Celebratin the fourth, Doha style!

My goodness (my guinness!) I'm hungry. It's almost lunch time here in the office, and considering I still wake up around 5am (thank you sunshine!) I've gone far too long without food. How am I ever going to survive during Ramadan?

Well, the July issue of ABODE has hit the shelves, offices and gyms. This means I'm out and about in the glossy world of magazines, a published journalist. It's crazy. Absolutely crazy. When Tessa dropped a copy off on my desk, I almost started crying. Call me young, naive and all other sorts of names, but at the end of the day I can't help but to be young and naive and all sorts of happy. I'm a journalist, for real. 

When I'm not hiding behind a desk in our fortunately air conditioned office, I'm out and about getting lost on the Doha streets and meeting my interviewees. I can't really detail the stories I'm working on this month; suffice to say I'm excited and I think they're going to be pretty good. Tessa made a point the other day about how writing is more significant when you feel it might impact people, when it might make a little change in even one life. 

That's the kind of writing I want to do. Change lives. 

The ABODE staff got together on the 3rd to celebrate 'merica in the 'merican style. We ate hotdogs, burgers (Bryce requested veggy burgers for me. YUM!) and sat in the sun for hours. After lounging around lazy in the exhausting heat, Kath and I ducked out to attend a salsa "Bad taste" party. My gangly limbs struggle to dance, but I still had a great time. Kath, dancer o'15 years, was naturally pretty good. And pretty. Even in her colorful outfit.

Being in Doha for the fourth made me miss my family, especially lil sis 'n bro. I think last year, my pops tried to grill a lobster. Not quite sure what they did this year. It's getting tougher to cope with the fact that I'll be leaving Leia for two years in two more months, and that I probably wont see her during that entire time. She truly is one of my best friends.

Maybe she can fit in my suitcase.

That having been said, I really can't imagine myself anywhere else right now but here. I absolutely love what I'm doing. The people are so well travelled, interesting, diverse, loud and dirty and pristine and chaotic. It's everything at once thrown into a desert, with opulence and poverty shoved side-by-side. It's astounding. 

 

Yesterday after dinner at Thai Snack (which is absolutely, positively one of the greatest not-secret secrets here in Doha), the team'o'staff popped into this nearby antique store. It's the first used-goods shop I've seen yet in Doha. I fell in love, mostly with the upstairs attic room filled with hundreds of books. Swollen from heat and dusty with age, the books were stacked against the walls and falling in piles. I could have spent hours going through each one. It's times like that that I realize just how awfully nerdy I truly am. I love books. I enjoy reading. I wanted to accost the store owners and demand they sit down and talk with me about literature. 

 

Instead, I went home, finished off my fruit supply, and watched a film called "How to make an American quilt" with my sleepy suntanned roomy. It was the perfect end to a beautiful couple of days.