Welcome back to the Middle East! Last week I mentioned that Saudi Arabia had been a new country for me this year, and while I really wanted to hang around and explore it more – I was frankly a bit intimidated by not knowing the language or understanding the cultural nuances (or really know much about the country in general), so rather than spending the weekend there before heading to Dubai for work on Monday, I decided to shoot over to Qatar for the weekend, which was another new country!  Haha, when in doubt – new country!  Anyway, I had an amazing time exploring around and seeing a good sampling of what the country has to offer.

Above is an image I captured while wondering around the capital city, Doha.  While riding around I snapped a few pictures with my phone and texted them to my buddy Ben, who had been in Doha about 20 years ago, and he noted that it looked nothing like the city he remembered.  Almost all the skyscrapers you’ll see in these images have been built since the late 90’s / early 2000’s.  With the buildings all being fairly new-ish, I felt the architecture of the city gave it a bit of a futuristic feel to it – really cool looking.  The picture above and several below are shot in infrared, and one is shot in IR Chrome (the red trees and very blue looking sky), which hopefully sheds a bit of light as to why they look a bit strange.

While I was there, I took a tour that took me out of Doha and out into the rest of the country.  The country is only 50 miles across from east to west and one hundred miles north to south, so you can see a lot of it with a bit of driving.  Below you’ll see images from around Doha, as well as an old fort, a fishing village, and a really interesting / strange art installation that is literally out in the middle of nowhere.  The piece – if you call it that? – is called East-West/West-East and was created by Richard Serra.  It consists of these four giant steal plates, each about 45 feet tall, placed an equal distance apart, with the full length spanning one kilometer, and running from east to west.  Modern art is often lost on me, and this was no exception, but it was admittedly kind of cool looking, if not a bit strange to see out in the middle of the desert.

More next week!

Dan

–Dan Thompson