A few more pictures of what I have seen around Doha. This is FANAR which is the Islamic cultural centre. The building represents a light house and is intended to be a beacon of light for muslims. This is where we went the other day and saw the mosqe. Apparently you can walk up to the top of the building if you take a tour, which I will do sometime before we leave. This is where they teach arabic classes and also cultural classes.

On the Corniche is this giant oyster and pearl which is a lovely refreshing fountain. There is a quite large cascade of water on the opposite side, but I also wanted to show the back of the shell as well. It is quite large. The pearl is about eye level. Doha of course was originally a pearl fishing village. Around the time that Japanese pearls were flooding the market, oil was found which was very fortunate. The pearl is found in a lot of designs around town and there are some lovely flower containers also in the shape of an oyster with flowers cascading from them.

Here is another piece of graffiti on the wall of the corniche. Very artistic.

All around the city are large sculptures relating to the local heritage. This is a coffee pot and very large. There are similar sorts of sculptures in the middle of all the roundabouts, although this one was on the corniche.

On a different note - I noticed on the Google webpage today they had some morse code because today is Samuel Morse's birthday. Which reminded me of Banff ; while we were there in March, they held the finals of the competition for young composers. At the final performance, where the winners were chosen, the actual winner, Andrew Staniland, talked about his composition and the ideas that influenced him. The pieces were to be based on Evolution in recognition of the anniversary of Darwin and he had a recurring theme throughout his piece, taken over by different instruments at different times, but it was based on the percussion of the morse code of Darwin's name. Anyway, the Google page took me back to our wonderful time in Banff, and to that concert in particular.

Here are a few more pictures from the boat races yesterday. Just to show what you can find in surprising places. This was obviously the podium to hold the cups or medals whatever they were. But how beautifully done, it looks just like smocking.

I walked around from the main viewing area and found another fellow photographer who had found a quiet spot by the tents set up for VIPs. Behind the tents were quite an assortment of items including these ornate chairs. I dont know where they were going to be, but they looked quite amazing glistening in the heat and sun - these very ornate chairs with gold and filligree on them.

Very close to the abandoned chairs, were all these carpets rolled up waiting for them to be used at the appointed time!

Also near to the lone photographer was this bit of graffiti on the wall that surrounds the corniche. I found another one the other day with pictures on it as well. I will add it another day, together with the beautiful flowers I discovered a little further on my walk.

Today I had my appointment, together with a number of other people from the company, to have my medical which is required by the Qatari government before we are given our identity card. A chest x-ray and blood test is required. It involves a dance of moving from chair to chair until it is your turn to pay, and then you have to navigate your way through with all the other women (men are in a separate area) as you get each procedure done. In all it only took about an hour or so, but it seemed very random. No taking of numbers - and some people went ahead of me who should have been behind and vice versa. There was a lady in charge who just nodded at you as you were supposed to do something and if you missed her nod - you had to wait until she nodded your way again. Then if an employee of someone important came in, they went to the head of the line. All in all, a very interesting exercise. As least we went early in the morning but there were still a lot of people to be processed. It just shows how many people are entering the country to work on a continual basis. The other woman from the company and I still beat the guys and we ended up having to wait for them, as usual in this country, there are a lot more men than women.

There have been power boat races for the last couple of days, and they are taking place in the water virtually in front of our building. I walked over today while they were doing some training runs as I figured it would be really crazy around 3 when the finals take place. This picture is a little far away but you can see the numbers of the boats along the dock. The size of them, to put them in perspective is longer than the room I am in, which is about 15 feet. They are monsters and very low in the water. When they start up, they really vroom. The crowd is mostly male and they all smile when they hear that noise!


This gives a bit of an idea of the speed. They race around the whole bay twice, or at least they did for the training runs. They are fairly small specs when they get to the open end of the bay until they start coming back around the small island and back in front of the corniche.

They have a holding area on land where they keep the boats when it is not their turn. You can see, they are like the miami vice type of boats - or cigarette boats we used to call them.

To get them in and out of the water they use huge cranes. Quite a well orchestrated procedure. It was very pleasant with the sea breezes and then I thought I would walk back via the gardens a little way and it took no time for me to get boiling hot with a red face and realized it was time to head for home. It really takes very little effort in this heat to get very hot. I find I am good for a couple of hours standing still, which I was watching the races. But only about half an hour walking is my max. Amazing to think that when I first got here it was so much cooler that I could walk for a long time. I am curious to see how long I will last in the real heat - probably 5 minutes of walking!

Here are a few pictures for my calligraphy friends. This photograph and the next were taken in the Museum of Islamic Art. This is written on a series of leaves. I can't imagine the amount of patience it must have taken to write this on a skelatonized leaf without tearing it.

This picture was also taken at the museum - they didn't seem to mind pictures being taken there, as long as it wasn't a movie. This is the Imperial Decree by Ferman of Sultan Sulayman The Magnificent, dated 966 from Turkey. It is actually quite large, but I am not sure of the size maybe 3 or 4 feet high. I will have to go and see it again to remember the size. I hope you are able to zoom in on this to see the detail as it is truly beautiful all in blue and gold.

This is from the small art gallery in Souq Wakif art centre. These calligraphic pices are done by an Iranian calligraphic artist and these pieces are floor to ceiling and then spilling over onto the floor. Each piece was about 3 feet wide. I have signed up for some drawing classes at the art centre, starting quite soon.

This is a carpet done in calligraphy by the same Iranian artist, Golnaz Fathi. I thought this was really beautiful. There were several other carpets, also black and white in a similar style. I am amazed at how arabic writing is used as a decoration, sometimes around the edge of tiles and I saw one shallow porcelaine bowl with just a few letters in black written across the centre of it - it is very old, but in its simplicity it could have been done by a contemporary artist.

Today I went to the Islamic Cultural Centre called Fanah. They have classes there teaching arabic and also how to write it. Some time in the future I may look into doing that. They also have cultural classes. Today we had a young english fellow give us some information about the Islamic faith. We also got to try on the traditional black robes the women wear and a young lady kindly showed us how to tie the scarf around our heads, so that we were able to go into an area of the mosque. We finished the rather intense day off by going to the souq for a latte and pizza. Truly a country of contrasts. We drove home by the Corniche where they are getting ready for the races on the weekend of some monster speed boats - the kind that used to be on Miami Vice. We can see the course from our living room window, but I suspect we will join the throng to see and hear it live and in technicolour!

Yesterday I went to my first quilt meeting of the local Quilt Guild. It was so nice to be with such a welcoming group of women. I felt really at home with them. They had the library books on the table, with lots of really up to date quilt books. They had a work bee on the weekend to make baby quilts for charity and all the usual challenges and demonstrations you would find at a quilt group at home. In fact a large amount of people were actually from Canada. Several people gave me their email addresses and phone numbers. The only sad part it that there is only one more meeting and everything shuts down for the summer. However, it will start up again in September and I will have a few months to meet the members then.

Last Friday we went down to the steps at one end of the Corniche where the fishermen lay their fish out to sell. If you go early enough you see them taking the fish from the nets. We went down late by the usual standards, if you are not there before 8 am, you have missed the boat for the freshest fish, although you can actually buy fish all day, every day. However, it is out in the sun and probably wouldn't be too good later in the day.

Most of the fish I dont recognize and I went on the web to look up their names, and I still dont know them. However, I went for lunch at the Golf club yesterday and had Hamour, which was a very white fish, and was about an inch deep and the meat just fell away in strands. It was really good and will have to be more adventurous in trying the local fish.

Well, I recognize the squid in this batch, but that is the only one and I haven't been able to find the name of the colourful fish yet. There is a big fish shop at the back of the meat section in Carrefour and I am told all the fish are labeled, so I will have to go and take a photograph of them! There is a fish restaurant I hope we will go to soon, where you take your purchase from the fisherman early in the day and you go back at night when they will serve you your fish beautifully cooked.

Here are some more pictures from our trip to the petroglyphs. This hawk greeted us after we had just got through the gate. Fortunately the camera was handy, although he took off pretty quickly.

This looks very much like it might have been used for a cooking pot, or perhaps a pit to put some hot coals in for cooking. It was about a foot across.

This looks like it could be a boat. Since this is really close to the water, it is quite likely.

This was the beginning and the end of the sunset. Sunsets here are really quick and early, by about 6 o'clock. The actual sunset lasts about a minute and is yellow, and not much pink. Still beautiful though in the way the sun catches the clouds.

Today was a very successful shopping day, after a pretty lousy day yesterday trying to figure out how to get our taxes done in a timely fashion and being let down by numerous types of technology, including my brain. However, today I explored the top floor of the City Centre mall and found to my delight a very well stocked art supply store with fabric paint, silk paint and dyes - mostly from Germany. All kinds of sketchbooks, paints, paper etc. everything you could ever want. Also I found a book shop, not huge, but with a great selection of different types of fiction and non fiction. I bought a book on shopping in Doha and a childrens book for my grandson and a how to book on writing arabic, together with a cd to listen to it spoken. It is a very very beginner book. I had already been given some great books, but this one is like a kindergarten one, which is more my brain level. I have already been trying to learn my numbers which is made easier by the fact that on car license plates they have both the arabic and western numbers so it is easy to compare the two. So when we are stuck in a traffic jam, it becomes a number learning experience

Friday is the start of the weekend here, so we took the opportunity to drive up to see the petroglyphs at Jabal Al Jassasslya which is about and hour and a half drive north of Doha. The road all the way there is under construction, so it probably took longer than it would otherwise. Also, the instructions we had off the web didn't really do us any good as the road we were on, was basically not the original road, and the signposts seemed to be missing. Anyway, we persevered after a few mistakes - thanks goodness for 4 wheel drive cars here as off road driving in the desert is basically a dirt track with huge rocks in. Derek has had the practice of driving in the sand dunes so heading up rocky outcroppings didn't phase him, while I just shut my eyes. Also, our directions mentioned that we would find the carvings near the gate, only to find there were four gates when we got there! This picture shows the kind of terrain we were looking for, where ancient people have made these carvings in the rock. It looks a little like the Badlands in Alberta, but on a rather smaller scale.

This is one of the quite typical carvings. They are on top of the rocky outcroppings, on the flat surfaces on top. There are tons of them, so whoever the people were who made them, were either very prolific or they lived there for a long time. After we had been there for a while a couple of young archeologists came by and they said they had read that these carvings were thought to be made in the bronze age. I had read that they may have been later, but being the archeologists they probably knew more than I did. It is thought that some of them were possibly games, while others, the deeper ones ,could have been used for cooking. I will show some more pictures of them later in the week.

This one definitely looks like it could be part of a game. This was by far the most common shapes that we found. Some of them were together in a line and almost looked like a spine

This one, looks lke an insect, but there are ones that are larger and the centre part is more boat shaped and the lines could be oars. The archeologists were looking for one of a hand with long fingers, but none of us found that one before it started to get dark. We were there as the sunset on the desert. This area is by the coast where lots of people head for the deserted beaches on the weekends. As the sun set, we heard the call to prayer from a nearby compound which was really haunting in the desert with the sun setting.

We headed back into town to eat in the Souq Wakif and then headed home. However, the next hour and a half was spent drive up and down between a couple of areas by the Corniche. We would get to the roundabout, only to find the way we wanted had been closed by the police. So then we inched along, with everyone else, back to the way we came, only to find that roundabout had also been blocked and we were sent back the way we had come from - along with everyone else. Then we saw a bunch of cars waving flags, one car had a bunch of people sitting on top of the car with flags and a picture of the Emir, there seemed to be young men in their white robes riding on top of cars all over the place. We were just hoping none of the cars hit the brakes too fast. I still don't know what it was all about - just kids having fun on a Friday night in Doha, stampede style, or maybe their team had been successful, or as someone else suggested, a wedding! I will see what I can find out! I guess young people on a weekend are the same the world over!

Just a few more pictures today of the buildings around where I live, some under construction still. This one is still under construction, but already you can see the local influence in the pattern on the outside of the building. It will be amazing when completed.

Again, this shows influence of the region, and yet it is still a very modern building. There is another building that is totally glass but has a similar old fashioned building superimposed on top. Hopefully we will go by it again in a day or two. It is hard to remember where I have seen some of these buildings - a lesson to take a photograph at the time.

This one is so tall and slim, almost like it is going to slice the sky -with interesting reflections in the glass.

I have no idea or the purpose of this ball - perhaps it is an elevator, but I haven't seen it change position. This is the shopping centre I go to quite a bit. There are a lot of English stores here, I have been to Debenhams many times in Exeter in England and several of the women's sections have the same clothing names. There is a Mothercare in this mall as well as Starbucks and the Body Shop, Nine West and Hush Puppy shoe stores. But then you get another section that sells the black robes that the women wear here, many of them with beautiful decoration on the edges in gold, and shops selling wonderful carpets. The first floor is made up mostly of Carrefour which is a huge grocery store, which sells household items, electrical goods and clothing as well as the usual food, fish, meat and a huge selection of vegetables. You have to have everything weighed in the vegetable section. I got to the cash the other day and had fogotten to have my bananas weighed - I ended up keeping the line up waiting while someone rushed back for me to weigh them. I won't forget again.

I have been watching Aljazeera tv station which broadcasts from Doha. The english language version is a mixture of BBC and CBC and I understand some of the people who run the english side were trained in those organizations. The news is very world oriented and the weather report is worldwide, which is just as well, since the weather in Doha doesn't change, every day you wake up, it is sunny and warm! The current news is all about the elections in India. Sounds like whoever is elected, it will be a coalition government. Tv is a mixture of western programs with arabic subtitles, arabic programs and some french programs with arabic subtitles. Makes for some interesting viewing.

My challenge for today was to post two birthday cards at the post office. Which normally would not seem to be much of a challenge, but for me, everything is a challenge when it is for the first time in Doha. It would be easy just to get a cab, but that is much too simple, and being a good Canadian girl, used to hiking in the mountains - how hard could this be? So I set off to walk there via the Corniche, the walk along the sea front. This is one of the buildings I passed on my way from my building to get to the road I need to cross to get to the Corniche.

This is one of the flowers I passed by in the gardens along the corniche. Although Doha gets really hot, the grass and gardens along the Corniche are well kept and are always green and tranquil.

This is the imposing post office building. The tube like structures on the front and there are actually more a little to the right, which I did not capture are supposed to remind you of earlier days when mail was delivered by carrier pigeons. It makes for a very attractive building close-up. Like most places here, it is not easy to walk to. I went across at the cross walk, but on the other side, it is all dug up for construction. Fortunately, some of the constructions workers directed me around the pipes and how to get around the ditch! and I eventually got to the building. There I had a bit of trouble finding the way to go and after a false start where someone unlocked the door to the actual mail room and locked me in again - I realized I had not communicated correctly and someone else showed me the way upstairs to the main part of the post office with a whole wall full of wickets. After the initial wait in the wrong line, (like I said, I never seem to do things the easy way) I finally got to the right woman who gave me some very colourful stamps for a total of 7 riyals which hopefully will get my cards to Canada.

This is the crosswalk sign that you need to find to make sure you can get across the streets. You push the button and it usually changes right away enabling you to cross, much quicker than at home. A lot of people dont bother with this and they seem to weave in and out between the cars, which is a hazzard for both drivers and pedestrians, but it seems the custom here. As far as I am concerned, the crosswalks work for me. I can see that it wont be long before I change to taking taxis as by the time I got home I was soaking wet with perspiration and this is still a cool month!

We didn't do much today - it seemed a very odd Easter. We ended up going to the LandMark mall which is a much more upscale place than the one near us, but not many people seemed to be there. They have a Marks and Spencers amongst other things, and a British Home Stores. We bought a few more essential things for the appartment like a tea pot! in a very nice but relatively inexpensive home shop called The One. It had a lot of very nice furniture and quite modern dishes and kitchen gadgets. The picture above is one of several really nice pastry shops in the mall. Yes, of course we stopped for a coffee and a pastry, although not at this place - maybe next time. There was also a Godiva chocolate shop and a Leonidas chocolate shop. This is obviously a mall after my own heart!

Yesterday we drove to a new area just under construction called The Pearl. These were some buildings we saw on the way there.

This was one of the signs we saw on the highway going out of town today.

The Pearl is a completely new development full of high end shops, a marina and appartment buildings. There are cranes everywhere at the moment, at one point we counted about 60 of them. Everywhere in Doha is like that, the whole place is under construction. No expense seems to have been spared as you can see with the metal railing - even it is beautiful.

Today we went to the camel races which are held out of town. At first we attempted to find a seat in the covered vieewing area, but fortunately it was full and we met a woman from Chicago who had been to the races before and she led us to an area really close to the starting and finish line. We would have missed all this action if we had been seated. We then saw one of the pursuit cars that had room and we hopped in and went around the track beside the races. Each camel in the race has a robot as a jockey and the men in cars have controls to work the whip of the mechanical jockey. It is surprising that this convoy of cars with occupants shouting at their camels dont collide in the melee. In days gone by they used to use small children as jockeys, fortunately Qatar is one of the countries that have outlawed this practice. There were also a couple of very decorated camels that you were able to have a ride on. They had beautifully embroidered bridles and many tassels. I also saw one of the camels with a crocheted "snood" over its mouth. I have more pictures on our other camera and will post those tomorrow.

This evening, we were invited to a party beside the pool in one of the other buildings that people from work live in. A little bit of Canada in Doha. That is what I call a full day -more adventures tomorrow.