The cultural center in Doha offers mosque tours. Now anyone who's been in a mosque knows that there's not much to see. The muslims take the opposite approach as say, the catholics do, when it come to decorating their places of worship. Last year Doha opened there own Grand Mosque which I've heard is quite impressive to see. So I've been trying to sign up for a tour of it for a awhile. I thought I had signed up for one only to get an e-mail the day before saying our tour had been moved to a different mosque. We already had the kids lined up for the afternoon so decided to do the tour anyways even if it wasn't the Grand Mosque. Well it ended up being the definition of a 'Doha' experience. We left with plenty of time to get to the meeting place where we were to take a bus to the mosque. Well that day they had speedboat races along the corniche so all the roads around where we were supposed to meet were closed. It took us almost an hour to get there - but we weren't late because everyone else was stuck in the same mess. They dressed us up in the abayas (black dress) and hijab (scarf around the head) and loaded us on the bus.
By now the traffic was 10 times as bad, we spent 30 minutes on the bus and had made it through 1 light only to have the tour director decide to give up and take us back to where we started and just do the tour in the local mosque. He did his best to make light of the whole situation. This was certainly a 'inshallah' moment. Inshallah means god willing and is an answer people will give rather then agreeing to your request. The say inshallah - so it will happen if god wants it to. Well he obviously didn't want us to see any of the pretty mosques that day.
We toured the little local mosque, saw the 2 highlights of the prayer times clock and the copies of Quran and decided we had had enough fun for one Doha afternoon.
You can be sure I wont be getting Steve to agree to another cultural experience anytime soon...
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