11/26: Texas A&M, Qatar

The next morning Molly took us on a tour of Education City. To backup, Courtney met Molly at her job working with waste water and some other shit back at Texas A&M. Molly’s husband Clifton was the Director of Graduate Research at A&M in lovely College Station, and recently took a position at the new satellite campus in Doha. Education City is a university campus shared by a bunch of American universities, such as Cornell, Northwestern University, Carnegie Mellon and others. They have a rather unique partnership with the Qatari royal family, where unlike most satellite campuses; they provide the same degree as the home university. TAMUQ was brought in to teach petroleum engineering … because apparently the Middle East has a bit of a need for that.

So anyways, we headed to the campus. We particularly liked the crosswalk signs. Courtney fortunately snapped a photo:
Clever yes, but to be fair it was kind of a blatant ripoff of another sign from a long time ago in a galaxy far far away.
Here are the girls showing some Aggie pride!
Molly showed us around the building, which was really cool looking. Here’s part of the exterior features and beyond it you can see part of the campus amphitheater:
Randomly an English course was giving a poster session. This was similar to most similar poster sessions presented in American universities. One major difference however was that until that day I had never been to a sophomore level poster session with a live D.J. … these kids (some of whom apparently show up to class in a different car every day) however spared no expense.

After we saw the campus we went and picked up Molly’s and Clifton’s son Jacob from day care. From there we headed to the Vellagio. If the name of this mall reminds you of perhaps a cross of the Venetian and Bellagio casinos, this was likely no accident as the mall is a shameless ripoff.

The mall is right next to a big tower that Jacob calls the “Tower of Power”.
This is actually the oldest building in Doha and dates back to the days when Orcs roamed the earth.
Jacob thinks he sees Gandalf (Courtney’s handiwork):

Note the awesome “Sverige” football/soccer jersey that Courtney picked up for the little dude.

The mall was crazy cool, and was way more interesting than the mall we saw in Dubai.

They also had this crazy Arabic chain called … Cold Stone I think is what it was called. Mmmm, authentic Arabic desserts. Delicious.

That night Courtney and Molly went out for girls night to get henna done. I’ll let you refer to her blog for photos from that evening. Meanwhile I hung out with Clifton and the kids and had lazy computer and tv time.

Next Post: Thanksgiving!