Thursday, December 14, 2006
Friday December 15th 2006 - Last day of competition and Closing Ceremony
The photo was taken at the Equestrian Endurance Venue yesterday which is a couple of hours away.
Well I manage yesterday to get 15 of my volunteers to Q-Post which is the Postal service here on Venue. I go one by one with them to have a photo taken of each person with me and a stamp sheet printed out with the photos and a Asian Games background. This is my gift to each one of them. We also do a few group shots with 4-5 people for those who want two photos on the sheets. It's relatively cheap at 15 Riyals per sheet (About $5 Ca or Aus) but it will be a nice souvenir and all of them are just thrilled. I probably have a few more to go through today.
We are still busy in the Work room all day yesterday although I've noticed the number of faxes being sent is decreasing a little everyday. Today there are only two games of Basketball left (the bronze medal match and the gold medal match) from 11am and the football (Soccer) final at 4pm in which Qatar and Iraq are battling for the Gold Medal. This is just before the Closing Ceremony which will start around 7pm. The Football game promisses to be a spectacle and judging by the streets after the victory of Qatar in the match to get to the final, there will be massive celebration if Qatar wins or maybe even if they get Silver.
The medal tally is crazy. China has 315 medals and Qatar comes in 11th position with 30 medals. I come in this morning and Sameera Ibrahim brings me a gift or three. A small bottle of perfume (my third now), another spray bottle of Arabic perfume and an Arabic clay incense burner. She tells me to get charcoal and burn different tradionnal branches. But then Salwa arrives with some of these apparently expensive wodden branches which seem marinated or seasoned as a gift (and I know there is no way I can bring them into Australia but I can't say anything), and she gives me another two lovely Sudanese gifts (as she is from Sudan). By now I need a truck to leave this country and plan to post some things back to Australia on the 18th.
At diner last night I bump into a journalist from Sri Lanka (or possibly somewhere else) who had talked to me the previous day. I sit with him for my short diner. I can't recall his name even then but he talks to me as if he knows me very well. Tells me he's been watching me for many days before he talked to me. He was just waiting to make sure he'd be talking to the right person. The words he pronounces are detached but caring telling me what he feels about my life. And I sit there wondering why he cares to tell me this. "You're a deep and complex person." and I smile and say that he had told me the day before that I was very simple. " Yes, you are very simple in the way that you don't play any games. Your heart is very simple. You are straightforward and open and that is great." Anyway, the conversation continues for a while and I leave wondering about all those people who have made comments to me during the last month. People who have hardly known me and invited me without reserve to their homes or who have come to see me before they left to make sure we had each others contacts details.
The next few days will be hard. Haeyoung, a lovely korean woman working in Technology came yesterday to tell me that tomorrow (today)was her last day. She's a bit of a gypsy like me. "I've decided to go to Egypt she tells me for three weeks. " She tells me she has been twice before and loves it there. She lived in Sudan for three years and plans to go down to Sudan for a few days as well. Everybody calls her Rhenee but I prefer to call her Haeyoung because it's her name and she is not really a Rhenee. I haven't spent much time at all with her but I'll miss her and hope we'll cross paths again.
On my return from my run this morning just before 6am, I see Patsy at the hotel waiting for a Rushmans employee to take him to the airport. She tells me she got woken up in the middle of the night because immigration didn't want to let another employee leave the country. He's on the same visa I am (multi entry visa). Normally when you live in Qatar, you are sponsored by an employer. Everyone who lives here needs permission from their employer/sponsor to leave the country. Wives need their husbands approval as well even just to get a driver's licence. But on a multi entry visa (which is extremely hard to get) you normally should be able to travel in and out without problems. I was planning to return to Doha on the 23rd earlier to spend the afternoon/evening here rather than alone in Dubai to break up my travels. But now I worry that if I do this at that time I may never get to leave the country since Patsy will be gone by then. Shall see.
Closing Ceremony tonight...bye for now
The photo was taken at the Equestrian Endurance Venue yesterday which is a couple of hours away.
Well I manage yesterday to get 15 of my volunteers to Q-Post which is the Postal service here on Venue. I go one by one with them to have a photo taken of each person with me and a stamp sheet printed out with the photos and a Asian Games background. This is my gift to each one of them. We also do a few group shots with 4-5 people for those who want two photos on the sheets. It's relatively cheap at 15 Riyals per sheet (About $5 Ca or Aus) but it will be a nice souvenir and all of them are just thrilled. I probably have a few more to go through today.
We are still busy in the Work room all day yesterday although I've noticed the number of faxes being sent is decreasing a little everyday. Today there are only two games of Basketball left (the bronze medal match and the gold medal match) from 11am and the football (Soccer) final at 4pm in which Qatar and Iraq are battling for the Gold Medal. This is just before the Closing Ceremony which will start around 7pm. The Football game promisses to be a spectacle and judging by the streets after the victory of Qatar in the match to get to the final, there will be massive celebration if Qatar wins or maybe even if they get Silver.
The medal tally is crazy. China has 315 medals and Qatar comes in 11th position with 30 medals. I come in this morning and Sameera Ibrahim brings me a gift or three. A small bottle of perfume (my third now), another spray bottle of Arabic perfume and an Arabic clay incense burner. She tells me to get charcoal and burn different tradionnal branches. But then Salwa arrives with some of these apparently expensive wodden branches which seem marinated or seasoned as a gift (and I know there is no way I can bring them into Australia but I can't say anything), and she gives me another two lovely Sudanese gifts (as she is from Sudan). By now I need a truck to leave this country and plan to post some things back to Australia on the 18th.
At diner last night I bump into a journalist from Sri Lanka (or possibly somewhere else) who had talked to me the previous day. I sit with him for my short diner. I can't recall his name even then but he talks to me as if he knows me very well. Tells me he's been watching me for many days before he talked to me. He was just waiting to make sure he'd be talking to the right person. The words he pronounces are detached but caring telling me what he feels about my life. And I sit there wondering why he cares to tell me this. "You're a deep and complex person." and I smile and say that he had told me the day before that I was very simple. " Yes, you are very simple in the way that you don't play any games. Your heart is very simple. You are straightforward and open and that is great." Anyway, the conversation continues for a while and I leave wondering about all those people who have made comments to me during the last month. People who have hardly known me and invited me without reserve to their homes or who have come to see me before they left to make sure we had each others contacts details.
The next few days will be hard. Haeyoung, a lovely korean woman working in Technology came yesterday to tell me that tomorrow (today)was her last day. She's a bit of a gypsy like me. "I've decided to go to Egypt she tells me for three weeks. " She tells me she has been twice before and loves it there. She lived in Sudan for three years and plans to go down to Sudan for a few days as well. Everybody calls her Rhenee but I prefer to call her Haeyoung because it's her name and she is not really a Rhenee. I haven't spent much time at all with her but I'll miss her and hope we'll cross paths again.
On my return from my run this morning just before 6am, I see Patsy at the hotel waiting for a Rushmans employee to take him to the airport. She tells me she got woken up in the middle of the night because immigration didn't want to let another employee leave the country. He's on the same visa I am (multi entry visa). Normally when you live in Qatar, you are sponsored by an employer. Everyone who lives here needs permission from their employer/sponsor to leave the country. Wives need their husbands approval as well even just to get a driver's licence. But on a multi entry visa (which is extremely hard to get) you normally should be able to travel in and out without problems. I was planning to return to Doha on the 23rd earlier to spend the afternoon/evening here rather than alone in Dubai to break up my travels. But now I worry that if I do this at that time I may never get to leave the country since Patsy will be gone by then. Shall see.
Closing Ceremony tonight...bye for now
# posted by AdeC @ 9:15 PM 
