Wow, today was a fun day.  Here in Qatar, as in other Islamic countries, the weekend is Friday and Saturday.  Friday is their “holy” day.  So, today was our day off.  This was of course an occasion to go for beers at the Sheraton Thursday night which was a nice change.  It wasn’t so nice this morning though.  A hangover the size of a small planet woke me up around 7 am.  I went to the gym for a run and must say that this is a rather nice gym.  Their treadmills have a fan so that you can have the wind in your face while running inside.  Haven’t seen that before.

Around 2 pm we got picked up by Helmut, our German Project Manager on the Qatari side.  He was kind enough to take us quad-biking in the desert which I have to say is one of the most fun things I’ve done lately.  Driving up and down these dunes wearing shorts and a t-shirt is great fun!  This seems very popular amongst the Qatari’s and there was a bunch of them there.  I even saw a woman, completely clad in these black robes they were, with a black cloth over her head (but not veiled) driving one of the quads.  That just seemed surreal.  But I also found out that they also have a female Qatari professional rally driver.    The drive up there was interesting.  Oil refineries in rows with fires coming out of the high “chimneys”.    The desalination plants since most of the water is simply seawater that is cleansed and desalinated. 

I got a lot of stories today.  In the days to come I’ll slide them in one by one.  The first one is about the 2 Yemenis that got into a fight which ended in such a way that one of the Yemenis killed the other one.  Here they have the concept of ”blood money”.  A prisoner may escape execution for a capital offense if the family of the victim settles for a payment by the wrong-doer.  I know nothing of the amounts.  This is very similar to the idea of “manngjöld” in the viking times and what I found in Angola when I was there in 1995 (a friend of mine killed a girl in a traffic accident and paid the family USD 1000 and that was the end of it).  So, in this case the deciding party of the family is a 2 year old boy.  Obviously, he can’t decide so they wait 16 years for him to grow 18.  Meanwhile the killer sits in prison.  When the authorities wen’t to ask the boy, he had left the country and now lived in Yemen.  The authorities sent a man to find him which he did and after 16 years in prison they led the poor guy in front of a firing squad in shot him since the Yemeni boy did not want money to save the live of his father’s killer.  Anyway,  I just found this interesting.

Here is a picture of the current team.  Me, Börkur and Lisa Dobson.  More pictures on http://www.flickr.com/photos/lisadobson/ under Qatar.  And BTW Gunnar, Lisa knows you.  She said she sat next to you at some conference, probably OUG UK, “blond, talks a lot, mostly nonsense” to quote her.  “Yep, that figures” was my answer.

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Benjamín Sigursteinsson

  • Experience: 16 years
  • Speciality: Oracle; SQL Server; Business Intelligence