A well spent day at Doha

We had planned a trip to South Africa. Due to rescheduled flights we had a 15 hours lay over at Doha.

We started early morning on 30th April from Mumbai. It was a long night with 3 children, 4 sleepy adults waiting to board the flight. We reached Doha at 5 am in the morning Doha time. 

We were worried how we will be able to keep children engaged and happy for that long, considering certain restrictions in public place. But they started playing the minute they saw an empty area on airport :).

We had checked whether we can go out in Doha city and visit places. By the time we reached Doha we knew 'On arrival' visa was possible for Indians with certain bookings in place. 

We were pleasantly surprised to find the process to book the specific hotel was very easy. We could do it from the airport booking counter and got the visa hardly in half an hour.

Near the airport exit gate number of sculptures of Qatar's national animal - Arabian Oryx are placed. Outside the airport, a huge golden bird sculpture is created. It is a Falcon, the national bird of Qatar. We went outside Doha airport and booked a taxi. The fare was on the meter reading basis and it was ok to use taxi as long as we wanted. 

There were many places showing up on Google which had good reviews. First we went to the National museum. The museum building has a beautiful interlocking discs structure which makes a shape of a dessert rose of Qatar. The museum has many galleries. There are huge wall screens all over the galleries showing videos related to the respective gallery. 

1 FORMATION OF QATAR - It showed videos of space, earth, life under water etc. There is a display of various fossils found around Qatar.  

2 NATURAL ENVIRONMENTS - It has a display of Animals, birds, reptiles and plants in Qatar. It has a dedicated showcase for insects with a table screen giving information about them. The table screen is interactive and one can browse through the types of insects and view the info and see the physical samples in the showcase. 

This gallery was particularly interesting as we found the interactive games for everyone, near these displays. 

• A puzzles game is to match body parts of animals / birds, then it shows information about why certain part is like that and how the animal / bird uses it.
• One is about drawing and identification game like identify where would we find what type of plants from the given list and draw the plant life in certain type player selects, like water, dessert etc. 
• Another game is to find insects by a specific parameter that shows up on screen, like find 5 insects having wings. 
• The play area has a wall screen showing animation of animals roaming around in the dessert. The game is to find a specific animal shown on small screen, in the animation on wall. 

We spent quite some time in this gallery before moving on.

On the way to next gallery it has a huge wall showcase showing birds and corals etc. And a display of few plants. It too has a table panel near it where information can be browsed.

3 ARCHAEOLOGY OF QATAR - This gallery has shelves containing items found in excavations. It has clay pots, jewellery and beads, coins, toys like clay bullock cart etc. A few traded items are displayed too. 

In front of the shelves is a map on a table highlighting the areas with lights in which people spread and created living, simultaneously showing the timeline in which that happened. 

On the other side of these is a play area. It has games related to excavations. 

• The screens give techniques to excavate and prompt which technique / tool needs to be used to find an artifact. On the interactive touch screen player needs to use the options and find an artifact.
• A game takes input of a shape from player and shows where in the old pottery that kind of design was used. It was pretty amazing to see the shapes that naturally come to mind like a circle, dot, lines, triangle, swails etc are used quite a few centuries back and how beautifully designs were created on pottery. 
• One is a puzzle of joining pieces of pots like it would be done with excavated pieces of pots. The pots are around 4 feet tall and the pieces are atleast 10 inches wide which children can easily use and they fit on a pot using magnets.
• The fourth game is to look at the changing pictures on the screen and see the artifacts from the interactive panel and identify which ones are from the era in the picture. The artifact player clicks on gets highlighted in the picture.

4 PEOPLE OF QATAR - It has maps showing how people spread on the land of Qatar, navy operated, how they traveled with camels, what they used to decorate camels and other useful items like saddles.

5 LIFE IN THE DESERT - It has screens showing how the people used to use tents, the kind of tents, how they found food in the dessert, the utensils they used, how the dessert keeps changing with whether and storms and how people survived. 

It has small dedicated platforms showing different type of utensils and equipments used in the old time. One such platform of approx 6-8 ft diameter has Coffee making equipment showcased on it. 

A huge showcase on a side wall is showing the type of clothes people used, the cloth used for tents and variety of designs on cloths. 

One of the chambers around this has only Surais made of different materials and in different sizes. 

Everything is very nicely presented and keeps a person engaged while in the gallery as well as while getting in and out of it.. 

6 LIFE ON THE COAST - It has beautifully carved models of different types of ships used. Personally I loved those. 

Near that is another play area. In this hunting seemed to be the theme. 

• In 2 games the player is asked to hunt some sea animal and catch as many of them in certain time. Both these games used touch screens.
• Another interesting game was of rowing a boat and taking it towards whatever that was to be hunted. There were 6 paddles in front of a screen. As a person rows physically, that particular paddle got activated on the screen boat and the boat moved as people rowed. It was fun to coordinate and row and see the boat move on the screen. 

There is a beautiful selfie booth made of shining silver white Mussel (शिंपला). It had a seat to sit down and click a picture :).  

7 PEARLS AND CELEBRATIONS - This was pretty big gallery with multiple shelves showcasing beautiful heavy pearl jewellery. 

There were weapons like knives, swords etc having amazing shapes of handles and  sheaths (म्यान) like fish tail, horse mother etc. The pearls and other things were used to beautifully decorate those.   

8 HISTORY OF QATAR - This gallery showed videos of how groups of people fought for authority. It displays the weapons used across the years ranging from swords, knives, guns etc. 

It has documented letters, maps of towns etc. A pretty big map of overall Qatar uses lighting to show where civilisation spread in which era since the formation of land of Qatar (separation of that land from continent of South Africa). 

9 INDUSTRY AND INNOVATION - It has a big gallery displaying the evolution of equipments, tools, cars etc. It has many photos and models of video cameras, telephones, type writers, radios and a few models are kept in showcases as well as displayed in 3D carved fashion on a wall.

On the way to exit, we went through part of the museum where dessert style homes and buildings are built, the type of windows and halls with the the furniture, matress (Galicha in Marathi) etc are displayed. A few palm trees are planted infront of these homes and a few camels created using wires are kept near a building. It overall gives an idea of how a Qatari village would have looked like.

It was great to visit the museum. All of us enjoyed the games. We spent atleast 2 hours there. Children were tired by the time we finished going through all the galleries and were hungry too.  

Then we went to Souq market. On the way we could see the art museum building, a masjid tower etc which were relatively small and old buildings. In front of the market road, the coastline of the other side of Doha can be seen and interestingly shaped huge towers are built on that side.. By the side of road a huge golden sculpture of Dugong (Sea cow) is built.

In Souq waqif is a market area. The children could watch a lot of caged birds and were happy spending time there looking at their colors, listening to their voices, specially a big colorful Macau. There were n number of lanes through the buildings with many shops having spices, toys, clothes, souvenirs, antiques etc. The buildings were beautiful and the pathways between the buildings were quite big and airy. It was pleasant weather and it was great to walk there on a breezy afternoon. We had lunch in the market and went to Katara cultural village.

We roamed around through the buildings to see beautiful huge wall paintings, amazingly big transformers action figures of Bumble bee and Optimus prime, which were created out of spare parts from actual cars.. The Katara village seemed very artistic area to me. A lane going towards the main area had flowers and trees made out of colorful glass and restaurants on both sides of the lane. A big fountain in the main open area looked like a fountain where they must be having a light show in the evenings.

On the other side of the fountain area, towards beach is a huge open auditorium building.

Katara village is on a sea shore and children were enthusiastic with an idea of going in to the sea.. We took them in the water to get their feet wet as swimming was not an option at the time. But ultimately all of them came back with half of the clothes wet :). We went to a cafe to pick up 'tea - roti', a famous dish there and then went straight to the airport. 

We were happy to have seen the city we had not planned to visit. The long layover was indeed turned into a very well spent day! :)