Passing through Doha

Just passing through, really. I had a brief stop-over in Dhoa on my way to Bangkok. To be honest, this entry is mostly just to give me "credit" for another country.

Qatar airways is apparently one of the few "5-star" airlines in the world. Whatever that means... I had a decent time with them. I got a cheap flight from Istanbul, which for some reason included a hotel stay in Doha.

Our flight was randomly delayed for an hour in Istanbul, but I didn't care because my connecting flight to BKK wasn't until the next day. I was supposed to stay in the airport Hotel, but due to the delay a bunch of peolpe missed connecting flights and the airline put them all in a 5-star Sheraton. I somehow got included in this group.

In the airport I met two interesting guys - A Swiss guy who rode his bicycle from Switzerland to Tehran. And a freelance Indian journalist who had recently moved to Cyprus (my favorite place in the world!).

It turns out that the airline was somewhat flustered in arranging all of the accomodations. We didn't have a ride to the hotel. A helpful angry American fixed the situation by brow-beating everyone in sight until a taxi magically appeared. "You have to be assertive with these people". I didn't like his attitude or his liberal use of generalizations, but he got me a ride to my room, so I couldn't complain too much. The clerk at the hotel informed us that we would have to share rooms, as they were running out. The brow beater beat some more brows and got out of this situation. I tried to muster some brow beatingness of my own, but ended up sharing a room with a random Burmease guy that I had never seen before. The hotel clerk knew straight away that my brow beatingness was all bluster. I guess I need lessons or something. To be fair, my roommate was a nice Burmease guy.

I ended up having a very interesting conversation with the brow beater. He had a real estate development company that operated in the Middle East. The region in general, and Qatar in specific reek money. Conspicous displays of wealth are everywhere. According to the brow beater (he has a name, but I like to call him BB), the whole country of Qatar has 800,000 people. 500,000 of these are foriegners, brought in for labor. Again, according to BB, the place takes in $600 million per day in oil and natural gas revenues. That's like $2000 per citizen per day. Of course, most of this money is controlled by a few of the richest families. No one knows the total value of the reserves. Estimates are in the trillions. His job is to help the sheiks figure out ways to spend their money in the real estate market. Apparently he is quite good at it. The interesting part of the conversation came when he discussed the cost that his business was having on his family life? Was it all worth it? Who knew... He told me all about his son and daughter, and about the inner politicing of his family.

I didn't see a lot of Doha, but what I saw was impressive. I would like to spend more time in the region on a later trip. BB also told me that Dubai (located in the U.A.E) is the fastest growing city in the world.

The flight to Bangkok was perhaps the best long-haul flight I have ever been on. Emergency Exit row. Decent food. Free booze. Video and music on demand with dozens of movies and CD's to choose from. You could even create playlists of songs, and the system would resume your playlist when you exited from a movie. Spiffy. I guess that's what happens when you buy an airline overnight (Qatar has invested like $7 Billion in the last 5 years to buy planes like they were going out of style) - you get the latest and greatest.

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