The end

Hi, we are home.  25 travel hours from wake up to delivery in our home.  Qatar Air was wonderful.  The Doha airport immaculate with customer service people everywhere.  24 hour food and shopping options.  Friendly customs and immigration people who were polite and helpful.  If you travel and have the opportunity try Qatar Air and spend some time in Doha, it is an interesting place.  Then we hit Seattle and the welcoming, helpful, friendly faces were generally replaced by most everything but welcoming, helpful, or friendly.  Welcome to the US was replaced by ‘Next’.  One Alaska Airline baggage agent was great, but the rest of the experience was just tiring.  So glad to be out of there.

Some random thoughts on a month in Qatar.  Remember this is not our first time there, for Shirley it’s been 3 trips, for me, 7, I think.  

If it wasn’t for Doha and Qatar I don’t know how the Philippines could survive.  The amount of remittances going home must be a huge part of that country’s GDP.  In the malls it is common to see a group of Qatari women being followed by ladies pushing shopping carts, just to collect their purchases, or Nannie’s taking care of children.  Turn signals are an optional convenience—cut across 5 lanes of traffic to reach an exit ramp—no problem, jut go.  Pharmacies always have English speaking pharmacists on duty and most are open 24 hours a day.  You can drink alcohol in almost all hotel bars and restaurants but they will not serve a person dressed in national wear—the thobe for men or abaya for women.  Change your clothes and party on.  When it rains traffic gets crazy, and it rained on us so we got to see how people  drive in rain—not pretty.  A smart phone is a mandatory fashion accessory here.  Traffic tickets are sent by text message and since there are speed cameras everywhere there are a lot of messages sent.  You also have to have the Etherez app which shows your Covid-19 status and your vaccination status.  It can alert you if you are in close proximity to a person who has been exposed to Covid.  This was suspended during the World Cup, but is expected to start up again next week.  The health authority dictates people use it and they do.  Covid illness, hospitalization and death has been very low in Qatar.  There are a lot of parks in Doha, one is air conditioned but off leash dog parks are still unknown.  Recycling is in its infancy.  At home everything goes in the garbage bin, in public there are some recycling containers, but it looks like the cleaning crew just takes all the separated materials and puts it into  one large container.  The idea has some ways to go.  There is a lot of glitz and glimmer here, a lot of conspicuous wealth, and a lot of laborers who are supporting desperately poor folks in their home country.  The license plate game is amusing.  Status is often associated with your license plate number.  A three digit plate means you have money, a four or five digit plate is still an acceptable level of importance.  A six digit plate, like most everyone else has, unless it is a good number, like 333333, jut means you are ordinary, or haven’t found the right plate to buy from someone else.  There is a market in plate buying.  Crazy.  Saw a Rolls  Royce silver shadow at a light with a three digit plate.  Status!  There a a lot of cats in Doha.  There is also a very active, and loosely organized effort to catch the and have a vet neuter them.  Lots of people set out tins of cat food for the feral cats.  There are sections of some malls that have a doorman to keep the common folk out of the ultra rich wing.  The architecture of Doha is amazing—buildings in odd shapes and sizes.  Creativity is allowed and there are very few buildings that look alike.  You ca play hockey in one mall, of ride down a snow covered ‘mountain’ in another, or tale a gondola ride, complete with a singing gondolier in another.  One mall has dancing water, akin to the fountains at Bellagio in Las Vegas.  Every mall has some kind of attraction and everyone is different.  We had a lot of people tell us Merry Christmas, ask us where we were from, almost everybody speaks English so communication is seldom a problem.  You can bargain in department stores, or mall kiosks.  Credit cards, are used for everything, and tap and go screens are at every checkout counter.  The Souq Wakif in Old Doha is interesting, and still where a lot of locals shop.  We met an original Pearl diver who now has a shop selling pearls and a large photo of himself as a diver, some 60 years ago.  This is a new country, independent since 1971, and many of the grandparents today were divers or herdsmen in their youth.  You want delivery of anything?  Pull out your phone, order, and the Talabat, or some similar service will bring it to you via motorcycle delivery.  Fast, cheap, and easy.  All payment is done through the app.  It’s a service we came to appreciate.  Need cough meds at 2am, no problem, delivery in 15 minutes.  At work there is a tea service, pick up your phone dial 3 and the tea man will bring it to you.  No unsightly office break room here.  Qatar is going to host the world table tennis championship is the spring.  Soccer signs are coming down now to be replaced by big paddles.  Whatever goes up it will be spectacular.  There is till a lot problems with the imported labor force here.  Laborers are still being abused and they have few ways to complain, but the government is trying to crack down and things are changing, slowly, but in the right direction.  There seems to be no shortage of workers willing to commit to coming to Qatar, which says a lot about the quiet desperation that exists in their home country.  Until conditions there change for the better places like Qatar will still be an acceptable alternative.  Qatar provides a lot of support for Palestine.  The 974 stadium will be dismantled and, reportedly sent to Uruguay.  It is cheaper to ship a broken, but fixable, washing machine to Manila than it is to buy one there.  In Kathy’s 15 years there she has been invited to a Qatari house for dinner only once, so they can be friendly on the street, but there is a still a social barrier that exists between Qatari nationals and the working population.  

Well, that’s all folks.  We are home, missing the warm weather and Kathy and here three guard dogs, Pepper, the ear licker, Elsie, the carrot lover, and Maxie, the sheriff.  It’s quite a place.  Very memorable.  Qatar is a country on the move, growing, changing, and somewhat beyond description.  Go yourself and see it first hand.  I don’t think it will disappoint.