The airport is small and is going through an overhaul prior to the games. The construction of the new airport is due for completion in a few years and will do the country a great service. But in the meantime they have renovated the old one, built a new 1st & Business Class terminal, plus another for athletes and officials when the games are on.
We went through immigration and showed our photocopied/emailed business visas, which all seemed ok. Baggage claim was an adventure, as we ended up spending what seemed like an hour waiting for one of our bags, but this gave us the chance to meet and talk with two fellow AJA travellers from Australia. One of them had lost all her luggage, us just one bag, and the other was providing moral support. But with all bags finally collected we headed through the doors to a sea of faces of all races of people, to be greeted by the familiar face of Dr Ken (the head of AJA).
We were then whisked away by mini bus via the streets of Doha to our new home, a Villa in Aziziyah Compound. The bus trip was an experience in itself - to see the roads (and the driving), the mosques and prayer towers, Arabic writing on signs, and things as simple as LuLu Hypermarket… I think the bus only nearly got hit twice, so that was a good bus trip!
Anyway once in our villa we were left to our own devices. We were provided with some essentials as far as food goes, but it didn’t take us long to venture out in the heat to the compound store to try our luck with the Mastercard to see if we could buy some basics. Luckily two boxes of belongings that had already arrived in Qatar were here which had bedding and pillows otherwise our first night wouldn’t have been very comfy!
Initial reaction to our villa was how dusty it was inside, as well as how big! Even though we are in one of the smaller two bedroom villas, it is still big - high ceilings and huge bedrooms. The compound itself is big with over 200 villas. The one thing about the compound that is blatantly obvious is that it one of the older ones, and hasn’t been looked after very well. It is also located quite a way from the centre of Doha itself. Even though there are lots of buildings and shops nearby, as well as being only down the road from the main games complex, it does have that outer suburbs feel to it.
The first night was an experience as I blew the power out at 2am, which meant no water or air-conditioning (the toilets flush via an electric water pump…)! The nice part to it all was our first morning in Qatar was greeted by the sound of morning call to prayer followed by the sounds of birds. These are things you miss being inside with multiple air-cond units going. We have four in our little villa, and like everything else here they are a little old (and noisey). But the power issue was all fixed with a call to Zaheer, the compound odd jobs boss from what we can work out – if anything goes wrong you call Zaheer and sooner or later he or someone else turns up to do something about it. Although this time he did send around the air-con guy to fix the power problem. This was followed by the power guy later in the morning who seemed to do the same thing as the air-con guy, but assured us he would return to fix the problem on Saturday morning at 8.00am – he arrived at 10.00!.
Note 1 – Friday is like Sunday and the weekend here is Friday & Saturday… some point in time it used to be Thursday & Friday but was changed to Fri/Sat, although most shops are open Friday afternoon and evening and Saturday is a normal shopping day, 10am-10pm for the shopping centres and various others time for other things. Many places close between 12 noon and 4pm. But schools and govt businesses are closed Fri/Sat so that is as close to a weekend as we get.
Note 2 – There are lots of “guys” in the compound that do various things. We don’t know where they come from, but once you get in touch with Zaheer the appropriate guy will turn up either by bicycle or walking. We have the security guys, the air-con guy, the power guy, the carpenter guy, stone mason guy (who we think does concreting), the gardener guy, and so on. Then there are various other guys who seem to walk around doing stuff around the compound all day… not sure if they have a title or not, but they seem to be the main guy's guy's guys (if you follow that). One did come up to me one afternoon asking if I had any work for him cleaning house although I have seen him doing gardens as well (but I think he answers somewhere along the line to the hierarchy of guys). From what I can work out women from the Philippines clean villas and Indian and Sri Lankan men are the various “guys”… don’t know if anyone is actually qualified to do their particular jobs, but one way or another everything seems to get done sooner or later.
Note 3 – Insh’alla… Insh’alla by direct translation means “God willing” What this is actually used for by many as a way of saying something will be done sooner or later, or potentially not at all. It is not in the culture to actually say “no” to something, so in other words you are told yes when yes doesn’t really mean yes… worse still you are given the response of insh’alla which can mean something may happen tomorrow “God willing”, which naturally could mean at any point in the future. Patience is important and there isn’t much of a hurry about anything here apart from on the roads.
After our morning of no water and power we headed off with more AJA arrivals via bus to Ponderosa (like Sizzlers, only without the bacon of course) for lunch and salary advances. Was good to actually see so many new staff that makes you realise just how many people are going through the same transition as we are. After our lunch we were all taken off to a small shopping centre to purchase essentials, one of a number of such shopping trips over the next few days. This first one was to The Centre, which is basically just a food store. Was interesting to see prices and brands for the first time… many the same as what we are used to, and virtually everything imported. Prices seemed all comparable or lower as expected with even some Australian imports on the shelves.
Part of Saturday was spent at the City Centre mall… one of the biggest malls in the Middle East (I think) with an ice skating rink on the ground floor, which the rest is built around. The drive there was our first chance to see the Corniche and West Bay (which is actually the northern part of Doha Bay), which is all rather nice and surrounded by much construction and much concrete and glass. Even driving there, you realise just how much of the city is a construction site. The amount of development and beautification projects that are being carried out is amazing. Apparently much of it is supposed to be completed for the Asian Games, but with only a couple of months to go it seems as if it is all part of a much longer term project. It looks like Qatar really does want to compete with the other more developed emirates such as Bahrain to the north and Dubai and Abu Dhabi in the UAE to the south.
Shopping once again comparable with Australia, with City Centre having the full range from the discount mega hypermarket Carrefour through to exclusive (and very expensive) stores. Once we get past the practise of trying to exchange all the prices from Riyals to $AU in our heads, I think it will make things much easier. Basically everything from the general cost of living to the most expensive clothing and cars are cheaper or equal, but I have yet to see anything that has been much higher in price to what we would usually pay apart from basic imported things like breakfast cereals, Vegemite, strawberries, etc… so it is more just random little things.
We were taken home via the stadium and Aspire sporting complex, which are more or less just up the road (in Doha terms) from our compound; huge development and all very impressive. Doha being based on ring-roads, means everything looks close and the size of the place is very deceptive. This is a big and very spread out city! There are many empty spaces between roads which is probably a result of the way they distribute water as much as anything. They don’t pipe it through out the city underground, but rather have water tanks that are refilled daily by trucks or in the case of the compound, the tanks are refilled daily from a underground reservoir which intern is filled by water trucks. I think what happens is someone builds something on one of these huge lots of dusty land on a major arterial road, then other things get built around or nearby. This ends up in there being huge lots of dusty land with nothing on them; even close to major built up areas and shopping areas. When and if more buildings and parks fill these in, this place will end up being huge!
M
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