Qatari Beauty Contest

Equal Bottom

Middle eastern men in Traditional dress, yes i know that this country is hot and sunny but the need for a cloth on your head when living in a nice air conditioned house and office has gone a long time ago, plus the fact that wearing a dress is not cool it looks like if they moved more than the speed of a slug they would trip up anyway, but i doubt that will ever happen ever.

Equal Bottom

Strange Indian Men, usually found staring at any women at all even the ones in total black uniforms

Equal Bottom

Young Qatari Guys, mostly because they shave their heads and have crazy arabian nights facial hair and then think this makes them good dancers and be attractive to the opposite sex, and the girls are not interested in his bank account at all, honestly

Equal Bottom

Old Indian Men, because they are from a different planet i think, with the ability to wear any item of clothing on their heads, including blankets, and probably dead cats

Equal Bottom

Old European Men, they may be old and fat and have no taste in clothes but they think this gives them the ability to dance in a club and be attractive to the opposite sex, and the girls are not interested in his bank account at all, honestly

Absolute Equal Bottom

Young Desperate Indian Men, they can do the most ridiculous things to try and attract a girl when at a club, like dancing as if they have been given hallucinagenic drugs and then given 12,000 volts up the ass and then look round as though a poor girl from the Philipines is going to look twice at him, and she really isn't interested in his bank account as they know they haven't got one and that they had to spend the entire weeks pay to get into the club in the first place

Global Cooling in the Desert

I am still in shock and denial that the desert of the middle east can be cold and miserable and rainy and windy, this is not possible, I really did bring the correct clothing like short sleeved shirts and no sweater, the cold that i am feeling as the wind erodes my blue lips with the sand that it is carrying, is only a figment of my imagination. The torrential thunderstorms that leave gigantic roadside pools of water are just a mirage and are non-existent. The fog that drifts across the incredibly flat landscape was just some dream i had as i leave my hotel before 6 everyday.
Can all this be real, this is the middle east, famed for having a dry blistering hot climate and i am feeling like i am back in the UK suffering crappy weather, this is worse than being back at school as i didn't used to get up until 7.30am then.
The rumour being put about by the meteorologists is it is the worst winter since 1964, the whole region is suffering, people in India are freezing to death as the winds have been roaring down from Siberia and chilling them to well below zero, and as many destitute people in India sleep in a few rags and eat nothing but garbage found on the roadside they will suffer more than most. But I am not enjoying this exposure to real weather, I am a reptile and need sunshine and blistering hot weather to survive, i need to roast my ass in a sequined thong on the beach or i will shrivel up like an old Mexican tortilla, this is the nature of a white boy from northern Europe who now lives in the tropics, i cannot deal with crappy weather anymore and will stamp about the office until i get fired from the project, what is the world coming to when a pampered engineer is expected to tolerate miserable weather for large amounts of dollars, it is just totally unacceptable, i will write to the queen and complain.

Friday Prayer, "LET ME GO HOME"

Well i am about done with Qatar, my only day off and it was cold cloudy miserable and sprinkling with rain. This has to be one of the worst countries in the world. I cannot see how there is one redeeming feature about qatar to keep anyone here. I have tried to get a decent financial offer from them and the money is positively piss poor. They seem to think that living in the wonderful country of Qatar will compensate for feeling depressed in a desert with shite weather, miserable in winter and blistering in summer. I am quite happy to stay with my present employer getting a change of venue regularly and not having to suffer such a miserable place, The new project which is the worlds biggest LNG train, all the guys live ina camp so they dont even get to stay in a nice hotel room and go shopping for time to time. this is pretty miserable for a working environment, i have asked for work in north africa, it has to be better than this.

Life goes on and I am now planning my trip to Florida as one of my old colleagues is getting married and I have been invited. he is such a nice guy and he is making the huge decision to quit working on the road and become a tax slave in the USA. This is great for him and will give him much happiness and a great home life, I have seriously been thinking about how long i can keep up working this routine, maybe a few more years, perhaps mi should go part time to stretch it out longer and longer, who knows what will come along. I certainly don't want to to be doing this when i am 64

I am also planning my summer house work in spain, i am looking at putting a third floor on the spanish house of mine as at present it doesnt have a view of the mountains and no place to sit in the sun, which is really why anyone would want to live in spain. sunshine and nice views are the stuff of retirement, so i have contacted a builder and a tiler who are going to do it all for me and as they can access the roof of the house from the back garden they willnot disrupt the normal living in the house too much I hope. i am even wanting to build a walled garden up the hillside and even a garage if they can squeeze it in. so it will be fully contained, somewhere to park the car and somewhere to plant a few plant and somewhere to sit in the sun with a view of the mountains. I can almost taste the vino rojo and olives here from the office in qatar, come quickly oh dreamworld.

Latest News From the Desert

I am still in a state of terminal shock at how this place is so different to my expectations. Today it was raining, not much admittedly, just sprinkling and just for about 5 minutes but i never expected to see cloudy miserable skies and cool windy conditions and this has been going on like this for the last 3 week. The terrible state of the driving is something i don't like, the indian drivers here are totally oblivious to anyone else on the road and really do some incredibly stupid stunts. They should all be made to stay in the camps down by the plant and not allowed to drive from Doha, that may sound pretty radical but it isn't a surprise to see the wrecked cars on the streets of Doha in a morning. The funniest thing i saw on my day of last friday was as i was walking passed a wrecked large engined nissan with the front end all stoved in and the rear end pounded and a wheel hanging off was the owner and the brother who had probably wrecked it pulling up and the owner looking at the state of his nice car, he was mortified and with what was a total write off. I wanted to laugh out loud, but he may have shot me or something equally horrible, i didnt want to tempt fate as i was going to the corniche which is the beach front road. As i was walking to the corniche i saw my colleague driving along and he picked me up and we went to a nice indian restaurant for lunch together. we had a nice spicy indian chicken thing and with a mountain of rice and no beer. The lunch was great and i then went on to the corniche, again another thing i am shocked about is you never see any local qataris, only indians and a few philipinos, the indians are all here alone and without a woman so they stare in a very ugly manner and are very irritating even for me to watch them, but they do everything here in Qatar. they really do everything as the qatari's do nothing as far as i can see. The government spread the money about to all the locals and screw the indian labourers with really poor salaries. I am drifting into a sad state of affairs with my working routine, i have to get up now at 5.15am and and get back from site at 7pm, i am feeling worn out with al the sitting about doing nothing and driving to and from work. so when i get back to the hotel i am just crashing out and eating an apple and then showering and sliding into bed for a 9.30pm lights out, this is the only way i am surviving the long day, plus if i was eating another meal at night i would be plonking the weight on, i am gaining weight with only 2 meals a day. The food in the restaurant on site is pretty good with a buffet you can choose anything from for only 18 Rials, which is about 4 Euros.
Life in the plant has just come to a grinding halt. they have some very serious issues with the gas lines coming from the new offshore platform and the lines are freezing up. this has shut the half tyhe plant down and we havent run very much for the entire trip of mine. this must be costing hundreds of millions of dollars. Which really doesnt bother me as it doesnt affect my incoime at all and to be honest i am not sure if i could work in this lifeless dusty hole full time as i had been talking about, it is just too lifeless and a real dusty desert hole.

we will see what comes along in the next couple of weeks while i am here and it also looks like i will be coming back for as second trip. but it is all money in the bank

Just a small update on Qatar

Life is a strange beast with my job, I arrive with my company rushing me here and in the last 2 weeks i have done basically nothing. My companion here is a nice guy, he picks me up at the Ramada Hotel in a morning and we chat and discuss the news and usually have a laugh at someones expense. Anyhow we have a good working relationship but he is a guy living in France but of Algerian origin, nothing wrong with that but one thing he does do that irritates me he puts the radio on and off when he wants, sometimes very loud sometimes very quiet, sometimes some good music sometimes some 'Orrible arabic music from Lebanon, you know the kind, all wailing and twangy tinny mandolin things, and then sometimes as we are in Qatar they read the Koran in English at 6.15am just as we are driving to work, to be truthful, the Koran has some very good things we should all follow, like don't screw your brothers wife, i liked that one, and don't steal from a poor peasant from the desert, don't be a miserable bastard, i liked all those but it goes on for ages and ages and the accent is bad and they have to repeat the phrase, peace be with him after they mention Mohamids name and it is just not me for that time of morning, so that really gets up my nose, him putting up the volume loads and i don't have the authority to touch the radio ever, as he has turned it off after i turned it on and he turned it up after i turned it down so now i don't touch it at all. Another bad irritating thing is that he complains about the quality of the Indians driving here, which is really bad but he does it all the time, complaining about how bad they are and that they were only scratching the balls of the elephant last year and now they are driving in Qatar, this is funny but not all the time we are driving together, and his driving is also appalling and this is giving me a bad neck as the car is all accelerate and then braking hard all the time even at the traffic queues, this makes my head rock back and forth non-stop until i am screaming in pain and with a pounding headache. i have to resort to forcing my head hard into the headrest to stop it bouncing. Another thing is he tells me silly stories about really boring things in the news, again not a bad thing but he repeats himself constantly hour after hour and day after day, i will have to kill him and bury him in the desert.

here is a picture i just want to share with you, will anyone know who anyone was

Observation of the Last Week in Qatar

The traffic in Doha is shocking, lots of very bad Indian drivers

Virtually no Qatari's seen doing anything, a few driving, that is all people seem to do at night is drive around the ring roads and pipping their horns constantly

Not a great deal to do here, probably all the expats just get together and house parties

very sandy

Chaos seems to reign in the plant, probably no-one will take a decision in fear of it being not 100% perfect so may get fired from their cushy well paid job

never see women anywhere, only a few Philipino's in the hotels working and a few expat older women in the supermarkets

cable TV is terrible with loads of Arabic speaking shows so bad as to make me cry

lots of indian food places that are really good and amazingly cheap, full meal and an alcohol free drink for $3

the favourite colour of the cars is white, very boring but must be something to do with the amount of sun they get out here.

millions of little indian guys working on the roads and everywhere, they must be the cheap worker of choice

life could be very boring here if you live in the wrong place and dont have a group of friends to mix with.

close to the far east so great holiday jumping off point for Oz and thailand

Qatar in Winter

Well I am still so shocked by the miserable cold weather that I don't know what to say about it, people are saying they have never known it like this and the LNG plant is having enormous problems because of it, the main gas line into the unit froze and shut everything down, they didn't plan on it being so cold and didn't fit any heaters so they are now suffering. my colleague here is freezing his ass off in his apartment as he doesn't have any sort of heating at all, so he gets up in a morning and has to get into the shower and then try and get dried in his freezing bathroom, I thought we were suffering global warming. I am still talking to folks about getting a job here but any house they offer must have a heating system for the winter, i must put it top of my list, along with fantastic Air conditioning, access to a swimming pool and close to a great shopping mall, i did find out gasoline is very cheap here, about 1 dollar a gallon, i should get a car that has the biggest engine possible, maybe a 6 litre corvette. or the 8 litre Viper, the favourite car here is the 4.5 litre Toyota land cruiser and they try and drive it like a sports car, and all the cars are white nearly, must be something to do with the summer temperatures reaching the high 40's. i wish it was that high now so i can stop complaining about the cold.