Dancing with Daggers

On Garrick's last full evening we went to Souk Waqif, the main souq (market) in Doha. There are all kinds of other, smaller, more specialised souqs here; a fabric souq, a vegetable souq, a meat souq, a carpet souq, an electronics souq, a gold souq and many others. Souq Waqif has been rebuilt traditionally and has always been the main souq here. It used to be the weekend market for the Bedouin who would get their staple goods in return for trading meat, wool, milk and weaving materials. Now it is a maze of little shops selling spice, incense, clothing, hardware. camping gear and kitchenware. There are coffee shops and even a little section where men work out of broom cupboard-sized offices with typwriters or computers, translating documents or writing letters for people. We were looking for Christmas presents and some souvenirs for Garrick before he left.

Now that winter is approaching the daytime temperatures range through the 20s, and the evening temperatures are around 20 degrees. It is very pleasant to walk around now. Souq Waqif was bustling. The Qatari men are starting to wear their winter thoubs, which are grey or black and of thicker fabric. Some of them also wear a red and white checked gutra in winter. I've even seen a few woolly hats and long scarves around people's necks to keep them warm in the freezing temperatures. The women, of course look just the same, elegantly covered in their black abayas and hijab headscarves.

We pottered about and found some new parts of the souq that we hadn't seen before and came across some traditional dancers, wielding khanja daggers, outside an Omani restaurant. Here's part of their dance which Leo captured on his state-of-the-art mobile.

We went into an antique sword shop and looked through lots of fearsome weapons. The shop owner told us when we were leaving that lots of Kiwis came through his shop and asked us to teach him some greetings from New Zealand. In a weird cross-cultural moment we were able to write down in arabic for him, "kia ora" and "haere ra". Our Arabic lessons are really starting to pay off.