A nighttime walk

On Saturday (our first day in Qatar) we went to the food court (at the mall! in our basement!) to find some dinner. We also found a yellow submarine playground, which Phoebe rather enjoyed.

On Sunday we made spaghetti for dinner in our very own hotel room/apartment and then in a fit of...insanity (?)...took the kids out for an evening stroll to enjoy the, uh, cooler (?) evening air by the corniche. 

Things are very hot during the day. My glasses immediately fog up whenever I step outside—day or night. 

(this picture is from Saturday morning)

But things really do cool down at night...a bit. 

On this particular evening, around 9:00 PM it was around 98°F (36°C) with a feels-like temperature of 100°F (37°C) and we walked down to the corniche, as I mentioned. It was a sweaty, sweaty walk.

The traffic here really isn't bad at all, and they even have controlled crosswalks at some intersections where you can truly believe you have the right of way as a pedestrian (very different from our experience in Cairo). The crosswalk signs show a man in a thobe:

 

Something that is different for our children is that when the crosswalk is not controlled, it is the responsibility of the pedestrian to (1) make sure the way is clear and (2) get out of the way as quickly as possible because cars are unlikely to slow down...much. You really have to commit to crossing—no dilly-dallying allowed! 

Zoë once hesitated on a crosswalk because she had followed Andrew across (he had said to go, so she was right to follow), but then I decided that Phoebe-the-slowpoke and I wouldn't make it before the next car and Zoë found herself torn between waiting for me and following her father. 

But that is not a luxury one has on the crosswalk!

"Zo, go!" I barked.

She hurriedly finished crossing and all was well (but she was a little bit sulky after that). 

Here are a few of the kids standing in front of the hand statue:

There is a matching statue in Rwanda. According to the afore-linked-to article (and this article, both crediting the sculptor Ahmed Albahrani), the hand "represents transparency and the vision of the Emir of Qatar towards fighting corruption and each part of the steel masterpiece was engineered in a way to represent every country of the world." 

The driver who took us fro the airport to our hotel told us that posture of the hand is modeled off of the emir's own wave (I don't know for certain whether that is true).

Apparently, though, there is also a hand statue in Vienna at the UN (according to this and this), though I can't seem to find an actual photo of the sculpture in Vienna. But wouldn't it be cool to have Patrick find it and take a picture with it? 

(I thinks so.)

Getting to the corniche was a little tricky. We know there is a walking path along the corniche somewhere, but we didn't find said path. Still, we found a little area in a park that opened up to the water. The kids were delighted to see that the lawn was full of friendly stray cats (we probably saw about 10 cats, all of whom were happy to get a good little scritch).

We are loving our view of the city. The sky is perpetually hazy—it's humid, it's sandy, it's full of emissions—and there's so much light pollution that I'm not sure we'd be able to see the stars even if the sky was clear. But Phoebe was dazzled by the skyline. On our way to the hotel from the airport she said, "Wow! The stars in Doha are so many different colours!"

She wasn't looking at stars through the car window, but a twinkling display on some building or other. There are many twinkling displays to see. And it's very fun to look out our window at the buildings—we are so high up that we look right out at the aviation obstruction lighting on our surrounding buildings, constantly flashing red. 

On our walk we also found this big...blue...thing:

It's an inflatable statue. And it is furry. And I had no idea why it's there, sitting on the outside of the mall by our hotel. But the kids found it delightful...

...especially Phoebe! Here she is trying to give it a hug while exclaiming, "It's too big to hug! It's too big to hug!"

Yesterday we returned to the mall (for our Arabic word search) and found the same character on a smaller scale. 

Come to find out, they are part of Qatar's Hala Summer tourism campaign (see here and here and here), hala meaning 'welcome' or 'hello' (a common abbreviation of ahlan wa sahlan in the Gulf).

There's also this pink and yellow character:

Back to our late night stroll, Phoebe was also ecstatic to point out all the dates in the trees (they're bagged to protect them from bugs and birds and things like that):

We returned to our hotel room around 10:00 pm absolutely drenched with sweat, so we didn't get to bed until quite late since everyone needed to shower off. 

Here are a couple more pictures of Alexander and Phoebe playing on the yellow submarine playground in the mall while we were doing our Arabic word search yesterday:

Hopefully we'll be able to locate some other public air-conditioned spaces for the kids to play before the they grow tired of the submarine.