Blog 1 Qatar

---

Today is our second full day in Qatar. I haven't been sold for camels yet so so far, it's been pretty good. I was planning on blogging yesterday but I fell asleep at 5 p.m. Jet lag is rough. Yesterday we went to a conference about the history of the UN climate change conferences and what is expected of this years. Probably the most interesting was learning how much of a failure the Copenhagen COP was. I also learned a lot about the politics of these conferences. They put a lot of emphasis on the fact that the COP conferences are a lot about negotiations and less about actually fixing climate change. It was really interesting and they even gave us free food at lunch.

Qatar is a really interesting country. Their are all sorts of different religions. There are women who wear full burkas, women who cover everything but their face, women who just wear head scarves and women who dress completely normal. Some of the women who wear burkas personalize them, too. One lady even had spikes on the shoulders of hers. Their culture is definetly less strict than I thought it would be.

Doha is probably the nicest city I've ever been to. They have really cool architecture that you don't see in Canada. The food here is really good too. They have way better yogurt and olives than we do in Canada and they sell coconut juice here, which is really yummy. So far, the only bad thing about Doha is that they have weird plug ins that won't work with my hairstraightener, even though we have an adapter. Other than that, Doha is really cool and I'm excited to see their market today.

---