Saturday, December 6, 2008

Enter Kamal

Upon every life a little rain must fall, even in Doha, and our personal stormcloud was one Mr. Kamal, "maintenance man" (despite the fact that I never saw nor heard of him actually ever fixing or facilitating the repair of anything). He actually was the gatekeeper for the sheikh who owns, well, our neighborhood. His actual function was to stop any residents from actually hanging or fixing anything in their units, for example changing curtains, having baseboards, which looked like they had been vandalized by some malcontent with wood glue, painted.


He was creative in an obstinate kind of way, though. When we aksed him why we had a three foot tall kitchen cabinet with no shelves, he replied "It's supposed to be that way." When I pointed out that every other cupboard, even ones half that height, had at least one shelf, his rejoinder was "maybe it's the style somewhere." I was a little disappointed he couldn't give me specifics on exactly what culture or country could make use of a kitchen cupboard where one could stack approximately thirty-seven tuna cans on top of one another. When we asked him about our vandalized/recycled-looking baseboards, he just kept repeating "I don't think this is a problem," presumably hoping to rely on his superior mind-control skills to convince us we weren't seeing what we were claiming we saw. When finally cornered, he said "as per company policy, no changes are allowed." At this point Michelle asked if company policy was to have baseboards that looked liked they'd been ripped from a gutted building...


We weren't the only rabblerousers that Kamal was sent in to deal with. Our neighbors Dan and Melissa had a desk delivered to their home one afternoon. Kamal insisted on opening the box and inspecting the contents. I have no idea what he was searching for, but I'm sure the TSA could use people with his persistent and lack of personal skills. Soon thereafter, the "security" gate at the entrance to our compound, which had previously always been up, was sudden lowered so that we had to honk to have Ahmed or Abbas open the gate with a key fob. This was obviously meant to keep out contractors that we had coming to our places to fix the original shoddy finish work, since any teenager with a couple years of karate could have overpowered Ahmed and Abbas and made it into the compound. Actually, several of us had considered ramming through the flimsy gate with rental cars before we bought our own, but didn't feel like paying damages for the car.


So for over a month we had to deal with constant drama regarding any repairs or improvements we wanted done to our villas, and we generally decided we needed to act covertly if anything was to be fixed...

Monday, November 17, 2008

Pimp my TLC

Somewhere in the world, decals on the sides of cars are back in, and that somewhere is Doha. Our townhouse (sorry, villa!) complex is about a block (if there was a defined or discernible block actually there) behind a long row of about a dozen or more carwashes. They are interspersed with car accessory shops with exotic names like "Gulf Falcon" or obtuse ones like "Fast Car," as well as Puncturies, which are actually tire shops; no one has bothered to tell them it makes it sound as if they'll provide tire puncturing services. A couple juice stalls, the Popular Cafe, Al Zoof Cafe (like that one) and a couple "saloons" - they meant salons - and Hot Bread Bakery (talk about good marketing) round out this row.

Every night, but even more so on Thursday and Friday nights, this row is literally almost impossible to navigate, as Qataris in blinding white silk thobes (traditional robes, sometimes with diamond encrusted cufflinks) and headress sit on $2 plastic chairs and chew the fat while Philipino, Bangladeshi, Indian, and Pakistanis wash the desert and construction dust off their Land Cruisers. Yes, there are a few Hummers and BMWs, Mercedes, etc., but the Toyota Land Cruiser (or TLC) holds pride of place in the hearts of Qataris determined to run over curbs to catch the turn they should've been looking for but weren't because they were texting or talking on their mobile phones. Of course there is a slip road but the "driveway" for every single car wash consists of construction rubble and dust, which seems to defeat the purpose. But if you've got the money and time, and Qataris have both, you can spend every or every other night pimping out your TLC.

I have to admit, though, it does add a lot of life and local color to our 'hood.

Thursday, November 6, 2008

There's got to be a better way.

(Note: fortunately, I did not witness this Ahmed and Abbas incident, but had it related to me by a neighbor Dan)

Among the myriad of building issues (I'm starting to wonder if I'm just in a Middle Eastern "reality" show, where someone f4#@*s with various household appliances, etc. in order to create good television entertainment) is our front door glass, which is only glued to a wooden crossframe on one side of the wooden door - you can already see where this is going. Well, at some point, Dan's new bride Melissa goes to close the door behind her and the glass breaks and a shard cuts her hand. A few hours and several stiches later, she's resting comfortably, and in a week or so, as good as new.


Meanwhile, in order to remove the rest of the glass, Ahmed and Abbas, in this order of operations:

1) both get hammers
2) open the door
3) stand on either side of said door
4) proceed to pound the glass with their hammers
5) spend the next fifteen minutes
a) dodging the glass the other has knocked in the general direction of his face
b) yelling at each other regarding the aforementioned glass


After a two week search, someone manages to find glass to replace the glass Ahmed and Abbas so handily removed. Of course, the glass still doesn't have the wooden frame on both side to stop this from happening again. Apparently the producers might want to fall back on that skit again later this season.

Obamania abroad

It's quite interesting to see the effect that Barack Hussein is having here; it seems like most of the security folks, retail clerks, etc. smile at us a little more since the election outcome. Michelle even had a Bangladeshi janitor give her a thumbs up and "Obama!" cheer when she left work Tuesday night. The Syrian guy at the sweet shop (who, as it turns out, is spending the next two years in Qatar to avoid his service in the Syrian Army and sent back the required remittance so that he can actually return and not have a jail cell waiting for him) reached over the counter and shook my hand and said "Obama good." The Turkish barber said "Bush bad blood." Our Syrian Arabic teacher said he liked Obama but would have preferred Hillary "beautiful, strong." I won't even touch that one.

This is all regardless of the fact that Obama will simply do some things that any US President will, and will support Israel (in general), send more troops into Afghanistan, etc. People here know the difference between a government and a people. We've travelled in Egypt and Jordan where people gave us a thumbs up every time we said we were American, saying "Al Ahsen Nas," meaning "The Best People." (As an aside, we didn't test the theory, but I always wondered if we told them we were from Bosnia-Herzegovna they would have responded similarly). I think people just didn't think we'd use as blunt an instrument so readily in our war on terror, but they cut us, personally, some slack.

But at least for a while, they can look up to the United States as the classless meritocracy we've always aspired to be. And regardless of your political affiliations, a 65% turnout and a mixed race president being voted in by a mainly white nation could happen nowhere else I can think of, and it's something of which every McCain and every Obama voter should be proud. That janitor and that barber and baker realize that and appreciate it. In many ways, more than we ever can.

Thursday, October 23, 2008

When ingenuity goes horribly awry...

Ahmed and Abbas, our two maintenance men onsite at our housing complex are a plucky if somewhat haphazard team of handymen. They don't let their limited tools and skills impinge upon the hasty completion of any task, no matter how marginal the outcome. To their credit, they are always happy and upbeat. At least, their non-verbal clues lead me to that conclusion, because Ahmed especially speaks such a staccato patois of Nile Delta village Arabic, that even Michelle, who is nearly fluent in spoken Arabic, usually just gives up on conversations after a minute or so. I take a strange sort of encouragement from that.

Anyway, they can be pretty inventive in their solutions. A week or so ago, our washer/dryer combination (which really doesn't dry, it just somehow superheats our clothes into a steaming creased crumple - I've considered taking clothes out with tongs) suddenly stopped working. So I called Ahmed and Abbas over. After pulling off the top, checking the switches, the wall fuses, they pulled the unit out away from the wall and Abbas began to remove the wall plate. Not being particularly electrically literate, I figured maybe there was a fuse in the wall plate. I asked Ahmed what they were doing. The only phrases I caught were "lots of these" and "back in five minutes." I figured they would return with a new wall plate. Five minute later, they were at the door carrying in a new washer/dryer. They explained to Michelle that since it was the weekend and the appliance company was closed, they just took a unit from another apartment that was still empty. We were happy with their can-do attitude. Ten minutes later, we had a brand new washer/dryer. Brilliant.

Our next incident came up when Connie, our cleaning lady, ironed our front curtains and was kind enough to even put them back up. Unfortunately, Connie, for all her diminutive size, is a proverbial Cape Buffalo in the china shop. That evening, Michelle asked "why is our curtain rod hanging lower - it wasn't like that before, was it?" I, of course, hadn't noticed (I'm convinced I eventually would have).

So I went out to get Ahmed, who was soon up on our stepladder, pulling the right sconce of the rod out of the wall to reveal a much larger hole in the plaster than the plastic screw plug that had been holding the rod up. In the process, he also hadn't unscrewed the other sconce end of the rod completely, so as he twisted the rod to remove the curtains, he etched a nice corkscrew design in the left side of the curtain rod. At this point Michelle asked what his plan was. Ahmed explained calmly that he would just make a hole under the too-big hole that obviously hadn't been working. As a shower of plaster fell on the floor, Michelle tried to explain that having the curtain rod level was equally as important as having it stay in the wall.

Ahmed seemed nonplussed. The problem, of course, was that the curtain rod was going to fall; his solution promised to rectify the situation. The fact that our curtains would then be listing ten degrees to starboard was immaterial. At this point, Michelle retreated to the entry hallway, doing an excellent pantomime of pulling her hair out. Meanwhile, I had a perfect view of Ahmed simultaneously struggling for balance on the stepladder while he lost his grip on the curtain rod itself, which went swinging down like a pendulum (missing our iPod dock, luckily), and I thought to myself, they pay people good money to come up with this stuff for sitcoms, and I have it happening in my living room.

Eventually Ahmed's solution was to take three or four screws and put them in around the plastic plug. The curtain rod was actually just about level too. When he started to try and undo the tiebacks, I started fearing another catastrophe, and said don't worry we'll get that later - Michelle through in a few al-hamdullahs for good measure. We were all smiling, and then Ahmed decided that to allay any fears about the quality of his work, he'd tug on the curtains to prove how solid they were. And so we were back to ten degrees to starboard. We smiled and shooed him out of the house, and now, two weeks or so later, the curtain rod hasn't fallen. So far.

Saturday, October 18, 2008

When Green Mosques aren't green, and you see camels instead of sheep

Driving here is one part improvisation, one part planning, and one part faith. I recently had to drive to the edge of town to pay our fee for having our cat, Iris, relocated. I was given a map. It looked vaguely (but not comfortingly) like the kind of pirate map pointing cryptically to some buried treasure, or the maps drawn in the beginning of fantasy books.

In this case, my goals were a bit more prosaic, and my landmarks were, in order: a green mosque, speed bumps, the end of the road, and some kind of rectangular building labelled "sheep." First, the green mosque - which turned out to be a mostly white mosque with green trim. Close enough, and I made an educated guess/leap of faith and made my turn there. Next were speed bumps, which are pretty hard to miss, and did not provide any problems. The end of the road was easy enough, but considering that as soon as the road ends, you have open gravel and sand, and given any possibility of driving outside of driving lanes, Qataris will do so, given 180 degrees of freedom leads to a maze of tracks. So I followed the map, and wound around a couple derelict buildings. Now for the sheep - only problem was that the only livestock to be seen were camels, tended by Bedouins in dark goat-hair tents. So I headed for the only patch of irrigated green and trees, and of course called the owners of the pet relocating business, who pointed me to their place of business. Of course I didn't even bring up the lack of sheep issue; it would be a bit peevish, and just didn't seem tasteful on so many levels...

Monday, October 6, 2008

Finally, into the desert and gulf

After a couple weeks of moving madness (more on that later) we finally made it out to the desert proper on a daylong desert safari with Toyota Landcruisers. After about an hour heading south, past some pretty heavily protected and isolated oil fields and refineries, and a random camel now and then, and voila, we had run out of room in Qatar (kinda reminds me of Jersey) and were looking across an inlet to Saudi Arabia (no worries, that's as close as we got). 


Then it was back across the desert for some "dune bashing" which at times felt like being on choppy seas, and at times felt like the big drops at the rollercoaster. Except you could actually imagine the Land Cruiser flipping end over end, and there was no minimum height requirement - I always hated those;). 

Of course no such thing happened, and it was just good plain adrenaline. After which we headed over to a beach camp where we got to frolic in the Persian Gulf. It was nice to be back in warm (bathwater warm) ocean water, in early October no less. 

Hopefully we'll have a couple more months of this kind of weather, but everyone says it's going to get "cold" soon. I think that means 80 during the day and 55 at night, which actually will feel cold I think, since I barely notice 95 anymore. It's all relative I guess. Anyway, we'll be stocking up on space heaters (seriously) so as to not be caught burning our Kleenex for heat (not so seriously). Until then, I'm going to enjoy the weather as much as I can.


Saturday, October 4, 2008

Far from the Black Forest

I've stumbled across the pinnacle of all Anglicized names. While in a book store which also sold art supplies, I was shopping for an easel, and asked the nice Philipino man in the art section if the floor model I liked was the only one or if they had any others in stock (I'm quickly realizing that if you find something you like, buy it, or buy several, because you may never see them again). 

Then I looked at his name tag. Hansel Rivera. I fine Teutonic name for someone whose last name would go better with, say, Mariano, or even Geraldo. I had no idea that Brothers Grimm was so popular in the Far East. I never thought I'd ever meet someone named Hansel anyway, even travelling through Germany or Austria, but to have done it here... 

Now I almost feel compelled to search Qatar until I can find Gretel. It's possible. But it would be easier if all residents were all required to wear our ID in nametag format. And it would be more fun.

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Attention Mitch and James Baby: Activate your minds!

OK, the concept of lost in translation has been done before, and I'm no Bill Murray, but sometimes I feel like I'm on a movie set similar to the one Bill dealt with in Lost in Translation, and while frustrating at times, it makes for great comedy.

Since so many people in Qatar are expatriates and English is the lingua franca here, many take it upon themselves to Anglicize their names. Unfortunately, this turns Pythonesque at times. During the last week, Michelle and I were stopped at the gate to Education City housing. Normal enough. Michelle's asked to show ID. Fine. Then I lean over and look at the name tag of the security guard, and I see "James Baby." I have no idea what this man's name could have originally been, or for that matter how many degrees of separation from it James Baby could possibly be, but he seems quite comfortable in his uniform (epaulets even!) and his bright shiny nametag. Who am I (other than a native English speaker) to argue.

Last night, we stopped by the aptly named Take Away arabic fast food restaurant for a late dinner, and Michelle regaled me with horror stories about the surly service rendered by the girl at the counter. I was quite sure Michelle said "girl." As I was about to run in and order, I asked Michelle what the gal's name was. The reply: "Mitch." So... I walk in and there's Mitch, all 5 feet of her, a pretty normal-looking young Asian woman. I'm pretty sure she had never been a he; no strong jaw or cheekbones, etc. But there she is with another bright metal tag that says "Mitch." All the guys working there, unfortunately, don't seem to appreciate the joke - they just call her "Mitch" like it's quite normal. I guess it is.

Sometimes, the English skills seem to be put on display for my benefit. Our maintenance crew consists of a couple Egyptians who have no English at all (when asking if the smoke alarm worked, I was treated to a minute long pantomine of someone sleeping, smoke rising from the stove, and waking up from the loud noise, as if I had just asked what that thing was for). Most of the time I walk away (or they go spinning back out of the house) without having the slightest idea of what the hell we were just talking about.

Sometimes I'm given a special treat and "specialists" are called in, who come in Tasmanian-devil-like, waving hands, and arguing with each other, until they all decide to continue the argument outside, without any apparent progress on the given issue. When the A/C in a guest bedroom was not working, though, a "higher up" who knew just enough English to be dangerous started haranguing the Sri Lankan workers and calling a subcontractor on his cel to complain. He made it a point to tell the workers that he was an engineer (dubious at best) and they didn't know what they were doing (less dubious). Finally, he yells into the phone "send me Rafeer, these guys are Ramadan and their brains are not activated!"

You can imagine my shock. Here I had been this past week operating on the assumption that Ramadan was the month of fasting, not a person or people. Silly Mike. Nor was I aware through any of my cultural research that, like air conditioners apparently, these Ramadan need to have their brains activated. No wonder nothing's been getting done lately. I thought it was because people were fasting from sunup to sundown. Apparently I have a lot to learn.

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Greetings from "sunny" Qatar

If you go out to wunderground.com or weather.com, you might be fooled into thinking that it's actually sunny here. Well, it actually is sunny, just not on the ground. Michelle has mentioned before that you'll often see something in the forecast that you don't in Oregon (or anywhere in the states, as far as I know, at least since the 1930's) and that would be "widespread dust." So my tender eyes have been spared the glaring September sun for my first two days here. Temperatures are still about 105 or so in the day. Coupled with jetlag, that means Mike moves very slowly.

Everyone else here has other reasons for moving slowly - namely Ramadan. Many businesses' "Ramadan Timings" (they seem to love gerunds here) call for about a few hours sometime during the morning or early afternoon (10am -noon is a favorite), than open back up at around 8pm and stay open til midnight. Nor is anyone supposed to be seen even sipping water during the day. So I'm guessing productivity is a bit lower than usual - and of course Ramadan is falling in late summer this year too. Anyway, the South Asian construction workers don't seem to care - you can see them lunching out of their homepacked stainless containers anytime of day. I couldn't imagine trying to do physical labor in this heat and NOT eating and drinking.

As for Doha, you can literally see a city and country being built before your eyes. Actually city planning, though, follows a pattern of selecting a couple (or couple hundred) empty acres (it's all empty anyway) somewhere and building a development. Things like utilities and roads can be dealt with later. It's kind of like connecting the dots. They're not so much into the street sign either, and seem to like naming things after landmarks. So, the two roundabouts closest to our flat are the Slope Roundabout (it isn't quite flat) and the Burger King Roundabout (for obvious reasons). Some are named after the more or less spotty public art found in the middle (the Oryx Roundabout, etc.) and others after local businesses (Decoration Roundabout, named after a home decor store - God forbid it goes out of business, you may as well throw out your maps). Very exotic and alluring, no?

It's also an interesting mix of Third and First World. In a mall you can buy (gaudy) TV trays worth hundreds, or you can run into a little take-out restaurant where you can pick up two shawarma sandwiches (sliced roasted chicken with a garlic mayo lettuce, tomatoes, pickled veggies, and optional hot sauce, in a pita - I'm seeing lots of these in my future here;) and two drinks (e.g. fresh mango juice:) for four bucks.

So far, it all seems quite surreal. Moroccco and Egypt had hundreds to thousands of years of settled history, architecture and culture and a certain continuity. But here, just a few generations ago, they were bedouin or pearl divers, and now some 250,000 of their descendents are sitting on 15% of the world's natural gas (by some estimates). The West Bay, where most of the modern skyscrapers are, looks absolutely like something out of a sci-fi movie when seen from the Corniche/promenade on the other side of the bay, especially on a night with widespread dust and a very blurry moon.

I'm sure in a year this will all be quite mundane. I think.

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Not there yet

Leaving in just two weeks, which seemed like a lot of time... two weeks ago. I'm finding I walk around with a constant feeling like I left the stove or iron on, but can't drive back to shut it off. Well, that will change once I get on my flight from PDX (i.e. the point of no return).

The next blog will be from the sunny Persian Gulf!