Quite a day yesterday, partially because it just kept on going and didn’t end until 4 this morning. When I went to bed here in the living room, David and Jensen were still finishing their work. If you’re here because of an interest in MotoGP, make sure to check out their coverage at MotoMatters and Asphalt and Rubber, respectively.
My first set of photos went up on MotoMatters just before I went to bed. One of them is above this post and you can see the rest .
The test has been a very interesting experience for me, this being the first one I’ve attended. I have a few observations to make soon, but right now I’d like to tell you about how the day began since I’ve received some very nice comments on my reports about Doha and what it’s like beyond the fact that there is a racetrack here.
After my epic post-arrival sleep-in, I’ve managed five and then four hours the last two nights, which meant I was able to partake of the hotel’s breakfast service. We are at Le Grand Hotel, which is staffed by charming people from Nepal, from which so many of the working class here seem to hail. Most have at least some English, and all are smiling and warm. If you’re a long time reader here you may recall how I got to know a chap named Purna in 2009, who drove me all around the city on my first trip here in his immaculately tidy taxi. Purna had been working here for seven years, sending most of his paycheck home to his wife and children in Nepal, and I assume that many if not most of the people in the hotel are doing the same thing.
One receives a warm welcome at breakfast, even if you show up just as it is wrapping up. I’ve not yet found the selection other than nearly gone, but it consists of the following. Four warmed and covered serving trays, today containing the remnants of sliced hot dogs, baked beans, one last hard boiled egg in a broken shell, and steamed (?) pita bread. There is a hunk of what looks like white cheese next to a huge bowl of dark olives in brine. The cherry jam is orange in color but does taste something like cherries, sort of. It’s good, just not something that would jump out as cherry jam in a blind taste test. There are three cereal options (rice crispies, corn flakes and a mystery choice that looks like spicy puffed rice) and two types of juice, which I have been unable to identify but which are quite tasty. The coffee one of the lads makes behind a counter is excellent. CNN is on in the TV so one eats to news of the earthquake and nuclear explosions in Japan.
David and Jensen have missed breakfast so far, and thus were hungry when we started the day. We decided to hit the Carrefour at the big shopping center before we went to the track, and an innocent pit stop at an ATM for Jensen meant we could not turn left when needed due to the massive traffic between our location on a side road and the left turn lane. We went right instead, looking for a place to make a u-turn, and ended up on a scenic tour of Doha’s mean streets. Navigation here is quite a challenge since to the unfailiar eye evereything looks the same and many of the streets don’t have names. Finding a street number on a building can be a real challenge. The address of the hotel, for example, is Le Grand Hotel, Alsadd Area, behind Almuftah Building, Doha, Qatar. The streets that do have names often don’t have street signs and those that have both a name and a sign are slightly less difficult to identify than streets signs in kanji. Every one seems to have Al or Bin (or both!) in it and some other names that mean little to the western tourist.
The fancier parts of town have big shiny buildings that are useful as landmarks, but the back streets… One looks just like the other. Doha does not have poverty the way you see it reported in third world countries, I suppose because this is not a third world country. It’s an extremely wealthy country that has poor areas with dusty, run down buildings, old cars, feral cats eating out of garbage cans. But I’ve never seen any sort of violence or even a public argument, and every part of the city I’ve been to continues to feel perfectly safe, even for a blond-haired westerner.
Having just driven through that environment, it was a bit of a shock to find ourselves at the City Centre shopping mall minutes later. Curiously far from the city center, this mall is pretty much an American style mall with some Arabic lettering on the storefronts. Companies from Europe and the US join the odd local business in a huge building of five or six floors. There is an ice skating rink on the bottom level, and from one part of the mall you can see two different Starbuck’s stores. It wouldn’t surprise me if there is a third or fourth in the mall somewhere, but we didn’t have time to explore the whole thing.
We stopped off at the food court to feed the icons of Motorcycling New Media. I fought off the urge to try the best donuts in town, which looked pretty darn good, and settled for a cup of Seattle’s Best coffee. It wasn’t as good as the hotel’s. They boys hit a hot corner of the food court that was quite popular with the locals. There is something so odd about seeing women in burqas stroll right up to the Hardee’s counter for their lunch that I couldn’t resist risking a photo.
After getting some supplies at the Carrefour, we left the mall and made our way out of the giant construction zone that surrounds it. Two years ago this area across the bay from the old part of town was busy around the clock as some amazing buildings were going up. Some of those are now done, but more have sprung up right next to the finished art works. It’s going to be an amazing place to behold when the dust settled.
Next time, some observations about the test itself.
