Our first clue should have been when Taxi Driver stopped his car on the side of the street next to the site of the 2006 Asia Games. Hurrying out of the car, he left the door open, the engine running and three passengers in the backseat completely confused.
“Well,” said Waleed. “I hope he doesn’t mind us borrowing his car.”
The Beginning Other Favourite Twin Erica was the one to bring up going to Qatar in the first place, as a relaxing girls weekend. “And I’ve heard the museum in Doha is beautiful,” she said.
I paused. “But I’ve heard that there’s nothing to do there."
Every other person who had ever been to Qatar confirmed this. But there was one who voiced opposition to the usual “Oh my god, Qatar? There is nothing to do in Qatar!” chorus we kept hearing.
To paraphrase: “Doha is one of my favourite cities,” said Architectural Friend of Waleed’s. “It’s developing, it’s booming; it’s going to be great in a few years.” After hearing this, Erica immediately turned to pout at me. I rolled my eyes and decided to look into hotels. I arbitrarily chose the first few weekends in December, just to get some prices. There was not a hotel room to be found. This was in early November.
Waleed’s Middle Brother Samer was the one to bring up going to the Asia Games, after seeing a commercial on television. Seeing as there wasn’t a hotel room available in any of the four hotels that Qatar had, the five of us (Myself, Erica, Waleed and his two brothers) opted to go for the day instead. Airline tickets were soon purchased, but we decided to hold off on purchasing tickets to the events, since two of us had connections to the Games.
The Arrival As we landed, Samer leaned past me to look out the window. “Where is everything?” he asked. Indeed, Qatar seemed to be comprised mainly of sand, with the occasional building sprouting up in the middle of nowhere.
After landing and going through customs, we stood in line for the taxis and were soon informed that because there were five of us, we would have to take two cabs. After waiting for about 20 minutes, we finally got cabs – Samer and Ziad in one, Waleed, Erica and I in another. Once we got in, our cab driver soon set the trend by informing us that he didn’t know how to get to our destination – the Aspire Stadium. Samer and Ziad’s driver did know, however, so we instructed our Clueless Cab Driver #1 to follow the other cab. He managed to keep up with Cab #2 for a little bit, but eventually lost him in the bizarre Los-Angeles style traffic that engulfs most of Doha’s roads. Peering out the window of the cab on the way to the stadium, we all took note of the architecture (or lack thereof) in Doha. “See those buildings?” said Waleed. “It’s like being in Jahra*. Except this is the country.”
What should have been a 15-minute drive ended up taking about 45 minutes, thanks to the ridiculous traffic light system of the country. Once we got to Sport City, where the Games were taking place, Clueless Cab Driver #1 abandoned us on the side of the road, hurrying through the rain (yes, the rain: it was about 70F/22C degrees and raining) to ask the guards at Gate 6 where the Aspire Stadium was. He then drove a few more feet, got out of the car again and asked another guard at another gate where the stadium was. Coming back to the car, he looked inside and said “This is it.”
The Games Three confused passengers still sat in the backseat. “Here?” one of us said. “Where’s the stadium?”
Clueless Cab Driver #1 pointed past the chain-linked fence at a building with blue trim on it. “It’s that one there.” Convinced, we paid, hopped out of the cab and trekked over to the nearest gate.
“No,” said the guard at the gate. “You can’t enter through here.”
“But… the gate… is open?” I asked.
“Go through Gate 6.”
“Where’s the Aspire Stadium?”
The guard pointed about 50 feet away at the blue trim building. “There. But you have to go to Gate 6.”
Gate 6 was a five minute walk in the opposite direction from the stadium that we wanted to get to. At this point, we had abandoned hope of finding Ziad and Samer, because neither of their cell phones worked. “Are we there yet? Where is this place?” asked Waleed. He paused. “I was totally one of those kids in the car. ‘Are we there yet? How about now? Now?’”
Upon reaching Gate 6, the blank-faced guard briskly informed us that no, we could not enter here, this was the service entrance. We’d have to walk another five minutes to Gate 5. “But the guard over there told us to come through here. You told our cab driver to take us to the other gate and the people there told us to come here."
Gate 6 Guard was completely unsympathetic. “Gate 5.”
“I will come in and work if you let me into through this gate.”
That didn’t work either. Apparently free labour isn’t high on Qatari’s list of Things They Like. I sighed and did what I always did when people are inept: I got bitchy. “Look, you guys really need to figure out which gate to tell people to go to. And tell those guys over there to tell people where to go, because this is ridiculous.” And then I stalked away. I’m sure they were quivering in fear.
As we walked past the cheerfully decorated chain-linked fence that declared that this was, in fact, the Games of our Life, we tried to figure out how we were going to get to the Aspire Stadium which was, to our eyes, halfway across the country. While Gate 5 proved to be the Passageway to the Games of our Lives, we soon realized that to get to Aspire we’d literally have to walk around the aptly named Sports City, through the rain. Like every other warm-weather place (including Kuwait, San Diego and many other parts of California), Qatar is not built for rain. The Sports City was essentially a Sports Venice. All that was missing were rowboats and men with jaunty straw hats and black-and-white striped shirts.
As we approached each building, we tried to figure out where Aspire was. We had an idea of which building it was and we could see it in the distance; the problem was we didn’t know how to navigate our way around the village. “A map!” cried Waleed, rushing over to what was, essentially, our oasis in our desert of confusion. Yet again, the Games of our Lives failed us. The map failed to name any of the buildings. In fact, the legend read as follows:
Light Grey Areas: Open Area
Grey Areas: Part of Venue
Dark Grey Areas: Buildings
“I aspire to find Aspire,” sighed Waleed. The rain and the trek were making us punchy.
Twenty minutes later, we finally saw Aspire. Standing in front of the Stadium were Samer and Ziad, who we had quite seriously had given up for lost.
--
The Events
The events themselves were fairly uneventful. Since Ziad had a friend working at the Games, we had gotten some free tickets, but not enough. We ended up purchasing tickets to the boxing and basketball events. The boxing venue smelled like a locker room. Basketball seems to be much more exciting when it’s either teams you care about (Bahrain vs. Syria! Yawn!) or when you’re watching it on television. I nearly lost my mind again when the concession stand refused to take my 500 Qatar Riyal bill for the 13 QR food I wanted to purchase. It wasn’t so much that they balked at the large bill (that’s understandable, it’s like me trying to pay for a Happy Meal with a $100 bill), it was the attitude the cashier gave me. Cashier #1 was nice – he said he had to go to the manager to get change and I’d have to wait a little bit. That’s fine and completely reasonable. Cashier #2, the one who was actually ringing me up, was just giving me attitude. Pulling his face into a sneer, he shook his head. “No,” he said. “I have to stay here.”
I glared at him. There were about five people behind the counter, and the line consisted of me and the other five people I was with. “So send someone else.”
“No.”
I was beginning to lose my temper. “Look. This is all I have. The people at the airport gave me two 500 QR bills. The person at the ticket stand wouldn’t take this. I need to eat. Go get someone to go get change. Or call the manager up here.”
That’s when Nice Cashier popped back into the conversation. “I’ll go and get it,” he said. Smiling gratefully at him, I wondered how, exactly, I could nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize.
--
The Cabs
As I said earlier, it was raining when we landed. It continued to pour throughout the day; while I missed the swimming events, I still felt like I got to see some swimming through the pools of water that had collected on the ground of Sports City. And as I have heard from every New Yorker I’ve ever met (all two of them), when it rains, it makes it that much harder to get a cab. The same is true in Qatar.
We all piled into the first cab that pulled up, decided that it didn’t actually matter if they wanted to take five passengers or not. The three brothers all wanted to go see their cousin who had recently moved to Doha, and with over two hours to go until we had to be at the airport, we figured we had plenty of time.
“Do you know how to get to the Cinema City roundabout?” asked Waleed
The cab driver just stared blankly at us, prompting us to ask him, yet again, if anyone in this country knew where they were going.
“No,” he said. “I don’t know.”
The Cinema City roundabout is apparently one of the biggest and most known roundabouts in Qatar. It’s the Qatari equivalent to Times Square.
“Can you call your company to find out?”
“… No.”
“Do you know how to get the airport?”
“No.”
“Do you know how to get anywhere?”
“No. I’ve only been working for two days.”
As we all sat in the cab, wet and miserable, Waleed called his cousin for directions and handed the cell phone to the driver. After hanging up, Waleed tried to confirm that the driver did, in fact, know where he was going. “Yes, I know,” claimed the cab driver, the way a little kid claims that he did not pull his sister’s hair. In the meantime, another cab had pulled up behind us, so we opted to get out and switch cabs. This cab driver claimed he knew where Cinema City was, but once we started driving suddenly became unsure. “Just take us to the airport instead,” sighed Waleed. It was 5:30 at this point.
As we, once again waited about 20 minutes for a light to turn green, I leaned over and asked Waleed what, exactly, his friend, who had his Masters in Architecture, meant by “Doha is one of my favourite cities.”
“Well, what he meant was that Doha was being built in a logical manner. So, unlike other Middle Eastern countries, this city was being planned and constructed logically.”
He paused, noting the time we had sat at one traffic light and mentally calculating how long it would take us to get to the airport if we walked, considering 10 minutes had gone by and the light was still red.
“And when we get back to Kuwait, he is going to get a foot in his face.”
An hour later, we finally made it to the airport. After asking two different people, we stood in line at the First Class Check In, since we had no luggage to check. Handing over our itineraries to the man behind the desk, we were all kind of in a daze. And craving alcohol.
“They should have given you your boarding passes in Kuwait,” said Qatar Airways Dude Behind the Counter.
That got our attention. “They only gave us our boarding passes from Kuwait to Qatar,” someone said weakly. Maybe it was me.
QADBtC sighed. It was a sigh we were familiar with, a sigh we had been sighing the whole day. It was the “I cannot believe how stupid people are and how completely inept everyone in this entire world is” sigh.
“If you want to bump us up to first class because there isn’t room in Economy, it’d be okay with us,” joked Waleed.
QADBtC grinned up at us. We were friends now. While we didn’t get First Class, we at least got boarding passes.
“I can’t wait to get out of this fucking country,” said Ziad.
--
The Homecoming
As we boarded the plane (which was already 15 minutes delayed at this point), we all nearly immediately fell asleep. A half hour later, Waleed looks at his watch. “Why haven’t we taken off yet?”
That would be because the plane was waiting on two passengers who were still boarding. No other airline in the world would wait for two passengers, but Qatar Airlines apparently has the time and the money to spend waiting at a gate for an extra half hour. When the stewardess passed by, Waleed flagged her down to ask for alcohol, to combat the stupidity that had plagued us the whole day. She laughed and said that once we took off, she would get us the wine we were so desperately craving.
Halfway through takeoff, the sound of Tom and Jerry rang through the cabin. Erica and I both stared as Waleed jumped in fright, groping frantically for his cell phone, whose ringtone this week is the Tom and Jerry theme song. As Samer, who was 20 rows away, turned back, glared and mouthed “What the hell are you doing?”, Waleed was muttering in a panic “I thought I turned it off.” As the song continued, the sound of a cat meowing was heard, and the three of us looked up at the in-flight television, which was playing the actual Tom and Jerry cartoon.
As we landed and walked through the arrivals terminal of Kuwait International Airport, Samer spoke for all of us: “I never thought I’d be so happy to see this country.”
Erica wanted to go to exchange her money from Qatar Riyals to Kuwaiti Dinars. “Yes,” said Ziad. “Let’s go do that. Because if we keep the money, that’s going to give us a reason to go back to that country. And I never want to go back there again.”
* Jahra: Middle of nowhere Kuwait. Living here: The Kuwaiti version of rednecks.
