First day in Doha

So 7 and a half hours later and I am back in the land of dust and dishdasha's. Sondra and Phil picked me up from the airport before 6am (how nice is that!) and we headed to Rick's for breakfast. Sondra caught me up on all the netball going's on.

We headed back to their place to drop all my stuff off and then headed out for the day to run some last minute errands for the netball trip to Bahrain.

After dropping of kit bags to Wendy at Doha College, we headed to City Center so Sondra could get some new trainers and some other bits and pieces. The photo to the right is taken looking down at the ice-rink. I thought it was hysterical that some kids were trying to ice skate in a dish-dash!

After finishing there, we tried a few stores for gag items for each of the teams. Doha A are the mafia and hence have guns (albeit water guns!). Doha B are "Little Miss" characters and have hot pink feather boas. Doha Youth are pirates and have eye patches. Now it may sounds pretty easy to find water guns, feather boas and eye patches but this is Doha so it took a visit to seven stores to find it all!

Sondra, Phil and I spent the afternoon making up names for each player's name tag - not that easy! After some creative thinking, we managed to get one for each of the 36 players. We left Jess and Steph the task of printing and cutting out the tags while Phil, Sondra and I headed out to the Irish Harp at the Sheraton Hotel for dinner and a couple of drinks.

Pascal and Caroline met up with us there. Pascal and I spent most of our time catching up on events at work over a couple of glasses of red. Caroline arrived later and it was great to hear news. Sondra and I headed home about 10.30pm and left Phil with his mate who continued drinking until 2am.

I fell into bed and slept like a log.