CONTINUING STUDIES

Sunday 12 February 2023

Koh Lanta

The great sage Ice Cube dedicated one of the most famous hip hop songs in history to the importance of appreciating when one has had a truly good day.  A lesson to live by — especially when one’s days consist of looking after small children and all of their attendant hopes, dreams, and physical needs.

Going on a beach vacation with kids has necessitated coming to a new understanding of the word “relaxation”.  To begin with, Zara and I aren’t really used to taking trips where the goal is do nothing.  Before kids, it was common for us to fill a weekend or 5 day or 10 day trip with as many highlights as we could comfortably (and sometimes not-so-comfortably) see during the time available.  Maya slowed us down a bit, but not that much if we are being honest.  On the trips we've taken since she was born, we were consistently going on some adventure or another almost every other day.  Partly out of circumstance, both of our trips back to the US with only one child have featured significant to-ing and fro-ing, as we try to pack in as much time with family and friends and other special people as possible.  And the first month of this trip was like the Pakistan version of those visits to the US.

So as much as we were looking forward by the end of January to the promise of our month on this very relaxing island, I think it took us a few days to really come down.  The same may well have been true for Maya and Camino.  What I can say is that few things feel less conventionally relaxing to an adult than feeling irritable while cajoling a misbehaving toddler through a succession of beautiful and interesting places where you can’t stop thinking about how you really should be having a better time.  For all the heroes out there who cast dirty looks at parents struggling to manage their kids in public situations, I can guarantee that no one is having a worse time than the parent who is the object of such foolish and undiscerning scorn.  

After a few days of feeling this frustrating dynamic repeat itself (minus the dirty looks — people here are nice), I think a few things happened.  First, I asked myself if I really wanted to be the person I was seeing myself become.  Toddlers need boundaries, but at the same time I knew that we had to find an outlet for Maya’s physical energy that would be more fun than getting annoyed over and over at her frequent testing of limits.  Second, I think we had to discover a good routine here.  We started doing some "yoga" on the beach in the morning, which involved some actual yoga and a lot of redirected toddler energy, but overall it set a good tone for the day.  Hanging out at the beach and doing yoga were two things that I was looking forward to about being on this island before we came here.  Each day spent without doing yoga and without enough beach time therefore made me feel as if I was missing out, further fueling my cycle of being a grumpy papa on vacation.  

Finally, I think it dawned on Zara and me that we had to accept the pace of this trip for what it is.  I spent the first few days here feeling various additional levels of FOMO from looking around at all the interesting places to see on this island that would be either impractical or impossible to explore with our children at their current age.  The best way to get around Koh Lanta is via motorbike, which plenty of families do but is not really something that we have a desire to try.  We needed to acknowledge that against all of our previous traveling impulses, we would have to be okay with not doing as much on this trip and just be a little bit more strategic about what we do want to see. 

Which brings me back to Ice Cube.  Since adjusting our expectations of what we will manage to see and do while we’re here, we’ve discovered more of the charms of Khong Klong than ever.  On Friday (maybe it was Friday?) we decided that our big adventure would be to walk slightly further down the beach to a slightly different beach bar with slightly different loungers and hammocks, affordably priced food and drinks, and all of the other key features of just about every beach bar in Koh Lanta.  Zara had spotted this one a few days earlier after yoga and noted that the abundance of umbrellas would make it a good place to try if we wanted to go for a full day at the beach.  So we left in the morning with all of our beach stuff in hand, and a plan to stay out as long as we were all still having a good time.  I brought Maya’s backpack so she would have a place to take her nap in the middle of the afternoon. We prepared as many things for both Maya and Camino as we could possibly think of.  And I gotta say it was a good day!

Maya is a lot of fun right now at the beach.  She’s really into her sand toys, and loves filling the bucket with anything from sand to rocks to water to, naturally, a combination of all three.  She also really likes going into the water with us, and so far it’s been a good place to teach her about some important boundaries.  It would be interesting if there were any scientific information on how many times various guidelines about safety must be repeated to a child between the ages of 2 and 4 for them to reliably internalize it.  But it’s been cute and reassuring to hear the way that Maya, who is repeating everything right now, repeats lessons like “watch out for rocks in the water!” and “only with mama and papa in the water!” to herself even when I am not putting her on the spot.  In all, the combination of perfect sea temperatures and Maya’s general willingness to take safety guidance has made going into the ocean together a great experience that we can share.  When I’m lucky, after we’ve been in the water for a while Maya will go play with her sand toys on her own and I can submerge my entire body in the waist-high shallows of the water while watching her from a distance.  I keep hearing that parenting does get easier.

We went on like this for the entirety of Friday (?) afternoon - me getting into the water with Maya, us playing in the sand together, me washing off again in the ocean and relaxing while she busies herself with sand, us going into the water together again, walking back eventually to Zara after I’ve had enough and then letting them repeat the process together after a while.  We had managed to score a great home base on two loungers underneath an overhang, where we were fully shaded until the sun started to dip over the western-facing sea in the mid-afternoon and gradually chased us back.  All day we ordered a succession of fruit shakes and pad Thai and had a nice view of the comings and goings of this interesting beach.  Camino, for his part, seemed to have an enjoyable day lying in the shade while playing with sensory toys and getting his bare body cooled off with water every hour or so.  He got to go in the ocean a couple of times too.  Like his sister, he seems to really enjoy water.

That night I brought Maya back from the beach far past her bedtime, carrying both her and the backpack (why?) and also pushing our stroller.  Zara had gone home earlier with Camino, wearing him home in the wrap after he’d had some trouble going to sleep.  Maya and I had stayed late at the place we had wandered to for dinner, running around with Nola and Juno and the nice Swedish-American kids that we met on the beach earlier that same day.  By the time we walked up the hill to Pinky it was almost 21:30 and I was tired physically from carrying Maya and the stuff home for almost 20 minutes, but lifted by the adrenaline of a day where almost everything went right.  We read books and had a nice bedtime together. 

The next morning we continued our beach routine and had another really lovely time under the shade of a banyan tree at Meeting Point, the closest beach spot to us at the opposite end of Klong Khong.  In the evening, we went back to the beach to get some barbecued tuna.  We let Maya roam naked on the beach for awhile as she played with her toys.  We ate at a table in the sand.

At some point I stood up and saw what looked to be a small brown turd.  I immediately thought the worst, but Zara confidently reassured me that it was not from Maya.  She pointed toward the three dogs from one of the beach bars that were running around.  Both of our stress levels were starting to rise with the sound of Camino fussing from again being overtired.  It must have been one of the dogs, she insisted.   Zara said she was sure Maya hadn’t pooped on the beach.  I thought it unwise to push back any further.  

Clearly not fully sure of herself, Zara went to ask Maya if she needed to make poo poo.  It was at this point that Maya pointed back in the direction of the turd and Zara’s adamant denial was overridden by the rapid realization that Maya really had pooped on the beach.  She came back and told me the news.  I tried not to gloat about being right.  I was busy soothing Camino, so she was the one who had to use Maya’s toys to clean the turd from the sand.

Parenting.  Sometimes you have a great day and sometimes your kid takes a poo on the beach.  Sometimes, these two things happen in the same 24 hours.

Saturday 21 January 2023

Karachi

Lately Maya has developed a habit of mysteriously hiding things in strange places.  We first noticed last week when all of a sudden half of the pieces to her baby and grown-up animal puzzles went missing.  Zara kept asking me where they all were, to the point that I got a bit defensive thinking that she thought I was simply being careless and lost them.  In reality I was as confused as she was.  When Maya and I were playing with the puzzles in the drawing room last Saturday morning, just one piece was missing - the baby rhino, the same one that has been missing since we left Berlin.  A few hours later at least 4 baby and grown-up animal sets were completely missing, along with a few more random individual pieces.

We puzzled over the missing puzzle pieces for the rest of the weekend.  I looked in sofa crevices, under carpets, and every other tight space I could think of where Maya wouldn’t possibly cram one or several puzzle pieces.  Zara at one point announced that she had figured it out - Maya probably put the pieces in the trash bin.  This sounded plausible, but I convinced myself it wasn’t true because the trash had been taken out the same day we were playing and that would mean the pieces had entered the Karachi waste stream already, never to be seen again.  They’ll turn up, I insisted.

The next day Zara finally shared some good news - she knew where the pieces were.  She’d asked Maya, who the whole time had been saying they were upstairs but declined to give any further specifics.  Eventually Zara asked again when they were in the bedroom together and Maya pointed to the bottom of the bed, where there is the slightest of gaps between the solid wood bedframe and the floor.  I’d already dismissed this as a possibility myself, thinking the gap was too small.  But sure enough, upon checking further I could see the edge of one of the baby animals poking out close to the opening.  One-by-one apparently because I can’t imagine it working out any other way, Maya had taken the time to slide at least 8 individual puzzle pieces underneath a massive wood bedframe in the only place where they would fit, because why not.

I got the missing pieces later in the week after I had my strength back.  It was a physical task.  Before sliding the heavy bedframe across the floor to reveal the pieces, the large double mattress also had to be lifted off the frame and propped against a wall.  And in order to move the bedframe, multiple other pieces of furniture also had to be temporarily adjusted.  The sight of the pieces after straining to push the heavy, unwieldy frame across a marble floor was a bit like finding buried treasure.  Moving the physical manifestations of heaven and earth to recover toys that my child has hidden in the most impossible places - these are clearly the things that bring me joy as a toddler papa.

Later in the week things got a bit more real when Zara’s pink fanny pack all of a sudden also disappeared.  She realized that she couldn’t find it as she was getting ready to leave to bring Camino to get his vaccines on Thursday afternoon.  I asked if there was anything important in it - no passports or important documents, fortunately, but there was a fair amount of cash.  Zara looked everywhere, as we did with the puzzle pieces, driving herself mad in the process as each new obscure location failed to yield the pink bag.  We ran through all the scenarios.  Hadn’t Maya been wearing it that morning?  Did she bring it to Nani’s school?  Zara didn’t think so.  Where was she playing with it last?  I had seen her with it in her bedroom that morning.  Was it there?  No.  Zara asked Maya where she put it, her frustration with the situation (and with Maya) becoming increasingly clear.  Maya kept repeating that “Maya put it somewhere”, but wasn’t able to elaborate.

Finally Zara left with Camino and Maya went down for a nap, which gave me some time to look around again.  I honestly didn’t even know where to start.  It felt like Zara had already frantically searched everywhere, but maybe with a clear head and not being in a rush I would be able to figure out where somewhere could be.  I scanned the main upstairs common area as well as our bedroom, and then wondered if Zara had checked the two leather side tables next to our bed.  I opened the top drawer on my side - sure enough, there was the pink bag, sitting there in the drawer next to our two journals.

Later on when Zara came back I walked downstairs with the pink bag, eager to show her that the mystery was again solved.  While she was out Zara had already called Rita, the house cleaner who has been coming over every day to the house where we're staying, to ask if she’d seen the bag while she was over that morning.  Rita made a special trip back and was looking around for the bag, just as I walked into the living room with it.  Although Zara and Rita were both obviously happy that we had found the bag, things disappearing in homes can be a touchy subject in Pakistan, and we saw that in Rita’s reaction.  The vast inequalities in class and material ownership here make petty theft from domestic helpers a not-infrequent occurrence, and Rita was obviously sensitive to any suspicion that we may have had that she may have taken the pink bag.  In reality that was the furthest thing from our minds — we knew all along that the culprit was our mischievous 2 1/2 year-old.  But Zara had to clear this up and reassure Rita, who was fighting back tears.  She has been wonderful to us this whole time and particularly cute with Maya, who she even looked after on one of our last days for a few hours.  So Zara, naturally, felt terrible that this pink bag mystery had made Rita feel in any way insecure about what we might have thought of her.

That afternoon we all sat on the terrace as the sun went down, Camino on his back in his usual spot taking in the Karachi street sounds, Maya playing with playdough, and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan serenading us all through our BlueTooth speaker.  Zara attempted to explain to Maya that the situation with the bag had made Rita feel really bad before trailing off.  How do you articulate the human complexities of post-colonialism, inequality, feudalistic social hierarchies, and material wealth itself to a toddler who just likes hiding things?  

We left it there, for now, as a chilly evening breeze eventually blew us back inside the house - a conversation for another day. 

Sun 8 Jan 2023

Doha > Karachi 

Arrived here in Karachi late last night after an airport/airplane experience that felt like another parenting gauntlet.

We made it to the gate in Doha for the final boarding call with minutes to spare — despite arriving to the airport nearly 2 1/2 hours early.  First two visa-related delays and then some toddler-related delays accounted for much of our harrowing hustle to get on the plane.  

The first delay was predictable enough.  As Maya alternately charmed the airport staff, sat behind the check-in counter, and repeatedly tried to climb onto the luggage conveyor (all while wearing her bright red sunglasses inside the terminal - at night), the check-in agents noticed the one thing on Maya’s Pakistani visa that we hoped they would overlook.  Having been issued the visa one month before getting a new German children’s passport, the numbers on her visa and passport didn’t match and that meant the visa was now also technically on an expired passport.

Supervisors were summoned, Zara explained the situation, and eventually after a phone call with an unnamed person in Karachi, we were cleared to fly.  We were starting to get a bit nervous about time, but at this point I was still relatively relaxed.  We walked up to a mostly empty immigration line, and despite my trauma after I had to physically prevent Maya from running through an empty immigration booth on the way into Qatar, she remained cute restless in the line and mostly stayed close to us.  Fortunately she also held up well during the next obstacle — for some reason, it seems that in the previous customs drama, we were either never issued (or possibly weren’t aware that we needed to take) paper visas along with our passport stamp.  The absence of such visas required the agent stamping our passports on the way out to summon her supervisor, who after doing some things with his immigration computer was seemingly able to verify who we were and allow us to leave Qatar.  But this, like the Pakistan visa mixup, took up additional valuable time.

We made it through security quickly and, with Maya still on a run of good airport behavior, I pointed out the duty free to Zara and we picked up a couple of bottles of alcohol for our friends in alcohol-restricted Pakistan.  Unfortunately we learned the hard way that brightly lit airport shops with enticing signage are not a good place to take tired toddlers (why did I think this was a good idea?).  Maya grabbed a bunch of different colored mentos off the shelf at the checkout counter and it was just really hard to handle her energy constructively while also being asked to take out my boarding pass at checkout, pay, and handle the adult side of this moment.  When Maya ran away for the third time with a different bottle of mentos, I took it from her, picked her up, and wouldn’t let her go back down until Zara finished paying.  This, unsurprisingly, didn’t go down well and the ensuing meltdown(s) slowed our progress through the terminal considerably.  I can’t say I handled it well but this is honestly one of those moments where I sometimes ask myself whether I’m capable of doing any better in moments like this.  What do you do when you’re trying to get a baby and a toddler through a busy airport and you have to try and stay calm and collected while managing the toddler’s emotions, preventing said toddler from shoplifting, not losing something important, not losing the toddler or leaving her little brother somewhere, and trying to catch a flight all at the same time?

The internet parenting experts would advise leaving yourself more time at the airport so you’re not under as much pressure and can therefore be more relaxed and patient about all this.  Yeah…. we tried that.

Eventually we did get on our plane and Maya actually was quite good again on the flight.  She played quietly with her etch-a-sketch and even sat normally in her seat with the seatbelt fastened all the way through takeoff.  Although it’s early days and there is only so much you can expect from a 2 1/2 year-old, she seems to at least tacitly understand her new role in the family, and respond to the occasion when called.  One thing I’ve noticed is that when Camino is upset she almost always seems to try to make things easier on us by settling down, playing or even just sitting quietly, so we can attend to her brother.  I’ve noticed this around the house when she will just sort of hang on one of our legs or play with her toys next to us while we’re trying to soothe Camino.  On the way back from the airport when we arrived in Doha and Camino was crying in the taxi, she sat calmly with me and even tried to talk to her brother in his car seat - without any prompting from me.  The way she says “don’t cry Camino” and “it’s okay buddy” to him (imitating her parents) are so sweet and sincere.

The good news is that on our flight here Maya once again rose to the occasion.  The bad news is that this meant her brother was having a really tough time, likely due to being overtired and not being able to fall asleep in the brightly lit plane interior.  He’s normally so relaxed and sweet and laid back that when he’s upset, it’s really hard sometimes to see.  Apart from hunger, cold, and stomach cramps, the only other time he seems to get really mad is when it’s evening or nap time and he can’t fall asleep.  Once he starts screaming in those moments it can be quite difficult to settle him down, and the beginning of our flight was no different.  After about a half hour of disapproving looks from other passengers (to which I was not prepared to respond with the same level of sass that I usually would), the young Pakistani student sitting next to me eventually asked if she could take him and settle him down.  Her father had been one of the passengers staring at Camino and me, which was stressing me out, but after he had apparently asked his daughter in Urdu to ask me in English if she could help me, I wasn't really in a position to say no. And it worked.... for about 20 minutes or so, until the food came and we had to lay Camino down again on the empty seat between the young student and me.  After he woke up on the seat and the cycle of screaming repeated itself, eventually Zara strapped him in the baby harness and had him fall asleep on her, which we both realized we probably should have just done to begin with.

Both children slept through the last 30 minutes or so of the flight as well as the entire process of getting off the plane and getting through the airport.  This was a bit more difficult in Maya’s case, as it involved me carrying her in a series of awkward lying positions as she contorted her body as if she were tossing and turning in a bed.  Somehow in addition to balancing our 15 kg child I managed to lift our 25 kg suitcase onto the luggage rack with one hand while carrying her limp sleeping body in the other.

Emerging from the passengers only section into the sea of faces in the waiting area at Jinnah International Airport can be an overwhelming experience for anyone who’s not used to it — so I can only imagine what could have been going through Maya’s head as she awoke to the four of us stepping outside and being greeted by Ghani, the family driver of a close friend of Zara's, who took our luggage cart and led us to the car.  All of a sudden Maya began to cry for what sounded like “Mama!” - after a couple of minutes of reassuring her to no avail that Mama was right there, we realized that Maya was not crying for “Mama” but rather “Mama’s suitcase!”, and all the rest of our luggage, being pushed away in front of her in the middle of the night by a man she didn’t recognize wearing clothes she’s not used to seeing.  Ghani wears a blue Shalwar Kameez and had a head scarf on to make himself more recognizable to us.  He was walking probably 10 paces ahead with all of our bags.  

As soon as Zara and I both saw the situation from Maya’s perspective we exchanged some knowing smiles and reassured Maya again that our suitcases were okay and that this nice man would be helping us to get to where we’re staying.  Actually this was one of those moments of toddler despair that was really hard not to find funny.  It made total sense that a groggy, confused 2 year-old might find this situation distressing.  I could empathize and maybe even imagine a time where I felt similar as a smaller person.

The rest of the trip proceeded uneventfully as we exited the airport and drove the short distance on the highway and through quiet leafy streets to the house where we’re spending the next two weeks.  We got inside, unpacked a few of the essential kid things hastily, and split up into two beds - Zara with Camino in one room, me curled up with Maya in the other.  It was around 2:30 am local time by the time we went to sleep.  We slept soundly until 11:00 in the morning the next day.

Maya has been excitedly saying “Pakistan!” for weeks now ever since we told her all the places we were getting ready to visit on our trip.  It seems like she understands on some innate level that this is an important place in our family, and that after 2-plus years she’s now being clued in to something that’s a part of her that she didn’t know about before.  Maybe I’m just conjecturing my way inside her mind.  But it’s interesting to see her experience this all as a toddler, while at the same time remembering how vivid and intense my own first impressions of Pakistan were as a 26 year-old.  I can only imagine what kind of sensory stimulation baby Camino is getting when he points his 2 1/2 month gaze upward into the furthest reaches of the universe, and excitedly moves his limbs around with a big smile on his face and the street noise of Karachi playing in the background, as he did earlier this morning out on the terrace.

Friday 6 Jan 2023 

Doha

Yesterday we took the gleaming Doha metro system up to Lusail, a new development area north of the city based around the stadium where they just had the World Cup Final.  We encountered a sea of new skyscrapers built on an unnecessarily large amount of land, connected by wide empty streets and a massive highway to the rest of Doha.  With more new buildings on the way and mysteriously few people around who might actually occupy, visit, or work in all of this newly conjured urban real estate, Lusail exemplifies so much of what feels strange about this city generally.  Particularly with all of the World Cup signage still up, it has the feel of a place that was purpose-built over the past decade and is now grasping around in search of its next purpose. 

One of the common Western criticisms of the 2022 World Cup (and, by extension, of Doha and of Qatar) is that the atmosphere at the tournament was “artificial”. Insofar as Qatar built most of the infrastructure for the tournament in 12 years essentially from scratch, doubled its population over that time almost entirely with migrant workers, and even imported fans for its national team from elsewhere in the Middle East, that criticism is tempting. But as relevant as it might be to the World Cup itself, zooming out I think it misses the mark. I might describe Doha in other ways - sterile, incongruous, held back by its religious conservatism - but this city and the role it plays at this particular moment in global history is very very real.  

Consider this: there are 2.6 million people in Qatar, just 300,000 of whom are Qataris.  That means there are well over 2 million people in this country, the overwhelming amount from developing parts of South Asia and Africa, nearly all of whom are here because the Gulf offers a level of economic opportunity far enough beyond than what they could find at home that they are willing to give up everything in order to move here and send back money.  Most are men and most come without their families - the demographics of Qatar are so heavily skewed towards male migrant workers that 75% of the current population are men.

Like many world cities, Doha is full of migrants and dreamers - but without any of the romanticism.  From professionals to peasants, it’s a place where people come to get as big a piece as they can of a small desert peninsula’s incredibly lucrative oil and gas hustle.  The economic engine, apart from Qatar’s role in helping the world feed its ongoing addiction to fossil fuels, is the Qatari government’s continuing effort to make Qatar relevant (beyond its natural resources).  That’s what the World Cup was about, it’s what Lusail is about, and it’s what all the other tall buildings and shiny infrastructure are about.  Qatar is not satisfied with just being the rich kid whose family has all the money they could ever need.  It wants recognition.  It wants to tell its story and it wants to matter.  

Whether Doha would be nicer if it were more compact, whether it would be more entertaining if it were less conservative — none of this is actually important.  What is important to the people that choose to come live and work here is that a fabulously wealthy country in Western Asia is spending billions to put itself on the map, and that they need to import 90% of the human capacity required in order to do it.  It doesn’t matter that the result looks and feels a little bit like what would happen if Las Vegas and Saudi Arabia had a baby.  This is simply what Middle Eastern oil money buys in the 21st century.

Doha’s economic magnetism highlights so much of what is contradictory about our times - here is a giant city in a desert climate where it’s literally too hot to go outside in the summer, designed for a far greater number of people than will ever live here, financed by the very thing that is making this part of the world hotter and more uninhabitable every year, built up and managed at a low cost by hiring international workers who are willing to do the job for as little money as possible.  So much of this is so obviously wrong and bizarre but as long as the money keeps flowing, there will be people from less fortunate corners of the world who see places like Doha as their genuine best opportunity.

On our last full day here, a rare rainy day kept us in the hotel until 2pm.  We decided to go for a shorter walk in the afternoon - about 30 minutes from our hotel to a park with a playground.  As we did for most of our journey in Doha, our family of four stood out walking through some of the more local back streets.  A brown woman not wearing a hijab, pushing a stroller next to a white guy wearing a toddler on his back…. in a city without much of a pedestrian culture, this must have looked genuinely strange.  I felt a few eyes on us, though fewer than I was expecting.  

We spent an hour or so at the playground and as darkness fell and the call to prayer rang out throughout the city, the rain started to come again, first as drizzle and then crescendoing with the sounds of the Azzam.  If I were less immediately concerned with the welfare of two small children, it would have been quite a beautiful moment, but with Maya’s clothes getting increasingly soaked and rain starting to seep through into Camino’s stroller, we looked for the first place we could take cover, which happened to be the entrance to the men’s park toilet and prayer room.  

So there we were, our multicultural family of four, looking every bit the part of a Western caricature as we stood with our stroller and toddler backpack with Zara wearing a low cut shirt and stylish green blazer in a hallway crammed entirely with modestly dressed men coming from their evening prayers.  They were dressed like South Asians rather than Qataris or other Arabs - migrants, most likely, as opposed to locals, coming together to pray in the park prayer room.  Aware of how awkward Zara was probably feeling, I held Maya and tried to keep Camino warm in the stroller.  Her presence would likely have raised quite a few eyebrows in any other situation, but it seemed there was a tacit understanding that this was an OK reason for her to be in the entrance to the men’s prayer room given the weather outside.

Still, I knew she felt weird and at some point we decided to make a break for it.  We got pretty wet again leaving the park and took shelter in the first restaurant we could find, a South Indian place that called us an Uber and helped us dry Maya off.  The driver came and brought us home for a stated price of 9 Qatari rials (3 euros).  I thanked him and gave him two 10 rial bills, to which he seemed a bit confused why.  I’ve been trying to tip well.

A city full of transplants from all over the Global South, many of them everyday Muslims, stitched together by the common experience of hustling for opportunity in this center of Arab wealth and cultural ambition - I went back into the hotel thinking that this is the real story of Doha.

In a lot of ways, this place is as representative of the 21st century as any Western city.