Museum of Islamic Art

I had a chance to visit the Museum of Islamic Art this past Eid and what a place it was! It is architecturally stunning and the contents are pretty amazing as well. The only qualm I had with the museum is the poor labelling and lack of organization in their displays. But like I said, the contents were pretty stunning and I'm sure, priceless. If you're in Doha, a must see!

Cars

Another adult rite of passage crossed, folks. Yesterday, I purchased my first...car! At 29 years of age, I have finally bought my own car. It is used, but it's still my own car. A used 2007 Nissan Tiida, with 50 000km already on it. Its condition is fairly new and I just need to take it in for some regular maintenance and change the front break pads, but other than that, it runs smoothly. It is off-white in colour, but it looks pretty white to me. I will take a picture soon and post it here, but I still wanted to mark this occaision. My first car! Yay!

Goodbye 2008, Hello New Year

I've been very bad with posting on this blog, so no presents for me I guess. I'm sorry for the delayed posting - and I can't really say that it's a reflection of how busy and exciting my life is here either. I've just been consumed with work mainly, and more recently, illness. Over the last Eid el-Adha, I developed really large and tender swollen lymph nodes that tend to emerge in times of prolonged stress. What happens with my body is that through the period of prolonged stress, my immune system is depleted and weaken, making me subject to infections that I would otherwise be able to fight off. So with a weakened immune system, my body experiences some foreign body that's not good for me and my white blood cells kick into gear and try to fight it themselves. That's where the lymph nodes come in and that's why they swell up. One major side effect of all of this is fatigue, nausea, fever, body ache and headache. It's like the flu except it lasts much longer. I'm still dealing with it now but am doing better than I did the past few weeks. It has quite frankly been hell going to work, which I have pushed myself to do.

So fast forward four weeks and it's now Christmas. I really find it hard to be festive here, though. The weather's still pleasant, and there are simply no cues to remind you that it's Christmas. The radio station will play the occaisional Christmas song, but mix it up with Arabic pop. Carrefour has a Christmas section that's always filled with foreigners, but I have to say, I haven't bought any Christmas decorations. It's not fun when it's just for one, kind of like cooking meals. I can't help but think back to what I was doing for Christmas last year and I'm grateful for the memory. My sister had come and visited me in Egypt for the first time in three years and we did the requisite trip to the south of the country along the Nile. We were pulling into the Aswan train station on Christmas morning and by that evening, we were eating at a Nubian restuarant on the Nile that you can only get to by boat. The food was great as was the atmosphere. We then tried some Nubian coffee which was pretty strong. It's a great memory.

This year, in contrast, involved a Christmas dinner at the Marriott hotel somewhere in Doha. Good food was eaten, conversations were had, but I have to say that something was lacking, namely, the closeness that comes with sharing Christmas with really close friends and family. Is this my way of saying I miss home? Maybe - home being evenly split between Toronto and Cairo, I suppose. Finally, to add insult to injury, I am actually at work right now, if you can believe that. There are some loose ends I wanted to tie up and needed to make some photocopies so here I am. The many lives we live.

The semester is winding down and next week is our final week of classes. After that, we have three more weeks to putter around campus and then we're finally released for our mid-year break. Hopefully I'll be able to churn out a few more posts before then. But until then, Merry Christmas to all, and Happy 2009!