Crazy Days

Land of Black Gold

This is a great way to break silence. I've been silent for some time since lot of things happened with my life which I don't consider to be happy. Though I call this is the land of black gold it's mainly natural gas. Yes people now I live in Qatar, the third largest natural gas producer in the world.

Apartment we live in give a picturesque towards downtown Doha from the fifth floor, of a reasonably tall building, which really reminds me of Tatooine. Still I can't find any resemblance to Dune though, because we're far away from them I guess. Should go check them out once I buy some wheels.

The moment I arrive here, I was surprised by the heat. After living in a tropical country for more than 29 years I never felt heat more intense than this. The day after I landed the, during the noon recoded the highest ever I have experienced 41 Celsius, which was really shocking. First thing first....had to find a cap and a pair of corrected shades. Sun is so bright in this part of the world I have never seen sun light pure white, or at least I have never noticed in SL. Not to mention it is very difficult to keep my eyes open during the day time outside.

Qatar is some what a cosmopolitan society. Still there are many restrictions exists, inherited from the fundamental Arab world. In a way it is glad to see Qatar at this level after sharing a border to Saudi Arabia which I heard to be quite the opposite to this. This is worst than London I believe when it comes to cultural mix, when I visited the UK last November, one thing I notice is that 80% of the population (in London) was not English (lots of Indians, Chinese ,Arabs and East Europeans), but here I don't know whether there are any Qatari nationals since majority are Indians, Sri Lankans and Filipinos and most of the people in Arabic dress code seems to be either Egyptian or Lebanese (referring to women). May be I have still not figured out how to identify Qataris.

News papers are fascinating over here, not much gossip, murder stories or politics, so in a way it's fun to read news papers at the same time I'm missing the frustration (which was quite fun) I used to experience back in SL.

Finally, technology is booming over this end, they're giving cable TV over ADSL2 (I guess) which was new to me and I guess to many others as well, but the sad story is that the Qatar GNU/Linux User Group (RMS should love this country) had no movements since I joined the group. Compared to LKLUG that is a dead list. And if some one from Dialog Telkom read this, you guys are doing a great job with your customer services, it sux over here, keep up the good work. Still couldn't fix my GPRS to work properly, because these guys have no clue to what they're doing. I'm quite disappointed since my Java apps in the phone are not working.