Sun and sand

I can't write much about Denmark today because I spent the last week in the Middle East (my first visit). I was in Qatar for three days followed by two days in Oman. In Qatar (besides working) we attended the Asian Games being held in Doha. We also went to a shopping mall in search of dinner. After searching high and low we settled for Applebee's. It was a bit strange - it could have been Kansas City. Qatar is certainly open to products and franchises from the U.S. (Burger King, McDonalds, Pizza Hut, KFC, Starbucks and so on).

The Asian Games were lots of fun. I read that they're trying to get the 2016 Olympics, so this was a bit of a test run. Turns out that they didn't have enough hotel rooms, so they couldn't accept lots of visitors from outside. That's okay, because plenty of outside visitors are already in the country doing virtually all of the work in Qatar (mostly from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Phillipines). At the games we saw badminton where the Chinese won the woman's gold medal.

The other event we saw was Kabbadi. This was a bizarre game combining the finer points of tag and tackle (American) football on a tennis court. Two teams of seven take turns sending a player to the opposing side where he tags an opponent and tries to return to his side while being tackled all in a single breath. China is clearly getting geared up for the 2008 Olympics, getting more gold medals than the rest of the countries combined.

The most striking thing about Qatar is the amount of construction that is underway. It has already in the span of six years built more office towers than there were in downtown Houston, and there are more than 20 tower cranes in operation. A funny thing was that they almost invariably built the office towers in twos. "Why build one when you can build two" seems to be the motto. I'd like to go back in five years to see how it has changed.
Oman was a nice place. We spent most of our time in the mountains where it could sometimes look like west Texas, except for the camels. One night we had free time to explore Nizwa where we saw the restored wall around the old town along with various shops. The weather was nice, 25C/77F and sunny, a big change from here. Both countries were very safe. Gas prices were 50 cents/gallon in Qatar and 70 cents/gallon in Oman (if I did all of my conversions correctly). Most everyone in Qatar drove large SUV's. Not unlike Houston a few years ago.