Guys in Dresses, or Day 103 in Doha

Happy International Day, everyone!

I got in the spirit by wearing "traditional" Pittsburgh clothing - a fleece, a hat, a scarf, and gloves... not many people noticed, in the sea of beautiful, multicolored traditional dress. The great part is, people weren't necessarily even wearing their own country's!

KayKay in Singaporean and Urmila in Indian garb (I think).

Varun, his Desi self.

The Student Affairs staff (in random travel wear)

Tessa in something I'm assuming is from Brunei.

My beautiful Sudanese girls!

Boys from the subcontinent (and Shaza still looking gorgeous). (Note Allen's wrap! Knees!)

Arash in eastern Iranian wear (because apparently they differ... and I'm not sure if I got the east versus west thing right; it actually might be western Iran).

Samreen in her pantsuit (and I'm wearing pant I got in India)!

Mathew just wore a dress shirt (boring) but Shahriar (front left) got in the spirit with his Bangladeshi clothes.

Jimmy wore something from a Middle Eastern country... can't remember which one, but he didn't have anything from Kenya to wear.

Some of my favorite traditional costumes, though, were the ones where the guys were allowed to wear shorter skirts than I am!

Besides just wandering around and taking pictures with people (and eating food), there was the International Day show that Fatima and Maria put together. Being on "Arabic Standard time", it was scheduled to start at 5:30. At 8:00pm, the first act (Mridula doing an awesome traditional Indian dance) was just finishing up.

There were other Indian dances, a Dominican song (sung by Melissa, our study abroad coordinator), an African dance, a Bangladeshi anthem, an English poem, a presentation about Azerbaijan, an impromptu salsa/latin dance session, more dabkeh, an Iranian dance (that was also performed at Coffeehouse), and I'm sure there are other performance I'm forgetting.

What I won't forget, though, it how people reacted to those performances. For a few of the dances, instead of just sitting and watching, people from the crowd stood up and joined in! The final dance, an encore performance of the "Desi Dancers", turned into a giant jumping mob. It was a bunch of fun.

As if that wasn't enough for a day, Abdalla gave me a ride to Ezadin Towers (yet another fancy hotel!) where Kelsey was throwing Ziad a surprise party! We weren't there for the actual surprising, but we were there for the cake.

When the cake was getting lit, the manager was having a hard time lighting them... so another guy with a lighter came up and started helping him. Then another guy. There were eventually half a dozen people gathered around these 20 candles trying to get them lit!

We sang "Happy Birthday" in English and Arabic, then he blew out the candles.

Then, the photo shoot started. Ziad was wearing a striped shirt, as were another two or three guys at the party. So after the group picture, all of them jumped in together... someone yelled "Arab picture", and all of a sudden the photo shoot got "racist."

They didn't leave anyone out... there was the Africans, the East Asians, those from the subcontinent, the Khaleejes, the "white people"... Just goes to show how diverse this place is!

After the final photos, a few of us ended up at the souq, enjoying some karak and sheesha. They kept flipping channels on the TV we could see, but on every channel, Fred knew exactly what was going on. And I think Ziad (the birthday boy) had a good time.

If it looks like I'm blowing away... I am! It was super windy and actually sprinkled a bit. (The waiters broke one of the large umbrellas trying to take it down, and some of the sheesha stands - that weren't being used thankfully - got knocked over.)