This post is probably different from all previous posts. I just decided that instead of having two seperate blogs, I should just post in one place regardless of the theme of the post.

For some reason my internet browser kept showing me Qtel's censorship page every time I tried to open my blog. I refresh, and it's gone. I hope this is just hiccups my Firefox is having. Otherwise it would be a little ironic after my post about censorship [LINK].

My latest gadget has been the GoPro HD camera. This little toy is incredible. It has so many accessories and it can be mounted on almost anything! [GoPro]

I just wanted to post some of the photos and a video I took last week. Hopefully more stuff will be coming up.

I don't know if you've seen this one before


This photo was taken in Marina Mal in Kuwait. I don't know if they still have that. I thought it was sexist and unnecessary.

This other photo, however, shocked me. I was dropping a friend of mine to his house and I took this photo of the house across the street.


It doesn't say it in english but in arabic it says "No parking for non-qataris". This is wrong on so many levels. I need to mention that this neighborhood doesn't have many Qataris living in it and this particular street has many Indians. I should also mention that the owner of the house walked up to me once when I was waiting for my friend out side the house and asked me where I was from.

It's ok if you don't want people to block the entrance of your house but this has nothing to do with their nationality! I thought of parking there and leaving my car overnight just to see his reaction.

I can understand the intention behind this cartoon and the cartoonist's concern about the cleanliness of the streets and roundabouts. Abdulaziz Sadiq is a Qatari artist/musician whose work is regularly published in Al-Raya newspaper. Despite that some of his cartoons can be seen as offensive by some none Arabs, his work usually delivers important messages.

In this particular cartoon, Sadiq shows some workers, from the look I'd say from India or Nepal, laying in a roundabout to rest with their trash littering the place. So why Friday?

Friday is when most workers (usually Asians) get their day off and tend to go out for the weekend just to change some scenery away from the construction dust. Friday is also a family day in most malls and public parks. Family day in Qatar means only women and Qatari and white people are allowed in. The exception might also include well dressed arabs. This excludes most other workers who are usually too busy with their jobs to come to places like this.

The Problem? Well, I can tell you that this problem will get worse and, in my opinion, obvious reason behind this. Workers have a day off and they can't hangout in usual hangouts, roundabouts seem to be a good choice. With the new law banning workers from residing in "family neighborhoods", most of these workers will have to move to remote areas. This will not solve the problem. When they get their weekly break, they'll try to find a ride to Doha and get their cut of the weekend. Commuting back and forth might not be feasible for most of them and this keep them in their hangout spots for longer periods.

I see many Qataris throw trash out of their cars. So I don't think this cartoon was intended to deliver a "do not litter" message to the addressed people because in any case, they can't read the cartoon! Then what is the idea behind it? Suggesting banning these from more places on weekends? or perhaps suggesting a curfew after a certain time on Fridays?

If you've been to the movies at Villagio mall you probably have noticed the crappy sound distribution in the theater. Most of the sound effects / music coming from the front with the volume tuned up to the max.. just a prescription for headache.

What can be more annoying are those lights at the bottom corners of the screen. sometimes blue and sometimes red, depending on the LED rope lights they use in the theater. i don't know what's the point of using these lights. You still can't see the row letter to find your seat and they have to hire people with annoying flashlights to point people to their seats.


the black is never black anymore. Red is the new black at Villagio.


The exit signs used to be a problem when they first opened. This was my main problem with City Center's theater when they first opened too. They managed to solve this problem.

I'm waiting for them to replace those lights and let us have a nice movie experience. It's enough that we have to deal with those retards talking at the movies.

Oh god, I just love to complain..

And when it comes to going to the movies I can complain all day. However, I'll try to ignore the fact that people in this place can't whisper.

What I hope I can find an answer to is the secret behind people leaving the theater before the movie ends. I just don't get it, if you paid 35 riyals, why would you leave the movie 10 or 15 minutes before the end? This time I CAN generalize.. Why do QATARIES do this? I'm sure I wasn't the only one to notice that.

No matter how good the movie is, they keep leaving and sometimes disturbing other people.

In a country where the surface shows passion and enthusiasm about education and freedom of all kinds, there seems to be a bit of a problem on some freedom issues.

If you live in Qatar and tried to "google" something, the results you'll get will be totally different from the results you'd normally find somewhere else. That's simply because our beloved ISP is forcing us to have the "safe search" option enables. What they don't understand is that Google is just a search engine. If they want to block away pornography, they can block the websites and not Google. I guess they caught some retards looking at tiny thumbnails of naked women on Google's image search and this made them think Google was a porn site.

When is this going to stop? Youtube, which normally doesn't allow obscenity, was also modified to fit with Qtel's standards.

I just want to tell Q-tel that we're not stupid. We know that censorship is not a funny issue. They're just trying to make it some how humorous to have censored sites all over the internet with their new censorship page:

I'm not going to go into how children show learn that obscene photos and video are wrong and they're stuff they shouldn't be looking at. Keeping them jailed out is not effective. In face no1 downloads pornography from websites, people know zillion other ways to get access to these stuff. So i don't really see the point of censorship.

We have more dangerous issues to worry about like pirated material all over the internet.

So what’s the convention on holding the door for other people in this part of the world? How far behind you the person has to be in order for you to hold the door open until they get to the door? Or should I just be holding the door until someone passes by and takes care of it?

I’m writing this post while in class, pretending to be taking notes. I needed to write something before the idea cools off. As I was running to class, a Qatari girl was walking behind me. I open the door to enter the building and hold it open for few seconds for her to enter. Guess what happened to me for the 3rd time this week? She did NOT say thank you or even gesture it in anyway! This happened to me several times before. I just don’t understand why is it so hard to thank people who do you a little polite thing.

I read a post on Mimiz Blog a while ago and she mentioned how she felt insulted when a person sat in the library with the bottom of that person’s shoes was pointing to her. We consider this rude, but not saying thank you is not rude in any way.
Where did this habit come from? I’m sure it’s neither culture nor religion. I’m not talking about holding doors. I really couldn’t care less if they thanked me or not. I care about the general courtesy between us. What kind of society is that? I noticed this in restaurants, gas stations, star bucks and other places. And guess what? It’s the Qataris that do this most of the time. And to be more accurate, the girls do it more than the guys.

Again, don’t get me wrong with the generalizations. What i mean is that mong the people who have this ugly habit, Qataris are the majority. It doesn’t mean all Qataris do this.

So what’s the deal about that? I mean did we forget how to live happily with each other? Did we start to think that people are obligated to serve us and we don’t need to thank them? What kind of ugly society we’re turning to if we didn’t have common courtesy.

يشتمني ويدعي أن سكوتي معلن عن ضعفه ،

يلطمني ويدعي أن فمي قام بلطم كفه ،

يطعنني ويدعي أن دمي لوث حد سيفه ،

فأخرج القانون من متحفه ،

وأمسح الغبار عن جـبـيـنـه ،

أطلب بعض عطفه ،

لكنه يهرب نحو قاتلي وينحني في صفه ،

يقول حبري ودمي : " لا تندهش ،

من يملك القانون في أوطاننا ، هو الذي يملك حق عزفه " للمزيد من لافتات احمد مطر: اضغط هنا