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Two Months of Frenzy I resigned from Metro the day after Atkins sent me their official job offer, figuring that I wasn’t going to wait around there and be cut, as their blunt CEO had promised to do a few weeks earlier. Just like with George Costanza in the TV show “Seinfeld,” it was a pre-emptive break-up, I guess you could say.
That was in March of 2013 and I was scheduled to start working in Qatar in May. You would think that two months would be plenty of time to pack and move to Qatar (like I did at the time). But you would be wrong (like I was). I didn’t comprehend the enormity of what I had to do in that short span. Let’s see, I had exactly two months to:
That last one was probably the biggest challenge. There are certain things that we take for granted in America which aren’t allowed, or are highly restricted, in most Arab countries, including pork and alcohol. I wasn’t concerned about not having alcohol because I don’t drink much, but the pork thing was truly unsettling. I want my brats! I want my ribs! I want my pork chops! OK, I’m sort of joking. Sort of.
But in all seriousness, things were extremely hectic at my house from March until May. During that time I managed to sell my Honda van to my neighbor, Dave, and arranged for a property management company to rent out my house. Lisa, one of my friends in Portland, agreed to take in my mail while I was overseas (I paid her, of course), so I changed all of my mailing addresses to hers. And I made repeated trips to Best Buy, Home Depot and the Fred Meyer grocery store to stock up on things I might need in Qatar.
Atkins had agreed to ship a 20-foot container of my belongings over to the Middle East, something that would normally cost about $8,000 but was included in my job offer. But now I had to figure out what I was going to bring with me to Qatar and what items I was going to put in a storage unit in Portland. I rented a 20’ x 15’ unit in Portland, so roughly half of my stuff was being shipped over to Qatar while the other half would stay in Portland.
The shipping company’s estimator came to my house one afternoon and we spent two hours going through my belongings, so he could tell me if everything was going to fit into a 20-foot container. I asked him about shipping food (in cans and jars) to the Middle East and he said that wouldn’t be a problem, so that evening I went to a Fred Meyer grocery store, grabbed a cart and filled it literally to the brim with two of my favorite necessities: Crystal Light powdered drink mix and several ultra-large bottles of “Frank’s Red Hot” hot sauce. The next day, the estimator sent me an email saying, “Sorry Del, I just learned that you can’t ship any powders or liquids to Qatar.” So I packed all the Crystal Light and Frank’s Red Hot back into my van and brought it back to Fred Meyer and returned it. The clerk at the Customer Service counter there was puzzled when I stacked dozens of containers of Crystal Light and Frank’s Red Hot onto the conveyor belt, asking for a refund.
Dealing with electric components, like lamps, stereos, and computers, was a special challenge. The electrical system in the U.S. is 120 volts with a 60 hertz frequency, but in the Middle East they use the European system of 240 volts with a 50 hertz frequency. The two systems are totally incompatible and, in addition, the physical plugs are completely different. That means that you can’t plug an American-bought stereo system or computer into an outlet there – and even if you could, it would fry your components.
Therefore, if you want to use any American-bought electrical components in Qatar, you need to buy transformers, which are very heavy and come in different sizes, like 500 watts, 1000 watts, etc. I bought seven of them on Amazon and shipped them over to Qatar. I didn’t ship my flat screen TV, though, because the video system over there is totally different than in the U.S. (PAL vs. NTSC, to be technical), so TVs that you buy in America won’t work in Qatar, even if you use an electric transformer. These were just some of the many issues that I learned about during my two months of frantic preparation.
By the way, I learned about incompatible electrical systems the hard way after I’d moved to Qatar. One afternoon I plugged my 120-volt American DVD player into a 240-volt outlet using a physical adapter, while forgetting to use an electric transformer to change the voltage. I pressed the Power button of my DVD player and two seconds later, I heard a soft “pop,” then saw a small puff of smoke rise from the back of the player. Yep, I had fried it. I threw the DVD player into the trash and bought a new one in Doha.
By early May of 2013, I was still at my home in Portland. My stress level had increased, knowing that I had only two weeks to wrap everything up before I had to fly to Qatar. During my last week in America, everything happened very fast and in quick succession. The movers came to my house and, in four hours, they packed everything that was going to Qatar. They loaded it into a large Mayflower moving van (and soon into a 20-foot shipping container). The next day I rented a U-Haul and moved most of my remaining things into a storage unit nearby. During my last full day in Portland, I sold my van to my neighbor, then I stayed up almost all night, packing the last few things.
I got only two hours of sleep that night and woke up at 5 a.m. An hour later a taxi pulled up to my house and I loaded two large duffel bags and a large daypack into the trunk, a daypack that contained my laptop computer and a three-terabyte external hard drive with all of my files: data, music, movies, photos, TV shows, you name it. My entire life was on that precious 3 TB drive. These were the only things I would have until I was reunited with my belongings that were being shipped to Qatar via sea. As it turned out, I wouldn’t see those sea-bound items again for another five months.
The driver took me to the Portland airport, where I caught a flight for San Francisco. I changed planes in San Francisco and boarded a non-stop flight to Dubai in the U.A.E., an 18-hour trip which, at that time, was the longest flight in the world. I’d gotten used to 12-hour flights from the work trips I’d taken to the U.A.E. a few years earlier but, as I learned, an 18-hour flight was something else entirely. The plane left San Francisco around 2 p.m., the sun set somewhere over Canada, then rose again somewhere over Norway, then set again somewhere over Turkey. Enduring "The flight that never seemed to end" (like a 1950s horror movie) was a surreal experience, being cocooned with 250 other people for nearly a full day. But on the positive side, I had to change planes only once, in Dubai, for the short flight across the Persian Gulf back to Qatar.
The food on the flight was fairly good and was served often. And I enjoyed the in-flight movies, especially the newly-released “Silver Linings Playbook,” which I watched over the North Atlantic from Greenland to Norway. The scene where Jennifer Lawrence teaches the clumsy Bradley Cooper how to ballroom dance in her house stuck with me for a long time afterwards. It’s a memorable scene in a memorable movie with a memorable Bob Dylan song, one that I hadn’t heard in many years.
Above left: The movers packing my entire life into 123 boxes. Above center: My pool table during the pack. Note the "Dogs Playing Poker" on the wall. Above right: Hauling my stuff to Qatar.
Above left: Everything's ready to go. On the right is my DVD player, which I fried later in Qatar. Above right: The movers packed up everything in just four hours. Next stop: Doha.
Above left: I U-hauled the other half of my things over to a storage unit in Portland the next day. Above center: And here it is, nicely organized like a transportation planner would do. Above right: My good friends in Portland, Carl and Lisa. Lisa kindly agreed take in my mail while I was in the Middle East. She didn't quite realize what she was getting herself into.
Above left: I took to the landfill everything that wasn't being shipped to Qatar or put in the storage unit. Twenty years of precious memories equals one trip to the dump! Above right: Taking a taxi to the Portland airport early in the morning.
Above left: I have to stop taking selfies in airport restrooms. Above center: Enjoying a delicious pizza in the San Francisco airport. But sadly, this would be the last good pizza I would eat for over six months. Above right: Being a geographer, I was transfixed with the seatback map of my flight, as I always am.
Above left: I reached the Dubai airport, one of the busiest airports in the world, after an 18-hour non-stop flight from San Francisco. Above right: Seattle's best coffee is here in Dubai? You mean I didn't have to leave Seattle?
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