Déjà vu All Over Again

If Avatar (13 years), Twin Peaks (25 years) and forking Top Gun (65 million years) can all return to wild acclaim after extended absences, then I’d be a fool to miss out on the nostalgia trend by not resurrecting my blog after a six-year hiatus, right?

Living somewhere like Doha – a place that not many people have visited – means you’ll frequently get asked what it’s like here.

Many adjectives come to mind – I’m sure all residents reading this will have some suggestions – but you’ll probably hear a variation on ‘dusty’ or ‘beige’.

Hardcore fans of this blog, and/or anyone with the ability to press CTRL+F at the same time, might remember that I wrote those words in summer 2014, as the mercury began its inevitable journey from unpleasant to inhospitable.

Welcome (back)!

And it’s a question I’ve been asked once again over the past few months, as it became apparent that we were going to be able to finally return to Doha, albeit briefly, during the World Cup.

When we lived and worked there for three years, I didn’t do a thing without analysing it from all angles via the magic™ of this blog.

So to me it makes total sense to reopen the dusty doors of Little City one more time, and try to crystallise the weirdness of revisiting our former home for the first time during an international sporting tournament when the worlds’ attention is firmly on its back.

Previously on Little City…
Mrs Little City (Mrs LC) and I lived and worked in Doha between 2012 and 2015. From there we relocated to a new job in a new city (Abu Dhabi, UAE).

Click on the images to scroll through the gallery

Outside Khalifa Stadium c 2014…

…and inside, pre-renovation

Since then, only Mrs LC managed a trip back to Doha at all, and even then, just for a long weekend. As for me and the kids (Kid A, 11 when we left Qatar; and her little brother Amnesiac, then 8), we didn’t go back at first because there were too many other places we wanted to visit.

Then we couldn’t visit Qatar at all, because of the three-year GCC blockade that started in 2017.

Then relocation back to the UK in 2018 meant Qatar weren’t our neighbours at all anymore; and then Covid meant we couldn’t even leave our homes.

Which brings us inelegantly to today.

I guess at its core, the reason I fired up this blog after all these years is because I made a promise to an 11-year-old kid about coming back, and in the face of many odds, some of which we never saw coming, managed to keep it.

Metro, this way!
Unlike the fans who were only there for the football, and were gleefully haring round this compact city on its awesome new metro to try and take in multiple matches in a day, our Doha itinerary as returning ex-residents was a little more esoteric.

Take the distinct lack of crowds who declined to join us as we wandered all the way back to the tip of MIA Park, to revel briefly in the sight of Richard Serra’s Seven one more time. The only other traffic bar the beIN Sports buggies whizzing crew back and forth from their temporary base, was a dude who jogged past us in the afternoon sun, and by the time we reached the sculpture, was using its spectacular but tiny interior for a shaded mediation session.

Best view of the city makes this a no brainer for beIN’s World Cup backdrop

Back in the shadow of Seven after, er, seven years

Souq Waqif, World Cup style

Similarly, I’m not saying we saying we flew thousands of miles through the night just to eat the lamb chops at Turkey Central, or sip karak in the setting sun at Katara one more time, but it was definitely on our to do list if no one else’s.

Look! At the pavements you could walk on without worrying that some impatient driver was going to use it as an extra lane in a bid to shave a few seconds off their journey time.

Marvel! At the fast, silent and free Metro! And the beautiful new urban neighbourhood of Msheireb! And the doubling in size of Katara!

Gasp! As the roads seem calmer than ever, thanks to a combination of Waze, speed camera enforcement, and clearly written bi-lingual warnings to buckle up and not use your phone whilst driving.

(It’s a shame that the messages still need to be displayed at all, but at least there’s no room for ambiguity unlike the Google-translated fun phrases from our day of “Catch your goal then call” and “Beware road surprises!”)

Catch your goal then call, obviously

Lamb chops and a lemon mint, please

A Doha landmark for 30+ years

Decision to Leave
There was definitely a bit of unfinished business on our part in returning. Gulf departures can feel sudden, even if they are months in the making. You close your bank account, your work permit is expired, you move out of your work-provided accommodation, and endless admin follows whilst you await the inevitable trapdoor.

In Mrs LC’s case, her planned end to her contract was on a Thursday night, and by the following morning she was on a plane back to Europe. Even though you know it’s nothing personal, it’s hard not to feel slightly unceremoniously ejected.

Working now with a new set of colleagues in the UK, I found myself on more than one occasion having to explain to people who had only ever heard one version of the Qatar narrative, why I was choosing to visit the World Most Controversial Sporting Tournament™. It felt like explaining why we were moving to Doha in the first place, all over again.

Put it this way: I’ve never felt the need to apologise for previously living in, say, Putney, but that’s the Qatar effect for you.

For me, that conversation finished over a decade ago. It was late 2009 when I was first approached about a job with what was then Qtel (now Oo-re-doo-re-doo). We were flown out for interviews, and housing + school visits. That job eventually fell through, but it put the country firmly on our radar. So when their equivalent of the NHS came calling for Mrs LC in 2012, our decision to leave was already years old.

Khalifa Stadium – looking good in 2022

We even saw some football when we came back for the World Cup 🙂
Oh, Canada…

House of the Dagon
They’ve built malls, hospitals, high rises, highways, flyovers, stadia, a new city (Lusail) and an entire Metro since we were here last. So what were the odds that a broken sign above our old convenience store would have escaped the developers’ clutches?

Only one way to find out, so on our final morning in town, we paid a flying visit back to our old neighbourhood. Our bemused Uber driver was happy enough to keep his aircon running while we spent a few minutes wandering round, taking in the new name for our old compound, and the closure of its neighbour, formerly home to our nearest convenience store.

The once broken sign that had turned that shop from Dragon Mart into D_agon Mart, had first been replaced, and since been abandoned completely. It had become something else, was currently nothing at all, and was no doubt soon to be something newer and shinier.

Quite the little Doha metaphor, that shop sign.

On his last last full day in Doha, here’s Amnesiac at Dagon Mart.
Showing his face for the first time here because he’s 6 foot 2 now…

Extra Time
As we rode the Metro for the last time on our trip, all the way back out to the airport, it was easy to see why fans had loved this compact, single-city tournament. In the face of howling opposition and criticism, Qatar had run a vibrant, friendly, and incredibly safe tournament (especially for female fans and visiting families), seen some amazing matches with a worthy winner – hey, we went to a match too! – and will have sent millions of visitors home with a new perspective on this dusty, beige peninsula.

That’s Qatar’s equivalent of Messi lifting the trophy.

So why don’t I end where we started our long, slow return journey, by asking Kid A – by now somehow a first-year Uni student – how it was going back, after seven years?

“Loved it, thank you! Nostalgic, significant, meaningful to keep the promise…amazing to be back after so long away.”

PS Here’s a delightful Twitter thread (which you don’t need a Twitter account to read) from another returnee on what changes they found when they went back. I can’t wait to go back and go exploring!

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Postscript
Not saying I’m a bit rusty at all this, but I wrote many versions of this post before landing on the one you’ve just finished. (Thanks for reading by the way.)

I drafted paragraphs worth of “My how you’ve grown, Doha”, but “Capital city hosting world’s biggest single-sport tournament changes a lot in seven years” isn’t really headline news, is it?

I wrote acres of text explaining the context for coming back at all, given the shitstorm whipped up by the media here, and the seeming need to explain and justify any positive engagement with the country at all.

Other drafts were too focused on the politics of sport, or on FIFA and the tournament, or a match report, or its impact on football and What It All Means. Blah blah ugh.

I’d tried covering a lot of that ground in this post from 2013, and was keen to update it.

Essential reading

So I cut most of that out and instead will point you if you are interested in the direction of far better writers than me, of whom there are many on all of these topics. I will draw your attention to just two:

The first is John McManus, author of Inside Qatar – Hidden Stories from one of the richest nations on Earth – a brilliant book which I can’t recommend highly enough. It is an enlightening, accessible and balanced examination of everything that’s happened in the country over the past decade, and it plugged a lot of the gaps in my knowledge.

Through cleverly themed chapters on things like hotels, cricket, and religion, McManus examines life in the country in a way that’s insightful and informative. He also touches more eloquently than I could on how and why Qatar’s neighbours (especially the UAE), whose rules are no less stringent and should attract all the same criticisms as Qatar, have positioned themselves much more favourably in the eyes of the west.

(In an early draft I had even written: “It will provide a useful blueprint to what Saudi might have in mind for the next decade,” only for Ronaldo to pull back the curtain on that plan for all to see…) You can also read his post-tournament reflections here.

The other author is Qatar-based expat blogging / podcast queen Kirsty Rice, of whom I’m a huge and longtime fan. Check out her podcast episode here on Expats at the World Cup, or tuck into her recent Facebook post on the whole “why Qatar?” shemozzle, where she brings her years of Doha residency to bear on a topic that seemingly everyone on earth has an opinion on.

Until we meet again…