Or so they say!
The past few days have been an exercise in flexibility, patience and humour. If your schedule says black, then you can be pretty certain that in twelve hours it’s going to get changed to white. Or grey. Or hey, wait! Green could be pretty cool! No wait, black. Black’s good. Let’s go with black.
It’s nothing if not entertaining and at the end of each day we usually have a pretty good laugh over how everything is coming together. We are in the final lead up phase prior to the opening of the Games, which is on December 9th. Our typical days are made up of spreadsheets, scheduling, venue visits and meetings, workshops… Soon we’ll be moving into rehearsals and then finally, competition! We are hoping to go to the Opening Ceremonies which would be pretty great. To give you some perspective, tickets to the opening ceremonies at the Vancouver Winter Games cost around $1100 for the “fancy seats”. Here, we can buy tickets in the VIP section for 150 QR (about $50). So let’s hope it doesn’t rain!
I’m getting more accustomed to the pace of life here – I’m even able to tell when a cab driver is jerking me around! I can usually negotiate a few dollars off of the rate which I am pretty proud of. I even negotiated some prices at the Souk the other night! I’m practically a local! (A still very pasty white local who only speaks 7 words of Arabic, but still…)
My camera died a few days ago so I missed a few days of pictures but thanks to the good folks at the Carrefour grocery (where they sell just about everything) and $65 later, I am back in business. Insha’allah I’ll have more exciting stuff to write about soon!
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