WEEK OF ADVENTURE!!! Day 3

We planned to go to the Katara Cultural Village on Tuesday. The website led us to believe there were a bunch of interesting galleries there with photography exhibits, art exhibits, and statuary, along with lots of activities to do on the beach and an atmosphere like old Qatar.






What we found was a glorified business park with an attached amphitheater, which was cool, and a few small galleries, most of which were closed or empty. The one that wasn't was full of what appeared to be university student art from artists who hadn't quite found their voice yet. So after walking around for a while, we headed to the beach, where I hoped for Rachel and me to take turns taking care of the kids and parasailing. However, I was pretty sick by this point with a cold, and the weather was windy and chilly, and we figured we'd enjoy parasailing more if we tried it in warmer weather. So instead, we rented a paddle boat and took it out for 15 minutes or so. Note: next time you use a paddle boat, do it when your legs are fresh, not after an hour and a half of walking around pushing a stroller over cobblestones.

































We also thought we'd have gelato there, since there was a gelato shop, but by this time it was close to lunch, so we went to City Center Mall instead. We got Indian food at a restaurant in their food court, then shopped a bit and ended up getting gelato there. It was the first gelato any of us had ever eaten, and now we understand why everyone says it's so good.

































"This had better not be like those onions you fed me, dad," says Amelia.




MIND BLOWN.

WEEK OF ADVENTURE!!! Day 2

Day 2 was not planned to be as big of an adventure as it turned out to be. It was supposed to be a resting day after a big Day 1. We decided to try to find the mythical "lumber souq", as we'd been calling it, a market where one can buy hardware and raw materials like wood. There's no such thing as a Lowe's or Home Depot here, nor are there reliably stocked small mom-and-pop hardware stores, at least not that we've been able to find. But our neighbor said he found this souq one day on a lead from someone else and had it marked on his GPS. When I went in the morning to ask if he could show it to me on his GPS, he wasn't home, so we decided to head out with only our memory of what he'd said and a few vague posts from QatarLiving.com as our guides.




We went first to what turned out to be an office for a building supplies company, but they only sell prepared wood flooring, not raw lumber. However, they gave us vague directions to the "Souq Haraj", which means "Outdoor Souq", which is really unhelpful because they're all semi-outdoors. So we drove to where we thought they'd pointed us, which was our planned second place to try anyway. And we parked and got out and asked at another store, and they said it was just around two corners, so we decided to walk with the kids around those two corners. Well, we still didn't find it, so we asked for directions again. Three blocks and a few more corners later, we did find it. It's called Souq Najma on Google Maps (named after the area of town it's in, but not what anyone we've met calls it). Be sure to look at the satellite view and zoom in to get a better sense of it. Pickup trucks and delivery trucks everywhere, with hundreds of Indian, Filipino, and Nepalese day laborers squeezed into and between everything else. We were undoubtedly an uncommon sight: tall white guy in a polo and sneakers pushing a stroller with two little blond-haired, blue-eyed kids in it, accompanied by a beautiful white lady. From the looks she got and the look on her face, I guessed that it was the first time she felt uncomfortable here in Qatar because of people looking at her. I asked someone for lumber, and another worker overheard my question. He spoke good English, and we were tired at that point, so I let him take me to his friend's shop and charge me QR 50 ($14) for a 10-foot 3"x1" pine board cut into five 2-foot sections.

We have since hand-sanded and painted 4 of the wood pieces silver (accidentally, because we thought the paint looked white in the tube) and connected them with hinges so that we can have a portable doorframe on which to mark our kids' heights, then fold it up and put it in our luggage wherever we move.











After the outdoor souq, we had lunch at home and Rachel got her hair cut. Then we had a relaxing afternoon, a regular dinner and Family Home Evening, and then I put the kids to bed while Rachel went visiting teaching. Not bad for a day in Doha!

WEEK OF ADVENTURE!!! Day 1

Our first morning (Saturday), we did something familiar along with something new so that we could ensure at least a little success -- and because both were in the same area. We went to the greenhouse out in Al Shahaniya near the Camel Racetrack and bought three more of the hen-and-chick-ish brightly colored flowering desert flowers that we have in our front window to put on our kitchen window sill. We also bought two aloe vera plants and a plumeria sapling. Next, we went to the Sheikh Faisal Bin Qassim Al-Thani Museum, which was not what we expected. We thought it was the preserved home of a former emir showing how life used to be, but instead it turned out to be the private collection of a successful businessman descended from the former emir who had defeated the Ottomans while in his 80s. When I say private collection, I mean probably everything he had ever collected in his life. I could write it all here, but I narrated a lot in my videos of the place, so just check out the rest below. We spent about two hours there walking pretty briskly from one wing to another, and just as we were about to leave, Rachel discovered two more areas we hadn't even noticed before. So we'll definitely go back to see the "fossils" section and an outdoor portion with old wagons and stuff. Someone else told us there's a whole farm we could tour there, as well, so we'll make a day of it.











































































































































































































































































































































That evening, we went to the Spring Festival at Souq Waqif. Big E's favorite part was seeing the guys do a skydiving simulator over a big fan. His least favorite part was anticipating the human cannonball firing out of the cannon, though he did like when it actually happened. We ate kufta and kebabs for dinner, saw lots of cute animals including some bored falcons (they were bored because they had their hoods on and couldn't see anything), and discovered an inexpensive nearby parking garage that we intend to use instead of fighting for parking spaces there in the future.