Conference WRAP

First things first:

I HAVE MY BAG :)

It arrived from Paris at 6am this morning. I was totally exhausted by the end of the day yesterday (as you can probably imagine, since I wrote in the morning from the i-park with a LONG day ahead of me and already a lot of headaches by 8:30am) and I fell asleep at 8pm and slept through the night until 6am :)

Anyway, I got my bag and was so excited to have my own clothes again that I had them send me an iron and ironing board and I quickly put together three outfits (even though most of the day I'd be wearing a suit, you can be damn sure I was going to work in as many outfit changes as possible -- I mean I only have 24hrs to show everyone that what I looked like the past 2 days is NOT the normal me).

The conference ended kind of how it began, which is to say grand but a little lacking in substance. I'll get more into the content in another entry, probably when I'm back in NYC.

After the closing ceremonies, where the Sheikha (basically the Queen of Qatar) announced the creation of a new human rights body (I found something odd about a stunning woman dripping in diamonds talking about the need to have democracy and human rights in a country where those diamonds were basically had on Asian slave labour...but I still like her), I finally got to start feeling like I was experiencing Doha.

I went to the gym, where (I need to get a photo!) the treadmills are 100% computerized...like it's just a flatscreen tv panel where you push all the buttons, create your workout program, track your progress, AND select from all the satellite tv channels. It's amazing lol

After the gym, and outfit change #3 lol, I had them give me a car to take me to the National History Museum (they were basically stunned that someone wanted to go somewhere other than the airport or another hotel, and demoted me to the third tier car which is something gross and American -- this AM when getting my bag I had the top of the line Jaguar which actually made the already-enormous tricked-out Mercedes from yesterday look like an auto-rickshaw), which is totally not as great as Lonely Planet makes it out to be, but was still interesting. I didn't want the driver to sit in the sun in the parking lot, so I had him come in with me, and we had a nice time talking. As is the system here, if you are brown and South Asian then you are used for really shitty tasks (anything that involved manual labour), and if you are light and Southeast Asian then you are used for slightly less shitty tasks (talking to people -- since the Gulfis themselves can't speak English to all the foreigners they have here). Drivers occupy a weird inbetween space, because it's not a customer service job, but it's not labour either. What I've now seen is that if you are driving a Mercedes or a Jaguar then you're Southeast Asian, and if you're driving the crappy thing I was in this afternoon you're South Asian. My driver was a really nice guy from Kerala (South India) and we had lots of fun joking about how the museum (an old palace...supposedly) totally sucked compared to the Taj Mahal, and how Qatar didn't even have its own currency before and had to use Indian rupees (true).

After the museum I went to the area with all the souqs (which, in case you're envisioning some kind of open air market in the middle of Morocco, basically means "mall" these days, so it's like there is the mobile phone souq, and the computer souq, and they're indoors and air conditioned lol), because I heard there was another national heritage museum there, but we couldn't find it.

I went back to the hotel and then went down to the lagoon and park area and explored that a bit, getting more photos of the hotel than were really necessary (it's both ugly and fascinating -- this pyramid that takes on totally different triangular shapes from ever angle), went back upstairs to put on outfit #4, and then came here to the corniche again to enjoy the free wireless of the "i-park."

It's a little gross out here, though, because bugs are attracted to my monitor (not so many that I'm truly freaked-out, though, so you know it's not THAT bad), so I'm going to head back, but I wanted everyone to know that I'm clothed, happy, and more or less ready to go back to NYC.

I'm honestly not looking forward to the next few days at all, because I will have a social obligation every day until work starts, and you all know how much I hate that. PLUS it's the French Open, which just makes me even more acutely aware of the "me time" that I wish I could have but can't. It's not like anything I have to do is so miserable (Curie's gf's birthday party, a wedding of an old friend, helping Desi move), but it's more like having everything totally back to back, during a time where I'm really in need of just having unstructured and uncommitted me time, is kind of...super sucky.

Shakira wants me to extend my ticket and stay with her to enjoy the country with her semi-royal semi-lover, and I think that everyone in NYC would understand if I wanted to stay, but I feel like that just replaces one set of obligations with another, and I feel like she has too many balls in the air right now in Doha (pun intended) to really make spending a few extra days here worth it, as I don't think we would really have that many opportunities to connect one on one.

Ok I'm off to dinner :)

VC