BONUS ROUND: Qatar

So my surprise was that flying with Qatar Airways back to New York, I couldn’t reduce my layover in Qatar to less than 21 hours. Thus, I qualified for a free hotel stay in Doha complete with complimentary transport, meal vouchers, and a visa into the country, giving me a day and night to explore the city.

I got into Doha at about 11am local time. If you are unfamiliar, Qatar is a small peninsular country in the Persian Gulf next to Saudi Arabia, the capital city is Doha, and it’s currently booming. Although the city’s newly constructed skyline is gorgeous, I was frankly unimpressed with Doha and the country in general for a variety of reasons.

To begin, there is simply nothing to do in the city. In a way it was perfect for me because I didn’t have a whole ton of time in the country to begin with, but believe it or not it was actually difficult to find things to see and do to fill this time. The most notable attractions in the city are shopping malls for the newly rich Qataris to blow their money on coveted designer brands. There is the ‘traditional’ Souq (market) Waqif which was little more than a tourist trap, the Corniche walkway that follows the bay and offers views of downtown, and the I.M. Pei designed Museum of Islamic Art, which offers more appeal outside than in. And that’s it. The city really doesn’t have any cultural appeal because most of the people you encounter are Filipinos and Indians imported to do the Qataris' dirty work- I saw very few actual Qataris. On that note, historical sites are almost completely absent; the ones that do exist are from the early 20^th century and either not terribly significant, or rebuilt/restored.

Furthermore, the heat makes it really unbearable to walk around between about 10am and 3pm. An obvious hindrance, the fact that I was prepared for it doesn’t make it any less unpleasant. Doha actually made Yangon feel quite temperate and pleasant. The heat was made all the more frustrating by the fact that the residents of Qatar are absolutely terrible at giving directions. Ask where something is and be prepared to receive vague answer after vague answer until you are hopelessly lost. I encountered this problem when trying to find a currency exchange, and I ended up spending no money in the country simply because I was never successfully directed to one. When I finally stumbled across one while walking around the Souqs after nightfall, they took so long to serve me that I finally just told them to shove off and left.

As I mentioned before, the one good thing about the city is its skyline, and after finding a grassy hill on the edge of the bay opposite downtown, I laid there for a couple of hours taking pictures and enjoying the sunset. By this time the air had cooled off and it was a perfectly nice way to spend an evening stuck midway between Yangon and New York. Additionally, the Qataris really know how to light up their city at night, which I found out later on from the roof of my hotel.

If Qatar seeks to draw more tourists to help fill their abysmal hotel occupancy rate, they should really come up with some more things for those tourists to do. That being said free is free and I’m not complaining. I caught my flight to New York yesterday morning and was back in Providence late last night, jetlagged, phone and laptop batteries depleted, and ready to crash.