Steve's Very First Qatari Post

Hallo loved ones,

It's been two weeks since our late night arrival into Doha Int'l. Our PC should arrive this week (Inshallah) along with the rest of the air shipment. It wasn't supposed to take longer than two weeks, anyway. In the meantime, I'm at one of the local internet cafes near our compound, Al Bustan. BTW, "Inshallah" is "God willing" and its very commonly used here, as in when I ask the maintenance guy when he will fix our leaky kitchen faucet he says in broken english, "We get part one week, inshallah." Meaning, it could be a week, or two, or two hundred. So we live with the drippy sound coming from the kitchen sink. Oh well.

So far Doha is a weird but good life. The expats in the compound are very social, we've been to three parties in two weeks, including the St Patty's day Villa crawl last night. Nice people, mostly from the UK or US, and some europeans sprinkled in. At the end of January we attended a wedding in Yosemite of our friends Sean and Kim (see previous post), and also in attendance was (from Bakersfield) Bryan and his fiancee Casey. Well now we are hanging out with their parents. Everyone seems to be about 15 years older, but we're getting along ok and they're good people.

Our villa is nice, very big but also very oddly constructed. I say that especially due to the electricity quirks. The plugs are 220V british, and require a huge three pronged adaptor. Also, each side-by-side plug has an on/off toggle next to it. They have some interesting ideas about plug placement, for example there are NO plugs in the kitchen except above the countertop, nothing at say, knee level. The upshot is that our ozarka machine is in the ballroom! Guess if we get thirsty dancing the night away it could come in handy.

Got to wrap up this post, but soon we'll have a computer of our very own and we can blog your collective ear off. I know you can't wait.

Love--

Steve