Doha, State of Qatar

This is such an amazing place and nothing like what I ever imagined. Not that I’m really sure what I thought it would be like. Its getting into summer and the temperature is about 35 degrees most days. In the summer months of July August it can reach as high as 50 and it’s much more humid than I was expecting, because it is a peninsular and almost totally surrounded by water. Doha is the capital and more than 50% of the countries population lives here in this city. There are about 800,000 people living in this country only 200,000 of which are actually Qatari people. The rest of them come from all over the world.

The land is sandy and covered with rubble. There is little grass except outside wealthy homes and some buildings, which is watered constantly. Petrol is so cheep here I thought they were exaggerating when they said petrol is cheaper than water, they weren’t. It costs about 20 Qatari Riyals for a pint of beer and only 25 to fill a normal sized sedan. Water costs about 1 Qatari Riyals per liter!! (There are approx 2.7 QR to the Australian dollar) so that makes a tank of petrol about $9.25 aussie to fill your tank. I’ll try my best to bring some back ok! Taxis are very cheap a 15 minute ride only 7QR and if you hire a limousine (not really a limo by our standards it just means a big flash Toyota) then its about 35 QR / hour. There is a bus system but it has only been in service for about 5 months and most people don’t know about it. Some of the taxi drivers speak a little English, but they don’t know the names of the roads they navigate by landmarks. To get to the place where we are staying we say, KFC roundabout (yes as in the chicken place) and we can direct them from there. Probably a good thing as it we’d have a hard time trying to pronounce the Arabic street names.

The best way I can describe Qatar is unfinished and random. It’s a tiny country only about 11,500 sq kilometers but at present there must be at least 50 buildings under construction just in the city of Doha. There are huge holes everywhere and the roads are being dug up and changed which makes getting around a little tricky. Sometimes you would drive down a road then come to a road block and have to drive all the way back and find another route. The road system works on 5 rings around the city inside each other and then many long straight road sprouting from the rings going out as far as you can see.
They seem to use much of the traditional way of building on many of the new constructions, which I’m sure would never pass any sort of standards in our country. The new DAGOC (the company I work for) housing had to be evacuated last week as its falling down. People have only just moved in there and it’s brand new. A little scary. Thankfully all the hotels and stadiums we are building are a little more stable, though i’m not sure where I’ll be living for a while.

It’s a strange place to look at and as I said looks very unfinished. There isn’t any dirt as such so when they have finished a building it just stands in the middle of a sandy rocky plot unless they bring in the landscapers or pave/tar seal the surrounding land. There is a huge amount of development going on for the games and it will be interesting to see the country develop over the next 7 months.

They are currently constructing an island called the Pearl. Similar to “The World” and “The Palm” in Dubai which holds hundreds of houses, apartments as well as shopping centers on a man made pearl shaped island.

It’s a very safe place, you often see people park their car outside a building, leave the key in the ignition and the doors unlooked while they pop into the bank or a store so they don’t have to turn off the air conditioning. One of the people at my company, who has been working for a while, went on holiday for 5 weeks and forgot to lock his house. He discovered his door unlocked when he returned and nothing had been touched. There is almost no crime and the punishments are very strict.

Here people drive on the U.S.A side of the road, fast and I almost think they just close their eyes and put their foot down. Lots of very busy round abouts where people sometimes park their cars, and drop people off!! Most people have massive 4wd’s hummers, big jeeps and land cruisers. There are also busses just like the ones on The Simpson’s, the big yellow school busses for local school kids.