Bye-Bye Al-Malki

When we moved here 5 years ago, EM was running low on housing and had just signed a new ‘temporary’ lease for a small compound with houses significantly smaller than the other housing in Doha. Because they were sub-standard they only put the couples-with-no-kids in them and most of us had a pet so couldn’t go to the apartments that we would normally be allocated. We were told not to get too comfortable since EM was signing a lease with a brand new bigger compound – well 5 years later they finally finished it and we ACTUALLY moved. Here are a few things I WILL NOT MISS about our villa in Al-Malki… the leaky and noisy A/C units - 1 for ever room so i think we had about 8 in the house; the tiny and poorly designed kitchen that had no pantry and couldn't even fit the fridge properly; the construction right outside our window - no more getting woken up at 5:00 am by a jack-hammer or the beeping of some dump truck backing up, though Jaydon will miss his tractor watching time - we spent many hours sitting at this window watching tractors scope, dump, and flatten dirt. The extremely poor workmanship; tiles were always falling of and groute was more likely to stick to your feet then stay in between the tiles. The complete lack of storage - no closets anywhere and the closets in the bedrooms were too narrow to fit hangers so we had to take the closet doors off...
A few things we will miss is its location, 7 minutes to the office for me (when there’s no traffic) and Jaydon’s daycare is 2 minutes away; the lax rules – the mgmt really didn’t care what we did as long as no other residents complained about it; the small community feel – almost every night I’d come home to a small gathering of neighbors who were out for a walk or the nannies and kids waiting for parents to get home; and Jaydon’s room. Steve and I spent 5 days painting his room with 3 different colors and tracing all the letters and numbers on the walls before he was born. I should also mention that we have never painted a wall in any house we’ve lived in together – we can never agree on a color…
And this picture is for the ex Al-Malkiers who read our blog. The compounds approach to pruneing trees was to mutilate them so we never let them touch ours the whole time we lived there. We had the biggest tree and it provided enough shade for a whole group of people to stand under. Well within hours of daylight the morning after we moved out this is what our beautiful tree looked like - we also had an orange bougenvilla that reached across the car port that they slaughtered too...