Exploring Doha, Qatar 4— Doha Port, National Museum of Qatar
- London — Doha Qatar Airways QR16 Flight Report
- Exploring Doha, Qatar — 1
- Exploring Doha, Qatar 2 — Expo 2023
- Exploring Doha, Qatar 3 — Souq Waqif
Thanks to smoking too much shisha, when I arrived at Doha’s fish market at the port, I was too buzzed to walk, trying to take a nap at a bench there but in vain. Turned out smoking solved or improved none of exhaustion, jet leg, allergy or cold. For some reason I was very thirsty and craving for gummy bears, not fish.
Seafood sellers and buyers were going on their lives, not paying attention to a dizzy nicotine-sensitive backpacker sitting at a corner. The air-conditioned fish market looked like the seafood section in a modern supermarket, and most of the products were caught elsewhere — the north Atlantic, the north Pacific etc, instead of the Persian Gulf. It gave a very different vibe from fish markets in Oman and Sri Lanka, for example, where fishermen bargain and sell their catch. A restaurant connected to the market seemed to be cooking the recently purchased seafood for customers to dine at the spot.
The fish market itself was small (most of my time there was spent to recover from buzzed). But to my surprise, the walk to Doha Port, full of traditional Qatari houses painted in different colors, was a highlight.
Docked in the port were huge cruise ships and some traditional Qatari boats with its flags. Just like the country itself, Doha Port is where tradition meets modernity in an abrupt way. On the other side of the road was Doha’s skyline, a view I witnessed at the Expo site last evening as well, full of modern, sometimes absurd looking skyscrapers (there’s an even more absurd one in the northern city of Lusail). The port area was also where local people came to enjoy their weekends.
I then took Uber to my next stop, and my final stop during this 2-day stopover tour, the National Museum of Qatar. I always try to go to the national museums whenever possible in new countries, to learn not only about their nature and history, but also how different governments interpret their history and formulate their national identities.
The National Museum of Qatar, famous for its potato-chips-like architecture designed by an award-winning architect, is one of the two major museums for tourists in Doha. The other one is the Museum of Islamic Art, which is also famous for its architecture.
The first exhibit hall displays Qatar’s flora and fauna, ranging from antelopes, ostriches, wolfs, hares, marine animals, fossils, insect and plants.
Arabian oryx, the state animal of Qatar, is also featured on Qatar Airway’s logo. This large antelope could be seen throughout the Arab Peninsula. I had a chance to see living ones in a farm in Nizwa, Oman last year.
Before discovery of more than 10% of the world’s gas reserve, pearling used to be Qatar’s major economy. A section in the museum had footage of a couple of old pearlers sharing their stories. Pearlers used to work before dawn with only one single date for breakfast, and dive to the seabed to harvest pearls. Some of them sailed down to Mumbai to sell pearls to make huge profits, but most of the workers harvesting this luxurious product for the world lived without much material possessions.
After the rise of cultured pearl farms and imitation pearls, traditional pearling was left in the last century. Once the pillar of Qatar’s economy, “The Pearl” is now the name of an artificial island full of fancy real estates held by foreign investors (another source of Qatar’s economy today?) Qatar still extracted treasures under the sea, like in the past centuries, but this time in a much greater scale, and for something much more essential to our everyday lives.
After sitting there watch the entire footage, and seeing the equipment pearlers used to wear, a surreal feeling occurred when I saw these luxurious pearl jewelry possessed by people who presumably hadn’t seen or known where pearls came from.
The next session of the museum displays Qatar’s history, establishment of its national identity, and artifacts of each Emir (ruler). The history of the Gulf before colonization was a topic I had little knowledge about. Little did I know about the multiple battles Qatar fought against its neighbor Bahrain (one of Qatar’s Emirs was even once imprisoned in Bahrain), and the complicated diplomatic maneuvers the Portuguese, the Saudis, the Ottomans and the British played within.
In 1995, Hamad bin Khalifa (the guy whom Doha’s airport was named after) staged a coup to dethrone his father, Khalifa bin Hamad. I was curious to see how the museum would mention this event— the museum still praised Khalifa for establishing Qatar’s modern oil industry, without touching upon the coup at all; the next board simply says Hamad “became Emir in 1995, taking power with the support of his brothers and leading members of the Al Thani family,” perhaps implying that the process wasn’t that smooth.
In addition to its implication with Hamas, Qatar appeared on international headlines during its international blockade between 2017–2021. In June 2017, the Saudi-led Arab nations cut ties with Qatar due to its alleged “support of terrorism and ties with Iran.” They listed a series of demands for Qatar to surrender, one of which being to close down the Al Jazeera permanently. In 2021, the most challenging time in Qatar’s modern history finally came to the end, as the Arab countries agreed to start the proces of reconciliation.
The museum had a section dedicated to this crisis, showing how the event unfolded with detail to each hour and minute, with clips of news and tweets to fully document history:
- The Saudis cut ties with Qatar;
- The UAE cut ties with Qatar;
- Kuwait’s Emir arrived in Qatar for negotiation
- Trump tweeted about the event
- Bahrain cut ties with Qatar
- Erdogan held talks to lower tensions
- The Arab countries banned “sympathy” to Qatar
- Saudi closed border with Qatar
- Israel praised the anti-Qatar moves
- ……………….
I was aware of how the diplomatic crisis started and ended, but the museum did a really good job to display on full electronic screens how its nation was bullied, and how the Emir, “with unconditional support from its citizens and residents, solved the crisis and came out even stronger than before.”
National Museum of Qatar didn’t have particularly worldly famous, representative piece of collections, but it’s certainly worth visiting, not only for its absurd potato-chip-like outlook.
There’s a metro station nearby, and I did want to experience Doha’s luxurious metro one last time. But due to time limit I had to call Uber to the airport. After I got into the car, the driver tried to tell me something in part English and part body language —I had set the destination wrong: “Doha International Airport” was the old airport closed in 2014 (IATA: DIA, it’s now used only for military purpose, but during the 2022 FIFA World Cup, flights from many airlines were diverted to here), while “Hamad International Airport” (IATA: DOH) was the current one. I had to change destination by the road, and immediately saw the price increased by 2 fold.
All the Uber drivers I met during my 2 days were from Pakistan or Bangladesh. As I learned from our brief conversations, all were in Doha by themselves, living in shared rooms with multiple fellow workers, earning money to support their families back home. I wished the driver best of luck, walking to the terminal to start my next leg of flight.
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