Wandering Around Doha

I spent much of Friday wandering around. The weather is starting to cool off a bit so it's a little more comfortable to be out during the middle of the day.

First, over the summer the Government has been spending a lot of time turning a large amount of empty land near the Corniche into a park. Topsoil, grass seed, and lots and lots of watering is really paying off. Here's a picture I took from the side of the road near my apartment.

No, I'm not on the outskirts of the city in fact I'm more in the middle of it. The Qataris deliberately kept some land empty to turn into parkland. I expected a couple months time it will be open to the public. For now there are security guards (sitting under shady trees) to make sure people don't walk on the grass.


From there I went to see how The Pearl is coming along. The Pearl is a massive luxury development being built on reclaimed land north of the city. Much of the work on the first phase is done and it's now a matter of finishing off the apartment buildings and getting more stores and restaurants around the water. There's a number of restaurants and coffee shops already but there's still a lot of empty store space.

It's going to look fantastic when it's all finished.



Then in the evening I went down to Souq Waqif. The new Fall 2011 line is out in stores:

Awwwwwwwwwwwww, aren't they cute. Falcon shops were doing a brisk trade, every shop had some Qataris in it and a lot of falcons in stock. I saw at least three Qataris walking around outside with falcons on their hands. Because of the heat most the falcon shops are closed for the summer so I think they recently reopened.


I even came across a brand-new building in the Souq. I'll let you read what it is:

The lobby even had perches for falcons! Unfortunately it was closed for the evening. I'll try to get back there sometime and take some more photos.


In the main square they had a concert of traditional Qatari music. I sat down and listened to the band for an hour along with hundreds of Qataris. At times the Qataris were clapping along with the music, and a few would occasionally get up and dance to their favorite songs. I decided to take a quick video of the concert but unfortunately it is too big to load. I'll try to find a way to reduce the resolution to make it smaller.



Pretty active day, time for bed.