Ramadan Kareem
Umseya
Last night, the Qatar Foundation (the organization over TAMU) held their annual shindig for Ramadan. It was really a lot of fun and a lot of free food. The purpose of it was to celebrate the halfway mark of Ramadan and teach all their staff about this time of the year simultaneously. They had a few woman doing henna, a huge buffet, fireworks and band playing traditional Arabic music. I posted some pictures from the night. Click here to see them.
A note from the embassy
If you have not heard already, and chances are that you haven’t, the US Embassy has sent out an advisory to Americans located in Doha. We were instructed that over the next week we should stay away from all hotels that are frequented by Americans. We first got word of this on Thursday night (the start of our weekend) and I have to admit it shook me up a little.
A few weeks earlier a friend had knocked on our door at 2:00 AM and it took Kara a while to wake me up. Apparently I have the habit of being able to sleep through anything short of a nuclear explosion (no reference intended). So with this in mind I was wondering if I would be able to wake up in time in the event that we had to do some sort of level three evacuation. My solution was to cross the street buy some Pepsi and watch a couple of movies that we got from Columbia House. I try not to let things like this get to me but when I was in the mall I couldn’t help but look at everybody with a little bit of suspicion. Who’s this new guard? Why are these cars outside my building? Who’s that guy with the towel on his head? Oh crap, there’s 100s of them! Wait, there are always 100s of them, I live in the Middle East.
I then thought to myself as I transitioned of from fear to anger, would they really care if a hotel was targeted? That is to say, other then the financial implications that they would have on them personally. Would they morn for Americans? Did we when a bomb went off in Jakarta a few weeks ago? So I got over my little panic attack and desire to vote for W in the upcoming elections, watched a couple of movies and went to sleep. One bright spot in all of this was the fact that out crisis alert system ran fairly well. In a matter of 5 minutes I got a phone call, SMS message and email alerting us to the situation. In case you were wondering, yes it was my SMS application that was used to send the message :). So no worries, just reviewing our “evacuation plan” and buying bottle water and ducked tape.
Here’s the story on CNN:
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/10/29/qatar.threat/index.html
Last night, the Qatar Foundation (the organization over TAMU) held their annual shindig for Ramadan. It was really a lot of fun and a lot of free food. The purpose of it was to celebrate the halfway mark of Ramadan and teach all their staff about this time of the year simultaneously. They had a few woman doing henna, a huge buffet, fireworks and band playing traditional Arabic music. I posted some pictures from the night. Click here to see them.
A note from the embassy
If you have not heard already, and chances are that you haven’t, the US Embassy has sent out an advisory to Americans located in Doha. We were instructed that over the next week we should stay away from all hotels that are frequented by Americans. We first got word of this on Thursday night (the start of our weekend) and I have to admit it shook me up a little.
A few weeks earlier a friend had knocked on our door at 2:00 AM and it took Kara a while to wake me up. Apparently I have the habit of being able to sleep through anything short of a nuclear explosion (no reference intended). So with this in mind I was wondering if I would be able to wake up in time in the event that we had to do some sort of level three evacuation. My solution was to cross the street buy some Pepsi and watch a couple of movies that we got from Columbia House. I try not to let things like this get to me but when I was in the mall I couldn’t help but look at everybody with a little bit of suspicion. Who’s this new guard? Why are these cars outside my building? Who’s that guy with the towel on his head? Oh crap, there’s 100s of them! Wait, there are always 100s of them, I live in the Middle East.
I then thought to myself as I transitioned of from fear to anger, would they really care if a hotel was targeted? That is to say, other then the financial implications that they would have on them personally. Would they morn for Americans? Did we when a bomb went off in Jakarta a few weeks ago? So I got over my little panic attack and desire to vote for W in the upcoming elections, watched a couple of movies and went to sleep. One bright spot in all of this was the fact that out crisis alert system ran fairly well. In a matter of 5 minutes I got a phone call, SMS message and email alerting us to the situation. In case you were wondering, yes it was my SMS application that was used to send the message :). So no worries, just reviewing our “evacuation plan” and buying bottle water and ducked tape.
Here’s the story on CNN:
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/10/29/qatar.threat/index.html
posted by Russell at
4:29 PM
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