anyone done it ? thoughts / opinions ?

TIA

My mate works out there for Qatar Airways. Not had any adverse comments.
Rich.

My pal was out there for years working for Al Jazeera. Went out to visit.

It’s basically just about money. You’ll get loads. You get a fancy car and a nice house. You get the lift from your air conditioned apartment to your AC garage and drive in your AC car to your work’s AC garage and work in an AC office.

There’s no real culture to speak of other than consumption. You’ll spend a lot of time in malls or corporate hotel bars. They have Marks and Spencer. The police are mercurial. Going out into the desert is an experience. You can also do quad biking which is good fun.

The treatment of their immigrant labour is inhumane. A lot of people don’t care or see it.

You’ll get loads of money but you’ll probably be so bored you will spend it all. You won’t want to come back to the UK cos the salary you’d get would be 1/3rd and you think you’re worth £100k a year.

I was out there for 6 weeks, i was staying in a hotel so i can’t talk about proper living there.

I hated the place, nothing to do.

No amount of money would make me live there permanently.

Edit – what he said^

Does Qatar still expect you to surrender your passport to your employer?
Or is that only for the neo-slaves?

Qatar is a big funder if ISIS. How that would affect life there, I don’t know. UAE is probably more “western”

Rhymes with guitar – soap bar

We’ve discussed it before, have a search. I’ve travelled there for business frequently and have an ex colleague who lives and works out there. An expanding ex pat community, quite small town obviously. Some high profile cases where disputes with employers have lead to people being stuck there as you cannot leave.

mmmmmmmmmmmmmm……….

Sounds like you should apply for a second passport before you go!

i’m not that keen but they are wanting me and wanting to pay for it.

i’ll miss the commuting by bike, mountain biking, swimming with my pals, lots of drink at weekends, the football, my skiing, etc, etc…

i doubt i’ll do it…….

It sounds, like Dubai, to be my perfect example of hell on earth. A place where your soul is leached from you in exchange for money and consumer goods you neither really want nor need.

I bet everyone you meet is either a tool or depressed.

oom – my current thoughts exactly

I’m back out next week for my 3rd work trip. As others have said it’s all about the money. Doha is okay for a work visit but I can’t imagine wanting to live there. Morning rush hour is horrific and a lot of offices dont have enough parking space. Also loads of building works everywhere. You can get all the major uk shops out there. I did see someone riding a expensive road bike around tge Corniche and the sports shop in the mall sold Giant mtbs and Surley Fat bikes, but apart from desert not sure where you’d ride. You can drive to Dubai for the snow dome 😉 It is a very hierarchical society, locals with the money at the top, European expats doing the tech work and Asians the donkey work. Some people don’t care about that others do. Oh and it’s hot, very hot in summer. Winter temps are nice though.

I have worked in the UAE for a few weeks and hated it. Soulless awful place. The locals treat their immigrant low paid workers like shit.

They treat the professional westerners better, they have to, but really look down on you. I found it incredibly racist.

By all accounts Qatar and Saudi are much worse. A mate of mine who likes living in the UAE avoids even visiting them. I can’t imagine how bad they must be.

If watching football is your thing then you’ll get everything you want live on telly normally with Sky rejects doing the summaries. Plus they have facilities if you want to play as some major European teams train there in winter. Swimming there are plenty of pools around. You can run along the Corniche and there are some fitness stations. Skiing as above drive to dubai or fly back to Europe.

You go there for the money in exchange for letting your soul for a period of time.

You then save like crazy so that you can come back to build a house of your own to be shown on Grand Design.

While there you keep a low profile by observing the true nature of people.

If you are really bored then find a female expatriate for boom boom to past time … watch out for their strict rules though. Don’t look at their women as you might get into trouble.

😯

It’s not exactly relevant, but I just got a job offer in Oman rescinded after 6 months of dicking around. Oman is supposed to be the western friendly face of the middle east. I actually went to primary school there. I went back for 5 days as part of the job offer and things have changed a lot since 25 years ago – a lot less western friendly, e.g. live music is now banned.

Anyway, the people in Oman were saying how shit Qatar is. Only do it for the money.

i dont need the money,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, ive worked oil and gas for the last 25 years…….but the job is greenfield long termer…..

I suspect I’ll end up working in the Middle East at some point in my career – there’s not enough life left in the North Sea to see me out. Already tried Houston. So Dubai and Oman would be at the better end of the spectrum. Not sure work in Aberdeen is bad enough yet to convince me to go with Qatar though. But if I was single, wanted to pay off a mortgage and buy nice cars then maybe I’d think about it for 1 or 2 years – anything seems bearable if you break it down to 2 year chunks.

I’ve visited a few times, and it’s similar to the other Gulf places I’ve been to (Abu Dhabi, Bahrain) except Oman, i.e. pretty dire. Having said that, I was ready to go there for a couple of years (didn’t work out, in the end) for personal reasons as well as the old money thing. So yes, a bit shit, but surviveable.

EDIT – the best thing about Doha is that it’s an airline hub for a lot of places that are hard to reach from UK. You can go to Katmandhu for the weekend, or Australia for a week.

Other plus points everyone speaks English and the plug sockets are UK 3 pin type, so all your electricals will work.

there’s not enough life left in the North Sea to see me out.

It’ll certainly be ‘interesting’ to see how it plays out, but with the lowering oil price we are going to see the need for big cost savings across the board. Slightly scary from a safety point of view, as the regulator is currently in a mess.

the plug sockets are UK 3 pin type

If that is one of the few plus points them it must be worse than I thought.

there’s not enough life left in the North Sea to see me out.

It’s gonna be touch and go for me too – which is why I cling to the thought of any bright spots, like UK 3-pin sockets !

yep – i’m seeing a dramatic slowdown in North Sea Engineering, although I’ll always be ok for a job, but the greenfield projects in the middle east are so far unaffected due to the lower recovery price.

i like the fact that it opens up travel to other places such as Aus for a week……

I don’t live there but travel there ALOT. Would I live here? NO! i’ve turned down many offers paying signficant sums of money and basically your talking about wasting 5yrs or so of your life to earn a pile of cash. I couldn’t subject my wife and kids to the misery of Doha. You’re basically a prisoner here, especially in the summer where it is literlaly too hot to be outside. Everyone I deal with are ex-pats from a variety of countries and all have an exit plan.

Bland – extra passports will be of no use to you if you cannot be granted an exit visa which you need from your employer. Yes, you need a visa to exit the country. The company I work for supports multi-exit visa’s for ex-pats based there, but alot don’t.

Alot of people do it obviously, so come can hack it, but there is literally nothing to do here. Its OK earnig the dosh, but you need to consider how much of your life you’re wasting. Alot of Brits here tend to be those who’s kids have flown the nest and they’re on a 5yr pre-retirement plan. The ex-pay community is growing, but there are only so many Tennis club lunches you can go on before it starts to get a bit tedious. Also you can’t spend too much when there because it is very expensive and defeats the object of being there in the first place.

What about water sports, restaurants, etc ?

There is a sailing club and a marina, but the marina is the sort with the multi-million dollar luxury yachts rather than the more humble dingy’s. The club is quite expensive I believe, but one of the guys I work with who is based there just rents dingy’s and windsurfers. There is also Scuba diving, but I don’t know anyone who does that so not sure how good the diving is around there, I don’t think there are the reef’s you get in the Red Sea.

As far as restaurants are concerned, there are plenty around and most are very good as they are catering for the more expensive end of the market. There are some great M.E. cuisine restaurants too, but only the tourist hotel restaurants and bars will serve alcohol, so all hotel chain stuff. Its not particularly cheap, and alcohol is around £7 or £8 for a beer. Apparently there was a 3-day Octoberfest on at the Intercontinental Hotel serving a range of German beers last month which surprised me. The other thing to consider is when it is Ramadan it is proper lockdown, not like Dubai where you can still get Alcohol at certain places. I was there during the last Ramadan and everywhere was dry, it seemed to be more strict than last year, not sure if that has anything to do with the fact the Amir handed over power to his son who is a bit more hard-line than his father.

There is a championship golf club and a rugby club which are good places to get into the ex-pat scene. There really isn’t a huge amount to do and of the 4 or 5 months or so over summer it really is too hot to be outside at all. A lot of the ex-pat wives get out of town over the height of the summer and go home for a few months. Last week it was a pleasant 24 degree’s or so, it was almost chilly, and will drop to around 15 degrees. They still run the A/C at about 18 degrees everywhere though. Their energy consumption is disgusting. At about 12p a litre of petrol everyone runs around is stupidly big 4×4’s with huge petrol engines – Audi Q7’s are almost considered mid-sized cars there. Unfortunately cycling is a no-no out there, the roads and standard of driving is just do crap. They’ve build a cycle track out to the new airport which would be a nice family jaunt in the winter, but that’s the only suitable cycling area i’ve seen.

As far as kids are concerned there is currently a shortage of school places. A guy I work with has only just got his kids into school and he’s 12 months into his assignment, and it was the only school with availability so he’s not had a few to choose from. His wife and kids have only just joined him out there as they stayed at home until the school places were confirmed.

You do get big events there though the year – the Moto GP, there is an annual ATP tennis tournament, A Golf tournament and a few other big events dotted through the year, like car and boat shows (though you just have to hang around the Corniche in the evenings and its virtually like a car show).

Like I said before, there are plenty of Ex-pats out there – the population is a little over 2 million with only about 300,000 local Qatari’s, so just about everyone is an ex-pat, though a lot are the unfortunate labourers who are treated like crap.

The biggest challenge is in the summer months where for almost 6 months of the year the outdoors is basically a no-go area. The heat is unreal. And there is no let up at night – its just as hot, if not hotter as the baked ground and buildings radiate the heat they’ve built up during the day, and it’s humid with it, so particularly unpleasant.

I worked out there for 2 years, at the end of my stay it was a lot better but getting used to bureaucracy is hard work. The ex pat community is improving as well but there is nothing to do really. My social life revolved around bootcamp and then crossfit, all my colleagues went to the pub, it was fun for a few months but expensive and got really fat spent too much money which was debating the object! There is a few people that mountain bike out there but it’s usually too hot to enjoy it and basically flat anyway.
I did it to save for a house deposit I think if you go with a purpose you can stick it out but if not it would be a struggle. There is also all the sponsorship and exit visa shit that you need to deal with, but being British that probably won’t be a problem. A big issue I found difficult and my girlfriend hated about the place is the blatant racism there’s no hiding it, “family day” at the malls is just ridiculous.

I struggle to think of a good reason to go back unless you are saving up for something and have a fixed timescale.