Recovery day in Doha

After getting in from Bahrain late last night, I took the opportunity to sleep-in today. Sondra, Jess and Steph all relaxed too and once we were up we managed to make our way to the couch to watch mindless TV for hours before feeling the need to take another nap in the afternoon!

5 days of going out, sitting in the sun and little sleep had finally caught up with me. After my second nap :-) we headed to Villagio for a bit of pampering. We all booked in for manicures and I have to say that it wasn't the best that I have had. As I am typing today my fingers are sore!

We headed to Spaghetto's for dinner (Steph's favorite restaurant!) before heading home for a bit more relaxing on the couch. Sondra was kind enough to take me to the airport about 9.30pm for my flight to Shanghai. I spent the next couple of hours before my flight checking my email and writing a press release for the netball tournament.

I boarded the flight and promptly fell asleep...

Heading to Bahrain

Today, Sondra, Phil and I spent the morning running around doing last minute things for netball including picking up the bibs, going to the tailors, buying a couple of last minute things and stuffing kit bags.

Sondra and I headed off to the airport about 12pm to meet up with the teams at 1pm. It was nice to see some familiar faces again and also meet some new ones. This was the first time I met most of the players on my team. Like last year, Sondra gave a speech and the airport and handed out the badges and other bits and pieces to the teams before we boarded the plane.

As you can see from the photo, the tradition of landing hats continued this year i.e. taking the pillowcase off the pillow and putting it on your head! Agnes, Mel and Sondra are featured in this photo and were all girls I played on a team with in Doha before I left.

Everyone was pretty excited to get to Bahrain and it was nice to get to there early in the afternoon so we could relax, enjoy the champagne welcome drinks and mingle with the other teams. Elyse came to the hotel to meet up with me and we caught up over dinner and a few drinks before I headed to Fiddlers to meet up with the rest of the girls.

It was a reasonably early night and we hit the hay by about 10pm in readiness for the big day tomorrow.

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.