Livin' the Qatar Dream: Life's a beach!

Darn interweb wi-fi thingy. I spent an hour last night posting this blog and got up this morning only to find our that it didn't post!

We got home last night at 10:00pm from an amazing day at the beach. We were just north of Al Ghashamiyah (see the map). We were invited to go to a camp set up by an incredible family from Jordan. Lindsay teaches their daughter and another teaching colleague of ours teaches their son. So the group of us headed up to the camp around 12pm yesterday.

After a short one hour drive, we had to park our cars and head out across the desert on a 4 X 4. The camp was a little more than what we expected. A big wooded shelter with a palm leaf roof, equipped with seating for 20 or so, an RV, a separate washroom for men and women, two other big tents, one of them air conditioned, a volleyball court and helpers quarters.

We dropped of our stuff, made our introductions and the guys headed out for a little fishing excursion. We set up a 90 m net about 300 m from shore. The interesting thing to note was that there was an old wall out in the water that was used to capture fish as the tide went out. It had a few holes in it, hence the net!

There was about 12 adults and 8 children in total. The kids played perfectly all day long. It was such a nice day for all of us.

I stood down by the water for a bit with their boy from grade six. He was talking to me about skipping stones and the fact that the only stones that were available to skip were the black ones. I found that odd, since the rest of the beach is white. Turns out, in the 1980s there was a huge oil spill that covered the entire length of Qatar's eastern coast. The black stones are actually crude oil biscuits mixed with sand. I cracked one open and it smelled just like Mike Piva's garage. I started to look around and they were everywhere. What a shame. Not to ignore that fact that the spill would have been devastating. Apparently there were a number of dead whales washing up on the shore after the spill. The amazing thing that I found however was the ability of the Earth to fix itself. Much of the oil had turned to stone along the shoreline. Eventually the oil will simply be reabsorbed and disappear.

Later that night, we had a big dinner that was prepared in a traditional method using an Earth Stove. It is an underground smoker. There is a coal bed at the bottom and the heat is captured as the food sits on racks inside a round chamber buried in sand. The chicken and baby goat (if you can believe) was very moist and tasty. Along with some seasoned rice, it made for a very nice meal.

After an entertaining game of volleyball, we had our first, second and then third dessert! We were well fed without question.

All in all a great day was had by everyone. We have been invited back and I think that we will take them up on that offer!

Night everyone and Happy Movember!