Our Sentiments Exactly

Sometimes we feel like we are constantly hitting our heads against the wall here in Qatar. Since I subscribed to the New Yorker magazine last year and am never home to receive it, I brought a whole pile of them with me to read through here in Doha. A few days ago, I opened the September 28 edition to find the following cartoon on page 21. For licensing reasons I can't reproduce it, but please do click on this link. It's worth it!

New Yorker cartoon

Now do you understand how we feel?

Our Qatari Cuisine

A few weeks ago, I was knitting along with the ladies of the Doha Knitters' Club when my question about where to find baking soda and powder was met with quizzical looks. Having had trouble finding both ingredients everywhere else I have lived in the past 10 years, I automatically expected the same here in Qatar. Not so. It turns out that almost every larger grocery store offers such ingredients and more. Today, for instance, we had a fantastic Mexican meal courtesy of Old El Paso and fresh meat and vegetables.

We found a supermarket today that offered all kinds of "delicacies", but many at a very high price. Organic lactose-free milk? No problem, but it'll cost ya 65 Qatari Riyals (€12/$18). We passed on that.

Had we had the energy to make a Thanksgiving dinner, we would have had no problem finding a turkey (Butterball - I'm not kidding!). We will celebrate Thanksgiving a bit late with pumpkin pie since we turned the corner in the market to find...

I'm not a great fan of processed meats, but Erik was happy to find good 'ol Oscar Meyer bologna, in the beef variety of course, You won't find a bit of pork here and I fear for gelatin when they finally find out that it is actually made of pigs' hooves.

But beef and lamb is the thing. In fact we had lamb AND beef in our tacos today and anytime we want we can make some beef patties and buy a..

or two to go with them.

One thing's for sure. If you find something relatively rare that you can't do without, buy lots and call all your friends and tell them to buy lots for themselves (of course, AFTER you've bought lots for your own family). You never know if you'll find it the next day. Today we actually found spelt (Dinkelmehl), but again, at a price. That won't stop me from importing my allowed 3 kilos from our lovely DM-Markt in Cologne every chance I get, but it does mean that we don't have to ration it as carefully. Hey, they even sell chocolate chips.

So, culinarily-speaking (is that even a word?), we have it good. Maybe it's the..

...after all.

Water unites

Sometimes we get a little melancholy about being so far away from the people we love and the homes we have known. We're not in a situation in which we can just jump in the car or hop on a train and reach our friends and family. A plane trip to most European destinations is a minimum of six hours in the air, taking a train is out of the question and I don't even want to think about how long it would take to drive. To give you some perspective of how far it is from Doha to the places with which we are bound...

Klagstorp, Sweden: 2824 miles/4544 km
Halden, Norway: 3021 miles/4861 km
Cologne, Germany: 2921 miles/4701 km
Munich, Germany: 2658 miles/4277 km
Saarbrücken, Germany: 2880 miles/4635 km
Portland, Oregon: 7529 miles/12,131 km
Spokane, Washington: 7352 miles/11,831 km

Think of all the frequent-flier miles!

In the end, all I can say is thank goodness for modern technology like e-mail and Skype which allows us to stay in touch with everyone.

A few days ago, a German colleague told me about a wonderful gift he received as he was preparing to move to Qatar. A friend of his gave him several stones taken from the Elbe River and told him that if he ever gets lonely, he should throw one of these stones in the ocean. Isn't it nice to think that somehow, somewhere, all the rivers and oceans of this world are connected? So maybe we're not so far apart after all.

Never say never

I never thought I'd be even tempted to blog. To blog. How is it, that in the space of just a few years, "to blog" has become a verb? Obviously because it has become a part of everyday speech and it has become a part of everyday speech because lots of people do it. First there was "to Google" and now there is "to blog".

Anyway, this is beside the point, isn't it? The point is to find a way for our family and friends to be able to keep track of our very odd and transitory lives. I (Karen) will essentially be doing all the writing, but it will not be without the input of my husband Erik and I hope to convince him once in a while to write something himself.

As you all know, we musicians lead pretty hectic lives, especially me as a free-lance musician. What some of you probably still don't even know yet, is that we've added chaotic to hectic and the result is that Erik is trying out a position in the bass section of the Qatar Philharmonic Orchestra in Doha. Here I would use that handy little link option so that you could all learn more about the orchestra, but there is no link. This orchestra has no internet presence whatsoever which, for some people, means it doesn't exist. But we'll get into that later...

Now to explain the title of the blog, since you non-Swedes will have no idea what it means. Puttes äventyr i blåbärsskogen is a famous old chidren's book by Elsa Beskow (1874-1953) in which a little boy is searching for blueberries for his mother's birthday and suddenly finds himself the size of Tom Thumb. When that happens, ants and snails take on an entirely different proportion for him.
That's a bit how we feel sometimes.