neh13
4th Jun 2011, 00:55
Don't shoot the messenger, but I thought anyone thinking of going to Doha to work , should read this. It has been edited for, some content as to keep the hotel and writer anonymous This is a non pilot perspective.
Good riddance, Doha! I’m gone, and I ain’t never going back!
We tried really hard to like Doha. We really did. We went in with positive attitudes and high hopes. But it was pretty much impossible. We found all the fun stuff within the first few days, and it was all downhill from there.
A warning: this email is basically one long rant, me just getting some things off my chest, hopefully to be done with them. It’s excessively long and exceedingly negative, even for me. For those of you who’d prefer not to read the whole thing, I’ll sum it up in one sentence: Doha is the most miserable city I’ve ever had the misfortune of visiting. Ahh, I’m feeling better already...
LOST IN THE DESERT
Starting with the small things: It’s hard to get around without a car. Everything is spread out, public buses are useless, there’s no subway and very few cabs. The hotel won’t even call a cab for you (that’s right: the hotel, which has a bar in it, will not call cabs for people. Nice, right?). If you call a cab yourself, you might wait three hours. So, you have to walk a few blocks to the main road and stand for twenty minutes to hail one. Walking anywhere is both awkward and depressing, with endless streets of boxy concrete buildings, construction sites and enormous dirt lots. There are few sidewalks, and no crosswalks, which is particularly tricky across the numerous traffic circles.
THINGS TO DO IN DOHA WHEN YOU’RE DEAD INSIDE
These are all rather moot points however, since there’s nowhere to go and nothing to do anyways. Doha is stale place where nothing happens. While living there, it’s hard to imagine a world outside where people are doing things, creating things, falling in love, developing ideas, interacting with a community, living real lives. Instead, people just go to work. The city is basically a set – they built a picturesque skyline of business buildings and hotels; behind and around these buildings there is nothing.
Hanging out in the souq at night was nice, walking along the waterfront was okay once, but other than that you can choose between five star hotels and depressing shopping malls - even depressing as far as malls go, with designer store after designer store, each with no customers and one employee who looks about ready to cry from boredom. There aren’t many cheap places to eat, and of those even fewer where you can hang out (by few I mean I found none, but assume there must be one somewhere). The one “park” (large patch of grass) near the hotel is next to the airport (the hotel itself is not quite inside the airport, but is in between the arrival and departure terminals), and the noise level is reminiscent of the scene in Wayne’s World where they drive to the runway to sit underneath planes as they take off.
There is no art or culture to speak of – forget about seeing live music unless it’s “Jazz Club”, or the top forty band at the Intercontinental Hotel. Despite the enormous number of expats (that is to say the vast majority of the total population, more than 3/4), there aren’t any English bookstores (I haven’t noticed any Arabic ones either), since western books are so censored most people don’t bother reading. Movies are heavily censored, too. Best to choose a family flick if you want to see a movie in its entirety.
You’d think that being on the water there would be beaches, but there are only private boat clubs and small private beaches owned by the hotels, which charge admission. You have to drive out of town, through the desert get to a decent swimming beach. Luckily, people would occasionally invite us to do fun things like that – actually, to be fair, I must say that dune bashing in the desert in a land rover, followed by swimming in the Arabian Gulf (I guess they get mad if you call it the Persian Gulf) was really, really fun. But most people work six days a week and don’t have much time to hang out, so we were limited to what we could get up to ourselves. On a couple of our nights off we went out, for lack of other activities, to a nightclub in the basement of the Sheraton Hotel, which was loud, crowded and reeked of cigarettes and d%ck. On a better night off, we went bowling in a mall.
But as for other happenings? Well, perusing the local entertainment magazine, the events listing for May include three events: Mother’s Day, The Doha Singers (a community vocal group) at a school concert, and the Information, Communication & Technology Conference and Expo. I’m not kidding. The same magazine, under Doha restaurant highlights, lists Dairy Queen with its “interesting desserts.”
MORALE IS LOW, THE WEATHER’S GOOD
Here are some direct quotes from conversations with people here:
“-How do you like Doha?
-It’s okay.
-Yeah, okay like death.”
“Doha is exactly how I envision hell.”
“-Do you live in Doha?
-No, I suffer in Doha.”
“I hate my life. I wake up, I drive a cab all day, I watch a dvd, I go to sleep. I wake up, I drive a cab all day, I watch a dvd, I go to sleep.”
“I think God must have made Qatar last, and had nothing nice left to give it.”
“I hate it here so much.”
Even with the lack of fun, and the excess of soulless business, we did manage to meet - in addition to many loathsome, rich snobs - plenty of friendly people, and make some great friends, from Qatar and abroad. Maybe it’s the fact that everybody feels trapped, everybody’s in the same boat, and feels the need stick together. Nevertheless, it is undeniably upsetting to live in a city that nobody is happy to be in. Nobody. Well, let’s say about five percent - and they are either soulless money-grubbing machines, out of their minds, liars, or some combination thereof (or, they just got out of Kuwait or somewhere worse). I’ve never seen such a strange phenomenon in my life, a place so unanimously disliked by its inhabitants. For my part, I can say that I have never disliked a city the way I dislike Doha. Even people born and bred in Doha are embarrassed to admit it, and they all talk about how they have plans to leave. Rich white expats and third-world labourers alike count down the days until they finish their contracts. I stopped asking people how long they were staying, because their faces and moods would drop as they thought about the months or years they had left. Those who have stayed too long, or are staying indefinitely get a glazed look on their eyes and just shrug. The only reason people come is for money, obviously, and while nobody expects it to be the most exciting place, the depressing energy of the city is more than people bargained for.
BONER CITY BREAKDOWN
And a world without women is not a proper world. It’s unbalanced. You feel it in the air. Many men are depressed or overly aggressive, and women have to be weary. There isn’t a woman in Doha who doesn’t have a stalker story (some say that’s true for the whole region). Any time a group of women came into the club (you never saw a woman come in alone), they would be hit on at least half a dozen times before the night was through. We would sometimes see men literally pleading with them. A lot of the single women in Doha are Qatar Airways cabin crew, all of whom have a curfew whether they’re working or not and aren’t allowed visitors, so the guys inevitably drunkenly drive home alone and come back the next night with even more pent up frustration.
FIVE STAR SWEATSHOPS
Speaking of foreign labourers, it’s truly depressing to see the way workers are treated. Qatar is built by cheap, imported labour. The richest country, per capita, in the world and there’s no minimum wage. In our hotel, the workers (generally from third world nations) get two or three bucks an hour (which is a lot more than what others are making), live in dorms, three to a bedroom, and have an absurd number of unreasonable rules imposed on them, ranging from no jeans even when they are not on duty to random room checks to see if their beds are made. Keep in mind these people are generally aged twenty to thirty or older. They work six or seven days a week, and the (mostly Western European) management are, to put it politely, a bunch of f%&king d#cks, talking down to them, making them work on their days off, night shifts followed by morning shifts, and so on. We came to hate management we didn’t even have to work with, just by watching how insultingly they deal with their employees.
Workers can’t leave the country without getting three people to formally vouch for them, guaranteeing they will come back. This is because people actually do want to run away. Everybody signs on for two-year contracts, with the excess of rules and restrictions unbeknownst to them. If they break the contract, they have to pay a fee, plus repay the hotel full price for their flight out (even though it costs the hotel next to nothing, as it’s owned by Qatar airways) and pay for their own flights home. And still, most of the employees I spoke to have plans to break their contracts once they save up enough money to do so. The hotel has been open less than a year.
But, as everyone says, That’s how business is done here.
Needless to say, the vibe in hotel is awful. It got significantly worse in the club in the time we were there, since it started staying open seven nights a week; the staff were all working extra and their moods got lower. Add to that the fact that manager, a little Italian man who at first seemed like the only manager who was actually a human being, is actually moody and temperamental, going from joking and buddy buddy, to yelling and calling his staff “f$cking useless,” to suddenly giving you the silent treatment for days.
MUSIC LESSONS
But we were still playing music right? That was the silver lining?
Well, everything started hunky-dory, playing music and all that. As the management and last band advised us, we would play mostly standards for the first two sets- to “bring up the party” (even though dancing is forbidden). Not all my favourites, but still fun to play, head and shoulders above top forty. Luckily the band was great and it always feels fantastic to be doing real playing every night. We didn’t even mind when they would ask us to play on our night off. The crowds were decent from the get-go, although occasionally people would come in to a club expecting it to be very quiet, and they would ask the manager to ask us to play quieter. So we have to bring up the party, but play quieter.
REDUCED SENTENCE
We got fired anyways.
Which was the best thing that could have happened.
At first we were angry, since they didn’t give us a clear reasons, saying sales weren’t what they wanted, the band wasn’t entertaining enough, even thought the club had decent sized crowds every night, and was often filled to capacity. We have a number of theories as to why they actually decided to cut us short... but soon enough we realized that whatever it was, it was actually a blessing. Qatar is a penal colony masquerading as a prosperous nation, and we were getting released early. When we told our friends we got fired, most of them responded with jealousy, rather than sympathy.
This was at the beginning of May. They said we would finish the month and then go home. It was a long month.
THINGS GET WORSE BEFORE THEY GET BETTER
It was a like a TV show, where we kept saying, “at least it can’t get any worse.” And then of course... It became absurd. It would have been hilarious if we weren’t so frustrated and miserable. Little things kept coming one after the other, getting bigger and bigger.
-One of our members, claiming to fear for his sanity, left a week early. He found us a local substitute player, who was a very friendly guy who had never played before. The evenings stopped being a release for us, and were just another frustrating part of the day.
-The last Thursday (Friday is the one day off here, so Thursday is the party night), instead of letting us have a big final blowout Thursday, they hired the local Doha band (the one local band that plays all the corporate gigs – though apparently some of the members don’t improvise) for one night and made us move all of our stuff to our rooms. Well okay, actually, it was nice to have a night off.
-On Saturday night, our final night of playing, the manager was in one of his moods and took our only monitor off the stage to set up outside where they were showing the soccer game on TV. We told him we wouldn’t be able to hear ourselves sing without it, he said he didn’t care, it was hotel property, he could do what he wanted, then stormed out. Actually, that was okay too, since it gave us an excuse to play instrumental all night. We gave Doha its first, and probably last, taste of free music.
-Our very last night town, Sunday night: the management organized a dinner party for all the club staff, whom we had become friends with, at a restaurant in the hotel. We weren’t invited.
-Then the biggest pi..off ot all. We had been told that laundry service was provided to us, but on the night before our morning flights, we found out there was some kind of “miscommunication.” Our rooms all had huge laundry charges. I mean huge. Mine was almost eight hundred dollars. For laundry. Management was nowhere to be found for discussion. As our club friends came out of their party, we sat on the front curb, totally miserable wondering what the hell to do. They had invited us to come out (albeit to the smelly nightclub, but still, one last night out with our friends), but we couldn’t.
We didn’t know what to do. We were all in a terrible headspace. None of us had been sleeping properly for weeks. We had been puttering around the hotel during the days, perpetually frustrated, and now this, on our last night. I was near my boiling point, and I just wanted to go for a walk and buy a coke or something, but there was nowhere to walk and nowhere to buy a coke. It felt more than ever like prison. We were so desperate to get out, we abused our credit cards, paid the absurd charges and hit the road. I guess that’s how business is done here. Exploit your employees in every way you can.
How’s that for a fond farewell?
SUMMERTIME
But I’m home now, free at last. Best of all I get to enjoy my summer, frivolously squandering what’s left of my ill-gotten gains.
I can’t wait to see you all, and catch up with everyone!
And to be honest, I don’t want to talk about Doha ever again.
Good riddance, Doha! I’m gone, and I ain’t never going back!
We tried really hard to like Doha. We really did. We went in with positive attitudes and high hopes. But it was pretty much impossible. We found all the fun stuff within the first few days, and it was all downhill from there.
A warning: this email is basically one long rant, me just getting some things off my chest, hopefully to be done with them. It’s excessively long and exceedingly negative, even for me. For those of you who’d prefer not to read the whole thing, I’ll sum it up in one sentence: Doha is the most miserable city I’ve ever had the misfortune of visiting. Ahh, I’m feeling better already...
LOST IN THE DESERT
Starting with the small things: It’s hard to get around without a car. Everything is spread out, public buses are useless, there’s no subway and very few cabs. The hotel won’t even call a cab for you (that’s right: the hotel, which has a bar in it, will not call cabs for people. Nice, right?). If you call a cab yourself, you might wait three hours. So, you have to walk a few blocks to the main road and stand for twenty minutes to hail one. Walking anywhere is both awkward and depressing, with endless streets of boxy concrete buildings, construction sites and enormous dirt lots. There are few sidewalks, and no crosswalks, which is particularly tricky across the numerous traffic circles.
THINGS TO DO IN DOHA WHEN YOU’RE DEAD INSIDE
These are all rather moot points however, since there’s nowhere to go and nothing to do anyways. Doha is stale place where nothing happens. While living there, it’s hard to imagine a world outside where people are doing things, creating things, falling in love, developing ideas, interacting with a community, living real lives. Instead, people just go to work. The city is basically a set – they built a picturesque skyline of business buildings and hotels; behind and around these buildings there is nothing.
Hanging out in the souq at night was nice, walking along the waterfront was okay once, but other than that you can choose between five star hotels and depressing shopping malls - even depressing as far as malls go, with designer store after designer store, each with no customers and one employee who looks about ready to cry from boredom. There aren’t many cheap places to eat, and of those even fewer where you can hang out (by few I mean I found none, but assume there must be one somewhere). The one “park” (large patch of grass) near the hotel is next to the airport (the hotel itself is not quite inside the airport, but is in between the arrival and departure terminals), and the noise level is reminiscent of the scene in Wayne’s World where they drive to the runway to sit underneath planes as they take off.
There is no art or culture to speak of – forget about seeing live music unless it’s “Jazz Club”, or the top forty band at the Intercontinental Hotel. Despite the enormous number of expats (that is to say the vast majority of the total population, more than 3/4), there aren’t any English bookstores (I haven’t noticed any Arabic ones either), since western books are so censored most people don’t bother reading. Movies are heavily censored, too. Best to choose a family flick if you want to see a movie in its entirety.
You’d think that being on the water there would be beaches, but there are only private boat clubs and small private beaches owned by the hotels, which charge admission. You have to drive out of town, through the desert get to a decent swimming beach. Luckily, people would occasionally invite us to do fun things like that – actually, to be fair, I must say that dune bashing in the desert in a land rover, followed by swimming in the Arabian Gulf (I guess they get mad if you call it the Persian Gulf) was really, really fun. But most people work six days a week and don’t have much time to hang out, so we were limited to what we could get up to ourselves. On a couple of our nights off we went out, for lack of other activities, to a nightclub in the basement of the Sheraton Hotel, which was loud, crowded and reeked of cigarettes and d%ck. On a better night off, we went bowling in a mall.
But as for other happenings? Well, perusing the local entertainment magazine, the events listing for May include three events: Mother’s Day, The Doha Singers (a community vocal group) at a school concert, and the Information, Communication & Technology Conference and Expo. I’m not kidding. The same magazine, under Doha restaurant highlights, lists Dairy Queen with its “interesting desserts.”
MORALE IS LOW, THE WEATHER’S GOOD
Here are some direct quotes from conversations with people here:
“-How do you like Doha?
-It’s okay.
-Yeah, okay like death.”
“Doha is exactly how I envision hell.”
“-Do you live in Doha?
-No, I suffer in Doha.”
“I hate my life. I wake up, I drive a cab all day, I watch a dvd, I go to sleep. I wake up, I drive a cab all day, I watch a dvd, I go to sleep.”
“I think God must have made Qatar last, and had nothing nice left to give it.”
“I hate it here so much.”
Even with the lack of fun, and the excess of soulless business, we did manage to meet - in addition to many loathsome, rich snobs - plenty of friendly people, and make some great friends, from Qatar and abroad. Maybe it’s the fact that everybody feels trapped, everybody’s in the same boat, and feels the need stick together. Nevertheless, it is undeniably upsetting to live in a city that nobody is happy to be in. Nobody. Well, let’s say about five percent - and they are either soulless money-grubbing machines, out of their minds, liars, or some combination thereof (or, they just got out of Kuwait or somewhere worse). I’ve never seen such a strange phenomenon in my life, a place so unanimously disliked by its inhabitants. For my part, I can say that I have never disliked a city the way I dislike Doha. Even people born and bred in Doha are embarrassed to admit it, and they all talk about how they have plans to leave. Rich white expats and third-world labourers alike count down the days until they finish their contracts. I stopped asking people how long they were staying, because their faces and moods would drop as they thought about the months or years they had left. Those who have stayed too long, or are staying indefinitely get a glazed look on their eyes and just shrug. The only reason people come is for money, obviously, and while nobody expects it to be the most exciting place, the depressing energy of the city is more than people bargained for.
BONER CITY BREAKDOWN
And a world without women is not a proper world. It’s unbalanced. You feel it in the air. Many men are depressed or overly aggressive, and women have to be weary. There isn’t a woman in Doha who doesn’t have a stalker story (some say that’s true for the whole region). Any time a group of women came into the club (you never saw a woman come in alone), they would be hit on at least half a dozen times before the night was through. We would sometimes see men literally pleading with them. A lot of the single women in Doha are Qatar Airways cabin crew, all of whom have a curfew whether they’re working or not and aren’t allowed visitors, so the guys inevitably drunkenly drive home alone and come back the next night with even more pent up frustration.
FIVE STAR SWEATSHOPS
Speaking of foreign labourers, it’s truly depressing to see the way workers are treated. Qatar is built by cheap, imported labour. The richest country, per capita, in the world and there’s no minimum wage. In our hotel, the workers (generally from third world nations) get two or three bucks an hour (which is a lot more than what others are making), live in dorms, three to a bedroom, and have an absurd number of unreasonable rules imposed on them, ranging from no jeans even when they are not on duty to random room checks to see if their beds are made. Keep in mind these people are generally aged twenty to thirty or older. They work six or seven days a week, and the (mostly Western European) management are, to put it politely, a bunch of f%&king d#cks, talking down to them, making them work on their days off, night shifts followed by morning shifts, and so on. We came to hate management we didn’t even have to work with, just by watching how insultingly they deal with their employees.
Workers can’t leave the country without getting three people to formally vouch for them, guaranteeing they will come back. This is because people actually do want to run away. Everybody signs on for two-year contracts, with the excess of rules and restrictions unbeknownst to them. If they break the contract, they have to pay a fee, plus repay the hotel full price for their flight out (even though it costs the hotel next to nothing, as it’s owned by Qatar airways) and pay for their own flights home. And still, most of the employees I spoke to have plans to break their contracts once they save up enough money to do so. The hotel has been open less than a year.
But, as everyone says, That’s how business is done here.
Needless to say, the vibe in hotel is awful. It got significantly worse in the club in the time we were there, since it started staying open seven nights a week; the staff were all working extra and their moods got lower. Add to that the fact that manager, a little Italian man who at first seemed like the only manager who was actually a human being, is actually moody and temperamental, going from joking and buddy buddy, to yelling and calling his staff “f$cking useless,” to suddenly giving you the silent treatment for days.
MUSIC LESSONS
But we were still playing music right? That was the silver lining?
Well, everything started hunky-dory, playing music and all that. As the management and last band advised us, we would play mostly standards for the first two sets- to “bring up the party” (even though dancing is forbidden). Not all my favourites, but still fun to play, head and shoulders above top forty. Luckily the band was great and it always feels fantastic to be doing real playing every night. We didn’t even mind when they would ask us to play on our night off. The crowds were decent from the get-go, although occasionally people would come in to a club expecting it to be very quiet, and they would ask the manager to ask us to play quieter. So we have to bring up the party, but play quieter.
REDUCED SENTENCE
We got fired anyways.
Which was the best thing that could have happened.
At first we were angry, since they didn’t give us a clear reasons, saying sales weren’t what they wanted, the band wasn’t entertaining enough, even thought the club had decent sized crowds every night, and was often filled to capacity. We have a number of theories as to why they actually decided to cut us short... but soon enough we realized that whatever it was, it was actually a blessing. Qatar is a penal colony masquerading as a prosperous nation, and we were getting released early. When we told our friends we got fired, most of them responded with jealousy, rather than sympathy.
This was at the beginning of May. They said we would finish the month and then go home. It was a long month.
THINGS GET WORSE BEFORE THEY GET BETTER
It was a like a TV show, where we kept saying, “at least it can’t get any worse.” And then of course... It became absurd. It would have been hilarious if we weren’t so frustrated and miserable. Little things kept coming one after the other, getting bigger and bigger.
-One of our members, claiming to fear for his sanity, left a week early. He found us a local substitute player, who was a very friendly guy who had never played before. The evenings stopped being a release for us, and were just another frustrating part of the day.
-The last Thursday (Friday is the one day off here, so Thursday is the party night), instead of letting us have a big final blowout Thursday, they hired the local Doha band (the one local band that plays all the corporate gigs – though apparently some of the members don’t improvise) for one night and made us move all of our stuff to our rooms. Well okay, actually, it was nice to have a night off.
-On Saturday night, our final night of playing, the manager was in one of his moods and took our only monitor off the stage to set up outside where they were showing the soccer game on TV. We told him we wouldn’t be able to hear ourselves sing without it, he said he didn’t care, it was hotel property, he could do what he wanted, then stormed out. Actually, that was okay too, since it gave us an excuse to play instrumental all night. We gave Doha its first, and probably last, taste of free music.
-Our very last night town, Sunday night: the management organized a dinner party for all the club staff, whom we had become friends with, at a restaurant in the hotel. We weren’t invited.
-Then the biggest pi..off ot all. We had been told that laundry service was provided to us, but on the night before our morning flights, we found out there was some kind of “miscommunication.” Our rooms all had huge laundry charges. I mean huge. Mine was almost eight hundred dollars. For laundry. Management was nowhere to be found for discussion. As our club friends came out of their party, we sat on the front curb, totally miserable wondering what the hell to do. They had invited us to come out (albeit to the smelly nightclub, but still, one last night out with our friends), but we couldn’t.
We didn’t know what to do. We were all in a terrible headspace. None of us had been sleeping properly for weeks. We had been puttering around the hotel during the days, perpetually frustrated, and now this, on our last night. I was near my boiling point, and I just wanted to go for a walk and buy a coke or something, but there was nowhere to walk and nowhere to buy a coke. It felt more than ever like prison. We were so desperate to get out, we abused our credit cards, paid the absurd charges and hit the road. I guess that’s how business is done here. Exploit your employees in every way you can.
How’s that for a fond farewell?
SUMMERTIME
But I’m home now, free at last. Best of all I get to enjoy my summer, frivolously squandering what’s left of my ill-gotten gains.
I can’t wait to see you all, and catch up with everyone!
And to be honest, I don’t want to talk about Doha ever again.