Qatar First Blog Post – Dane Anderson

Hey my name is Dane Anderson and I am a sophomore accounting major and I decided to do a winter abroad business class for 2 weeks in Qatar. I have never been to the Middle East and the only other country I have traveled outside of the USA is Italy. Right before traveling over I wasn’t too nervous but was very curious to see what the Middle East was actually like, granted a more ‘western’ part of it, but I did dread the flight. The flight had a layover, it consisted of a 12 hour and then a 4 hour flight. The day was very long and annoying being in the airplane for so long. When we left the airport when landing in Doha and drove in a bus to the hotel it caught me off guard to see the roads look somewhat similar to the US ones when we were exiting the airport. It was about 3 am and I could somewhat see the building we passed by, they looked modern and had that Middle East architecture style to them. For some reason upon arrival and on the road it really didn’t feel like I was that far away from Texas, while when I went to Italy 2 previous summers before it did feel like I was very far away. Seeing the street signs in English helped the normal feel, but they were also in Arabic too. It did feel weird though when we arrived at the hotel and the sign at the top was in Arabic and the hotel itself looked foreign, not of one you’d see in the USA. This is when it started to hit me that it felt like we were very far away from Texas. Over the past few days what has shocked me about Qatar is actually how nice it is, the buildings and infrastructure look significantly nicer than the USA which is really cool to see. I did not expect this at all. I knew it was one of the richest countries by GDP per capita coming in before, but here in an oil wealthy nation it really sinks in how rich it actually is in infrastructure. Culture wise I wasn’t too shocked as I knew it would obviously be majority Muslim so that part didn’t shock me. What did shock me about Qatar though is that when the call to prayer happens it really doesn’t seem like people stop what they are doing and go to a prayer room or anything, they go about on their phone and do whatever they were doing before. I thought that since it was majority Muslim the majority of the population would take each and every call to prayer with most importance. Since I researched Qatar’s demographics beforehand and saw that almost 90% of the country was foreign born, it hasn’t shocked or surprised me at all seeing a lot of people from all around the world here working common jobs. What is shocking though is that the native Qataris seem to be in a much better economic and social status then anyone else here, always wearing nice clothes and driving nice cars and they do not work the lower paying jobs. Since we do not see a separation of economic and social status based on ethnicity in the US, it is a very different experience to see.