midwife’ sessions do pretty much what they say on the tin with the added bonus of new mums describing their recent birth experiences. A mixed bag. I suppose it’s good to hear women describe being in unbearable pain for hours but it doesn’t necessarily fill one with enthusiasm. Antenatal classes involve a midwife running through all various permutations of birthing options (including enthusiasm for home births which I’ll be passing up since we don’t really have a home here) and are a brilliant mixture of local women of various classes, races and ages. Partners are welcome too (though of course I don’t have one here at the moment) and the highlight so far has been the huge Rasta dude who was intent on getting the midwife to answer when he could ‘get back to the loving’ post-birth, much to the embarrassment of his partner.

I also spent over 4 hours in a breastfeeding workshop that involved more information than it would ever be possible to absorb in that period of time, and practising positioning with small dolls from The Shining. The dolls were, of course, a mixture of black and white but this didn’t seem to necessarily correspond to the race of the mother.

The other huge bonus of being in London is having friends and family close, though I’m engaged in an ongoing battle with my sister to avoid our child being known as ‘stegosaurus’ for the rest of his life. I also concentrate (pointlessly) on not getting swine flu. I haven’t been using that much public transport (though when I do, someone always gives me their seat) but afterwards I obsessively apply antibacterial hand-gel and I ring my GP weekly to find out whether they’ve received the vaccine yet. I’ve also been having Arabic lessons, essentially paying lots of money to a lovely teacher to be reminded just how much I’ve forgotten since I left Syria. I am finding it hard to remember what I need from the supermarket so I translating a letter about Shakespeare is really a step too far for the neurones.

We are renting a little temporary flat in East Dulwich for us (once Mr A returns from Doha) and the babe to cosy in through December. The weather is slowly deteriorating – the clocks have gone back so it now gets dark by 5pm and has been raining more than I would like. And it’s a bit cold which is unfortunate since I refuse to buy a new coat big enough to encase the bump so the little one probably gets a bit chilly when we go out. It has to be said that the view from my bedroom is of people’s unkempt gardens rather than the Arabian Gulf.

Dulwich is the antithesis of all things Gulf - cafes full of pregnant/mothering women with deliciously tempting cakes, pubs with dogs and fires (and no smoking), parks, and the trees have been slowly turning so there have been beautiful red and orange leaves everywhere. I have had ample time to appreciate these colours since I have to walk everywhere quite slowly these days. I’d forgotten about seasons – Doha has cooler and warmer months, with varying degrees of humidity and wind (something we’re sure to appreciate when we leave dark, cold London in January).

Before I became too large to move very far, I took short trips to Dieppe, France (to eat macaroons) and Sussex (southern England) to visit the De la Warr Pavilion, a restored Modernist building on the coast, where I lowered the average visitor age substantially.

I also went to Charleston farmhouse nearby where various members of the Bloomsbury group bed-swapped for many years with a variety of male and female companions. Now that is certainly not the kind of museum you get in Doha. In fact, I’m pretty sure that kind of set-up would be illegal in Qatar. It’s the first museum I’ve visited where I’ve been the weak woman in the corner sitting on the chair while the guide explains what you’re looking at.

I think we now own everything we are meant to, to keep a baby in the style to which they appear to be hardwired to be accustomed. We have a car seat, and a buggy, and plentiful nappies. In fact, our little flat is full of more babycrap than my and Mr A’s possessions put together. Now I am waiting with my legs crossed for Mr A to get back to the UK, in total denial that the babe could arrive early. In theory he’s due in under two weeks so we’ll see……

Wish us luck!

[P.S. Since I left Doha I have missed a ladies tennis tournament (Williams sisters final), the Tribeca film festival and (this Saturday) England playing Brazil at football. Who says there's nothing to do in Qatar?]

Andalucia and Ankles

2009-09-27T20:34:00.013+03:00

We had decided some time ago that we were going to be in Europe for just over two weeks in early September. We were coming back to the UK for a wedding but also wanted to spend a week on holiday somewhere (or at least holiday for Mr A. Since I have recently retired for the purposes of gestation I was there as relaxation support). Given the choice of the whole of Western Europe, we chose the area with the strongest Arab and Muslim influence. Obviously, because we don’t have nearly enough of that in the rest of our lives. Our other consideration was that we fly a lot and apart from our carbon footprints being large enough to wipe out whole nations, we are beyond bored of airports and airplanes. So, one week in Andalucia by train was the winner. Except that we couldn’t afford to get the train both ways so Andalucia half by train (hurrah) and half by plane (boo) was booked.

Leaving London on the Eurostar (from the delightful St Pancras station – so well designed! So many bricks! So many overpriced tempting shops!) we were surprised by the size of our seats. They were definitely larger than the last time we’d gone to Paris. Then an elegant French woman offered us newspapers, and a drink, and a menu, which is when we remembered that we’d booked posh train tickets because there were no normal tickets left so that was nice. Arriving in Paris we pottered around some Botanical gardens (Green! Plants! Flowers! People kissing!), ate crepes, admired buildings and looked for bathrooms (major theme of pregnant tourism = frequent need to find a loo).

The sleeper train from Paris to Madrid reminded us a lot of the Aleppo-Istanbul train. Our little compartment was exactly the same (not exactly spacious) only not as clean and had the bonus of an elderly French couple in the adjacent berth playing absurdly loud europop out of some very tinny speakers. A charming Spanish man appeared at the door shortly after pulling out of Paris to ask what time we wanted supper and we were swiftly accommodated in the dining car with crisp white tablecloths, gazpacho soup and sunset over the speeding French countryside.

Arriving in Madrid early morning after not quite as much sleep as I might have hoped, I wheeled out my incredibly rusty Spanish and we found our hotel in an area described as ‘down at heel’ which resembled a homoerotic boudoir (confirmed by magazines of naked men in the loo).

Our room wasn’t yet ready so we walked through Madrid in bright sunshine to the Prado to admire art and realise that Madrid has an extraordinary amount of graffiti. Everywhere. We also remembered that it’s basically compulsory to engage in Public Displays of Affection in Europe. That night we went to a heaving local restaurant where our waitress laughed at our Spanish and practiced her sprinting when Mr A attempted to leave his credit card with her. This was where I realised that my brain can only cope with one language at a time so even if I theoretically know the Spanish words for things I will say sentences half in Arabic and everyone, including myself, will be confused. Except Mr A who will be laughing.

Our next train was from Madrid to Cordoba. Atocha station resembles a greenhouse more than a railway terminal with huge tropical plants being constantly humidified by jets of steam and a pond full of turtles with red and green heads. Luckily we had plenty of time to admire these features as I’d made sure we’d arrived way too early.

Cordoba was on the itinerary because I had visited on a school trip years ago and thought the Mezquita so extraordinary that it was one of the reasons I became an architect. A huge mosque built by the Moors (roughly 8-10^th century), it was converted into a Catholic Cathedral and a gothic chapel inserted in to the middle which was, even the King who sanctioned the work at the time had to admit, a mistake.

We were staying in a hotel overlooking the ornate external walls which meant one could nap guilt-free with the cultural highlight in view. Cordoba was where we set in place the two main features of the holiday – daily siestas (primarily as an opportunity for me to try to de-puff my ankles which I seemed to have left somewhere in Madrid) and daily consumption of ham. Or chorizo. Neither of which pregnant women are really meant to have, and perhaps karma punished me by making me leave my handbag with wallet, phone and both our passports on the back of a chair in an alley. When Mr A scampered back to get it, it was still there. Trusty folk these Spaniards.

Also in Cordoba there were men who urinated against buildings when I was trying to take photos of architectural masterpieces, and a museum with the most patronising audioguide ever and a big model of the Mezquita just over the river (in case you can’t be bothered with that bit?) in which Muslim men are praying in shafts of divine light. Mr A spent most of the museum visit frustrated at the Arabic map which had been hung upside down so hindering his translation efforts.

Next stop was Granada where a taxi driver dropped us off at our hotel, except actually our hotel was 10 minutes away up a very steep hill with lots of stairs and winding alleys. Mr A obviously felt a little intimidated by the search with large suitcase and pregnant lady in tow so deposited me and the luggage in a shady square returning with a clear sense of direction, a lot of sweat and a keen porter. Another hotel room with a great view, we immediately bumped in to a friend from University who we hadn’t seen for seven years in a local café, who didn’t notice I was pregnant so must have thought I’d put on A LOT of weight.

Obviously we spent one morning at the Alhambra (huge hilltop complex of forts, Moorish palaces and gardens) which was as stunning as expected. They really knew how to do a ceiling those Moors. And a waterpool. And a spot of wall carving. And a niche. We later met a guy whose only comment was that it was hard to get a feel for the place when there was no furniture in any of the rooms. Just being in one of the most beautiful Arab palaces in the world was enough for us. It was a teensy bit warm (farewell ankles) and we paid an extraordinary amount of money for a very dry cheese sandwich, but somehow we managed to resist the opportunity to dress up as genuine Arabs.

The rest of our days in Granada were spent climbing up hills (I overtook a teenage girl in the prime of life and felt inordinately proud of myself), going to look at churches which were closed at the exact time that we happened to visit, and noticing yet more graffiti. We also watched a man down four cans of extra-strong lager in less than an hour and homeless, drunk men dancing with their dogs which was a little bit like being back in South London.

Our last night was spent in Velez-Malaga which is, predictably, close to Malaga and couldn’t be described as one of the highlights of the Andalucia region. A set meal at a tapas restaurant went on for about twice as long as necessary – it’s hard to enjoy a meal when you have absolutely no idea how many more courses there might be. And one of them was sweet and sour fish which I’m pretty sure doesn’t originate in Southern Spain. Our hotel was run by a British couple and, by being the subject of one of those ‘Our life in the sun’ type documentaries, was full of British guests. We lowered the average age around the plunge pool substantially (once Mr A had been given brand new trunks by the owner of the hotel since he hadn’t thought to bring any on holiday. To Spain. In August) and I think we almost killed off a Northern couple of a certain age when we said we’d got there by train. By train? Bill, did you hear this? They came by train!

And so to Malaga Airport where the insolent British Airways staff totally ignored my carefully prepared Fit to Fly certificate, I had a totally irrational (hormonal) breakdown midflight, and we wondered whether we regretted the situation we’d got ourselves into when the twentieth child started screaming. But even these irritations couldn’t dampen the pleasure of our last child-free holiday for a while where, ilhamdulillah, I hadn’t needed the Spanish for ‘I’m in labour, get me to a hospital’.

Horses and Hospitals

2009-08-21T14:09:00.007+03:00

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

2009-07-30T19:03:00.011+03:00

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

2009-07-17T14:24:00.004+03:00

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

2009-06-29T21:09:00.009+03:00

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

2009-06-06T19:45:00.009+03:00

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.

Cat hair and Curtains

2009-05-15T15:41:00.007+03:00

It was my birthday last week, though the day itself was somewhat low-key. There were apparently more important events taking place in Doha that day such as Sudanese peace talks and a forums to discuss Democracy (best not to mention that this is a country doesn’t really have any) and we had Mr A’s colleague staying with us, so I was pushed back a day. This meant some toast and tea in the morning. That’s it, since the convergence of the British Forces Post Office and a small lack of forward planning by family and friends, meant there was nothing else to open. So I went to work, returning to find my one true friend in Doha had somehow noticed the date and delivered flowers, sweets and a bracelet to our flat! Hurrah! Thereby easily outdoing Mr A who tried to console me with birthday wishes from Sudanese Rebel leaders. The next day Mr A sprang in to action. More tea and toast, some presents and a small mortgage spent at a Ritz Carlton restaurant restored marital relations, and postal gifts have been arriving ever since.

Otherwise, we have been hawking ourselves around town a little less than usual. The annual US Independence Day party was restrained this year (tent at Intercontinental Hotel rather than ballroom at Ritz Carlton) and dry to reflect the sober times in the States (boom boom). This obviously also translated in to the snacks which were extremely hard to come by, and mainly involved greasy lumps of cheese. The experience wasn’t hugely improved by the American Ambassador giving a rather dry formal speech in English (annual value of trade has increased x percent) and then a blatantly fascinating speech in Arabic (Obama’s statements about US relations with the Arab world and Islam). At least we got to see good friends, and then we hopped in the car to eat burgers and fries.

We visited the Museum of Islamic Art again. Mr A has been a million times with various visitors over the past couple of months and so has had a million tours around the highlights with the Director and various Curators. He has vaunted this knowledge of many occasions: ‘my love, we should go to the Museum and I can take you on the tour that I’ve been on. I know loads of stuff about the best exhibits’. So off we head, and it turns out that he can’t remember all that much about the first gallery we enter. That one isn’t normally part of the VIP tour, better to head the other side. Though his memory is a little vague on this one too. A couple of bowls are definitely important, he just can’t quite remember why. And a carpet is really significant, it was found in a Mosque where it had been covered by later, newer carpets only he can’t quite remember exactly which carpet it was. Luckily there are enough beautiful things to distract from his aimless wittering. I should have just taken the convenient guidebook given to us by the friends who wrote it. Next time.

The cats continue to horrify and delight. They are definitely substantially larger, and there are hints of improved behaviour such as not waking us up at 5.30am EVERY day. They do, however, steal any food you may be really looking forward to eating, sleep on any dark clothing you might have and chairs which you will sit on in black trousers and then go to work with a bum covered in white hair. We finally got round to replacing the printer that no longer really prints having lived in the cat room for a while, just in time for them to pull a curtain rail out of the ceiling. Since we aren’t really meant to have cats in the building, this now means a complicated process where the maintenance men come to look at a curtain rail that we have pulled out of the ceiling for no reason, while the cats are relocated to another bedroom that they can slowly destroy. We love them with all our hearts. Most of the time.

And I am obsessed with mangoes. The supermarkets have huge mounds of various varieties of them, ranging from the most expensive from Brazil (left of picture, £1.80 each) to the cheapest from India (right of picture, 35p each). I’m working my way through the taste test. Next week I’ll move on to melons, or kumquats, or any of the other fruits that I don’t recognise in the Philipino section.

Power steering and Pork dubbing

2009-04-30T22:27:00.008+03:00

Last weekend we went ‘dune bashing’ in the desert. We have been before ('Dolls and Dunes' here) but, sensibly, were driven by an experienced Qatari ex-body builder in his car. This time we drove ourselves (in a Chevrolet) so set off on a sunny Saturday with two friends in convoy – one who had been before and was our guide for this particular jaunt (in a Nissan), and one who was a fellow bashing novice and, importantly, was driving his brand new 4x4 (maybe 6 months old) which is really his wife’s car (a Honda). We drove south towards the end of the tarmac-ed road, stopped to let down our tyres, and then set off for the Inland Sea (or Khor Al Udaid).

It must be mentioned at this point that this is a popular destination for Qatar residents and people drive there all the time. It is, as its name suggests, a body of sea water almost totally surrounded by sandy land, close to the Saudi Arabian border (one can also just peek the United Arab Emirates over the barren landscape). There are two ways of getting there – either to follow the reasonably flat salt flats compacted by the tyres of hundreds of 4x4s, or to ‘bash’ the dunes that surround the flats i.e. driving up and down piles of sand. We, of course, followed the latter strategy and happily drove up and over a couple of dunes. Not very far in we approached a larger, sandier patch and, brought to a slow behind our struggling Honda friend, promptly sank in to deep, very sandy, sand with friend sunk in same sand nearby. Alighting from the vehicle it became obvious that the wheels were sunk up to the underside of the chassis which was firmly banked. Luckily we’d inherited some spades from some friends last year, and had remembered to bring one so the boys took turns to dig the wheels out (note: next time take more than one spade) as I administered sun cream and water in the 40 degree heat and escaped to the air conditioning of the Honda (which had been extracted from the sand by now. By driving.). We tried the tow rope that someone had remembered to bring, which snapped as soon as any force was applied. We tried a rope that we’d inherited from the spade-friends, which snapped too. We tried both broken ropes together, which both snapped again long before there was any danger of our car moving.

At this point a friendly and very bearded Qatari in shell suit trousers cruised past in his Toyota Landcruiser (there is a very valid reason why all Qataris drive Landcruisers) and stopped to consult. Ah, you’ve driven right in to the most notorious sand patch in the whole of Qatar – people always get stuck here, he told us in Arabic, managing not to smile. He pottered off to procure a decent rope (advising that the one we had was meant for towing motorbikes), returning to supervise tying of knots, depth of digging, placement of sunbathing mat beneath tyres, and direction of towing. Within minutes we were off, with our Qatari friend clearly unable to believe we could get anywhere unaided so offering to lead us to the sea and off we went in our convoy of four. He took us to the spot where he was fishing with his friends surrounded by litter, asking whether we needed any water (clearly thinking we were stupid enough to have not thought of bringing any with us), and advising that we might want to stop here rather than carrying on to the more popular spot further around the water’s edge (called the ‘Sheraton’ by Qataris because of the large number of ex-pats that go there). A very nice man – shows that you shouldn’t judge men who look exactly like Osama Bin Laden.

Of course, we didn’t stop there. We had more exploring to do. So off we went further south which, apart from a bit of a jolt as Mr A approached a dune on the speedier side, passed off without hitch and was a lot of fun.

We found ourselves a perfect spot between sand dune and water and rewarded ourselves with some sandwiches, beers and a swim, ignoring the occasional wafts of sulphur (from the sea bed or the nearby gas works?).

All too soon, it was time to head back so we packed up, got in to the cars, and turned on the ignition. Ours came to life with a worryingly loud rattling noise. The kind of noise that, as much as you tell yourselves it’s nothing serious, sounds like your car is about to keel over. Perhaps that earlier jolt had been more significant than we’d hoped. The only member of the group who knew anything about cars got on his back under the engine and fiddled with the various tools and gloves (that it turns out were nestled with our spare wheel) when we heard an almighty crash from behind us.

It turns out that Mr Honda didn’t feel he’d bashed enough dunes on the way so was taking advantage of the break to launch himself and his car, fast, over the picnicking dune. Although he looked impressive, getting clear air between the bottom of his car and the ground (Mr A is the only person to have seen this and laughs every time it is mentioned to him), the landing didn’t go so well and resulted in a bonnet that wouldn’t close, a plastic section hanging off the front, a deployed airbag that filled the car with smoke, and some funny noises, though we were still winning on that front.

So, feeling somewhat chastened by the noises and having tied the front of the other car back on, we headed back to the road minimising the number of dunes though loving the ones we just couldn’t drive round, only delayed briefly by digging Nissan out after an over-keen dune run (hee hee).

Reaching the small garage back at the road in order to pump tyres, Mr A said he was pretty sure the power steering had gone and made a 24 point turn to get in to the space in front of the garage where a disinterested man said we’d broken the power steering fluid hose which, since it was high-pressure, couldn’t be fixed by anyone outside Doha. Meanwhile, the Nissan was producing small clouds of burnt rubber as a result of being driven over dunes with the hand brake on, and the Honda seemed to be leaking whilst its owner contemplated the future of his marriage when he told his wife what he’d done to her car. It was all pretty professional. We ended up eating some shortbread before driving back to Doha with Mr A using all his muscles to steer.

Someone invited us down to the Inland Sea tomorrow. I think we’ll give it a bit of time before we head down there again, and perhaps buy a different car.

Whilst not destroying our car, we went to a quiz at the Marines Bar of the American Embassy. Once past the security (which at one stage involved them dapping your car with a pad to check if there are any traces of explosives - I can’t believe they’d pick up anything through the layers and layers of dirt on our car) we gamely participated in a quiz as the only non-Americans, and with limited knowledge of US College sports mascots or 1980s American hurdlers. In fact I didn’t answer a single question, but our very focussed team-mate did and we continued our tradition of not bothering to turn up to quizzes unless we’re going to win which meant we left with a fishing rod for Mr A and Celine sunglasses for me. Not a bad evening’s work, especially since I hadn’t been to a bar before where an AK47 sits above the bar and you walk past a pistol to get to the loo.

Yesterday I was watching Rachael Ray (America’s girl next door who prepares easy, cheap dishes whilst doing make-overs for podgy housewives) where Tonight’s Dish was fried steak with a tomato sauce. She helpfully said you could make this dish with either chicken, or… well her mouth said ‘pork’ but her voice said ‘steak’ which, apart from not making any sense, shows that someone’s job is to screen television programmes for references to pig foodstuffs and dub accordingly. In the days of swine flu perhaps not such a bad idea. The whole thing was slightly undermined by Rachael adding white wine to the sauce which she was able to pronounce, say and show without disruption.

Doha is now heating up and the sinking feeling of knowing time is limited until it’s too humid to go outside is hard to ignore. This is only helped by thinking about London in the rain (wet feet, no umbrella, buses that smell of swamp) and trying not to remember the lovely wedding and beautiful blossom in the UK when we were there two weeks ago….

Sheikh Faisal and Saddam Hussein

2009-04-17T11:46:00.008+03:00

I am continually frustrated here that since the exchange rate is currently about 5 riyals to the pound (having been almost 7.5 when we first arrived), 0.5 riyals is about 10p. A significant sum of money me thinks. And yet there only about eight '50 dirham' coins in the whole country, none of which end up in the shops that I frequent. Since all shopkeepers round up, you either pay 10p more than you should or they palm you off with some stale chewing gum as a meagre substitute. I know it's not much money, but just imagine all those 10 pence pieces over three years...... I could buy some shoes for that.

Mr A is meanwhile working out how to do his job without putting on five stone having had two separate meetings/events last week which involved unannounced three course buffets. Ah, they love a good buffet. Especially one hidden behind secret doors that will be opened just as you think it might be safe to leave. One of these events was for the launch of a website where at the critical moment, the screen said 'Internet Explorer cannot connect'. Priceless. Maybe they were hoping to distract with the lamb stew.

I’m recovering from the hilarity of him destroying security barriers. Going to visit some friends for supper, we were driving in to the parking of their apartment building which, like so many others, involves stopping at a security gate where a man takes your ID, writes down your name, and lifts the barrier to let you through (which is of course how they will spot the terrorists when they come, because the terrorists won’t have thought to have their ID with them). As we’d stopped to talk to the security guy he’d lifted the barrier but during the course of the conversation (and unbeknownst to Mr A), he’d lowered it again. So when we’d completed the technicalities Mr A happily drove in to the car park, THROUGH the barrier which conveniently snapped off leaving our car totally unbothered, a rather flustered security guard and a pathetic looking plastic bar at the side of the road. Mr A is in damage limitation mode with regards to his reputation in Doha, not helped by me telling everyone we meet.

I’ve been counting my lucky stars at having a job as my weekly British architecture journal keeps me updated with the increasingly depressing news from the UK. This week I’ve been discussing the intricacies of toilet arrangements with my older, Qatari colleague in the foyer of a 5* hotel - should this toilet have a handspray? and loo roll as well? and should it have a basin IN the toilet cubicle, or is outside acceptable for whatever people will get up to in there?

I spent last week collapsed at home with a bad back, a cat with an eye infection to keep me company and Jane Austen DVDs that I forgot I hadn't watched (much to Mr A's disappointment). This week we’ve been entertaining my sister who has popped by for a week. Having taken her on a tour of hotels – Four Seasons for terrace cocktails in a thunder storm, Ritz Carlton for brunch, Grand Hyatt for sandwiches overlooking furry animals dancing to 90s Europop - we took her to Sheikh Faisal’s Museum yesterday which is one of the very few things that we hadn’t yet done in Qatar. Obviously, this highlights the inaccuracy of my previous statements claiming that the Museum of Islamic Art is the only Museum around but perhaps you will forgive me when I make clear that this is an eccentric collection of an old man’s belongings only able to be seen by appointment. We had a very exclusive private tour with fifty Italian tourists, a Lebanese contingent, and most of Germany.

Sheikh Faisal bin Qassim al Thani is a relative of the Emir who has collected a lot of stuff and has built a big complex to house it all. He has:

Boats, with lots of boxes on them (inside),

Boats on a small pond (outside),

Old cars,

Pennyfarthings,

Pictures of Saddam Hussein,

Bowling balls,

Spearheads,

Carpets,

Painted Indian and Pakistani vans,

and a verdant oasis…

… with peacocks.

Well done Mr Faisal.

Biltong and baboons

2009-03-23T19:47:00.010+03:00

We have been in Cape Town for a week which - apart from giving us the opportunity to discuss the differences between living in Norway (cold), Sudan (men with guns), Doha (not cold) and Brighton (lots of vegetarian restaurants) - gave me the opportunity to note things that South Africa has that Qatar hasn't:

• Women wearing hijabs with short-sleeved t-shirts, thereby rejecting the commonly held principle that if you're going to cover your head, you also cover most of your skin.

• Pork, in many forms, mostly barbecueable. And beef, mostly very, very dry to be chewed a la caveman. It's called biltong. It's not all that nice.

• Vineyards, which serve many kinds of wine in scenic surroundings, with knowledgeable people telling you what you're meant to be smelling and tasting. We horse-rode between vineyards which was more idyllic than one would have thought possible. And we went to a restaurant where we could sit outside admiring vines, drinking chilled wine, eating food, with waiting staff who knew what they doing.

• Seals (a little smelly), penguins (3rd biggest colony in Africa or 7th biggest in the world depending on who you ask), baboons (greedy bastards) and lots of birds.

• Mountains. Everywhere. Clime-able mountains if you're male and keen, or accessible by cable-car if you're female and lazy. Cable cars can have revolving floors, which is a step too far in my book.

• Prisons as tourist attractions, which you can only get to by boat and, if you're us, will only get to on your third attempt when you're sprinting to make the deadline and so don't have time to read the informative displays and so don't really know what's going on. But you know that Nelson Mandela was there because a helpful former-inmate tells you. And you can watch tourists taking their photos in his cell, with the door closed, as if they have just been imprisoned for 26 years for fighting apartheid only they haven't, they just want to send the photo to their mum. Actually Doha doesn't really have tourist attractions, let alone former prisons. Though this guy recently visited and seemed to have a good time.

• Very smart Thai restaurants in beautiful restored old houses which come as a surprise because your friend told you you were going to a local curry house. Such restaurants have a whole page of 'rules', which include not wearing shorts but don't mention anything about the 6ft tall woman in a skirt only just covering her bum, looking suspiciously like she might be working that night. Meals for 6 with cocktails and wine in such restaurants will cost the same as a meal for two in Doha.

• International cricket matches (South Africa v Australia) with hoards of schoolchildren binge-eating from the prolific roaming snack-sellers (biltong, doughnuts, biltong, hot chocolate, crisps, biltong, coke, chocolate bars). You will get sunburnt watching.

• Massive oysters that barely fit in one mouthful

• Lots of cheerful black people who aren't doing menial jobs, with their families. Men singing in colourful shirts.

• A late night bar which will sell you take-away food and alcohol at 11pm on a Sunday night when you forgot to go the supermarket and, despite being called Pirates, won't be as grim as it should be.

• Ostrich eggs (from the ostriches, but Doha has them too) with pretty holes carved in them which you can buy at the airport and then threaten your husband with divorce if he doesn't get it home in one piece, despite a packed plane and no room in the overhead lockers.

• Newspapers that analyse regional and local politics. Elections. Campaign posters for aforementioned elections, Political parties. Etc.

• Crime - necessitating a fortress-like house with two separate alarms, electric fences and numerous gates/doors/keys. Despite a week of trying, you will not work out how the alarm actually works and will set it off repeatedly.

Naked ladies in restaurant menus. We went to that restaurant twice just to be sure.
Colourful houses (though such districts have shops that sell halal food and posters about Gaza so that made us feel at home).

So, a week spent relaxing with good friends was just as good as we expected. Of course no trip involving Mr A could be without some drama and, on cue, he managed to leave his mp3 player and SIM card on a different continent. They are currently en route to Europe where they will have a small holiday before returning to the Middle East. At least they get a bit of a break.

I'm just relieved that the Qatari customs official believed that my model guinea fowl was an ornament and not haram contraband, His colleague spotted it on his scanner on the way out of the airport (yes, they scan your bags on entering the country to check you're not bringing any alcohol or other illicit foodstuffs in). Thinking it was perhaps a novelty booze bottle, he pulled me over. Mr A popped up with some Arabic chat and Mr Customs asked, very politely, if he could see the 'egg' within my bag. I showed him a model bird and he seemed satisfied, which is fortunate since if he'd probed further he would have discovered the Champage truffles Mr A was smuggling in for his colleagues. My colleagues didn't get anything except the joy of having me back. Lucky them.

Saloons and sand

2009-03-12T14:13:00.006+03:00

February was spent in Doha. We didn't go abroad once (the first month since September that that's been true), and didn't even leave the city which is something of an achievement in a place that doesn't have the most enormous variety of diversions. I think this is probably a reflection of how settled we feel - almost a year and a half, in our laziness testifies to our homeliness.

We have been forcing ourselves to go to new places though, having not discovered anywhere new for ages. After the initial few months, where every weekend was spent driving off to somewhere someone mentioned, we have become very habitual in our destinations but in February we discovered a new park (enormous, a lot of grass and log cabins with nothing in them), a Thai restaurant (incredibly cheap, a bit tacky, lovely courtyard with a fake folly fountain), and a new hotel bar (Hip India with not much Indian music: 'mingle with the chic and swanky with the latest contemporary rhythms, colourful cocktails and a trendy crowd'. Yuck. We bumped in to loads of friends which means they must be chic, swanky and trendy. I'm not sure this is a good thing).

Yesterday we went to the beach, our first Qatari excursion since December. We headed out of Doha along the Shamel (North) Road which they're rebuilding so there were roadworks, a windy sandstorm so there were clouds of dust, and it's the main route to where the gas plants are there are always plenty of lorries.

An urgent need for petrol meant a stop, surrounded by slightly scary men with their faces wrapped in arab scarves because of the sandstorm, and an opportunity to admire the 'saloon' (perhaps THE most common spelling mistake in the Arab world).

Despite my boasts about the weather it was way too chilly for a swim and a brisk wind meant there was some chafing of skin, but sheltered behind a convenient rock we ate our picnic (managing to get sunburnt in the process) and admired the flare at Ras Laffan (huge gas flare, allegedly been going for over three months, that's millions of dollars of gas literally burning - you really see it in the photo because i forgot to take my zoom lens).

When we first went to this beach (here) there were loads of tents (and cars, and rotting sofas). Then we went last year and all the tents had been taken away. Now the tents are back with a vengeance. They appear to need a permit so each sand-coloured structure has a neat little number on the side and, once again, the owners have settled in for the season - satellite dishes, permanent barbecues, portaloos, water tanks, generators and flags. They don't exactly rough it on their beach trips. It all puts our mini-cool box and two towels to shame. Mr A went to a similar set-up last year; a Qatari friend drove him in to the desert where he and some friends had erected a big tent (complete with full-time staff, generator to power the flat-screen TV and generous refreshments) in order for the lads to hang out and watch the football.

We headed along the beach straight in to the gale to accumulate more shells for my collection (one of which I found in my bed courtesy of the cats), inhale some fresh air, spy some fishermen and give Mr A an opportunity to skim stones into the sea.

Finally it was time to head back in to the city, stopping on the way to admire the impressive view of West Bay - apparently approval has been granted for three times as many towers as there are now. Cripes.

Flirting and "Flamingoes"

2009-02-24T19:39:00.008+03:00

The horror of the wrinkle cream incident has been counteracted by a work contact saying he thought I was 21. Whether he did really think this or actually it was a strange flirting compliment / insult is not clear and I haven't decided what this means his opinion of my professional demeanor is - does he think I have just left school? Does he not realise it took eight years to be qualified to choose marble colours? But he said it, and I might just go and tell Little Miss Beauty Serum. I'm definitely going to drop mention of 'my husband' into more conversations at work.

Last week I went to a worker 'breakfast' that was actually at 5pm because they work night shifts, which involved 120 male construction workers, 3 male project engineers, 5 male contractors, 1 male catering supervisor plus me in a room eating sandwiches. What with a Security guy saying he 'loved giving his business cards to beautiful ladies' and another guy taking at least twice as long as necessary to consider the plan of his office with me, being the only woman on the project is starting to chafe a little at times, but is improved when senior Qatari managers (who I have never met) give me boxes of cakes and leather diaries.

However, I must remember that my life is always better than that of others here. The 'tea boy' (a Nepali man in his late twenties who makes coffee and hot chocolate as well as tea) was asking today whether I know of any spare jobs at weekends because he doesn't earn enough money. He gets around 800 riyals a month (approx $220 or £150) and spends his weekends sleeping and watching TV because he can't afford to do anything else. I don't have a job to give him, though paying him to entertain the cats has crossed my mind.

Speaking of which, the cats pushed our printer/scanner off the table and it no longer works so added to the cost of two jumpers (eaten), one table (may have been small children) and lost sleep (priceless), things are adding up.

The weather here is (and sorry to be annoying) amazing at the moment as long as you ignore the minor sandstorm blips. It's mid-20s during the days and over the weekend was almost perfect despite dire warnings from the Qatar Meteorological Department. They do seem to be the Qatari equivalent of Michael Fish. We went to Wakra which is a costal village (town really) just south of Doha. We'd heard about people going there and had visions of a sandy beach packed out with workers on their day off. At first all we could find was an enormous pile of sand. Like seriously ENORMOUS, about 20 metres high, with a bulldozer zooming along the top. Then we found some police investigating a crash on a dirt track between two cars. Then we drove off-road past the industrial works and decaying buildings, and found a long deserted beach mostly rocky with the sandy part used as a road by Land Cruisers zooming past. We drove along for a while before the way was stopped by a mysteriously placed wall covered in graffiti (something of a rarity in inner Doha) advertising email addresses and websites. Nearby was a blacked-out car with a pair of shoes outside which perhaps contained some people getting up to no good, probably perturbed by me pulling out my camera.

We stopped a bit away from the pimp-mobile to admire the clear blue sky, wade out in the shallows in totally inappropriate footwear and appreciate the flock of large birds hanging out just off the coast. They looked like flamingoes (pink-ish with bright pink wings when they opened) but my mother-in-law assures us that flamingoes are fresh-water birds so perhaps not; more likely pelicans, Mr A assures me (what does he know?). Either way they were beautiful and a rare fauna spotting in Qatar watched while eating our picnic, sitting in the boot of our car.

On a lighter note, what the hell is happening in Britain? When I move away Girls Aloud are a faintly amusing bunch of racist WAGS and now I hear Cheryl Cole is climbing Kilimanjaro for Comic Relief (thanks to daily Facebook updates from G). And Great Britain won the women's bobsleigh world championships? Cripes.

Short and sweet,

See you soon,

Ms A xx

P.S. There is a little box on the right of the screen of which, in theory, you can type your email address in to and get an automatic email when I post a new blog entry should you be interested. Let's see how this goes.

Serum and Censorship

2009-02-08T22:00:00.012+03:00

Hello,

Well I nipped back to London last week (in an 11 hour journey kind of a way) to see friends, catch up on weddings and hang out with family. I think I sat next to an arms dealer on one of the flights - he was working on a powerpoint presentation about defence spending in Saudi - though he can't be terribly successful since he was in Economy. I did all the things I love in London and miss in Doha like drinking copious cups of (normal) tea with my sisters, drinking in pubs, getting wet feet in rain, buying art books, going to exhibitions, visiting architectural salvage shops, buying cakes at Borough Market and eating pies cooked by my Mum.

I am perturbed as I write this. I have just returned from a shopping trip to stock up on expensive face cream where the sales assistant automatically assumed I required the FINE LINES product. Are people that blunt in London? I asked whether she thought I needed anti wrinkle moisturiser. She looked at my face, and declared that it was never too early to start counteracting the signs of ageing! Cheeky. To add insult to injury, the anti wrinkle version was about £20 more expensive making it exorbitant rather than merely pricey so I opted for wrinkles. As I was paying she came rushing up to me with a free sample of Anti-Ageing Serum which implies that she was fearful of my descent into old age. Or she hopes that I am sucked in by the Serum and spend half my salary on creams from now on. Her calling me Madam throughout did not soften the blow.

In less personal news, we spent yesterday visiting The Pearl - 'an island rediscovered' - which is Doha's answer to Dubai's World or Palm(s) . i.e. not rediscovered so much as invented, reclaimed if you were being generous. It's still very much under construction and isn't the most beautiful architecture ever. In fact bits are quite ghastly architecture but as a place to spend the afternoon strolling along the 'boardwalk' (made entirely of concrete) in the sun, sipping hot chocolate it is brilliant (as long as you avert your gaze from the hideous advertising teasers).

I say a stroll - if that seems a bit taxing there are golf buggies to drive you the 50m from your car to the boardwalk.

All that is currently open is a couple of cafe booths and some banks - once it opens properly we will not be the target market unless we suddenly develop a taste (and the cash) for Armani, Cavalli, Ferrari etc.

Professionally, I have been working almost entirely on a project for a major Qatari gas company which means I spend my days in their office trying to work out how to use their computers and how to obtain a cup of tea. A request for 'tea with milk' produces a sickly thick liquid, so i now go for 'red tea' which is what I would call black tea with sugar. As a result of this adventure I have upped my quota of Qatari-contact exponentially and have spent as much time talking to male and female Qataris in the last 3 months as in the previous year. As everywhere else most are hardworking, focussed and competent; others are not. All are courteous and straightforward. Working on a building site highlights that the white thobe men wear doesn't look quite as good with a hardhat as it does with the traditional head-dress, and that a black abaya is the perfect outfit for heavily pregnant women (I hadn't even realised until she stood up).

I actually sloped off work this morning for a couple of hours in order to go to a lecture at the museum by Oleg Grabar who is the Grand Fromage of Islamic Art and Architecture academia. I was introduced to him just before the lecture and squirmed whilst he asked me what buildings I was working on - I don't think a curtain-walled high-rise tower cuts it when compared to ancient mosques. The man is a legend. Since I went to a lecture last week about Islamic Textiles this place is culture crazy right now. It can't last.

Off I now go to consider my wrinkles and read The Times, which Mr A gets through his work but is not immune from the censors.......

P.S. I got the cats castrated. I felt kind of bad, but they aren't letting a lack of balls affect their ability to whine, be cuddled and break things so don't feel too sorry for them.

Flags and Firecrackers

2009-01-23T21:17:00.011+03:00

I tried to spend as many days as possible in December not working, and largely succeeded helped by a week in Syria followed by Eid Al Adha, then Qatar National Day, then Christmas with a festive break in Jordan. All this leaves me with a surfeit of mildly diverting things to say and not much enthusiasm on my part (nor probably yours) to write in too much detail. So, I give you some observations on living in Doha during December 2008, and then some do’s and don’ts should you find yourself in Jordan for five nights.

Doha:

- Advantages of living in the Gulf: we went to the beach on 12 December. A bit too chilly for swimming but walked along the sand/rock, ate our picnic and then fell asleep in the boot of our car with the sound of water lapping at the shore. I think one of Mr A’s favourite days in Qatar so far – beer, food and a snooze.

- We spent the second Eid (Eid al Adha = Eid of the Sacrifice, to celebrate the end of the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, commemorating Ibrahim’s willingness to sacrifice his son) in Doha because I was too stupid to realise earlier that I should have stayed in Damascus. Lucky our area of town was less steeped in blood than most (our friend went to work past a tethered sheep, came back to a puddle of blood and the skin drying on the doorman’s car).

- We spent a day of Eid wandering around the souq area to look at the buildings in daylight for once and check out the street theatre.

During our perambulations we diverted off the main drag when we realised that policemen were herding all male workers round the back of the shops so as to avoid any contact with the ‘family areas’ i.e. the nice bits, with women, Europeans and Qataris . In 200 metres we went from continental street theatre to being surrounded by perhaps a thousand Indian, Pakistani, Phillipino men with nothing to do (a national holiday), nowhere to go (shops closed), being shouted at by policeman for standing still and presumably a warm feeling inside knowing how valued they were by their host country.

- However familiar the sight of women in full black abayas becomes, I will always have to look twice when I see a women jogging alone along the corniche with not one single bit of skin showing (black fabric covering her head and face, gloves on her hands) but large white trainers.

- Qatar National Day is on the 18 December and this year was a BIG deal. No-one noticed it last year so this came as something of a surprise but heck, if they want to spend a week setting up light shows and a morning watching 1950s British military and police vehicles drive past then who are we to judge.

Our poor friend happened be stopping in for 16 hours on this day. Coming from Pakistan, all he wanted to do was see the Islamic Art Museum but of course it was closed, so he had to do with a walk along the Corniche instead. But this was in fact more entertaining than usual. What’s ancient craft when you could watch 15 year old Qataris standing on the top of moving Landcruisers holding huge flags? Or sprint barefoot towards the same moving Landcruisers, jumping on the bonnet, running over the top and leaping off the other end? We took our friend to an overpriced National Day buffet sitting outside in order to see the fireworks but managed not to see a single burst of gunpowder. Hoards of the aforementioned Qataris in their vehicles (and did I mention firecrackers?) meant we then took a two hour taxi journey to go two miles to a party that he missed because he had to get the airport. We may try and be out of the country next year.

- Much to our surprise (and contrary to many naysayers) it is possible to buy a Christmas tree in this Muslim country, and if you go away for a week your husband will organise it because he can’t think of anything else to do with his time. He’ll get carried away and order one 2.5m high that costs a small fortune but the ceilings are high, the decorations have survived the move and the slightly pre-emptive 8th December delivery will be okay because you douse it in so much hairspray that those needles ain’t going anywhere.

- A visit to the fabric souq mid-December meant I wrapped all my Christmas presents in striped and chequered shirt fabric of various colours….. An eco-friendly choice (apparently, according to an irritating article in the Times) though I did it because fabric is cheap here, paper is expensive and I thought it would look pretty. Which it did - in fact the prettiness was the main reason. What’s Christmas without pointless, time-consuming craft projects? I also made stockings though ran out of time so only made three for the four of us which meant Mr A had to use a welly. That’s the first time one of those has come in useful since we moved here.

- We had Christmas day in Doha which meant a spot of breakfast with King’s carols before a walk along the Corniche in warm sunny weather while Mr A went to pick up the turkey. All the shops were open, lots of people were at work, a British guy was walking along the Corniche in a Santa hat with his son on his new bike and Mr A’s mother (“Um A”) spotted some of the very few birds in Doha with her binoculars. Yes you heard right, Mr A collected our lunch from a hotel, already cooked. All I did was make bread sauce, while Um A roasted potatoes. It was brilliant. Then I cooked Panettone bread pudding despite Panettone being one of the most expensive bread products you can buy.

- Major things can be going on the world, people can be dying in their thousands, and you can be sure that QBS Radio will be right on the action in their 6 o’clock headlines: ‘Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al Thani presided over the regular weekly Cabinet meeting today. The cabinet considered the matters brought before it and made appropriate decisions’. All said in a rubbish English accent.

- This is cheating a little bit because it actually happened last week but I popped to the loo at a hotel this weekend and who should be loitering en route to the lav but the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al Thani and his lovely (second of three) wife, Sheikha Moza. It’s the Qatari equivalent of standing 6 feet away from the Queen and Price Phillip only with more moustache, more money, and less casual racism.

Jordan:

- Do go to Aqaba if you want to be extremely close to Israel without having to cross the Allenby Bridge - you can see Eilat (the main port) just along the coast which is mildly disturbing when the Israelis have just launched a military campaign in Gaza. About which I am not going to say much as I think more than enough has been said elsewhere. Needless to say with even Sheikha Moza wearing a black and white checked keffiyeh to symbolise her sympathy with the people of Gaza, sales must have soared. I guess lucky for the London protestors that they are so readily available as a fashion statement.

- Should you be spending a night or two in Aqaba, do go snorkelling. I was put off by the low temperatures and stiff winds, but Mr A and his mum saw lots of fish and coral. Do not be tempted by the glass bottomed boats. Through a narrow Perspex window in the bottom of a small motor boat 5 metres off the coast, you will not see a single fish or living piece of coral. You will see a lot of plastic bags, a view back to Amman (including one of the largest flags in the WORLD) and it will cost you a small fortune.

- If you expect a religious experience when visiting the place where Jesus was baptised near the Jordan river, then don’t bother going. It’s beautiful in bits – amazing scenery on the drive, wooded banks to the river, fascinating to realise how narrow the river is and therefore how close Israel is, but the place itself is underwhelming at best.

Granted I’m not religious but there’s a limit to what you can imagine from looking down to a toxic-looking green shallow pool at the base of a pit, surrounded by (Muslim) guys chopping down trees. Apparently some people still go to be baptised in the River itself which is looks brown, stagnant and an invitation to contract a skin infection. There are steps down to the river directly opposite each other on the Jordanian and Israeli sides where the gap between the countries is perhaps 4 metres. Mostly you notice the huge Israeli flags. A new Orthodox church on the Jordanian side has bold gold dome which is also something of a statement.

- Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was filmed at Petra. This will not escape your notice during time you spend there but it’s still great.

Don’t visit in the middle of Summer - last time we went it was August and I nearly died of heatstroke. This time it was chilly though after a climb up to the High Place of Sacrifice we were in T-shirts.

On the way down I became obsessed with a field of cairns, and we bumped in to a Bedu lady selling necklaces who tried to shake Mr A’s hand. He said he looked at the grime and had an involuntary reaction which meant his body refused even though his mind said yes. She must have thought we were just another pair of unfriendly tourists.

Since we were visiting for the third time, we were rather bored by the walk from the site back to the car so rode overpriced horses that were slower than Mr A’s parents walking. Value for money right there.

- Do accept one of the Bedouin drivers at Wadi Rum (cf Lawrence of Arabia). On our previous visit we were driven around by a young guide in an Embassy Toyota Prado. This time Mr A drove us in a hired Mitsubishi Pajero. I wouldn’t like to comment on whether it was the difference in driver or car or map-reading that meant we almost got stuck in sand, repeatedly, much to Um A’s horror. When we weren’t fretting we enjoyed the beautiful colours, big skies and rock scrambling.

- Do expect to get lost if you are driving around Amman. It is one of the hardest cities to navigate. It’s essentially a series of hills and none of the maps show what level things are at, so when you think two roads are going to meet you will actually find yourself driving under the road you want to be on. It is also orientated around a series of roundabouts which they call circles and don’t mark in any way. So you will drive through the one you want, and find yourself at the amphitheatre when you were hoping to visit the citadel.

And finally, off topic, I think I might have mentioned the almost pornographic underwear for sale in most Arab souqs before. Two ladies have collected those available in the souqs of Syria in to a beautiful book: The Secret Life of Syrian Lingerie. Do have a look. Incredible.

Sunsets, Sunrises and the Sham

2009-01-03T16:35:00.003+03:00

Mr A and I parted ways at Larnaca Airport as I headed off for the second part of my early-December sojourn. Boringly, he had to get back to work in Doha whilst I had arranged to meet a good friend in Damascus. We carefully disentangled our possessions, checked we each had our own passports, and bid an emotional farewell for our week apart. I had to change flights in Amman so was just wandering through the airport (full of men in white on their way to Hajj in Saudi – I felt extremely dark and female) when I happened to put my hand in the key pocket of my bag. Ah, that’s rather a lot of keys, I thought as I pulled out not only my house key and car keys but also Mr A’s house and car keys. So that would be all the house and car keys we own. Mr A gave me cheery little call a few minutes later to say hello from Dubai airport. I quickly put a dampener on his mood as he realised he was about to arrive in Doha at 3am homeless, car key-less and due in to work 4 hours later. Luckily a lovely friend had a spare room and was willing let him in. So Mr A hated me a little less (though really was it my fault? Maybe he should have checked whether he had his keys with him? Or maybe I should have checked I didn’t have his keys with me? We haven’t really discussed it as these are the kinds of conversations that could end in divorce).

Meanwhile, by some miracle my friend J and I had arrived at Damascus airport at roughly the same time. Also relying heavily on the kindness of friends, we were staying in Damascus’s old town in a beautiful courtyard house. I managed to remember where it was in the dark, and J and I awoke in the morning to bright sunshine, orange and grapefruit trees outside our bedroom, and an urgent need to find DHL. Luckily, being us, Mr A and I have utilised the services of this company before and so I knew where the Damascus branch was. Leaving no time for J to appreciate the finer things of the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world (I know, others claim it too), we marched off. An hour, £35 and one really ugly complimentary cool bag later, the car keys were allegedly winging their way to Doha and we were free to potter to our hearts’ content.

J had never been able to visit us when we lived in Damascus so I was meeting her there partly to show her around and partly so I could remember all the things I love about the Sham and see all my lovely friends. Which meant that she got almost no choice about what she saw as I took her to the places I liked, ignored the places I didn’t, force-fed her Arabic food and made her hang out with people she didn’t know gossiping about people she didn’t know. Brill.

Some things about Damascus have not changed in the year we’ve been away. At my favourite restaurant, where I was absurdly, childishly pleased that the waiters recognised me, we ordered my usual truckload of falafel and tabbouleh. I loved being able to speak Arabic every day, though got frustrated that my vocabulary seems to have contracted to the point where I can only have a substantial conversation with my Arabic teacher. And I remembered all the reasons why I love the architecture: we visited an incredible V&A Museum ceramics exhibition at Khan Assad Basha, admired the Ummayad Mosque in our ewok outfits while avoiding the freezing stone floors in our bare feet, enjoyed the serenity of the Azem Palace and almost retched at the smell of mothballed stuffed animals on display at the Maristan (medical museum).

But much has changed – a lot of the old town has had a makeover for the ‘2008 Capital of Arab Culture’ celebrations – the ancient Straight Street now has amazing smart shutters and clear pavements rather than piles of rubble for a road and dangerous electric cables hanging at head height. And I baulked at the prices of pretty much everything. This exchange rate business really is a bugger.

When in Damascus one must watch the sun set over the city from the top of Mount Qasioun whilst sipping a cool drink. Unfortunately my planning went awry and we actually got there just after the sun had set, and I had failed to register it was December so we ended up on a hill, in the dark, freezing cold, sipping tea. But our 17 year old waiter (a soldier doing his military service) kept us entertained as he displayed mild shock at his luck in getting not one, but two women at his café. Two girls from London. Who spoke some Arabic. And smiled at him. That should keep him going for a while.

Heading home we chanced upon a parade. Keen for some political action (and in retrospect possibly defying advice from every guidebook in the world), we stationed ourselves on top of a bollard to wait for something to happen. Smart young boys practiced their trumpets as hijabed young girls looked on. Men in black leather jackets strode past with Lebanon flags as residents peered out of their windows. After half an hour of cold, numb extremities, we dived into a shop (there’s nothing like a Palestinian Women’s Co-operative to make you feel like the really expensive bag you like really HAS to be bought) to buy Christmas decorations and so missed the whole thing, though since it was a visiting Lebanese bigwig it wasn’t such a bad thing. Given the frequency with which politicians from Lebanon are blown up, there are safer places to stand than next to them.

It has to be said that courtyard houses are somewhat more romantic in summer when you can sit in the tree-filled courtyard, around the fountain, smoking shisha and having urbane intellectual conversations in the manner of Isabel Burton. In winter, having to go outside to get to the loo in the dark by the light of your mobile phone, when it’s cold and your host has let slip that he killed a rat that was IN HIS BED, is not quite as beguiling. We had also been warned that we might be woken up in the morning by the Syrian security services having a look around, so we weren’t heart-broken to leave the city.

Heading for Palmyra I hastily remembered the rules of Syrian driving (never waste time looking in your rear view mirror, use the horn at all times, if in doubt ignore the traffic signals) as I got us lost on the way there in our hire car. Following the signs to Baghdad, we eventually found our way and joined the road with the magical trucks which look like they’re carrying goods until one, and then two, and then forty women and children stand up in the back and wave. J was suitably impressed by the golden columns surrounded by desert and we rewarded ourselves with a half bottle of Lebanese wine (delicious) and a glass of Syrian wine (disgusting). We set our alarms for sunrise the next morning, which is a must-do at Palmyra. Except that I have never managed to do it. Here at last was my opportunity. J leapt out of bed into ALL her clothes as our alarms went off. I buried deeper into my duvet, grunted at her to feel free to leave without me and, in similar style to my two previous visits, lay in my bed wondering whether it was really worth it. Apparently it was as J came back with idyllic tales of having the ruins to herself as the sun rose behind the mountains, though it then took her about 2 hours to warm up again which I think vindicated my decision since I forgot to pack socks let alone a coat.

Back to Damascus via a Bedouin-run café where J swapped a pen for some spinach pastries and a whistle-stop visit to the Christian villages where at least one woman still speaks Aramaic, we snuggled in to another generous friend’s centrally-heated, all-mod-cons flat and spent the next couple of days seeing old Syrian friends, buying up carpets, knives and nativity scenes, reading Heat magazines, and going to an utterly bizarre Finnish National Day party where we didn’t meet a single Finn. I thought it was important to give her an unforgettable cultural experience.

So after all that it was time for me to return to Doha for the Eid holiday (no danger of going back to work just yet), J to return to the UK, and us both to realise we’d picked up a stomach bug as a memento of our time together. Ah, good times. Better times than a Doha acquaintance who was holidaying in Damascus at the same time as us and was apparently amazed because he’d never travelled to a Communist police-state before where there are food shortages. I have no idea which Syria he went to.

(P.S. For those of you with long memories, I was updated on the progress on the tortoises whilst I was back. They are well. A little too well. Lady has apparently given birth to babies, something I can only say was inevitable and may well be down to our over-zealous care. That probably means she has had children with one of her sons. Disgusting. Or is that acceptable in the animal world?)

Patriotism, Pelicans and Pilgrimage

2008-12-11T17:01:00.010+03:00

So,

Cyprus

. Or Kobros as the Arabs call it (not that it’s any of their business). My parents were going to be there for a conference my Dad was speaking at so we went to meet them for a pre-Christmas minibreak. I’d taken charge of the itinerary since Mum had attempted to ask a (Greek) colleague where we should stay in Northern Cyprus and mortally offended him. Armed with insider tips from a friend of a friend who had been posted there, I had booked some hotels. First night was going to be spent with Mum and Dad in Limasol/Lemesos (running theme of everything having up to three names - guaranteed to ensure the name on your map will be different to that on the road signs) at their conference hotel. This we were looking forward to having read the guidebook: “ the city has several reputations: ‘the city that never sleeps’ is one, and the cliché is thanks to the tourist area’s exuberant nightlife, rivalled only by that of Agia Napa; another is ‘sex town’”. I think the clubbers and perverts had been put off by the late-November temperatures and we spent a very pleasant evening in a posh hotel on the coast surrounded by doctors. Mum paid for a facial for me, 90% of which I was asleep for. Then two pelicans attacked her while we were sunbathing the next morning. Dad was too busy sitting in the shade to help.

We spent the following couple of nights in Nicosia in a rubbish hotel with an astoundingly grumpy receptionist and a bathroom where it wasn’t possible to sit down on the loo and have the door closed. Ah, the mystique of our relationship. The Classic Hotel in case you’re visiting. Very nice bar though. And the breakfast must have been okay because I watched a fellow guest pile her plate up 3 times and scoop the lot in to her handbag.

We perambulated around Southern Nicosia/Lefkosia (Greek) enjoying the sunshine and avoiding the English Pubs. Then we perambulated around Northern Nicosia/Lefkosa (Turkish) enjoying the sunshine, the architecture and a mosque (originally a church). We crossed South to North on foot which involved walking through No-Mans-Land, past the 16^th Century Venetian Walls of the old city, rolls and rolls of barbed wire and lots of No Littering signs. Flashing our EU Passports the Greeks were utterly unbothered by our movements, while a terrifyingly officious Turkish Immigration lady wanted us to fill in a form. Our first international border (or at least, UN buffer zone) on foot: tick.

In my role as Chief Planner, I booked a restaurant for our second night. Having perused aforementioned guidebook I chose one in the Old Town “a pretty little Greek-style mezedopolio (a small restaurant specialising in mezedes). Try a selection of the mainly Greek wines on offer’.“ So in we walked to a restaurant that was straight out of Paris – all large mirrors, cream walls, white tablecloths and chandeliers, a menu with not a single Cypriot dish (smoked salmon, beef carpaccio, steak) and a wine list with endless French wines. It seems the restaurant had had a makeover. By 10pm it was full of beautiful Cypriots (the ‘intelligentsia’ according to Dad who can’t understand a word of Greek) and we sipped complimentary Amaretto feeling slightly smug.

The problem with contested International borders is that neither side is very keen on showing you where to cross. One tip is to look for signs of patriotism – when we eventually found the checkpoint it was buried under Greek and Turkish flags and banners (‘I am glad to say I am a Turk’). The Turks haven’t stopped there – they’ve also painted an enormous flag on the side of the mountains visible from Nicosia just in case anyone wasn’t sure where Turkey began.

We stopped off at Famagusta to get some Turkish money, admire some ruins, visit a mosque (originally a church), despair at British tourists on their 3^rd beers (10.30am) and have some morning coffee in a delightful restored old building with an obscene cocktail menu (‘after this headbanger she’ll be yours all night’).

We spent a couple of nights on the Karpaz peninsula – a relatively remote bit on the Turkish side. I had booked some self-catering ‘houses’ so we stocked up on pasta and beer in case there weren’t any shops. We arrived at beautiful stone buildings with no kitchens, a restaurant next door and two shops. We scampered down to the beach before it got dark, passed a lady milking her cow, and then returned to while away a dark, cold evening.

It seemed that the guys running the houses occupied their nights watching extremely informative state-produced documentaries about leaf rot and other agricultural pests, so rather than joining them we spent our time drinking rather good Cyprus red wine and eating fish. As we were just about to leave a bunch of weather-beaten men arrived and offered to buy us a drink. One particularly stubbly chap would only stop rubbing his chin on Dad’s bald head and kissing him when we promised to drink Raki with them tomorrow. The following night me and Mum ate quickly and coincidentally became extremely tired just as Stubbly walked in, so Mr A and Dad were forced to drink a bottle of wine each whilst bonding with the locals.

By chance, we were in Karpaz on the day of the bi-annual pilgrimage to the Monastery of Apostolos Andreas. Over 4000 Greek Cypriots travel over the border to this remote, decrepit, normally deserted Monastery where miracles reputedly take place. The first sign was the streams of Mercedes on the single track road. At the Monastery police were keeping control of the coaches as middle aged ladies elbowed each other out of the way to get in the door. Once inside they lit candles for friends and family (unceremoniously cleared away every 10 minutes by a helper and dumped out the back), kissed icons and handed bundles of cash to the besieged Priest. Outside, market stalls catered for all your religious needs – bottles of holy water, Jesus trays, duvets, plastic toys…

All too soon it was time to return to Greek Cyprus (Larnaca: ‘All Day Breakfast with free Beer refills’) for a last lunch with the parents before leaving them at a seedy Chinese-run internet café. We stocked up on Cyprus Delight (remarkably similar to Turkish Delight) before Mr A headed back to Doha and I embarked on Phase 2 of my holiday…..[to be continued]

Robert de Niro and Russian dolls

2008-12-10T15:18:00.006+03:00

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

2008-11-13T12:36:00.004+03:00

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

2008-10-30T11:08:00.004+03:00

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

2008-10-11T23:12:00.007+03:00

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

2008-09-25T17:12:00.007+03:00

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……….)

Fasting and Feasts

2008-09-13T10:11:00.001+03:00

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