Doha Diary
Wednesday September 27th 2006
Don Christopher moved to Doha to work as a corporate lawyer for Al-Jazeera. We feature his musings as he begins a new life in Qatar
It is slightly overcast this morning while I?m in the pool. Friday is the first day of the weekend, so I?m later than usual. The sun is now above the villas opposite, so the cloud cover gives welcome relief. Three thrushes are calling to each other above the bougainvillea ? still in flower ? and sparrows are gathering in the tall mesh fence of the tennis court. Is it possible autumn is coming, even though it still feels like 40șC at eight in the morning? Just by the villa where our temporary offices are, opposite the burned out theatre where a car bomb killed the teacher producing Twelfth Night, the English school runs the length of the block, and vintage Chevrolet and GMC school buses are lining up like sparrows on a telegraph wire: school?s back on Monday.
The traffic seems to be building as everyone who fled the summer heat returns to town. At the back of my compound, on the other side of the twelve foot garden wall, is a major route into town called Arab League street, but addresses here are disregarded or non-existent; people direct you by the traffic roundabouts (?take the first exit at the TV Roundabout? or ?go to the Oryx Roundabout and take the last exit down to the Corniche?). Postal addresses are PO box numbers. The traffic seems to run all day and night, and at 07.45 it takes me several minutes to cross the Burger King roundabout, when two weeks ago I barely had time to slow to buy the Gulf Times. (That?s mainly where you buy your paper, at the roundabouts in the fast lane, and just like the fellow at the station the vendors get to recognise you and hand you your regular.)
At night from the villa I can see the Burger King building, MacDonalds, the TV transmission masts next to Al-Jazeera and in the distance some of the tower blocks down on the Gulf seafront ? downtown Doha. By six in the morning the traffic gets heavy: big four wheel drive creamy-white Toyota Land Cruisers, mainly driven by immaculate guys in dishdash and headdress, old Toyota pickup trucks with tethered sheep or goats in the back, endless lorries hauling cement or pulling huge cranes, business men and women driving new Japanese and German saloons, buses full of Asian workers, and mothers driving children to school. It used to be illegal here for women to drive.
Doha is a great dusty building site ? not just downtown but out in the suburbs and beyond. I guess this is partly due to the Asian Games here at the end of 2006, but it?s more than that. Downtown is a forest of cranes amid a forest of half built towers and some finished ones ? gold and glass, steel and marble. Some of them could be almost from downtown LA except they all have something more or less Arabic about them.
The Four Seasons hotel and apartments are four towers grouped together on the West Bay, on the very edge of the turquoise waters of the Gulf. Each tower resembles a finer, honey coloured marble version of the skyscrapers on the Moscow outer ring road (slightly Eastern Gotham city), with a pineapple on the top, and lit brilliantly at night, visible across the city and from the edge of my compound. One night I dined with colleagues on the long terraced balcony of an 18th floor apartment in the Pearl tower where we were served a whole hamour ? the delicious local cod ? with couscous and tomato salad.
A little across the bay is the Sheraton, one of the first Doha hotels, a huge white ziggurat. At the other end of the bay, past Palm Island, is a mighty mosque, the external stairway to the top of the minaret a great spiral, the whole in two-tone chocolate and vanilla ice cream. From a distance, from the beach where I was today, it resembles a seal from a circus, erect, with a small ball balanced on its nose. Beneath it the souks, mainly drab workaday boxy buildings which could be on the Whitechapel Road (selling similar products) and also a new medieval souk under construction, Sikh workmen poised on ladders laying on plaster from ancient palettes on chicken wire frames. Some of the spaces are occupied already, mainly selling bushels of Indian spices or rolls of silk; one, apparently a bureau, with serious young men in dishdashes peering at Mac laptops in the medieval gloom.
One Friday I followed the Corniche south and east, past the old dhow harbour and out into the steppes, a vast new airport being built on reclaimed land on the sea side of the present airport, and then a Qatari air base. And then a gas-oil plant and a desalination plant with rows of tall chimneys striped like seaside rock and on to Al Wakra. All the Indians were mending roads or selling papers; the Arabs were queuing in their Land Cruisers to park outside one of the several brilliant white mosques which line the Al Wakra high street. (The mosques all seem to be new, in blinding white, with elegant slender minarets, the balconies of which are brightly lit after dark. There?s one just behind our compound, and the muezzin calls for evening prayer just as I get in or out the pool. It?s beginning to sound beautiful and rather wistful. They?re as ubiquitous as churches in the Essex countryside, and swimming out in the Gulf today I fancied at first that there were lots of lighthouses I hadn?t seen before, but they were the minarets of mosques.)
The next day I found the beach, the other side of the harbour, past a colony of villas for workers at the gas plant which reminded me uncomfortably of Jaywick sands, north Essex. Not an uplifting comparison with the compound I live in, with British media types, and US and South African oil engineers and executives with their wives and their 4X4s. The beach had a few sunshades of battered palm leaves but no other amenity apart from the ubiquitous cleaners in their bright yellow overalls from the QKleen company. (Every local business seems to start with ?Q? in Qatar.) The water was very saline, very warm, and very shallow. A family arrived suddenly in a rather battered old four wheel drive. Man, wife, grandmother, several young children. The wife sat under the shade, the grandmother and the father paddled. The children splashed in the shallows, squealing like children everywhere at the seaside. All were clad head to toe; none removed a single cloth. Then they all jumped back into the vehicle and drove off in a cloud of dust.
Every few seconds a jet plane made its descent over the beach to Doha International. In five years? time this municipal stretch of beach will be an exclusive resort and the jets will go to the new airport.
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