Being happy in Qatar requires forgetting about many of the things that made me happy while I was living in Oregon: riding bikes, eating at great restaurants, and camping, to name a few. But thanks to our four-wheel drive car, a sense of adventure, and some courageous friends, I've finally crossed that last one off the list.

This doesn't deserve any sort of special celebration — people have been sleeping under the stars in the Arabian Peninsula for thousands of years. But still, the two times we've gone out this fall have been my favorite experiences in Qatar by far, so I thought I'd tell you a little bit about what it's like.

There aren't really state or national parks here, let alone organized campgrounds, but there are tons of places to camp, so you just have to go off someone else's recommendation. A colleague at our school told us about a small peninsula north of Zekreet on the west coast of the country which was nice for camping, so we drove out with some friends who were new to Qatar in hopes of recreating a few of the positive memories we have of camping back home.

One of the benefits about Qatar being such a tiny country is that you're never more than a couple hours from anything, and sure enough, it only takes about an hour (depending on whether or not you take Camel Underpass Number 7) to drive over to Zekreet, a very small, dusty town that serves as a jumping off point for the unpaved region to the north.

From there, it's another half hour up to the area where we've camped. On the way there's a camel farm, a fort built a few years ago to be used as a movie set, and a wholly un-mysterious collection of structures called Mystery Village. They appear to have been built to look old, but the cement they used gives it away.

There are a few other things to see on the way up the peninsula, including flamingos and a towering art installation by Richard Serra. The real point of the trip, though, wasn't the tourist attractions (if you can even call them that) — we just wanted to get up and away from the city, from the wide highways and fast cars, the noise, and the pollution.

This is, without any doubt, the most beautiful place I've seen in Qatar. That's not to say that it's objectively beautiful (whatever that means), but when you've been here for a while you recalibrate your definition of natural beauty. The water is cool and clear, and the wind pushes it into little waves that slap against the white sand beaches. The air is much clearer, so much so that we were able to see the Milky Way and, with the help of binoculars, the Andromeda Galaxy.

Qataris maintain the tradition of camping, but it looks very different nowadays. In place of camels and woven tents, there are huge trailers, running water, flood lights, and generators to power them. They set these up in the fall and leave them for the entire winter as a sort of temporary vacation home.

The bright floodlights and ever-humming generators make sleeping near locals a bit of a drag, so we've done our best to find camping spots off on our own, which isn't too difficult.

It's not really camping without a campfire, so I collected some small pieces of scrap wood from abandoned construction sites and used it to make a proper campfire the second time we went camping. We even roasted marshmallows on little kebab skewers.

Now instead of camping being something I had to ignore to stay happy here, it's one of the things that makes me the happiest. In a few weeks I'll be back sleeping under the stars, and I'm looking forward to it.

At the beginning of October Rachael and I spent a week just a few hundred miles southeast of Qatar in the Arabian country of Oman. We had time off for a Muslim holiday (more on that in a bit) and decided to spend it in the Middle East since we'd only just returned to Qatar in late August and didn't want to take a long trip away so soon.

Eid al-Adha — which coincides with the Hajj that many Muslims make to Mecca in Saudi Arabia — is one of Islam's most important holidays. Remember the story in Genesis about God telling Abraham to sacrifice his only son Isaac, and then, at the last minute, providing a ram for Abraham to sacrifice instead? The same story is told in Islam, and during Eid, Muslims sacrifice their own sheep, goats, camels, and cows in remembrance of Abraham's submission to God.

Rachael and I were lucky enough to connect with an Omani college student named Mohaned on Couchsurfing who invited us to stay with his family at their farm for the three days of Eid. I can't stress enough how much it meant to be included in a local celebration of Eid, even though we were non-Muslim foreigners who weren't part of the family. In fact, we'd never even met our hosts in person. It would be like inviting a complete stranger to stay at your house and celebrate Christmas with your family — maybe a bit weird for you and yours, but an unforgettable experience for your guest.

After a day and a half exploring the markets, beaches, and wadis around Muscat, Rachael and I pointed our silver Nissan Sunny toward Sohar, a few hours from Muscat, where we'd meet Mohaned and his family. Rather than take the fast and boring highway, we stuck to the narrow, unmarked roads along the beach in hopes of seeing a bit more of the local culture. In one small town we drove through I saw a group of men holding down a sheep as they slit its throat, and later on, I caught a glimpse of a street dog running across a barren field with a severed goat's head in his mouth. Even more startling were the entrails piled up next to trash bins from people who had slaughtered their animal at home rather than buying it from a butcher.

What a revelation it was to arrive at Mohaned's family's farm in Sohar. I was expecting a farm in the figurative sense (as in, there's dirt and a fence but nothing living), this being the Arabian Peninsula, but it's a farm in every sense of the word. They grow bananas and dates, plus some hay-like grass for animal feed. They raise goats and sheep and chickens, too, but only for personal consumption — the rest they sell.

We spent part of the afternoon walking around the farm, and then eating dinner on the floor of their majlis, which is a special room in the house for entertaining guests. After that we drove into town with Mohaned and some of his brothers to explore Sohar, but there wasn't much open or active (think Christmas Eve), so we soon called it a night.

The next morning we rose early for the main social event of Eid when family and friends greet one another at their houses. Mohaned directed Rachael (now covered in a shayla and a conservative dress) to the majlis where the women were conversing and me to the large, air-conditioned tent that had been set up for the men. It would be several hours before we saw each other again.

Inside the tent I talked with Mohaned and his relatives (many of whom spoke excellent English) while we ate a porridge-like dish called harees with our bare hands. Visitors came in waves of 20 or 30, starting with close relatives and eventually branching out to neighbors and close friends. Everyone was dressed in fine white dishdashas and masarh. It turned out that Rachael's experience was very similar to mine, lots of eating and talking, except with women instead of men.

It's always bitter sweet when an intense cultural couchsurfing experience comes to an end. On the one hand, it's a wonderfully educational experience I'll probably never repeat, but on the other, true cultural immersion is exhausting. There's a lot to take in, plus thinking about not making a faux pas, and then on top of all of that, you give up a lot of autonomy. Still, it's a good trade.

We spent the rest of our trip in Oman putting miles on our rental car, returning to Muscat for a night to meet up with some friends from Qatar and then driving several hours in the opposite direction of Sohar to hike into Wadi Bani Khalid and Wadi Shab, with a night camping on the beach in between. After two more days in Muscat exploring souqs and the Grand Mosque, we boarded a plane back to Qatar. It was nice to be going home.

I never could've imagined how stark the divide is between Qataris and expats. We spend all day teaching their kids, yet I can count on one hand the number of times I've actually had a real conversation with a Qatari outside of school. I won't spend any time lamenting the fact since the misfortune is self-evident, but I will share a story about an interaction I had a few weeks ago.

We were at a soccer game with a couple new friends from our school. It started around 8 p.m., but it was still pretty hot and humid out, so during halftime Rachael, Jake, and Bethany went to the concession stand to buy something to drink. While they were gone, I decided to try to strike up a conversation with a young Qatari man sitting behind us.

"Excuse me, do you speak English?" I asked.

"Yes," he responded, with a smile.

"I've been hearing people shout 'haka' over and over during the match. What does it mean?" I figured that I'd butchered the word so completely that he'd have no idea what I was talking about.

"Not haka, hakam. It's like referee. We're yelling at the referees because we are mad at them."

"Of course," I said. "I should've known they were shouting at the referees. حكم!"

"So, where are you from?" he asked.

"The United States. I came here to work as a teacher. Where do you work?"

"I'm a doctor at a local hospital. I just graduated from medical school last year."

The man sitting to his right, who I later learned was his cousin, said, "He's good to know because he can write you a doctor's note so you don't have to go to work."

"But he's an American," the doctor said. "They don't skip work!"

They both laughed. I wasn't sure if the joke was on me because I actually have to work for a living, but it was still funny to hear, especially from a Qatari. After all, there's a stereotype among expatriates here that Qataris are not very industrious, but apparently they harbor that stereotype about themselves, too. Or at least these guys did.

We continued talking for the rest of halftime about soccer, travel, and education. It turned out that his nephew, a second grader with a goofy gait and a wide, squinting smile, is a student at our school who Rachael and I know well. I asked him if he'll send his kids to a Qatar Foundation school like ours when they're old enough.

"I don't know," he said. "I want them to have a good education, because it's been really important in my life, but I want them to have a traditional Qatari education, too. Right now we can't have both of those things at the same time, so I'll have to choose."

What a difficult choice. I'm lucky to not have to trade my culture and traditions for quality education.

As halftime came to a close, they shared a bag of sunflower seeds with me and asked if I wanted anything to drink from the concession stand.

"That's very generous," I said. "A water sounds nice."

I spent the second half trying to muster the courage to ask for his phone number or email address, knowing full well that he'd probably find the solicitation a bit intrusive. When the referee blew his whistle signaling the end of the match and my last chance to make a Qatari friend, I turned around, but the doctor and his cousins had already left.

A couple weeks before Rachael and I were set to fly from Oregon back to Qatar, she asked me a question:

"I want to surprise you with something, but we'd have to drive for five hours into the middle of nowhere before you find out what the surprise is. What do you think?"

In retrospect, it sounds a bit like the setup for a horror movie. "Surprise! You're dead." But at the time I was just trying to think about what might be worth that five-hour drive. A hike? A rodeo? Transcendence?

A few days and one rented car later, we set out for the mystery destination, which Rachael directed me to, turn by turn. We drove for most of the afternoon, up over the Cascades and then down to the high desert, Madras, Prineville, and then up again into the Ochocos, past an abandoned pioneer cabin and signs warning us to watch for herds of sheep and cattle.

The further we got from civilization, the more I began to suspect that the point of this excursion had something to do with the stars. There were a few clues: First of all, Rachael knows I'm a bit of a space nerd. Second, the Ochoco National Forest has very little light pollution (see the map below), which makes for great stargazing. And third, the morning that we left Rachael's mom said that the clear weather "would be perfect for where you're going." Clear skies, high desert, can't lose.

As we got closer to our destination, I started to notice signs by the side of the road with the words "Oregon Star Party" pasted on. It looked like my suspicions were correct. So what's a star party? We were about to find out.

After a few miles driving over dusty gravel through a sparse forest, we came upon a grassy clearing on top of a small hill dotted with cars, campers, and tents. We pulled up to a homemade stop sign and a man in a tie-dyed shirt sitting in a camping chair holding a clipboard.

"Hi there! Are you here for the star party?"

"We are."

"Alright. How many telescopes did you bring?"

"None. Well, two." I pointed to each of my eyes, which elicited a groan from Rachael but no laughter from the man with the clipboard. He must've been too distracted by the fact that we'd come all the way out here without a single telescope, or maybe I'm just not funny.

"Go ahead on in, but don't forget to stop by the welcome tent to pay your entrance fee. You can set up your tent wherever you want."

We drove a lap around the clearing in search of a flat piece of dirt for our tent, but it was hard to focus on anything other than the degree of intensity with which our fellow Oregon Star Partiers had outfitted themselves. There were event tents and fifth-wheel trailers, custom-built camper vans and little campground motorcycles. And then there were the telescopes, hundreds of them, big and small, but mostly big, some so big you needed a ladder to look through.

We found a spot to pitch our tent off on our own at the edge of the clearing where we wouldn't be embarrassed by our lack of telescopic tools. Then we walked over to the welcome tent to pay our entrance fees, a steep $75 per person, and met a few of the organizers.

"Feel free to wander around and ask people what they're looking at. They'll want to show off their stuff. Just don't go down the road to the west where the astrophotographers have their equipment set up. They can be a bit, uhhh, grumpy. And did you bring a flashlight?"

"I have a headlamp."

"You'll need to cover that up with red tape so that it doesn't ruin anyone's night vision. And what about your car — will a light come on when you open the trunk?"

It was a good thing he was thinking about it, because I certainly hadn't.

"The glovebox, too. You can cover the lamps up with tape, or just pull the fuse that goes to all the car's lights."

Pull the fuse? These people were really, really serious about their night vision. And in a few hours, once I had a chance to look up at the unpolluted night sky with fully-widened irises, I would be too.

They were very friendly and eager to help us get settled once they found out that it was our first time (apparently most attendees are returners rather than newbies). They even signed us up for a "mentor" in the evening, a program which is designed to get children (and apparently children at heart) excited about astronomy. And while I didn't need much encouragement, I'm not sure I could say the same for Rachael.

The sun was low in the sky now, leaving only a little bit of time to wait before we'd be able to judge whether the destination was worth the trip. Rachael and I walked through the narrow thicket of trees bordering the grassy hill and found ourselves in another clearing, wholly separated from the campers and the telescopes and the people. It was just us, so we took a few pictures and watched the sun disappear behind the Cascades, giving way to what was to be the trip's headliner: a couple thousand stars, dozens of meteors, a few galaxies and planets, nebulae, and the list goes on.

As we were walking back through the trees and toward the party we spotted a bright light descending toward the northern horizon like a slow shooting star. It looked a lot like the International Space Station, which I've spotted many times with the help of emails from NASA and an app on my smartphone. There was no internet connection to verify the sighting, though, so I had to wait until we were back in cell range to check whether or not this was my first unplanned sighting of the ISS (it was).

Back on the other side of the trees we gathered in the middle of the clearing with a couple hundred other people to listen to a volunteer give an informative tour of the night sky with the help of a green laser pointer. I learned some fun facts, like that if the "seeing" is good enough one can spot our neighbor galaxy Andromeda with unaided eyes, and that the darker bands visible in our own Milky Way don't come from the absence of stars, but because galactic dust is blocking our view of them. Speaking of the Milky Way, as I photographed it below you're looking into its center, about 27,000 light-years away.

Next came our youth mentoring session, wherein a man whose face I only ever saw by dim starlight took us on a more detailed trip around the sky with the help of a small Dobsonian telescope. He showed us how to use it and then asked what we wanted to see, so we took a closer look at Andromeda and then spotted some double stars ("splitting," in astronomical lingo, because they appear to be one star with the naked eye but split in two (or four) upon closer inspection).

We also looked at a couple globular clusters, like the Great Globular Cluster in Herculues, which is home to about 300,000 stars. The man who was helping Rachael and me described it as a handful of diamonds thrown into the sky. It was one of the most spectacular things I've ever seen through a telescope.

Sometime around midnight Rachael and I walked back toward our tent, stopping along the way to ask permission to look through a telescope which was about ten feet long and two or three feet at the opening. I can't remember what we looked at, but I do remember that the man who shared his scope with us was very friendly and eager to share, just like the organizers promised.

At first, being a newcomer to the Oregon Star Party felt like being the only unrelated person at a family reunion. But once we had a chance to meet people we found everyone friendly and eager to make us feel welcome, even if it meant pulling themselves away from their eyepiece so that we could take a look.

Since we didn't have a telescope of our own to look through back at our tent, we laid our sleeping bags and pads across the roof of the car and stared up at the stars before we went to sleep. And while nothing compares to the gee-whiz effect of seeing a cluster or planet up close through a telescope, I still find staring up at the stars while laying on my back to be a much more moving experience. Not just because of the shooting stars or the sheer immensity of it all, but because I'm confident that humans have been doing this exact same thing for tens of thousands of years.

Having stayed up long past our bed times, Rachael and I awoke around 8 or 9 the next morning and found the star party abandoned, with just a few people milling around. The telescopes had been covered in some sort of special fabric for protection against the baking sun, and we were back in the car, headed back to Portland to make a complete circle of one of the best surprises I've ever been treated to.

No, Rachael doesn't have to wear an abaya. As far as I know, there are no laws here dictating what anyone has to wear in public. However, we're strongly encouraged by our employer (and the pamphlet above, which locals were handing out in malls a few months ago) to dress conservatively, even when we're not at work. That means covering our knees and shoulders in public. I suppose you could wear short shorts if you wanted to, but a lot of Qataris would see it as disrespectful, and anyway, you're setting yourself up for an awkward public reprimand.

None of this has much of an impact on me because most of my shorts cover my knees, and I don't own any sleeveless shirts. Someone told me once that you won't be helped in a government office if you're wearing shorts, so I wear pants for that purpose. And while I'm glad that back home in Oregon anyone can wear whatever they want in public (or nothing at all, as evidenced by that mid-June cycling event in Portland), I can't fault the Qataris for advocating for a style of dress that fits their values. After all, this is their home — Rachael and I are just passing through.

At work, we dress professionally with an eye toward conservatism. I have to wear a tie, dress shirt, and slacks, unless it's a special occasion, in which case I might be allowed to wear jeans or a polo shirt. I don't know enough about women's fashion to describe how Rachael dresses, but suffice to say that she covers her elbows and knees and avoids anything sheer.

At the beach and fancy hotel pools, I feel comfortable swimming without a shirt on, but I usually opt for board shorts over my trusa (if you've seen me wearing it, you know why I avoid it). Some of the Muslim women who work at our school wear an outfit called a burkini at the pool. It's made of swimsuit material but cut to cover the wearer's wrists, ankles, head, and everything in between. It looks like a hooded wetsuit.

Of course, just because Rachael doesn't have to wear an abaya (nor I a thobe) doesn't mean we haven't. It's a tradition for the Western teachers at our school to wear "national dress" (i.e., thobes and abayas) on National Day in mid-December, and when we went to pick up my folks at the airport last spring, we did the same. We got some funny looks, as it's very uncommon to see a foreigner in a thobe or an abaya, but no one said anything.

This is the fifth installment in my Qatar Questions series, in which I answer questions that people have asked me about living in Qatar. To see all of the posts in this series click here. If you have a question you’d like me to answer here, leave a comment below or get in touch.

A few weeks ago Rachael and I returned to Qatar after spending our summer vacation visiting friends and family in Britain and the United States. Everyone seems to have their own analogy for stepping from the dry, air-conditioned airport into the hot, wet air of Doha: walking into a wall, stepping into a hot shower. I, for one, am not sure that words can really do the feeling justice, but it's a pretty strong reminder that you're back in Qatar.

One of our close friends from last year, Matt, met us at the airport and drove us out on to the crowded highway and back to our house on the southern edge of Doha. One of the diversions we drive through a lot had been straightened out, but besides that, the drive was exactly as I remembered it, cars speeding and swerving and honking, headlight and streetlight beams made visible by the dust and humidity.

Our return to Qatar was going perfectly until we pulled up to our house and I spotted the dead fan palm on our porch, a brown, brittle shell of its former self. Right at that moment, I felt a feeling I hadn't felt in almost exactly a year.

We were landing in Doha, and my face was glued to the airplane window, marveling at how any place could be so brown, flat, and dusty. There was nothing green visible from the air: no grass, no trees or shrubs, nothing (though when I look back at the photographs I took, I can now see a few shrubs and date palms). The excitement of going to a new place was overcome by a fear for what that new place would bring. I started to think, "What have we gotten ourselves into?"

After a flurry of introductions to new colleagues at the airport and a short bus ride, we were in an apartment in an anonymous six-story building in a sea of anonymous six-story buildings. For the first time in thirty hours, after goodbyes in Portland, crowded airplanes and airports, and meeting our new colleagues in Doha, we were alone. And not just alone in the physical sense, but in the way that you feel in the pit of your stomach, like you're in over your head and there's no one coming to help.

If there was a fear in it, it was not a rational one. Though we'd only been in the country for a few hours, we already knew plenty of people, and there's an American embassy and military base here. And anyway, Qatar is a pretty safe place to live.

The feeling dissipated as we unpacked our suitcases and rearranged furniture. It came back, briefly, when we turned off the lamp to go to sleep, but by then I was so tired from making our first trip to the Persian Gulf and trying to settle in that sleep soon interrupted it.

This time, a year later, my seat was in the middle of the plane and there was no window to look out of, but no matter. I already know what Doha looks like from the air, and at least now I have a pretty good idea what we've gotten ourselves into. Plus, I found a new plant for the porch.

It seems like everyone has their own way of describing really extreme weather using metaphors and hyperbole, but I'm just going to state a fact: we live in the middle of the hottest place on the planet, the Persian Gulf. Not one of the hottest places, but literally the hottest. Humans have never felt hotter weather anywhere else. More on that in a bit, but first, our current conditions.

It's hot outside, at least right now. As I write this at 8:25 a.m., it's about 95 degrees outside. At noon the temperature should peak at about 110 degrees, and then around 3 a.m. we'll hit a low of 91. The heat is pretty crushing in the summer, but the winter actually feels quite pleasant. In January, Qatar's coldest month, we'll see lows of around 55 degrees and highs of around 70.

Of course, temperature is only part of the weather equation. There's also the sun, general lack of clouds, abundance of dust, and humidity.

Unfortunately, humidity is not a very useful metric on its own for talking about how we perceive weather, so meteorologists use something called the heat index, which takes into account temperature and humidity to estimate how hot it feels outside. So even if the air temperature is 88 degrees, high relative humidity could push the heat index temperature to 110 degrees, in which case it'll feel like it's 110 degrees outside. It's often expressed as a graph, as seen below. For the record, temperatures during Qatar's hotter months are almost exclusively categorized under "Extreme Caution," "Danger," and "Extreme Danger."

Taking the conditions from this morning (95 degrees with 30 percent relative humidity) results in a heat index temperature of about 95 degrees. In other words, the real temperature and the heat index temperature are about the same, so relative humidity isn't having a significant impact on how hot it feels outside. Fast forward to the middle of the day today, when it was 110 degrees with 25 percent relative humidity, which gives a heat index of 117 degrees. Pretty damn hot, but in the Persian Gulf scheme of things, not so bad.

Remember at the beginning when I said the Persian Gulf was the hottest place on the planet? That record belongs to our neighbor, Saudi Arabia. In 2003, just up the Persian Gulf coast from Qatar in Dhahran, a weather station recorded a temperature of 108 degrees and relative humidity of 68 percent, resulting in a heat index of a whopping 176 degrees.

Just think about that for a second.

The rain, all three inches of it, comes to Qatar in the winter, mostly from October to March. But it's not a long drizzle, like what I'm used to in Portland. One storm could bring an inch or more within the span of a few hours. Last year one of these storms trapped a bunch of cars in an underpass as the water, which was accumulating because of an unfinished drainage system, rose around them. Flooding in the desert. Imagine that.

Though we do have clouds occasionally, they're not a common sight here. In fact, I remember going a few weeks last year without seeing a single cloud. I almost forget that they existed. Of course, that's not to say that it's always clear here.

Dust is a major pollutant in Qatar, and as illustrated by the photo above (and in this cool video from NASA), sometimes blows across the country in giant dust storms. And even when there's not a dust storm, it's still around. Because of the dust (and humidity, I presume) visibility in Qatar is significantly lower than in Oregon.

I guess I've painted a pretty awful picture of the weather here, but at least for me, it's not too bad. When it's really hot out, I spend most of my time around air conditioning, whether at home or in the car or at school. Sometimes supervising recess outside can get a bit uncomfortable (though the kids are kept inside if the heat index surpasses 100 degrees), but that's mostly because I have to wear a tie and dress shirt. But not everyone in Qatar is so lucky.

There are many people here, many tens of thousands of people, who don't have much of a say in whether to go out in the heat or not. These are the construction workers, mostly from economically poor countries in Asia, who we see working on buildings or road projects as we drive around the city. If you've read anything in the news about Qatar, you've probably heard about the oppressive working conditions and how people are literally dying from working here. That's partly because of the summer heat. There's a lot more to be written on that front, so I'll save it for another post.

This is the fourth installment in my Qatar Questions series, in which I answer questions that people have asked me about living in Qatar. To see all of the posts in this series click here. If you have a question you’d like me to answer here, let me know in a comment below or get in touch.

Yesterday Rachael and I were driving across town when we came upon something we'd never seen before. It was still early in the day on Friday, the first day of the weekend, so I didn't expect there to be much traffic, if any at all.

As we turned onto Al Hadara Street, we saw cars, pickups, and SUVs blocking the entire road from one side to the other. And it's not just a small side road, but a big thoroughfare, with two lanes in both directions, plus a very wide sidewalk. And not like blocked with traffic, everyone in their cars trying to get through — people had just parked their cars and left them, right there in the middle of the road.

The cars were packed so closely together that there was only one way forward, a narrow path barely wide enough to fit our car. I pulled forward, but before it ended with another parked car, and we were stuck.

I popped the car into reverse in hopes of backing out, but by then there was another car behind me. What timing, I thought, but our timing was actually perfect, because before I could even think about what to do next a crowd of men and boys began filing through and into the cars around us. The car behind us began to back up, and as I backed up along with him, another car began driving out in front of me. We were free.

Why the middle of the road parking lot? As we were driving away we realized that we'd come upon the biggest mosque in our neighborhood right in the middle of Jumu'ah, the most important prayer time of the week, which always occurs on Fridays at noon. It's the only prayer of the week that's required to be practiced at a mosque, whereas the other 34 prayers of the week can be practiced at home or work.

So many people and so few parking spaces, unless of course, you count the road.

Whenever someone asks whether I'm excited to return to Doha, they never say, "How much are you dreading returning to that hot, dusty city in the middle of nowhere?", though sometimes I wonder if that's what they're really thinking. And even if they were, I couldn't fault them. On the beige, sandy surface, there's a lot that sucks about living in Qatar. But Qatar, to me, is a lot more than the nearly supernatural heat, or the endless beige. For one thing, it's incredibly interesting. I'm constantly being forced to think about the world around me, to challenge my assumptions, and to reshape my understanding of the world. My brain is never on autopilot in Qatar.

In the end, though, whether or not I actually like living here is almost beside the point. As Rachael described to our four-year old niece Claudia when she asked why we were flying back to Doha, Qatar is where our house, and jobs, and stuff is. That's the stuff of life, and where you make your life is where you make your home. Sometimes it's difficult to consider, and even harder to type, but Qatar is home, for now at least. How could I not be excited to go back home?

This is the third installment in my Qatar Questions series, in which I answer questions that people have asked me about living in Qatar. To see all of the posts in this series click here. If you have a question you’d like me to answer here, let me know in a comment below or get in touch.

Before I get into Qatari dress, there are a couple things worth mentioning. First, I'm not an expert on Qatari attire. Everything I've learned and written about here is the product of casual observation rather than a deliberate course of research. Second, there's basically no difference between traditional dress and daily dress. In other words, it's very rare to see a Qatari wearing non-Qatari clothing (like a business suit, for example) in public. The attire I describe here is not a once per year on National Day sort of thing. This is what people wear every day. And they really wear it well, too. I think it's safe to say that most Qataris take a lot of pride in their physical appearance. I've never seen a stained or patched garment or one that didn't appear perfectly pressed and nearly flawlessly fitted.

Qatari Women

Qatari women wear a black garment called an abaya which covers their entire bodies except for their hands, feet, and head. As I understand, it's designed to be worn over whatever else the woman happens to be wearing that day, like a dress or jeans. Some wear gloves on their hands, and their shoes are generally not visible because the abaya comes so close to the floor. When shoes are visible, it's not uncommon to see really fancy high heels sticking out from beneath an abaya.

Qatari women cover their hair and neck with the hijab and many of them cover their face with a niqab. Sometimes women cover their entire face, including the eyes, with a sheer piece of fabric. In that way, it's possible for a woman to cover every bit of skin from head to toe. Some older women wear a mask known as a battoulah which is either made of metal or stiff paper (I'm not sure).

I don't often see women's faces because of the variety of face covering garments, but when I do, I often see them wearing heavy makeup. Sometimes this seems an odd juxtaposition with the propensity to cover up in public, but I've never asked anyone about it so I'm in no position to judge. You should probably take my makeup comments with a big grain of salt, though, as my makeup meter might be broken (or at least in need of recalibration) after having lived in nearly-make-up-free Portland for 8 years.

Qatari Men

Men wear a garment called a thobe which begins at the neck with a stand-up or turned-down collar and descends to the floor like a too-long dress-shirt. There are buttons from the collar down to the mid-chest, sleeves to the wrist, and cuffs secured by fancy-looking cufflinks. The vast majority I've seen in public are white, but occasionally in the winter I'll see men wearing beige thobes or ones of other light, solid colors. Based on the prevalence of men's tailors in Doha, I'd guess that most men have their thobes custom-made.

The traditional head garment for men is a piece of fabric (usually white, though sometimes checkered red or other colors) called a ghutrah which is folded into a triangle and then draped over the head (think Yasser Arafat). Most are cotton or a synthetic fabric, but occasionally you'll see them made of very fine wool. A piece of coiled rope called an agal holds it in place and allows the formation of special folds in the crown of the ghutrah. In Qatar (though not in Saudi Arabia) there are a couple tassels connected to the agal which hang down the middle of the back. I'm not sure if it's true or not, but I've heard agals were traditionally used as a tie around a camel's feet to prevent its escape.

For shoes, most men wear slip-on leather sandals, like these.

Non-Qatari Me

Although my daily attire in Qatar isn't that different from what I wear in the United States, I do have a cheap thobe which I purchased for 45 bucks at Carrefour, one of our local grocery stores. It misses the floor by a few too many inches to look totally legit, and doesn't have French cuffs, but it gets the job done. When I wore it to school on Qatar's National Day in December, a Qatari administrator at our school said that it makes me look like a less vain, more devout Muslim because it's not perfectly tailored. Sort of an odd compliment, now that I think about it, but I'll take it.

This is the second installment in my Qatar Questions series, in which I answer questions that people have asked me about living in Qatar. To see all of the posts in this series click here. If you have a question you'd like me to answer here, let me know in a comment below or get in touch.