Breakfast in the Souks
“I need a hundred camel spoons,” my friend said, and since we all sort of think on the same track, no one looked at me like I was crazy when I said “let’s all meet for breakfast, shop when the souks open and leave.”
In fact, they didn’t look at me like I was crazy for two reasons. One was that we really sort of think alike, and meeting for breakfast is just the kind of thing we don’t do often, but it is a good time to grab some time together in lives that get very busy later in the day.
The second reason is that we are all introverts, and three of us were doing most of this arranging by e-mail. We’re not really phone chatters, although every now and then we will dial, but it tends to be the exception rather than the rule.
The weather is perfect. You would be amazed how lovely and peaceful the souks are early in the morning. There are customers in the restaurants, but it is a very laid back time of the day.
For a significant sum – I can’t remember how much, but I think I remember like 80 QR – you can park in VIP parking. Me, I was there an hour, and paid QR4 (just a little over a dollar) I just wanted you to see the difference from plain old everyday common folk parking and the VIP parking (above.) (Those signs in front of the stores straight ahead say VIP Parking, and at night they are roped off with red velvet ropes)
We find a shady table and order breakfast, across the street guys are into their early morning hubbly bubbly, there are people sweeping up to be sure everything is Disney-tidy, and it really is. As we are sipping at our coffee, the mounted police come by. Their horses are gorgeous, with high bushy tails and beautiful dressings in Qatar’s blood red and white colors.
What I like even better is the police-riders. They are handsomely dressed, and they ride like cowboys – look at that posture, the way real horsemen ride, with that cowboy slump and the weight firm in the saddle. The horses aren’t big horses, but they have beautiful bones. I wonder where they stable these horses in the souqs?
On to find the Yemeni Honey Man, relocated from Karabaa / Electricity Street. The police help us find him, hidden back next to a metal kitchen crafter, and we see he has other old customers who have also found him. His new shop is shiny and clean, with great shelves for displaying his beautiful baskets from the Asir.
“Big troubles” he says, and I know he is right, many people are being evacuated from that area while the Saudis and Yemenis have problems near the border. One of his customers communicates to us with gestures that in our new baskets, we must pack our jewelry in the bottom, then our abayas, and then food, oud or honey on top, so people won’t know where we are hiding our jewelry.
My Kuwaiti friend told me that in his memory, before oil, people kept all their clothes in baskets like this, folded neatly. They didn’t have a lot of clothes, he told me, and then there were other baskets specially woven to hold food stuffs, and to keep the insects off the food. Those baskets are not the same as these sturdy baskets, the more local Kuwait and Qatteri baskets are woven from palm fronds, I believe, and you can still find them in the more traditional stores at the Souq al Waqef, behind where the Bedouin women sell foods on Thursday night and sometimes on Fridays.
Open Window
For the last few nights, AdventureMan and I have been sleeping without the air conditioner – it has cooled enough that we can do that.
This morning, for the first time, I have the window open in the upstairs lounge where I do my computer things first thing every morning.
When we lived in Kuwait, I missed the open windows. We lived on the tenth floor, and there were no screens. I couldn’t trust the Qatteri Cat not to jump out the window. He is smart in a lot of ways, but not so smart when it comes to windows and being ten stories up.
It is migration time, and our gardens are full of birds. I remember seeing flocks of parakeets, wild bright green parakeets one time, it totally thrilled my heart. Just being able to sit here with the windows open – it doesn’t take much to make me happy. 🙂
Curvy Women Smarter?
Not everyone agrees with the conclusions found by a recent US study discussed on BCC News Health but for those of us who are curve endowed, it gives some hope . . . 🙂
Curvy women may be a clever bet
Women with curvy figures are likely to be brighter than waif-like counterparts and may well produce more intelligent offspring, a US study suggests.
Researchers studied 16,000 women and girls and found the more voluptuous performed better on cognitive tests – as did their children.
The bigger the difference between a woman’s waist and hips the better.
Researchers writing in Evolution and Human Behaviour speculated this was to do with fatty acids found on the hips.
In this area, the fat is likely to be the much touted Omega-3, which could improve the woman’s own mental abilities as well as those of her child during pregnancy.
Men respond to the double enticement of both an intelligent partner and an intelligent child, the researchers at the Universities of Pittsburgh and California said.
The findings appear to be borne out in the educational attainments of at least one of the UK’s most famous curvaceous women, Nigella Lawson, who graduated from Oxford.
But experts are not convinced by the findings.
“On the fatty deposits being related to intelligence front, it’s very hard to detangle that from other factors, such as social class, for instance, or diet,” said Martin Tovee of Newcastle University.
“And much as we logically like the idea that men are interested in the waist to hip ratio, it actually features relatively low down the list of feature males look for in a potential partner.”
Halloween Post Mortem
Hallowe’en is really more a cultural tradition these days than a religious event. We no longer worry about spirits walking around on Hallowe’en, and wear costumes to try to scare them away from us. In fact, many of the trick-or-treaters who came by our house last night were pretty! There were fairies, and little mermaids, and some very alluring witches.
In fact, there were so many trick-or-treaters that we ran out! How embarrassing! I thought I had a LOT, but there were more trick-or-treaters than we had treats.
It was a great evening, altogether, and next year I will know better.
Here is our not-scary pumpkin. I wish you could see the ears – it is an orange cat pumpkin, in honor of the Qatteri Cat.
All the visitors made the Qatteri Cat jumpy. He was happy to stay inside and hide with all the action in the streets last night.
Short Fat Women of the Future
I found this on AOL’s Lemondrop.com link this morning, LLOOLLLL!
Well, here’s a self-confidence booster — you’re not short and fat, you’re just highly evolved.
According to a study by Yale researchers, humans are still evolving, and women are evolving to become shorter and fatter. It is estimated that in 10 generations, women will be two centimeters shorter, weigh one kilogram (around 2.5 lbs.) more, and look back and wonder what kind of freakish monster Angelina Jolie was. (“What are these jeans called ‘long’ from the Gap?)
But we won’t just be jolly little trolls, we’ll also be healthier, with the study expecting women to have lower cholesterol and better heart health, start menopause later, and have more children earlier in life. The study observed over 2,000 medical histories from Framingham Heart Studies in Massachusetts. Shorter, heavier women have more children, who also grow up to be shorter and heavier.
Let’s also not forget that in addition to shrinking downward while expanding outward, we’ll all also have super-hot faces. Short, fat, healthy and hot. Totally awesome.
You can read the original article on TheMedGuru.com
New Tower at the Suq al Waqif
We’ve been watching construction on this new tower; it seemed to go up within months. I can’t imagine what it is for, but oh, what fun. It’s the brownish colored tower on the left, before the entrance to Soy. It’s fort-like.
Little Mosque on the Corner
This is for my western friends, but anyone who sees me saying something wrong is welcome to jump in and fix it so it’s right.
We have a little mosque on the corner near our villa. Now, having a mosque on the corner is nothing special, in fact, when giving directions, it is kind of a joke, because you can give landmarks and then say “and you turn right at the mosque” but there are SO MANY mosques that using a mosque as a landmark is almost sure to confuse whoever is trying to find you.
Nonetheless, every neighborhood has its own mosque, and then there are bigger mosques where everyone gathers on Fridays, we call them Friday mosques, and then there are even bigger ones where everyone gathers on the two big holidays called Eids.
But this is our little neighborhood mosque:
I think it is very beautiful.
In the back, around this time of the year, they start a garden. I think it is for poor people to have something to eat, but I don’t know. I love it that they take a tiny little space and make it useful.
We live close enough to hear the call to prayer five times a day – it seems like more. There is the “get ready” call and then there is the real thing. During Ramadan, sometimes there are prayers over the microphone (it is on low) all night. It isn’t so intrusive; when it is hot and the air conditioning is on, you can’t even hear it. It’s kind of reassuring, to me, hearing someone praying all night long.
The Heart of Doha – Disney Does Doha?
“No, it’s not DOHALAND!” I snapped at my friend. ‘It’s called the ‘Heart of Doha’ project.”
We were exploring the project in it’s first phase, the destruction phase, which is turning old haunts into several circles of hell – shopping hell, driving hell, parking hell, disorientation hell. And just as we were inching our way into a new diversion, I saw the big sign describing the future this funky area of Doha and telling us to go to ‘Dohaland.com.’
Oops. I apologized profusely and she very humbly pretended not to be gleeful that she was right and I was wrong. Well, actually, we are both right. It is both ‘Dohaland’ and ‘The Heart of Doha,’ but I shouldn’t have snapped at her over something so inconsequential. Blame it on the rain . . . umm . . . .err . . . the traffic.
Dohaland. I’m sorry, it sort of cracks me up. It’s just like Disney – JungleLand, FutureLand, etc.
I remember when the Suq al Waqif project first started, how outraged I felt, and how delighted I am to go down there now, where the shop-keepers have electricity that is reliable, even air-conditioning wafting out into the corridors, the appearance of ancient woven mats shading the twisting cobblestone street which no longer reaches out and grabs your heels, or changes levels unexpectedly. How can you be a successful curmudgeon when it turns out so positively? Even if it is a little bit Disney-does-Doha, it is so attractive!
What I love about what has been accomplished so far is how it has enhanced the experience for everyone. If you go down into the souks, you see more people. You used to see only a few westerners, now you see all kinds, even tourists, even your neighbors; you see every nationality down in the souks now, and people are actually buying things, not just killing time. There is a great variety of shops and restaurants, and even if the parking spots are tiny, there is parking.
Have you visited the website yet? Dohaland.com? I love the vision, although in one shot with people in suits crossing the streets, I want to shout “Hurry! Hurry! Or you’ll get run over!”
Here is what it is going to look like – and you can go to the Dohaland website and get a great big full screen map:
And here is what it looks like now:
These machines are like huge dentist’s drills, with points that pound down into the hard-packed Qatar soil to break it up so that foundations can be built:
It’s not unlike house-cleaning. When you pull everything out of the closets, out from under the beds, the drawers, those piles of things in the corner, for a while everything looks worse than it did before you started. Slowly, slowly, you create areas of organization and calm amidst the chaos, and slowly, slowly those areas expand, join, until the chaos is eliminated, you know where things are, and your living area is a calm and peaceful and organized oasis. I hope I get to see that day in Doha.
Update: Dohaland AKA Heart of Doha is now known as Musherib
More Jewels from the Doha Museum of Islamic Art
More guests, and another trip to the Doha Museum of Islamic Art. I never tire of the place. Most of all, when I walk in, I just take a deep breath, breathe in the serenity.
It doesn’t hurt that there is also a wonderful, clean ladies room.
Every time we are there, we see something new and wonderful, something that was there, but we hadn’t noticed before. Here are some things I saw this time:
Karabaa in Transition
This post is for my friends not here, friends who often accompanied me on trips to Karabaa and all the funky magical shops we would find there. I dropped off the towels at the Mumtaz Tailor to be embroidered, English on one end, Arabic on the other, and while the devastation is no longer so gut-wrenchingly stunning as it was – I guess I am becoming desensitized – I can also see changes.
A lot of the rubble has been carted away. So it makes me wonder, is this what The Pearl is being built on? Is rubble from the old Suq al Waqif and these old buildings along Musherib and Karabaa going to the sea to become reclaimed land? If so, isn’t this going to boggle the minds of archaeologists a couple thousand years from now who are going to find all this stuff jumbled together and try to figure it out?
Yes, yes, it’s true, my mind does wander into trivial areas . . .
From the old parking lot, looking towards Karabaa where the honey man used to be:
To help you know what you are looking at – remember the sign that shows people how to park? It’s still standing – so far 🙂
I wanted you to be able to see just how high the pile of rubble is:
All the rubble that was The Garden is now gone, as if it never was:
OK, now, in the midst of all this noise and demolition, the rubble and the trucks and bulldozers, there is this oasis of serenity. I often see old men sitting outside on those old fashioned built-in-plaster seating areas, or on the bench. Inside, it looks like it might even be a home for old indigents, but sort of palatial, very green, and well kept up. Is there anyone who can tell me what this is?
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