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Published: August 22nd 2006
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It’s been almost three months now and finally…we live in Doha. The apartment is kitted out with all the necessities, plus a few obligatory Arabian delights! We have a Camel and his name is Jamal. Gav has become increasingly attached to his Sphynx….and no, it’s not as a result of the local cuisine. The rug is leopard skin ON tiger skin, a catskin combo that these cheeky Qataris have been keeping all to themselves…and at AUD$88 a piece why wouldn’t they? The dining table has legs as thick as the light towers at the MCG and the dining chairs are hot pink. All in all, the combination has resulted in “Porn Star meets Arabian Boudoire”!
Setting up house in Doha is not easy. The little men that come into your house to perform duties for which you would assume they were qualified, frequently have absolutely NO idea what they are doing. The plumber will turn up to fix your leaking tap, but he won’t bring any tools. No problem madam. The washing machine man won’t turn up for days because he lost your contact details. The curtain man will turn up to install your curtains and leave you with infinite
Casa Bin Omran
Ours is top left... additional holes in your walls (because he can’t measure a straight line) and one window covering entirely forgotten about. No problem madam. The men who install the airconditioners will make a hole in the wall the size of a soccer pitch and then patch it with putty…twenty-four shades off the paint colour of the wall. Same same but different. No problem madam. And then the water pump man…the little f*&%$cking pump man, will cause you so much grief for a week that SWEAR you will NEVER move house again in Doha! But you breathe…and you breathe and you breeeeaaaathe again and finally, somehow, there are no more little men with dirty little feet coming into your apartment and leaving it, having caused more problems than the ones they came to fix.
Luckily though, there are far far more experiences to make you laugh than to make you cry. Little “Doha Moments”. Just the other day, my friend Manoj got home to his villa to find that the bathroom floors were sparkling clean…but a little frothy at the edges. When he queried his (illiterate) Nepalese housekeeper as to the product he had used to clean the floors, the housekeeper dutifully
Bin Omran
This is the view from our bedroom balcony. pointed to the bottle of hair shampoo sitting next to the floor cleaner in the cupboard!
Last weekend I went to a salon in one of the five star hotels here to have a manicure with a friend, Nat. Thoroughly enjoyable. Very relaxing, very five star, and in the end…very Doha. I was stoked with the quality of my French polish. Nat, on the other hand, had chosen to have a manicure and pedicure and this Queen of Sheba was being worked on by about three different women at once. The result? Ten red toenails - excellent work. Five pink fingernails and, on the other hand, five completely different sparkling peach fingernails!
Oh, and then there was: “2006: A String Odyssey”. Our walls in the apartment were very bare. We’re trying to be as economical as possible with our interior fitout seeing as it’s unlikely we’ll ship anything home, so expensive artwork was not an option. Gav was doing a bit of a reconnaissance of shops in our local area and managed to find blank canvases in various sizes which we decided would look very sheek and oh so designer on our bare walls. Purchase. Easy Peezy. Do
you think we could find string in any supermarket, newsagency, two dollar shop or stationary supply stores in Doha? Nope. Ridiculous! So we ended up purchasing laminated “name tags” which had been threaded through a kind of elastic string-like thing for people to hang around their necks. And at 11pm at night we headed home to hang the damn things on our walls!
When we were living in Japan we had to get used to the fact that all the washing machines were supplied with cold water only. Not a problem, but occasionally you’d find clothes wouldn’t wash as well as they do in warm water. Over here, the washing machines are also supplied with “cold” water. The only difference is that the cold water at this time of year is actually as hot if not hotter than the hot water tap. As a result, most of our clothes have shrunk by about 10% and poor Gav is walking around site in virtual knickerbockers!
Finally, there was our night out at a bar in the Ramada Hotel. Think Pilipino girl band, all members with hair down to their backsides, belting out endless covers of Tina Turner and Brian
Adams. Then, when you think it’s sounding pretty damn special, think lead singer…Pilipino male…hair ALSO down to his pert little backside…tight white jeans…tight orange MESH crop top…on stage with a podgy exposed belly jiggling away to the chart stoppers! And who said Doha nightlife was ordinary!!
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Nat
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I'm thinking a rug export business guys ! Wow, place looks great. Give Gav's Sphynx a rub for me.