We slept in today and didn't get out of the house until nearly noon. We helped Maria move a cabinet to her classroom, and got a tour of the American School at Doha. The school has a large campus and includes preschool through 12th grade. Maria is one of the art teachers who works with preschool through second grade. The portion of the school in which she teaches is newly refurbished, and it is very bright and welcoming. She has a nice classroom and usually has about 15 students at one time.
We visited with some of her colleagues and walked back to the vehicle through the hallways of the school. It looks pretty much like any American school.
Then we headed out to Education City but before we got to Education Village, we drove through the Aspire Aone and Aspire Park. It is - once again - a HUGE sports complex that also features Doha's popular shopping malls - the Villaggio and Hyatt plaza. The park itself is a massive green area that is a nice contrast to the characteristic surrounding desert landscape. The Aspire Zone is considered the ultimate sporting destination of the Middle East and rose to international prominence through successful staging of the 2006 Asian Games. The Torch Tower served as a giant torch for those games and is 300 metres in height. It's pretty impressive, and has a swimming pool that juts from it about 20 stories high.
The complex is 88 hectares and offers all the possible amenities as well as space to any sport (I saw at least two large indoor soccer stadiums, for instance, and there is a 1.6 km jogging track that surrounds the park). Aspire Zone is able to provide space to the sporting demands ranging from hosting major international events to coaching camps and conferences to pre-competition camps, training and research, injury diagnosis and treatment as well as rehabilitation.
Then we were on to Education City, located in Al Rayyan City on the outshirts of Doha. Education City covers 14 sqkm (5.4 square miles) and houses educational facilities from school age to research level and branch campuses of some of the world's major universities including Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar School of Arts, Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar, Texas A&M University at Qatar, Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar, Northwestern University in Qatar, HEC Paris and Hamad Bin Khalifa University. Among the research facilities is RAND-Qatar Policy Institute.
Apparently the presence of American universities with campuses in Education City has been the subject of ongoing criticism of whether it is appropriate to maintain a campus in Qatar, given the alleged Qatari links to state-sponsored terrorism, the lack of freedom of speech in Qatar and Qatar's absolute monarchy.
It is an interesting debate because in Qatar, the monarchy has absolute authority over all aspects of life including its strict adherence to Sharia Law. There also are strict censorship laws that at times have spilled over into Education City, despite the countries' stated claims that the institutions in Qatar have total academic and intellectual freedoms.
What I find interesting and something of which I am aware when taking photos is the potential for harassment and intimidation I might encounter. An article I read indicated that Northwestern students have said they face challenges due to the lack of First Amendment rights protecting the media, and they say they have been harassed and intimidated when trying to capture images that would be considered routine or non-offensive in the U.S. And I had to laugh a little when some faculty members said of the situation that it teaches students persistence and creativity in overcoming obstacles to report a story. :)
Education City also houses the Qatar National Library. We stopped, had some refreshments then visited the Heritage Center in the library. The library is another massive structure that was designed by OMA and was constructed in 2017 with an area of 45000.00 m2. From Architectural Record in April of 2018: "There's no mistaking that the new Qatar National Library was designed by the Rotterdam office of OMA. Like a lot of OMA's built work, it is slightly odd, slightly off-putting, but impossible to ignore. And the building quite literally borrows from earlier OMA projects, most conspicuously from the Casa da Musica in port, Portugal with its unusual crystalline geometry and large swaths of corrugated glass, and inside, from the Bilbliotheque Alexis de Tocqueville in Caen, France.
It is unusual - it actually felt like you were entering into some kind of space ship. :)
The library is a project of the Qatar Foundation and has three main functions: the National Library, the University and Research Library and a state-of-the-art Metropolitan Public Library. The Public Library houses over a million books and space for thousands of readers. Books are both in Arabic and English.
The heritage collection is in the center of the library in a six-meter-deep excavated-like space, clad in beige travertine. It houses valuable texts and manuscripts related to the Arab-Islamic civilization. There were some intriguing artifacts displayed in the area including really old maps, atlases and globes as well as some really old Arabic printed materials such as books, journals, magazines and newspapers. The most interesting portion for me was a selection of early photography. Something I did not know: an Arab, Ibn al-Haytham (known in the west as Alhazen) describe and built the first camera obscura. In his Book of Optics, written in Cairo between 1012 and 1021, Ibn al-Haytham used the term "Al-Bayt al-Muthlim," translated into English as "dark room." The camera obscura is significant in the history of optics, photography and the history of art. If it interests you, you can learn more at http://www.historyofinformation.com/expanded.php?id=2414
We called it a day around 4 p.m. and headed back to the compound, where we laid low until we got hungry then ventured over to Al Shami Home to eat. It featured Middle Eastern, Lebanese and Halal food, and it was buffet style, all-you-can eat! We enjoyed the evening tasting everything on the buffet and having some simply delicious deserts before we smoked some mint-lemon shisha. It was the convivial evening!
Then we returned to Maria's apartment to watch some Arabic television so I could get a sense of what it featured. It was pretty standard fare - movies, soap operas, news - but it all was Arabic, of course, so we didn't understand a thing. There are at least three news stations on the cable Maria gets: CNN, MSNBC and FOX. :)
Maria in her classroom, ready to rock'n'roll!
This is a pearl sculpture that pays homage to the pearl industry in Qatar. Pearl diving was one of Qatar’s main industries until the early 1940s, when oil replaced it. After being the major industry of the area for thousands of years, pearl diving was a decaying profession by the 1930s, after the introduction of Japanese cultured pearls and the Great Depression made pearl diving unprofitable. Even though pearling is no longer a thriving industry, it remains a beloved part of Qatari culture.
This it the front entrance of the Qatar National Library that resembles, I think, a spaceship.
This the wing of the Qatar National Library, which is to the right in the photo above.
A woman in hijab heads toward the stacks of books available in the Qatar National Library.
Me, Maria and Beth in Al Shami Home smoking shisha in a hookah in Al Shami Home.
Me smoking mint-lemon shisha in a hookah at Al Shami Home after supper and desert.
Fascinating.
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