I woke up 5:30am this day, wide awake! So i sat out on the balcony for a bit, watching the sunrise
This is a photo of the view from my room right at 5:30 am. It was a little windy, i suppose that's from being on the 8th floor.
This is a view from my room at about 6am
and this is the view just after 6am. it got bright pretty quick! I didn't stay up until the sun actually came up, i just went back to bed :)
Got up at noon, when mere came to let me know breakfast (lunch really) was ready, and then duncan came right after to tell me the same thing. both of duncan's parents were already at work, so it was just us.
so the plans for the day was to go to the mall cuz mere needed to get new clothes for her new job sunday, and i wanted to check it out too. also, i wanted to stock up on junk food, as i will be studying for most of my stay, by the pool of course, so i needed brain food: chips and popcorn!!
after the mall, we had planned to go to the Museum of Islamic Arts, but we ended up spending 4 hours at the mall!! which is what i like....but man, duncan was a trooper! we went to Landmark mall, which isn't so far from the apartment, maybe a 10min drive, but it's a bit of a walk. i may check it out one day. walking is scary tho...
anwyay, the mall had almost everything. we went to almost every store. apparently, the mall has had 3 expansions in the past year and a half, so most stores were 1 yr old. Lacoste just recently opened there, we went to Zara, Mango, H&M (they had a buy 2 get one free sale! wow!), we went to a chocolate store that had pretty expensive chocolates, about $2 a piece! we got a box of 8 for our turkey dinner party that night.
(pic of Landmark Mall)
(the Nine West...Sale!)
Also, Duncan told me that Virgin just moved in, which was the est thing since sliced bread about 3 months ago!
they had so many cute bakeries too, we saw a place called Opera, which had the most amazing cakes (we bought a chocolate chocolate cake for the dinner) and also mini cakes!! Duncan and his parents explained that since alcohol and cigars weren't customary to bring to someone's house who's hosting a a party or dinner party, sweets were the alternative.
Apparently, Qatar has the most diabetic per capita in the world....when i thought of it, it made sense. You have to hve a license to buy alcohol, and you cannot have alcohol in your car unless you're going from the liquor store straight home. also, many devout muslims don't drink alcohol anyway. so chocolates and sweets are the norm.
Wow, so i got a dress, a tshirt, a long cardigan that doesn't actually do up, mere and i got bras part of a 2 for 140 riyals sale (and duncan wasn't allowed into the store, cuz mere said so :)
but man, we went buckwild at Carrefour, Doha's version of Walmart. You can get practically anything there. the thing is, most of the food is imported, from europe, lebanon, and saudi. so you didn't really see the same brands here as you would at home. duh i suppose...
well, i wanted to make poutine!! so we found mccain fries (yum yum), shredded mozzarella, which ranged from 7.5riyals to 30 riyals, depending on the brand. you need to be careful and not grab the wrong bag, cuz depending where it came from it could be twice as much! the only thing missing was gravy....we scoured the entire store, the 3 of us, and we couldn't find gravy. the closest thing was meat gravy, which is not as thick as gravy for fries....more liquidy. but we got it anyway. i'll let u know how it turns out....
by the time we were done, it was almost 5pm, so it was time to go home and get ready for dinner, we had to leave by 6pm.
so we went to the education city, which is this huge community made up of 6 universities (branches of the original US schools...i can't think of the names, i'll let u know later), hospitals, and also the new science centre, which microsoft and virgin is a part of (the opening is march 18th i think, ad Bill Gates and Richard Branson will be there). It's called Qatar Science and Technology Pavillion, i think. all i remember is that the acronym is QSTP, which reminds me of Quebec Sales tax, but noone really got the joke...i suppose it's not much of a joke!
duncan's mom works at education city, and we were going to one of her collegue's flat, who's originally from New York. So we had a turkey dinner which was a late "new year's dinner". It was yummy. But i just can't hold my alcohol here, i had one corona, and one glass of white wine, and then i was out....i was falling asleep. i feel like a douche, where duncan and mere are like, oh we have to get Anny home!!
Well so after a power nap in the car on the way home, we went out to the Four Seasons lounge for drinks to celebrate mere's new job...it was an amazing place, there was a pianist there and we were in couches...it was really cool. I'll put up the pics from that night later...it's still on my camera!!
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