So Friday morning I woke up at 2:45am, ate my sohour, and went back to sleep until . . . noon.
What the heck? Noon?! Not sure how that happened, I can’t say I was particularly tired or something, and I did have a nap Thursday afternoon. Maybe my body is more tired than I thought from fasting. Anyway I jumped out of bed and busied myself with things at home during the afternoon until iftar. Big shock – I wasn’t tired at all during the day, that’s what sleeping until noon will do for you, but I was certainly getting really hungry by about 3pm.
I kept iftar small, some dates, olives, bread and cheese, I was going out to dinner that evening so didn’t need to stuff myself during iftar. Dinner was at around 11:00 because we were waiting for a friend to finish the tarawih prayer (a series of extra prayers and Qur’an reading held during each night of Ramadan). http://islam.about.com/cs/ramadan/a/taraweeh.htm
During Ramadan such late hours is standard, many businesses will open at 8pm until midnight or 1am, and the restaurant manager told me the restaurant would be open until 1:30, “but we will see how it goes, if it’s still busy maybe we’ll close later.” Case in point I was there early, around 10:00, chatting with a friend and the restaurant didn’t even start getting busy until 10:30.
At dinner I did reflect a bit on just how many people were leaving Qatar in the next while. I was eating dinner with someone who would be leaving in a month, three co-workers have left in the last month, and at the function on Thursday I met many people who were leaving the country or in one case managed to switch jobs and stay as the company they were working for packed up and left. While not everyone was in the oil & gas sector a lot of layoffs are happening now due to the low oil prices and as the months go on it’ll impact other industries as well. I won’t see the full impact of the job losses until September though when the schools are open at which point we’ll see how bad (or good) the traffic is.
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