A Year In The Sandbox

The Villagio Mall

Qatar seems like it’s caught halfway between what it was and what it is becoming. It’s a Muslim country, you still see men in the white man-dresses and women covered head to toe in black abayas, but you also see ultra-modern buildings being built and a lot of people dressed like you’d see in the US or western Europe. Our tour guide the other day was telling us that only 25% of the population are native Qataris, 50% are Asian immigrants and the other 25% are European and American. This picture from the Villagio mall shows what I’m talking about with Western and Muslim people walking around. In Afghanistan almost all the men wear the man-dresses but they’re not usually white, you see brown and khaki colors mostly. The women all wear the abayas but I think I’ve only seen a couple black ones. They wear alot of girlie colors like pink and light blue.

Wonder what’s in the ball…

On the subject of clothing, it’s funny seeing the people here on R&R and what they wear. Most people only brought one set of civilian clothes to the AOR if they brought any at all. There’s a poorly stocked closet of freebies clothes here in the R&R building but most people just head to the PX and pick something up. The choices there are pretty limited, so you see several people wearing the same shirts. We’re not allowed to wear anything that says Camp As Sayliyah or anything that would identify us as Americans or military personnel and the only tee shirts at the PX that meet that requirement are the Adidas shirts like I’m wearing in the picture here. The one tee shirt that I brought with me is from the San Antonio half marathon so it’s a no-go off post.

Me!

In the bay they have all these old wooden Dhow boats that they used to use to fish. Now that the country is rich from oil and gas the boats have been converted to party barges for tourists. There’s tons and tons of construction going on. Our guide said it was so that Qatar can make a legitimate bid to host an Olympics. The population is pretty small, our guide said 1.5 million but Wikipedia says only 1 million in the entire country.

Spices in the Old Souqs

We didn’t do anything today, just bummed around here on base, I slept in until noon. It was nice. Tomorrow we’re going back to the Villagio mall to eat at this restaurant called the Butcher Shop again. We ate there yesterday and it was awesome, worth another trip back. It’s fun to people-watch there too. Tonight there was a comedy show here. The first guy was terrible, I felt bad for him. The “headliner” was a lot better, he had me cracking up, but not many people were laughing or clapping or anything, it was the weirdest comedy show I’ve been to. He was really funny but was just dying up there. Maybe military folks don’t have a sense of humor for the most part?

There’re a lot of cool pictures I want to post here but I wrote about everything the other day. I’m going to try making the pictures bigger so I don’t have to write words to wrap around them

These nuts and beans were in the same shop as the spices above.

Looking down a street in the Old Souqs.

Pistachio and chocolate pastry.

Cool looking fan in one of the shops.

Engrish on some toys in the Villagio mall.

The canal and gondolas in the Villagio mall.