Ramadan kareem, and the end of (dis?)orientation week

Classes begin on Sunday (Aug 23). And, as it so happens, Ramadan starts Saturday (Aug 22), which is technically now at the time of this posting. In Qatar, the traditional observance of fasting during daylight hours entails no eating or drinking from roughly 5am to 6pm. By law, that standard applies also to all non-Muslims, at least when we're in public.

From what we're told, this is actually the first time that the start of the school year has coincided with the start of Ramadan at WCMC-Q. This is going to be particularly demanding on the students. Students' classes are scheduled between 8am and 4pm, and then many of the Qatari students, when they break their fast at the end of the day, have family commitments which run late into the night. As a result, the vast majority will be working, learning, and studying through the day without food, drink, or much sleep, and it's going to be tough for them to start out the year this way. It'll be a challenging balancing act for the TAs as well, between being understanding and respectful of our students' situation and making sure they keep up with the class as it moves forward.

At the moment, though, the premeds have just finished their week of orientation. This means, aside from my getting enough free food to keep me fed for most of the week, that I also got to say hi to a lot of first-year students as well as a few second-years, and it's been great meeting them. As usual, I'm near hopeless when it comes to remembering (and pronouncing) everyone's names, but with a lot of repetition, I'm making really slow progress on that front. Actually, I won't initially be seeing much of the first-years, since the fall physics course (electricity & magnetism) is for the second-years. Overall, though, the students seem really bright and driven, and I'm definitely looking forward to teaching -- very soon.

Weekends defined, Learning to drive, and Traveling outside of Doha

Weekends

In the last post, I mentioned that it was the weekend, but what I neglected to mention was that in Qatar, the weekend is different than it is in most Western countries by one day. Since Friday is the Muslim day of prayer, the weekend here falls on Friday and Saturday, and thus by extension, the normal workweek runs from Sunday through Thursday. So the phrase, "this past weekend," henceforth, can be legitimately used in this blog starting the Sunday of any given week.

Driving practice

Anyway, this past weekend, most of us took the time to get accustomed to our cars and did a pretty fair bit of exploring. Friday morning was the test run for our new cars -- I share a car with my apartment-mates Jeff and Adam -- and so we all got some practice navigating the city and its many roundabouts. Actually, I was hugely anxious at first about getting behind the wheel, but I've been getting the hang of it a lot more quickly than I expected. Driving around Doha could well be a subject for another post entirely, but for now, suffice to say that every pass through a roundabout is accompanied by much honking and a rush of pure adrenaline. This is one of those cities where lanes and turn signals are apparently vastly overrated. Think NYC traffic but with circular intersections. That's approximately how it is here.

Venturing out of Doha

Come Saturday, we all took our cars and headed out to explore some more of the country, driving north from Doha toward the town of Al Khor. In hindsight, we probably should've come a different day, and we probably will later in the year. As it is, we're currently in the middle of the hottest week of the year: the highs are about 105-110 F and it's humid enough to fog my glasses when I step out of an A/C-ed car. At this latitude and at this time of year, the sunlight is powerful enough to force most people to stay indoors during the midday hours. Including us. When we got to Al Khor, it was pretty empty outside, so we quickly took shelter and got lunch at a self-described Indian/Arabian/Chinese/BBQ restaurant. As hungry as I was, there was a definitely lot more food than I could finish, but altogether I don't think we spent more than 15 riyals each (less than 5 USD). That's one of the best things I'm discovering about living here: it's fairly easy to eat well without burning a hole in your pocket. Which is nice, because other things I'm on the hunt for, like books, tend to be somewhat on the pricey side.

From Al Khor, we drove northwest toward Al Zubarah, an old fortress, the last stop of the day. The fort itself was a bit underwhelming, but it was a worthwhile trip just to be able to explore some more of the country. I leave you with these pictures in lieu of the thousands more words I could type.

Looking out at the beach in Al Khor:

Peter, one of the TAs in our group, picked up a huge cardboard box to shield himself from the blistering sun. I caved and joined him, as did a couple others, not too much later:

Enjoying a tasty biryani lunch:

Driving through miles of mostly empty desert to reach Al Zubara:

Al Zubarah fort -- the flag on top of the rectangular tower is the flag of Qatar:

The Qatari flag, up close:

Yep, it's pretty lonely out there:

Climbing down the tower:

The inside of the fort:

A little background

It's about time I genuinely start posting here. So, for anyone just now reading this who's not sure exactly what it is I'll be doing for the next year, this is a good time to give some background on all of that and lay the foundation for entries to come.

Starting in mid-August, I'm going to be teaching for a year in Qatar, a small peninsular nation jutting out of the larger Arabian Peninsula (zoom out to see the surrounding region):


View Larger Map

By the way, so far I've heard it pronounced as "KAY-ter," "CAT-er," "kuh-TAR," and "CUT-er," none of which are right, I've learned, but the last of which is closest. Anyway, in land area, the country is only about the size of the U.S. state of Connecticut, but it's built a thriving economy around oil and natural gas exports. With the resulting wealth, Qatar has been investing heavily in social and economic development projects, and it's probably fair to say that it's one of the most rapidly transforming countries in the world today.

Education City is one of these ventures: working together with the Qatar Foundation, several American universities have, over the past decade or so, opened up campuses in the capital city of Doha. The one I'll be at is the Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar (WCMC-Q). For the curious, the other branch campuses there belong to: Virginia Commonwealth University, Texas A&M, Carnegie Mellon, Georgetown, and Northwestern. WCMC-Q runs a two-year premed program and then a regular four-year med program, teaching from essentially the same curriculum as Cornell does in its U.S. campuses.

So that's the short-version backstory for why I'm teaching there. Specifically, though, my tiny part in all of this is to be a physics teaching assistant -- one of two -- for the premed physics course. There are other TAs for other classes, of course, but the only other physics TA will be Jakob, one of my friends from Cornell who was incidentally in the same major and class year as I was.

As for how I even got into this to begin with, I first became really interested in doing this after hearing about it from Professor Robert Thorne, the guy in charge of recruiting physics TAs for WCMC-Q. I've had experience before in teaching physics and math, so I sent out my application for the job at the same time as I was applying to physics grad schools. As it turned out, I got the job, and so after some long and hard thinking, I decided to defer grad enrollment for a year to take up this opportunity. Which is great for me, because as much as I'm set on grad school, I probably won't get this kind of chance again for years. Plus, I love teaching, and now, for the coming year, I get to focus on doing just that -- to say nothing of the experience of simply living abroad and seeing a part of the world I haven't yet.

Two more weeks stateside. Can't wait.