Miriam and I went for a walk together last night. We were going to stay in the mall and do a few casual laps, but the weather outside was relatively decent, so we headed outdoors instead. Our goal was to find the metro entrance nearest to the tornado tower (and we did, but its location surprised us since the tunnel didn't go under any roads or anything—it just goes under the plaza, which you can just...walk across...so maybe it just exists for, like, the heat or something...I don't know).
Here's Miriam with one of the Hala Summer guys:
Doha has a lot of public art installations. This was done, in part, to foster a certain vibe across the city leading up to the World Cup in 2022—with "the nation’s public spaces...being transformed into a vast outdoor art museum experience." As Miriam, pointed out, a lot of the public art displays are actually indoors (inside malls and metro stations, for example), but given Doha's climate, these indoor public spaces practically count as being outdoors since the out-of-doors can feel rather impossible to access for much of the year.
There's actually a list of public art installations, so we'll have to pick some interesting-looking ones and go find them! Zephyr looks interesting! And the playground at Umbrella Park is actually an art installation as well!
Anyway, Miriam and I walked towards the Sheraton from our hotel, where we found another public art installation, this time by Martin Creed. It's called "Work No. 1361," though I do not understand the significance of the numbering system, if any, since his first project of this nature was "Work No. 203."
Essentially, he installs neon lettering spelling out the words, "EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE ALRIGHT" in some conspicuous place—in the case, right outside the Sheraton. The letters are in white neon, but the building facade is illuminated in many different colours (I caught it when it was blue, but it changes colour).
I know it's supposed to make people feel hopeful, but thanks to Project Hail Mary (the movie, not the book, since the scene I will describe isn't in the book) and perhaps also to Harry Styles (words I never thought I'd write), it actually made me feel melancholy instead. In the movie, Eva Stratt sings Sign of the Times in a karaoke event shortly before the astronauts are sent on their mission and...it's quite an emotional scene:
Just stop your crying
Have the time of your life
Breaking through the atmosphere
And things are pretty good from here
Remember everything will be alright
We can meet again somewhere
Somewhere far away from here
I suppose it's not precisely the same wording in the art installation, but that's okay. It's just what it made me think of.
We found a playground at the far end of the exhibition center (which is next to our hotel), but unfortunately the lights aren't on so it feels a little out of bounds...and is too hot to play at during the day...so I am not sure we'll be able to use this playground, unfortunately.
I also stopped to take a picture of this decrepit chair that was sitting near a mechanical room, which seemed to be a piece of the deep, dark underbelly of Doha...
...and a very enthusiastic kitten popped out from behind a crevice and started asking for attention. Clearly this chair belongs to the kitten (the paper fan kind of gives it away).
A lot of things are unbelievably new and shiny here in Doha, so it was fun to find a piece of the underbelly...even though it turned out that this particular bit of underbelly was really just...a kindness left out for fluffy kittens.
*****
I took this picture of Le Meridien to show the amount of care graphic designers go to to create recognizable brands in both English and Arabic. I could probably do a series on this—it's just so interesting to me.
The hotel is Le Meridien, wit the Le in a script font. On the Arabic side of things the entire hotel name is simply transliterated into Arabic, but they styled the laam to kind of match the scripted L in English and the waw matches the e so it's kind of mirrored: Le | لو. Now, E is typically not equated with waw (which is more like an O or W), but because "le" is French, the waw makes sense here and helps Arabic speakers approximate the French "le" when saying the name of the hotel (not that Arabic speakers need help with French pronunciation...I just thought it was an interesting choice...also, I will mention that reading "the" transliterated (sometimes as ثي (thee) and sometimes as ثو (thuh)) is actually really hard for me and it takes me a minute to understand what exactly is happening).
So, that was our evening walk.
It was a lovely walk out towards the corniche...and then we realized that we still had to turn around and walk all the way back to our hotel. By this time we were starting to feel the heat, but that's okay—we made it!
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