Qatar – Day 2

My bathroom smells like roses. They cleaned it. But that’s getting ahead of myself. I should probably start off with my arrival. I could tell you all sorts of facts about Qatar, but that would mean I would need to log on to wikipedia and look up things you probably would ignore. So look it up yourself. Having said that, I found out that the weekend days are Friday and Saturday. That’s pretty neat.

I’m staying at the Grand Regency hotel.

It’s pretty fancy, my girls would love being here. If you are following my movements on Gowalla, I have checked in to that spot. When we arrived, it was night time so the temperature wasn’t that hot, only about 38 degrees or so. The hotel is air conditioned. In fact when I arrived at the airport, it was actually chilly.

And my room is pretty sweet too.

When I first went into to the room, I had a problem with the lights. The room was dark save for the TV which was on. The menu of channels was available, and over it played an instrumental loop of some familiar song that I couldn’t place, and it said “Welcome Elumir.” There were switches by the door, but they didn’t seem to do anything. I walked through the room and tried to turn on the lamps, but there were no switches on the lamps either.

I went back to the door, and looked at this pad which had two glowing red lights. I didn’t know what it was, and since it was dark, I couldn’t figure out what to do with it. Do you open it? Do you press it? Is it voice activated? After a few minutes of struggling, I realized I could open the door and let the light from the hallway help me. See how quick my mind is? Give me a math problem and I’ll get back to you in a week with an approximate answer. Anyway, what did I find? It was a slider for my room card. So I dropped in the card and the lights turned on! How awesome is that?

Of course, I didn’t realize that this was on a timer of about 10 or 15 minutes. It became clear, however, as I sat in the bathroom and suddenly the lights went out. Good thing my iPad has light.

The next morning, I went for breakfast. At first, I had some fruit and nuts. The nuts were interesting because they were not crunchy. They were still good, but they were more flexible than normal. I don’t know what they did to the nuts. How did they make them chewy? I also don’t know what all the fruit is.

Also, there was this large copper bowl and around it were a bunch of spices and meats that I assumed you could throw into your own bowl of soup. Since I was alone, I couldn’t ask anyone what it was.

Maybe I’ll try it next time, but they had eggs, and I can’t resist eggs. I love eggs.

Next to the hotel is a small department store. Darryl and I decided to go check it out. It is about a 4 minute walk. Now, you’re probably wondering, how hot is it? It is hot but it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.

Of course, I spend 90% of my time in air conditioned hotels. I was actually cold in my room so I came down to the lobby. But once I was outside and let the heat sink in, I could certainly feel it bearing down me.

Once I got to the store, they asked me to to put my bag at the counter. It had my precious in there. I didn’t feel comfortable leaving my precious with strangers. Yes, I could have taken my precious out and carried it with me, but the thought jarred my thought processes so much that I couldn’t think straight. I walked back to the hotel.

And that’s when I noticed how much the heat embed itself. Even with the air conditioning, I still felt hot. I walked into my room and sat, waiting for the cold to win its battle over the oppressive heat that clung to my body.

The TV was on, still with my name on it welcoming me. I knew I had turned it off, but they turned it on again.

You know what I learned? That it is against our human rights to work in temperatures greater than 50 degrees. So in Qatar, it isn’t ever over 50 degrees. It may get close to it, but it is never 5over 0 degrees. If you are in Qatar, and check the temperature on the internets, it will even verify how not hot it is.

Enough about my complaining. Later that afternoon, our host took us to their hotel and we ate there. It was an amazing buffet with decadent food. The spongy nuts were there too. I got some salads the first time around and I had to take this cool pic with lamb tongue salad.

I didn’t get a chance to try it, but maybe next time.

After four, we were able to check out the Qatar Scientific Club.

It’s a spacious building, set up to help with education and sports. Apparently, they don’t focus on tourism here. They focus on sports and education. And the sports will attract people to come. There are many cool landmarks they pointed out, like this Spire near a large stadium. Apparently one of the largest in the middle east. You can look it up. I didn’t take a picture of it.

After training, Darryl and I went to Chinese restaurant. They had these cool menus which at first I thought were name plates or something. But they folded out and had the food listed in English on one side, and Arabic the other. How cool are these menus?

And the food was yummy. We couldn’t eat it all. We only get two dishes to share and the appetizer, and we had to let it go. So sad. It pains me when we have to let jumbo shrimp go.

Speaking of food, I drink fresh orange juice every day as well. I think that’s just with the hotel, but man, it’s yummy.

The rest of the evening was quiet. I returned to my hotel room to see my TV turned back on. Did i mention the bathroom? They have cotton balls in there. I don’t know why. I don’t even know what to use them for. I use them for crafts and stuff, and I remember in high school someone showed me that you could check to see how badly one didn’t shave one’s legs with them, but that’s all the use I know.

And the bathroom also has one of these things:

I don’t know what they’re called and I don’t have access to the internets to check. But it’s very cool and if this was a TV show, it would segue into an embarrassing montage of me trying to use the thing and failing. But that definitely wouldn’t be fit for TV… or anyone for that matter. I want one though, I would like one for home.

Anyway, I was tired, so I watched a few episodes of Glee and went to bed. Tomorrow, I have whole host of of even more nothings to talk about. Stay tuned!