doha daily 1/26/06

Phase two. The apartment. I realize now that the "load" to moving to an entirely new country, new culture, new way of life is lightened when immediately moving into a room at The Ritz-Carlton, where for two weeks, you are on vacation - room service, laundry, unlimited amount of fruit and chocolate chip cookies with milk everyday; not to mention the outstanding staff all wanting to take care of you AND Tristan for that matter. BUT now, we are in phase two - REALITY - We loaded up two cars of our stuff yesterday am and Tristan and I followed the housing Manager to our new "home." A 3-bedroom, 3-bath furnished place where all of the furniture looks as though it were made out of church pews. And with the hundreds of satellite channels listed, 3 of them accessible are English-speaking - all others like CNN and the Disney Channel all stare at me in the face with a big $ next to them - needless to say, we are working on getting a decoder ASAP! Another thing we realized at 5am this morning was the praying that is "loud-speakered" to the neighborhood from mosques, ALL at the same time. - 4 to 5 times per day. You cannot hear it at The Ritz-Carlton though. I imagine as it gets more populated near the hotel, mosques will follow. The radio stations as well, take a music break to broadcast prayer, usually at 11:45a.

With the help of a Qatari Representative who works at the Hotel between 3-5p roughly, I had my paperwork prepared to obtain my temporary driver's license. (You may drive on a national license legally for 7 days) The DMV here looks a bit like an old abandoned warehouse, dust everywhere, window panes cracked and rusty doors standing permanently open, old airplane seats sitting outside on a side walk as a "waiting area." And then you turn the corner to enter the registration area and there are digital signs hanging down from the ceiling signalling which number is next. There is a nice marbletop counter amid all this dust, etc...Males (or Gents as they call them here) go the left, Ladies : ) go to the right. There are several instances here I've heard where women get to enter crowded establishments ahead of men, no matter how many people are in line.

I had my car washed today for 10 riyals. That's $2.75 (divide $ by 3.64). Although rent seems to be rising here in price - we are looking at places listed for $4000+/mos, and other than Starbucks and Cheerios' products, all else seem to be lower in price than the US. A grande iced white chocolate mocha costs $4.67 - I think that's actually MORE than in the US. And Starbucks cards do not work here unfortunately.

We went "villa shopping" again today. I'll have an update on that hopefully after this weekend. See you soon...