The second and last day off since October 20. From now on it is work straight on through Thursday and my plane will leave Doha at 2 am Friday morning. Looking forward to meeting my wife and daughter in London. Anyway, today was great. I slept in the first time since I got here and then went to the mall with Börkur to withdraw money (yes, in Qatar you go to the mall to withdraw money). My creditcard got rejected again which was slightly serious since I am running out of money. I called VISA using Skype since my cell doesn‘t work here and found out that I should have used an ATM that can read the chip on my card. So for those that are travelling and have a card that gets rejected, try another ATM.
Yesterday was interesting. Lisa left us but before going the 3 of us and Helmut went to the market here. It is an interesting place, looks old and „markety“ but is in fact all new, built as a market. I managed to buy some stuff there, but not much. This is, as many other markets, full of crappy stuff. Here, the segregation between men and women became kind of obvious. You never see men and women hold hands or show affection. Howevere, you sometimes see men holding hands which freaks us westerners out, but this is a perfectly normal thing here, you don‘t need to be gay for this but it probably makes it easier. In the market there was a band playing and a lot of people sitting around and some of the guys singing along. Suddenly a few of the man get up and start dancing. After a while there were 15-20 men dancing together wearing the the traditional robes, dresses or long shirts (whatever you want to call it). This was a little too much for my manhood so off we went and had a nice Indian dinner for a fraction of the price it costs us to eat at the hotels we are forced to eat at every night since there is absolutely nothing but construction sites around the hotel where we are staying.
Speaking of hotels. Our hotel does not have an alcohol license. That means that if we want a beer with our meal, which is great after a 12 hour day, we have been forced to walk over to the Sheraton which is about 15 minutes walk away. Yesterday, we found out that the hotel right opposite ours – The Four Seasons - that has a license. What joy! What happiness! Börkur and I had a couple last night and paid more than Icelandic prices for the beer. Btw, Qataris are not allowed to buy beer. It is simply illegal. Sucks if you're not a muslim :-(
Today we went to the desert again to drive those quad-bikes. Börkur and I got bigger ones this time or a 250 cc (last time it was only 160 cc). What a difference! The conditions were a little worse this time since it was windy and we had the sand blowing in our faces. It looks like the rainy season is coming up and I sincerely hope that I will see some rain here. I just want to see what it is like in the desert when it rains. But what fun this is! Great stuff.
One the way back Helmut had to fill up the car. The gas is 0.8 Riyals/liter or around 13-14 ISK. The total production of Qatar per day is around of 900.000 barrels. Multiply that by 96 USD 81.000.000 (5 billion ISK). The Exxons of the world get a „fair“ share of that though. This is 28.836 million USD a year (29 billion)! The total budget of the Icelandic state last year was around 5 billion USD. Oil accounts for around 70% of their GDP. The numbers I am naming here are just figures that I pick up from people talking, not official ones so don‘t quote me on this!
Anyway, a good day.