Four Hundred Days Til Re-entry

Now, i just have to make sure I've got this right...

Yes, Lonely Planet did claim that it was the dullest place on the planet. One Word: Doha.

Two words: Didn't sleep.

Six words: Didn't want to miss my plane.

The lonely planet, which I only read grudgingly and call The Book, has this to say about the cultural / actual desert in which I stopped-over:

"Around the Gulf, Doha has earned the unenviable reputation of being the dullest
place on earth. You will be hard-pressed to find anyone who'll claim the place
is exciting."

I really wanted to give the place a chance. It is not really geared-up for someone to just drop-in and have a bit of a look around. That is all I wanted. I wanted to sleep on the plane from Manchester, spend the day in Doha being multicultural and then catch my ongoing flight to Osaka feeling vaguely like Lawrence of Arabia. Here are the main points.

• Disembark, enter terminal building (so named for the feeling it engenders), look for a sign and follow everyone through the baggage check thingy. See a guy come out shouting that people who wanted to go into the city shouldn't go through with everyone else.
• The next stage was a bit odd. I got a free breakfast and was told to come back in half an hour, when I would be allowed out. Breakfast was a slab of meta-fried-egg, non-rectangular non-triangular toast and a cup of ribena. I went back down to the reception wher I was told there was nothing to be done and to wait with a big bunch of other people over there. "What over there," I asked. Yes, over there. "What, in the corner?" That's right, I was told to go and stand in the corner. To my sleep deprived mind (it was 6am and I hadn't managed to sleep on the plane) this presented some existential issues. Maybe he was the teacher and I the border guard? I mulled it over, went back and spoke to a third person who correctly spotted that I didn't have anything better to do than waste his time for the next fourteen hours. We reached an arrangement, by which I was quietly slipped back under the rope, as it were.
• Getting a visa. Like the bloke in Massive Attack sez, gettin' a Visa Card Nowadays isn't hard. Though if you don't happen to have one, getting the other kind of visa is bloody hard. I had to open a bank account to get a Qatari bank card to pay the 12 pounds to get the visa. The woman stamped something in my passport and then litterally scribbled over the top of it.

Up to this point I was getting tired and irritable. Luckily things started turning for the better. The taxi-driver took pounds. He let me name my own exchange rate and kept the twenty pound note as a souvenir. This was not the last time this happened. I asked to go to the city centre. He took me to, not the city centre, but actually a shopping centre in the midde of nowhere called City Centre. Thanks, goodbyes, camera out. The transition from air-conned taxi to rarified desert at 42 degrees caused even the plastic parts of my camera to mist-up. Stood around and sweated for ten minutes while my camera warmed-up.

I killed time until Starbucks opened (The Cafe, Behemoth. I don't go here unless I can't help it). Killed time in starbucks by attracting attention using my Lancashire County Cricket sun hat. I killed time wandering around looking at shops until the internet cafe opened. I grimaced at other foreigners also wandering round trying not to fall asleep. I checked the net for details of the city. Enough to get me to the stuff that I wanted to see. Arabian art, the weapons museum, the national museum, the cultural museum.

"I want to go to the ethnographic museum."

"Wha?"

"A museum about people."

"National museum?"

"No. I want to learn about people in Qatar."

"I only know the national museum."

I inwardy sigh and off we go, me planning the ask the guy at the museum about the other museums and wondering whether this guy had stolen the taxi. We fire round the roads and roundabouts. We arrive at about 12 o'clock. "It looks awfully closed." I rap on the glass of the information window. The guy in there tells me the place doesn't open til 4pm. Because of the heat. No he doesn't know any other museums. Back to the shopping center.

Next began a six hour battle against sleep. I wandered. I sat and read. I sat. I had a burger king just for the hell of it. I wandered round. My sleep-addled brain made the best of a bad job.

At about 3 o'clock I stumbled into a shop shop selling Egyptian stuff, run by an Engyptian guy. Honest to god he looked like the Scorpion King. I bought something for Marikos birthday, which I cannot say any more about because she might read this. While we were haggling I somehow managed to end-up fixing the guys computer. Coffee was had, sadly not the arabian coffee I was hoping for but Gold Blend or something of that ilk. We had a bit of a chat. He showed me a pickie of his girlfriend at their engagement party. He told me that he wasn't going to marry her. He showed me a picture of himself a few years back, this time with hair. He looked like the Doughnut king there.

We watched a couple of videos of his favourite belly-dancers from back home. I found it strange that I should get on so well with a complete stranger, chatting bizarrely like there was no tomorow, though in fact there had been no yesterday.

More bizarrity at the airport. Some fifteen-year-old travelling alone latched onto me and struck up a conversation. I think he said he was from Kenya. He mentioned having been to Dubai and being off to India to see his grandmother. I had another one of those cultural line-crossing incidents where the questions started innocuous and worked upwards, like a shoddy chiropodist. Where do you live? What do you do? Do you have a girlfriend? Oh you live together? Do you sleep in the same room? How do you warm your girlfriend?

Honest to god I am not making this up. I am kind of used to this sort of situation now. "Do you always walk up to people and ask them questions like this," I asked, not harshly. He became embarassed and asked me some questions about my job, Marikos job, etc. As I went into some detail about what M does, the guy across from me closed his book with a snap and said, "Your conversation is much more interesting than my book. What does she do again?"

Thus began random conversation #3 which lasted me up until boarding my flight to Osaka.

So what, I can hear you wondering, was the point of this story? Well, the point is this: When I write, and especially when I write fiction (when I can be bothered) I get the feeling that what I am writing is not coming from me but some thign that I found and used. These three, the kid, the shopkeeper and the journo (the third guy) will probably crop up somewhere down the line. The journo will save a life, the shopkeep will probably become rich and the kid is going to die in a most dismal manner at the start of a screenplay or novel.

posted by Between daisies @ 09:27