Doha Diaries

Greetings everyone. I hope you are keeping well and enjoying life. It’s always good to hear from you, so please keep sending your news as well. Shout out to brother Neil Fordham today. It’s his birthday this weekend and he tells me that he’s making his own birthday cake. Now that’s taking control of one’s own destiny! Glenn and I are doing well: we’ve just passed the three month mark in Doha and feel that we’ve been here much longer. We can’t quite figure that out; perhaps it’s because we’ve settled into a routine and everything feels pretty normal for us now. But let’s talk about “normal,” shall we? I’ve already mentioned that the new normal means that Friday is the new Saturday and Sunday is the new Monday. Tuesday, not Wednesday here is “hump” day (the day at work when you feel as though you’re half-way through the week). But there are many more things that seem, well, a bit different here, even to the point of seeming upside down. For example, the “cold” water that com...

When you started reading this blog, I'll bet you expected a little more from me than pictures of food, descriptions of malls, and complaints about not being able to walk across the street to get to the mall to buy food. (Okay, there's also been a little bit of dragon boating and kite boarding thrown in there for good measure.) But this is probably what you've all been thinking: Nancy seems to be kind of stuck on the bottom rung of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and needs to climb that ladder and get to something more interesting, a bit more … cultural? Here we go, then! Yes, of course, the culture here is quite different than it is at home. I tend to be wary of the term "culture shock," however, and neither Glenn nor I has found it really difficult or disconcerting to adjust to life in Qatar. Of course, we live in a compound with other expats, and we're not too restricted in our "behavior" within the compound: for example, we wear our bathing...