Chaddi-Buddies, or Day 41 in Doha

I think I might have gotten a bit pink in the sun today... gotta watch out for those two hour Ultimate frisbee games. Also, I need to figure out where to get more free t-shirts, since my gray one is ambigious for the lights-versus-darks matches.

Utsav, of course, invited me along, and Salman was a great cheerleader, and Tina was pretty impressive for her first Ultimate frisbee experience. She touched the disk a few times (more than I did the first time I played.)

So I've been hearing about this Red Bull Crashed Ice event for a few weeks now, and a group of us decided to stop by. I heard about it through Facebook; some of the "Red Bull Girls" as well as a guy who works for them go to uni here, and I've seen them passing out free cans. So turns out that knowing someone who is working the event got us actual seats really close to the rink.

Now, this event is going to eventually be a full-fledged, contact-filled race down an icy slope in Canada. This preliminary round had a truck to jump over, some cones to slalom, and some large bumps that needed to get jumped over. The announcer elongated every name and was trying (with little success) to get the crowd riled up.

We did get a bit noisy for a few of the contestants, when they were struggling to get over the truck as the final obstacle and we cheered them on. Also, for a bit of "halftime entertainment", some BMX biker did some impressive balancing and tricks, while riding right along our toes.

After watching all 16 rounds of the preliminaries, Daedri, Abdalla, and I split off to go grocery shopping. We were running late to get back to EC (Daedri had some other people she was meeting up with), so it was a hurried trip.

When we got back to EC, and all my groceries were put away, I get a call telling me to come outside to help Abdalla fill out a form for the restaurant secret shopper job that he has. Well, thinking about food got me hungry, and what else is there to do when you get hungry at 11 then go get shawarma, and what fun is shawarma without adding another three people to the car?

So Maria and Fatima come along, and we convince Zaid that he needs to join us, and we get some food. Maria and Fatima get it in their heads that a new movie has come out, and we must, must, must go see it now.

We end up at Villagio, and... the movie doesn't come out until next week. So we sit with our shawarmas on couches in the mall and chat.

I was surrounded by best friends... Maria and Fatima are attached at the hip; Zaid and Abdalla are "A to Z" on the Qatar Foundation radio and are each others "other half." Not only are they all very close, but they all speak Urdu. So multiple times during the night, I started dosing off while they chatted away in their Pakistani language.

That's before they decided I should learn how to speak it. I got a few phrases, one of which was, very appropriately, "chaddi-buddies." "Chaddi", as they explained to me, is like underwear or diapers, so "chaddi-buddies" have been friends since they were little. And while neither pair met before coming to university, both pairs now act like they've known each other forever.

I'll have to steal some pictures from Fatima tomorrow (and a video), so I can show you the reason that we were asked to leave the mall... I mean, what kind of mall doesn't allow students to skip around and be hyper at 2 in the morning?

A final piece of news... one of the pigeons hatched! We now have a "Junior" on our windowsill. We'll see what happens to Egg #2!