A Weekend by the Inland Sea, and more!



The end of next week will mark the 1st full month that I have been blessed to spend in Qatar. It amazes me what has happened over that short time period. For example, just over the past week:

• Caleb has grown to be such a big boy! He's on the verge of crawling and teething, we think!
• I had some hilarious moments at a mother's Infant Music Class that Caleb attends just down the road. I'll include pictures one day, walla (I promise).
• Darren took me to the Women's Tennis Association Semi-Finals in downtown Doha(!). Beau, I thought of you! Here are some pics:

  

  You may notice that the advertisements for the women's tennis cut off modestly at the waist.

   

  

  These next pictures are our veiw from within the tennis stadium from left to right.
  In the far left of this picture, you can see the two "ZigZag Towers"

  



Downtown District, near the Corniche.






The Qatar Central Post Office in the forground; Far end of the bay in the background.

• I began a volunteer position with early school-age children, which refreshes my soul!
• The Conleys + Auntie Leona attended the Doha Tribecca Film Festival for a showing of "Just Like Us" [I highly recommend it!]. Here's more info: http://www.traileraddict.com/trailer/just-like-us/trailer
• My friends Matthias, Miguel & Kahla, and Joel travelled through the Desert to the Inland Sea, where we spent a glorious Friday afternoon & evening. We even caught a glimpse of Saudi Arabia!

In particular, the experience of travelling out to the beach/desert is one that I wish I could literally share with each of you. I’ll try to paint you a picture with words, but I warn you that I can do no justice to it here. Nonetheless:

Unconscious to how much planning and care went into such a trip, I gratefully accepted when my friend proposed a college-age crowd trip to the beach. Later I hear it was a trip to the desert... were we going to be driving up sand dunes or swimming in them? I wasn’t sure but was excited to find out! We started the adventure with lunch at an American restaurant in Doha (Seriously, I eat more American food than Qatari food in Doha, but it makes me so happy to see the Texans enjoying homestyle grub! Us blondies don’t exactly blend in all the time, so the ‘normalness’ of seeing a small crowd gathered around mashed potatoes and gravy strangely warms my heart.) Anyways, after lunch most of the Texas A&Mers actually had to split to fulfill some volunteering or academic commitments... we missed them!). So our reduced group zipped through the city to meet up with a family that was new to me (but I now feel so blessed to know), who own a land rover [note: land rovers are imperative to the facilitation of an Inland Sea day]. This family is originally from Mexico City, and had taken the time to prepare a full beach BBQ spread for us all, complete with sweet roasted bananas for dessert!! We quickly changed out of our Church clothes and into ‘bathing suit/adventure’ gear, land oaded up the land rover with coal, ice, the BBQ, towels, drinks, a soccer ball, a small jambe and of course ourselves. Anticipation mounting, we headed South (keep in mind, up until this point, Leona’s limited working-knowledge of Doha geography has included the downtown bay (around which the major downtown hotels, offices, corniche, and Islamic Museum of Art find their homes), and the general assumption that if you drive south in Qatar, you will hit Saudi Arabia. Since I am neither married nor accompanied by my father, visiting Saudi for a beach dip was out of the question. So, happily unaware of the end goal, I settled back to enjoy the wild camels roaming along the highway and the seemingly out-of-nowhere petrol (gas) stations where we filled up before our flight out of civilization. [Another side note: we can fill up a small gas tank for about 50 riel, which generously equates to about 15$ Canadian... isn’t that disgustingly fabulous!]. I suppose it helps that a large scale Qatar ‘chemical valley’ was located just a few more miles down the road.

About 45 minutes outside of Doha we stopped at a sort of unmarked parking lot where the men popped out of the car to release air from our tires. After rearranging the desert-savvy passengers to the front seats of the land rover, we were off. By off, I mean to say that we suddenly took a ‘right’ directly up and over a 50 foot sand dune. This is when the fun really began. For about an hour we flew up, down, around and through one of the most breathtaking environments I have visited yet in life – pure desert. We were indeed sand duning. It has got to be one of the most worthwhile adrenaline rushes available in Qatar. At one point, my sister called on my cell phone to check in on how/where we were: I peeked out my window to the 40 foot drop that our vehicle was skidding around the ridge of and squeaked, “I have no idea, but I think we’re fine”. Reversing, speeding up, cresting over sand rims with little idea of what lay on the other side, a friend of mine in the front seat nonchalantly guided us through the maze of sand (there are no markers, it is just sand) until we reach a clearing. Here is a very, *very* mild version of the first sets of dunes http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpARjmEB7Uk&NR=1.

“If you look to your left you will see flamingos... yes. There they are.”

“FLAMINGOS!!! In their natural habitat?” I squealed.

“Well, their habitat changes of course,” he added... pointing out that there was a new sand dune blocking the pathway around the flamingos’ pond of rest. The desert is apparently always changing.  Haha! Talk about spontaneous!

After about another half hour we reached... (do do do doo!!) the end of Doha... the Inland Sea! I am not sure that I have seen an equal to it. All of the tire-tracked desert sand dunes suddenly roll into a narrow strait of clear, widely-currented salt water. In the near distance, on the opposing side of the strait, a magnificent view of Saudi’s (rocky?) mountain ridge extends for a good couple of miles. If seeing camels and flamingos in the wild was not enough, seeing Saudi was too surreal. We arrived at this location at around 4pm – a beautiful time of day in Qatari October/November (temperature wise), and had about an hour of daylight left to spare. We selected a piece of beach void of people, scouted out the dunes and valleys that would make for the best ‘diving board platforms’ and then waltzed right into the 30 degree Celsius water. The current was incredibly strong, and the Sea itself exceptionally deep (compared to dear Lake Huron; I was treading water 5 feet from shore!). I thought of my parents and how much they would love to be at that beach (the Saudi Mountains give the whole thing a ‘Lawrence of Arabia’-type feel, and the salt content in the sea is so high that it wasn’t difficult to imagine we were floating in the notorious Dead Sea). After about 45 minutes of this delight (and some sea snail catching with my new child-friend David!), we watched the sun set behind a sand dune on land. Then, as if on cue, I felt a sharp sting on my right arm and looked down to see a billowy, faint pink jellyfish loosen and swim off. Yes indeed! I was stung by a jellyfish in the Inland Sea. One by one, each person in our group excepting an Indian friend (I was definitely skin jealous... in fact, we used him as a human shield!) was stung by a jelly! In the very dark a few hours later we would discover that we had essentially been swimming in a current of jellyfish, brought about by seasonal climate changes. The guys actually caught one and gave it to me as a pet (we named it Paul in honour of the recently deceased German football amulet... Paul has since passed and I am quite sorry for removing him from his original home).

After swimming, the dear family who hosted our trip broke out the burgers, hot chillies and (beef) bacon! Oh it was delicious. We kicked around the soccer ball as the stars quietly covered the night sky. Then it was finally time for the boys to reveal a desert surprise they had kept from us all day - they call it magic and it is a truly beautiful phenomenon. It was so special. I am actually going to hold that memory close without revealing it to “y’all”. Then we found spots to lay down on the sand and waited patiently for shooting stars to make their treks across the universe. Out came the jambe, and we softly sang a few worship songs together. It was such a humbling experience of completeness and unity, I remember thinking: “I don’t want to live for something other than this; I don’t ever want to be more presumptuous or assuming than I feel in this moment.”

We packed up and began the trip home fairly late (which is really not that late according to Qatari time). We became stuck in the sand twice, which was super fun with all the digging, pushing and collaborating that entailed. At one point a group of cruisers filled with French-speakers suddenly appeared to generously pull us out of a spot. English, French, and Spanish phrases were floating around amidst the horsepower, and it was a bon journey for sure (Thanks to Laura Flick for keeping la langue Francaise on my radar for the past couple of years through her Facebook statuses)!

Not to be outdone, when we reached Doha at midnight, we woke up little David for a PLANNED final stop at a fresh juice joint. 1^st of all, I am friends with a family of middle-school age children who stop for snacks in the middle of the night simply because they are delicious. That is how cool I want to be at 35/40! 2^nd of all, juice bars in Qatar (a country where alcohol is strongly regulated) are FABULOUS! We sampled avocado-mango, carrot-cocktail, kiwi puree, fresh lemonade, some whopper of fruit parfait, frosted milkshakes... you name it, and they make it! I think Canada could do well to follow their model for the end that sweet, decorative, fresh, inexpensive, and nutritiously-strong cocktails are deeply imbibed upon. It goes beyond a Booster Juice experience. It is just so good! [I also learned that nana is the Arabic word for mint. Huh, eh?]

At 2am I crawled into bed back in our happy little compound with a heart just swimming with memories I hope to never forget. I will post a few photos of the trip as I get them. Oh, you will just fall in love with the Middle East when you see it all! It’s impossible not to!