This is the first of several articles recounting our experience in Doha, Qatar, during my 6-month stay as a Fulbright scholar. I am alone. My family will follow me in about a week. That will give me a chance to clear things up and prepare for your arrival. I’m excited about this trip and looking forward to seeing what the Gulf is like. I’m a little anxious to know what to do in case I don’t find someone waiting for me at the airport. I tried to get my address before I arrived, but they told me that everything would be ready when you arrived.
The plane touches down and I feel a little more than the usual sense of urgency from those around me to leave the plane. The airport seems very small, maybe the size of Knoxville. A bus meets the plane and I manage to get on the second bus. When we arrive at the terminal, things look clean and organized. In a few minutes, I pass through passport control, collect my luggage and leave the terminal, hoping to find someone waiting for me. I see someone holding a photo of me and I feel relief.
The university sent someone from their external relations to meet with me, and the department also sent an engineer. This is a good start. The external relations person greets me, points to a driver who will take me to my new home for the next few months, and quickly apologizes. The other person talks to the driver and I understand that he will follow us to my future residence. My driver is Indian, Muslim and speaks English with a heavy accent, but I can still partially understand what he is saying as we start our journey.
Doha, it looks like a small city, I can’t see any skyscrapers while we are driving. The buildings are mostly small white and yellow buildings. I’m a little disappointed, but I know I’ve seen skyscrapers on the Internet; I must be on the wrong side of town. I ask the driver if he can help me when my family arrives in a few days and he tells me that I have to talk to his boss. We arrive at a gated complex. It looks like it’s still under construction; at least parts of it look this way. We parked the car; a Qatari person approaches me, greets me and points me towards a 2-story building.
My apartment is on the second floor, he says. “I thought I was supposed to live in a villa,” I question. She indicates that she would have to discuss that with QU. He quickly shows me around the apartment, stopping in the kitchen and pointing out some basic items, like milk and juice, as hospitality items. My luggage is moved to the apartment. Taking a quick look, I don’t notice a phone in the apartment, so I ask about it. We sent a request to QTEL, the telephone company, and it will be installed in a few days. “How about the Internet?” Asked. “It will come with the phone since it will be a dial-up connection,” he says.
I panic a little. I’m in a new city with no phone, car, or internet. What if I have an emergency, need food or just want to see the city? The university driver leaves me with the promise to be back at 8 am to take me to the university. The other individual who puts me at the airport enters the scene. I quickly realize that he is an Egyptian who has been working at QU for a few years. He offers to take me to exchange currency for Qatari riyals, buy a cell phone and have lunch. This is an offer I couldn’t refuse. I had no idea when my next meal would be!
We entered a commercial area made up of small shops and entered a restaurant, Turkey Central, as it was called. It didn’t look fancy, but the food was good and relatively cheap. A plate of grilled meat is around $6 and a large bottle of water is less than $1. No tip is needed and there is no sales tax. For the first time in so many years, I can easily find out the exact number on the ticket, just add up your purchases. We then went to Al-Sadd street, where several foreign currency outlets are available. However, they were closed until 4 PM. I learned that many of these shops take a break from 1-3 pm or 2-4 pm The exchange took only a few minutes, but as I had seen in Egypt, people are very particular about the shape of dollar bills. They will not be able to accept bills with marks, tears, etc. that you wouldn’t notice in the US.
Next was a visit to QTEL to obtain a Hala card to be inserted into my cell phone. This will allow me to purchase prepaid cards for my cell phone. Since I had no residence in Qatar, I was not allowed to get a regular cell phone or land line. The application also only a few minutes. I paid 100 riyals for my cell phone number and now I’m ready to buy a cell phone. My host takes me to Carrefour where I bought a basic cell phone ($50).
I felt relieved. I have a way of contacting the outside world. I learned that the emergency number in Qatar is 999. The cost per minute to use the cell phone is 55 dirhams/minute (16 cents/minute). QTEL is a monopoly, so it’s easy for them to keep the rates so high. This was the first thing I missed about the states, an open market, where competition works in favor of the consumer. My host takes me back to my apartment. I thanked him for all the help from him and I am ready to spend my first night in Qatar.
Things are so quiet around me. I think I’m alone in the whole apartment building. With no TV, no Internet, and no one to talk to, I turn to TV. There were hundreds of channels. Many were Arabic channels, many were European channels. I couldn’t find any US channels that are not encrypted. To my great surprise, while checking the TV channels, I noticed that some European channels were requesting live nudity phone sex. It was so obscene; I thought to myself “I have to find a way to block these channels”. How was I going to let my kids flip through the TV channels without knowing what they would see?
This was the second thing I missed about the US: “Parental Controls”. Something I didn’t expect to miss out on in a Muslim country like Qatar. I was shocked that the government would allow this to happen in a country where almost all the women I’ve seen so far are covered except for their eyes. Some will even cover their face completely with a black veil. This was one of the first signs of contradiction that I felt in Qatar.