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Published: October 8th 2012
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The Museum of Islamic Art
If you look close enough you would be able to see a Muslim woman face on top of the building. I said farewell to my family and friends in Darwin and caught my fly to Doha, Qatar via Singapore. I left at 6pm, the trip started off great as I got into Singapore airport without any tear. The transit time was only 4 hours so it was enough time for me to get from budget terminal 1 to international terminal 3. I arrived in Doha at 5am, stepped outside the airport and I almost past out from the heat. The weather in Doha was unbearable, it feels like I was in the oven. The heat sucked all your strength and left you with a dried jerky body. I found a taxi, went to my hotel and asked the air con on immediately.
I was so keen to see the city so after I checked in, I arranged to hire a taxi for a few hours to go around Doha. It was 10am and NOTHING was open, apparently no one get out of the house before 3pm as it was too hot to be outside. I wish the hotel reception told me that when I hire a taxi. So my sightseeing involved pretty much sightseeing and admiring buildings from afar. Doha
drivers were notorious and aggressive, every single car I have seen on the road all have dense and scratches. Drivers would stop at the roundabout for no reason; swearing and constant honking was part of the driving routine.
After three hours of driving around the middle of nowhere, I told the taxi driver to go back to the hotel. I met up with a couple friends I´ve met in India six months ago. They took me back to the same area I was this morning, the scene was totally different. There were people everywhere, street vendors, tourists (so I wasn´t the only tourist) and locals were cramming into the side streets aka Souq Waqif. I learned a lot about Qatari from my two American friends. Qatari people are so rich that they don´t need to work so they import people from all over the world to work for them. Qatari either own big businesses or work for the government. The Emir look after their people like no other, free education, free healthcare, no tax and free land (when you get married). Everybody here driving nice car BMW, Mercedes Benz and other luxury cars you can name. These people are
The Tornado Tower
This tower has been awarded the Best Tall Building in the Middle East dripping with money, they have so much money and don´t know what to do with it so they bought like 5 cars for one person, a BMW for work, Mercedes for shopping, Porsche for weekend getaway, Ferrari for guest etc.
What would you do when you are so rich and don´t have to work? Well you eat and smoke shisha. Qatari would go to a restaurant to eat then smoke shisha then eat the whole three meal course again and smoke and eat. This process can go on for 8 hours, so when you are in a restaurant if you want to leave you have to ask for bills. If you don´t the waitress will NEVER give you one, he would assumed that you continue to eat for the next 6 hours.
After dinner my friends took me to Souq Waqif, a market place that sold all sorts of handicrafts, souvenirs and also restaurants and shisha places. My friends insisted that we go past a side street that sell pets such as puppies, kittens and rabbits etc. To my surprise there was a cage full of baby chicken, all of them bright yellow, pink and green. These poor baby chicken have been special dyed to look pretty and I guess to add more colour to the city since everything else in the city is beige colour. I thought this was pretty cruel for the poor animal.
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