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!