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Qatar Study Tour Day 9

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Today in Doha was an amazing day. In school, they celebrated Qatar National Day, which is on the 18th of December. To celebrate it, some classes put on presentations teaching the other students about Qatari customs, which included everything from women’s daily lives to football (soccer). There was a ton of food, which was all traditional Qatari food ranging from chicken and rice to cake. There were also activities, such as quizzes on Qatar’s history. Additionally, all of the students wore maroon or white as those are the colors on the Qatari flag.  In the middle of the school day, we all had lunch from the school cafeteria for the first time. The cafeteria had several options for lunches, desserts, and drinks. My host bought me chicken and rice, a muffin, and a mango juice, and after we finished we played volleyball and badminton until the break was done.  After school finished, all of the students from CGS, their hosts, and a few other students got onto the bus that would take
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Qatar Study Tour Day 8

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The day started with me getting ready for school. My host was sick so her dad drove me and her younger brother to school. It had rained really hard the night before, which rarely happens, and because of the lack of drainage a lot of places were flooded. Some of us (CGS students) couldn’t make it to school because the flooding blocked the roads. While driving to school I saw water in yards and sidewalks that were so big that they could have been pools. During the school day I stayed with another host and went to a physics class. The materials and lab tables that they had were very similar to the ones at McMahon except for a different layout and different colors. After first period we went to the National Museum. The museum was built to resemble a Qatari plant, the Desert rose. The building looked amazing! It was unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.  In the museum we were given a tour focusing on the history of sea navigation in Qatar. First we were led through an exhibit t
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Qatar Study Tour Day 7

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On December 10th we went to the Bin Jalmood House - part of the Msheireb Museums - in Doha, Qatar. The story that is told from the walls of the house have been apart of a long history with slavery. While walking inside the house we were able to be  in a place of learning, dialogue, and reflection. We learned about the slaves integration in to the family, freedom through manumission grated by ones master, and freedom through Qatar’s abolition of slavery. Kids and adults, all ages and races, would be enslaved and forced into labor. I found a few interesting things: masters were darker than the slaves themselves, there was the killer camel-racing circuit which used toddlers which only got banned roughly 15 years ago, and we even got to see a video about pearl diving in the Gulf.  Another part of the Msheireb Museums is the Company House. From the late 1930s Qatari men used to gather outside this building to be taken on truck journeys to the desert oil fields of the western part of t
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Qatar Study Tour Day 6

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December 7th, 2019 The First Day of School  The day after we arrived in Qatar was quite a busy one. As we all woke up in our host’s houses for the first time, we began getting ready for school. Our classes  varied depending on our host’s schedules, but the day was filled with new classes and people for all of us. Despite the first day jitters, I think I speak for us all when I say that the environment at the Middle East International School is incredibly inviting, filled with students eager to greet and help us out. We’ve gotten to know our host’s even better, as we were able to shadow them during the school day. We experienced who they hang out with, the classroom dynamics, their teachers, and made new friends. Overall, the school day couldn’t have gone better. My host and I on the first day of school  After school, we all did different things. Maia, Parisa, and I went (with our hosts) to Fiona’s host’s house to swim in her pool. After a while of swimming, Fiona’s host
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Qatar Study Tour Day 5

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Hello Readers! Today was an incredible day filled with many interesting visits and places. Our day started out fairly normal; we woke up early, at around 5:30, to go to school by bus. The bus rides are very different than in America, one is jostled around as the bus hits curbs and suddenly brakes often, and all of this is without seatbelts.  When we got to school today, we went to class for about one and a half periods. My first period today was geography, which is essentially the same as history in the US. I found the teacher’s method of teaching particularly interesting. For example, he gave us a story that started like this;  “ There are three hunters that are trying to hunt a zebra before the spoken language was created, they still only had symbols and hand motions. One of the hunters went off on his own instead, and ended up not being able to see the symbols. When they are hunting the creature, the spoken language was created” then he asks “In what situation was the sp
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Oman/Qatar Study Tour Day 4

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Celeste Mendez 12/07/2019 On Saturday we everyone woke up, finished packing, ate breakfast and brought our stuff to the hotel lobby so that we would be ready to check out of the hotel before nine in the morning to start our last day in Oman. When we all got downstairs we turned in our keys, loaded the bus with our bags and got on to head to the mosque. When we got to the mosque all the girls put on hijabs and went inside. The first part of the mosque that we visited was the women’s prayer room, which can fit 650 women at a time to pray in their own praying squares has multiple very large chandeliers handing for the women to pray under. Then we passed through the outside praying area for men and women and saw the tallest tower in Oman which is where the Emam does the prayer through a microphone for everyone to hear. After that, we walked around the men’s prayer room which can fit over 7,000 men at a time and has the world’s second-largest chandelier in the world and is over 8 to
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Oman Study Tour Day 3

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Today in Oman we did many things. In the morning we stopped at a hyper market to grab some snacks. It was basically a huge target. We bought these Omani chips and they were very delicious. Next we went to the beach! It was 75° F outside and the water felt wonderful. The ocean was much cleaner than the water we have back home. Then we went to an Indian restaurant for lunch. We all ate a lot of carbs and the food was very spicy.  After lunch we went back to the hotel to shower and clean up after swimming at the beach. Then we went to the Omani National Museum. It was gorgeous and I learned more about Omani history. Afterwards we went to the souq in Muscat again. We all bought gifts for other people and a cat that liked our group. Finally we went to this amazing restaurant called Kargeens. It was a set menu and the food was wonderful. We got to try their famous mint lemonade and sat under the night sky. Overall, it was a lovely day. 
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