Al Shaqab

If you're ever reincarnated, you could do worse than to land a life as a horse at Al Shaqab. Al Shaqab is a horse breeding farm / riding school / hippotherapy center / horse competition site located about five minutes south of my school on the same vast Education City campus. It's also a paradise for horses.

I was invited to tour the facility with a team from our school. Allow me to share with you some photos from our tour.

These are some shots from the box seats overlooking the arena. They haven't had their grand opening yet, so the guide let us use the entrance that will, in the future, be reserved exclusively for the Emir.

Yes, that's a retractable roof.

 The decor had a decidedly 60's feel to it. Someone called it mid-century modern, I think.

The site is built around its namesake, an old Arab fort that the Qataris once used to defend themselves against the Ottoman army when they declared their independence from the Ottoman Empire. You can just barely see the fort between some trees in this photo. It still has its original stables, which is where the staff used to have their offices.

Here's the arena again, from outside.

I didn't get any photos of the rest of the facilities, but let me just say: wow. The stables were immaculate, temperature and humidity carefully controlled, and only the very best food and medical care for them, naturally. Each horse had a sign on its individual stall showing its pedigree for four generations. There was a horse spa, including a horse swimming pool, a horse jacuzzi, a horse shower, and horse heat lamps where they can receive horse massages. There were beautiful fountains, rivers, waterfalls, and running areas for the horses, huge areas of real grass, carefully manicured and irrigated. It would be a perfect place for a horse to live. Some of the horses are not purebred, though they are well-bred, and those are usually the ones they use to work with the kids. We asked our tour guide about the prize horses and she said they're just plain crazy. They've been so hardwired genetically to run fast and look taut, and so strictly regimented from birth that they really are, every one of them, high-strung primadonnas... which can easily fetch six-figure prices. While we were there we passed by a potential buyer sipping a drink while someone showcased a horse for him.

And now for something completely different.

We were really worried that we'd miss out on the blatant commercialization of Christmas this year, particularly the usual appearance of Christmas items in the stores even before Thanksgiving. So imagine how relieved we were to see these displays popping up in all the stores around. Ha ha! Silly us. Nobody's better at commercialization than Qatar!

Big...

 Bigger...

Biggest!

What do you think, should we go for the 15-footer? Or maybe the gold one. Decisions decisions.

Merry Christmas, everybody!