In Transit: D'oh-ha

16 July 2010

D'oh-ha

Greetings from beautiful Doha, Qatar, where I’ve been put up in the luxurious Doha Palace Hotel for the next while. The Palace’s amenities include an extremely firm bed twice as wide as it is long, a humble Turkish coffeeshop with free but Pleistocene-era wifi, a battered Qatari pride-themed tissue box, and a minibar (unplugged). To QA’s credit, they did pay for it, along with three meals, transport, and the entry visa.

This is where I am right now.

This is where it feels like I am right now.

Qatar itself is hot in the way that living on the surface of the sun would be hot, with the added benefit of the salty stickiness from the Persian Gulf. To give you a better idea, the pilot announced that it was 34 degrees (which I think is around 95F, though I never get this right) when we landed in the middle of the night. This is the sort of place where it’s too hot to actually go outside in the daytime, and if you don’t have air conditioning, you’re essentially dead. Even though it’s five in the morning right now, all of Doha is humming—because of all the a/c units struggling and wheezing away.

Don’t get me wrong, I love heat. And humidity. All winter long I dream of running around outside in a bikini and feeling the sun on my skin, and one of my favourite things to do is cook myself in the Bay Club’s steam room for longer than is advisable. The thing is that I stepped on the plane in Manchester, where it was about 15 degrees and raining, and I was dressed accordingly, ie jeans, blazer, boots. My flip flops and sundresses are in the checked bags, which are having a fun day out in some Doha airport storage area…so I have been reduced to watching Jazeera News in my underwear; thankfully I am travelling solo. Even if I did have my hot weather clothes, there’s no way that I could wear them outside without seriously offending passersby. Or getting a horrific sunburn—the first rays are out and they already look intense. I may have met my match. We’ll see tomorrow (actually ‘today’)—if I can bear putting on my clothes, I will make my way to a souq and buy everyone souvenirs of one of the planet’s least attractive destinations.

A few odds and ends:

-I suppose one of the big Doha attractions is the corniche, for which one sees signs that say ‘Al Corniche’. I like this. At first I thought, ‘It seems sort of cute’, and then immediately felt ashamed for being a patronising imperialist Western pig. Edward Said would be proud of himself.
-Very conveniently Qatar uses the same plugs and voltage as the UK. Win!
-Is it safe to drink the water here? I feel a bit squawky asking that, but it’s not like I had any reason to expect to have to know. I get the feeling that everyone just drinks bottled water here and there’s a problem with plastic bottles piling up, probably because everything else about the place is so unsustainable.
-There is an item on the hotel restaurant’s menu called ‘homos salad’. This is probably just an alternative spelling of hummus/hommus/houmos, but it did have me confused and a bit alarmed for a second. My favourite item on the menu, though, is something called Mutter Mushroom.

Edit: you now have the pleasure of seeing for yourself what a dump Qatar is! I've managed to upload some photos of this garden spot.

This stunning view was from my hotel room at dawn.

Rampant construction and indescribable heat: two things distinctly Qatari.

I did like this ziggurat, I'll admit.

I suppose there are some nice bits, but doesn't this mosque look a bit...fake to you?

I don't mean to hate on Qatar or the Gulf, but my God, when it's 49 degrees outside, wouldn't you be feeling a bit negative too? Anyway, I'm just glad to be here on the lucky 8th floor in Shanghai.

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Where I am

I'm actually so cutting edge that I moved from San Francisco to Oakland, which I'm told is super current; however, on general principle I refrain from making "I heard X is the new Y" statements because it became really uncool after Maureen Dowd did it. I eat a lot of organic produce, complain when the weather drops below 60F, do finance stuff during the day, and have three acupuncturists stored in my contacts who I know judge me for my fondness of early evening cocktails and whisky. Though I don't work in tech, I know a cornucopia of people who do.

Where I was

For four years, home for yours truly was a tiny and immensely picturesque seaside town in Fife, Scotland that goes by the name of St Andrews (also known as the Bubble, St Andys, the 'drews, the Drewzilles, etc). Most people know St Andrews for one of two things, so I get a lot of the following: OMG did you apply because of Prince William? and Heyyy, ever played any golf?

(The answer to both is no. William graduated long before I was here and really, honestly and truly had no influence whatsoever on my choice of universities. And this may be the ancestral home of golf, but I've never picked up a golf club in my life. I have nothing against the sport, it just doesn't get my adrenaline going the same way that plunging down a mountain on a pair of skis or piloting a two-tonne horse over a jump does.)

The town has three main streets, creatively named North, Market and South, and as such, any point in St Andrews can be reached after walking for twenty minutes. There is one Tesco, one Starbucks, one Romanian lady selling the Big Issue and an astronomical charity shops-to-people ratio. By the end of one's degree the place starts to feel distinctly claustrophobic (hence the nickname of the Bubble), especially considering that it is utterly impossible to venture out of the house without running into one or twelve people you know. Sometimes that's great; other times, you just wish you could pick up a pint of milk without having to change out of your comfortable but admittedly foul-looking jumper.

The skeletons of a castle and what would have been Europe's largest cathedral outside of Chartres call St Andrews home as well, though if the Reformation hadn't happened, they would still be intact. Our little town actually has a long a bloody history; look it up on Wikipedia.

Owing to its northerly situation, winter sees lashings of snow, ice, sleet, hail and wind that penetrate even the thickest of gloves and jackets, and it gets dark at three in the afternoon to boot. On the other hand, it's light for twenty hours a day in the summer and St Andrews looks positively gorgeous when the grass is green and the sea and sky are blue. If only it happened more often.

To summarise: it will always have a special place in my heart, and I do miss it, but not in a a wrenching, sobbing-into-my-pillow way. Just in what I suppose is a 'normal' missing way.

My digs immediately post-degree were located in the delightful and now riot-free Clapham, which, for those only familiar with Harrods and Trafalgar Square, is south of the river. The area is a mix (a heady mix?) of out-'n-proud gay men, Caribbean families and 'young professionals' like me who are figuring out what to do with their Hunter wellies and Fair Isle knits now that they live in an urban environment. And lots of Australians with a penchant for talking fifty decibels above everyone else.

Along with central tube connections on the ever-packed Northern line, Clapham's amenities include a great massive nucleus of a Sainsburys, a high street full of bars and restaurants, the green expanse of the Common and one really shitty nightclub called Infernos.

Where I'm from

It all began in 1989 just north of San Francisco, California in a place called Marin County (hop across the Golden Gate Bridge and there you are). Blessed with an embarrassment of riches in the looks department and a climate somewhere close to perfect, Marin was my day-to-day world before I moved to the frigid wind-blasted shores of eastern Scotland.

Back in the 60s and 70s there was a lot of protesting the war, hanging out in hot tubs, wearing homemade hemp clothes and having mystic crystal revelations with the help of psychedelics. Although it's still quite laid-back in comparison to pretty much anywhere outside the tropics, my mom tells me that it's gotten a lot more uptight in the past decade or so, largely thanks to an inundation of wealthy Generation X-ers.

As such Marin now has a reputation that's a weird hybrid of self-indulged, free-spirited, filthy rich, tree-hugging, Botoxed, vegetarian-friendly... After not having lived there for a few years, I'm starting to be able to look at it more objectively, and good God is it a strange place.

But oh, how fantastic-Marin sits on some of the world's most heart-stoppingly gorgeous beaches in addition to residing just a hop, skip and a jump away from the rather fabulous skiing and alpine lakes of the Sierra Nevadas and the world-class wines of the Napa Valley. And of course San Francisco, home of more eccentrics than you can shake a stick at, outstanding East Asian and Mexican food, and the US's oldest ballet company, is just across the Golden Gate. I may be slightly impartial, but I have yet to meet anyone who dislikes the place.