A rough transcript of my first successful, and second overall, bargaining attempt:
"Hello, how much for these (cufflinks) with a discount?"
"For you sir, 40 (Qatari Riyal, ~3.6 riyal is 1 US dollar)."
"Can you do 35?"
"For you sir, I can do that."
A few things to note. The list price was 65 QR. I was hoping to get him down to 45, and his original offer undercut what I was hoping to work to. This threw me off a little.
He was very polite and was not at all pushy. The store was also in a mall and not out on the street.
Did I get a good deal? Probably not what a local could have bargained for, but, in the end, I got cufflinks for less than $10. I'll work on my skills as I go along.
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Monday, August 16, 2010
The Clown Car
What do HIV, Hep A, Hep C, and Tuberculosis have in common? Hopefully, they are all diseases which I do not have.
Today, 9 of the other TAs and I took a ride down to the medical testing facility. To get a resident permit, one needs to get cleared of a few infectious diseases. There were also 3 other employees, three drivers, and our escourt from HR. All told, there were 17 people, and, at first glance, they had one 14 person van.
The HR escourt wound up taking a car with one of the drivers and one of the employees.
At the medical center, the men and the women were split up and entered the buildings in two different areas. We first sat in a row of chairs and waited to move up in the queue. Our driver is a rather large, imposing fellow who hails from Egypt. He relentlessly moved us forward in the queue and at one point seemed to kick someone out of line in front of us. It is possibly that I missed this person cutting to the front but it seemed as though he was just strong-armed out.
The man behind the window checked my ID and stamped my paperwork. I walked into another large room with a number of glass, curtain, and queue rail dividers. I stood in line to get a chest x-ray to check for tuberculosus. It was here that our driver truly showed his powers. He was a tireless defender of the no cutting policy. He would brow-beat his way through the line telling the immigrant workers we were standing with to shape-up the line and get to the back if they had stepped in front.
Eventually, I made it into the x-ray room and, after taking off my shirt, walked to a very modern looking machine and was blasted with high-energy photons. My paper was stamped and I moved on to the blood work stage. This involved another queue and more driver-instigated line culling. When I made it to the front of the line a nice lady called me into a small room and took my papers and the vial with my number on it. She took a sterile needle out of a drawer, hooked it up to my vial, swabbed my arm, and pricked the inside vein in my left arm. Blood flowed for a few seconds and it was over. I held the cotton ball to my arm and went outside to wait with the others who had finished. After everyone was done, we loaded back into the clown car.
Today, 9 of the other TAs and I took a ride down to the medical testing facility. To get a resident permit, one needs to get cleared of a few infectious diseases. There were also 3 other employees, three drivers, and our escourt from HR. All told, there were 17 people, and, at first glance, they had one 14 person van.
The HR escourt wound up taking a car with one of the drivers and one of the employees.
At the medical center, the men and the women were split up and entered the buildings in two different areas. We first sat in a row of chairs and waited to move up in the queue. Our driver is a rather large, imposing fellow who hails from Egypt. He relentlessly moved us forward in the queue and at one point seemed to kick someone out of line in front of us. It is possibly that I missed this person cutting to the front but it seemed as though he was just strong-armed out.
The man behind the window checked my ID and stamped my paperwork. I walked into another large room with a number of glass, curtain, and queue rail dividers. I stood in line to get a chest x-ray to check for tuberculosus. It was here that our driver truly showed his powers. He was a tireless defender of the no cutting policy. He would brow-beat his way through the line telling the immigrant workers we were standing with to shape-up the line and get to the back if they had stepped in front.
Eventually, I made it into the x-ray room and, after taking off my shirt, walked to a very modern looking machine and was blasted with high-energy photons. My paper was stamped and I moved on to the blood work stage. This involved another queue and more driver-instigated line culling. When I made it to the front of the line a nice lady called me into a small room and took my papers and the vial with my number on it. She took a sterile needle out of a drawer, hooked it up to my vial, swabbed my arm, and pricked the inside vein in my left arm. Blood flowed for a few seconds and it was over. I held the cotton ball to my arm and went outside to wait with the others who had finished. After everyone was done, we loaded back into the clown car.
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Eyes in the Sun
Second day at work. Took an eye test today as the first step in getting a driver's license. Got my paperwork from HR and Steven, a driver for Weill Cornell Medical College-Qatar(WCMC-Q), drove me and two others to a building in a small compound.
It was blistering hot out as usual(34 feels like 46 with the ~90% percent humidity). There were throngs of workers outside of the building; not sure if they are doing construction in the area or live nearby. Some of them seem well adapted to the heat and are barely glistening while others have sweat through their shirt, front and back.
The government building where the eye test was located was a cracked, squarish plot that, from the outside, was nearly indistringuishable from the houses and buildings around it. We had driven the 15 minutes at the jerkish pace that I have come to realize is commonplace in Qatar. Hard acceleration from every light and stop that pushes the little four-banger engines into the 6 or 7k rpm range as they gulp down the high octane fuel that is the standard.
The two minute walk from the car into the building burnt my eyes and made my light clothing hang a little heavier on my body. We walked past a group of sweaty men whom I would later join. Steven got us three lunch-meat-counter tickets for our spot in line which was an uncharacteristically familiar activity.
From room to room, the odors changed from a/c to sweat and b.o. to a flowery spray that one worker was laying down heavily. My number, 095, came up on the LED screen and I walked up to the desk. The only words exchanged between the woman behind the desk and myself were a quick "Room 2" and "Thank you."
I walked over to the lines for the two eye exam rooms. I got in the queue that I had previously walked through. This area was near the door to the outside world and was very hot because of it. I soon became one of the sweaty men I had noticed on the way in. When my turn arived, I entered a small room with a window a/c unit that was blowing on high, as far as I could tell. There were two women. One was wearing an abaya with her face covered and the other a sheila with her face exposed. The woman with the exposed face ran through a traditional eye test with me and I passed.
I then exited the room, sat with Steven until the other two had finished, and finally, completed the trek, in reverse, back to the WCMC-Q campus.
It was blistering hot out as usual(34 feels like 46 with the ~90% percent humidity). There were throngs of workers outside of the building; not sure if they are doing construction in the area or live nearby. Some of them seem well adapted to the heat and are barely glistening while others have sweat through their shirt, front and back.
The government building where the eye test was located was a cracked, squarish plot that, from the outside, was nearly indistringuishable from the houses and buildings around it. We had driven the 15 minutes at the jerkish pace that I have come to realize is commonplace in Qatar. Hard acceleration from every light and stop that pushes the little four-banger engines into the 6 or 7k rpm range as they gulp down the high octane fuel that is the standard.
The two minute walk from the car into the building burnt my eyes and made my light clothing hang a little heavier on my body. We walked past a group of sweaty men whom I would later join. Steven got us three lunch-meat-counter tickets for our spot in line which was an uncharacteristically familiar activity.
From room to room, the odors changed from a/c to sweat and b.o. to a flowery spray that one worker was laying down heavily. My number, 095, came up on the LED screen and I walked up to the desk. The only words exchanged between the woman behind the desk and myself were a quick "Room 2" and "Thank you."
I walked over to the lines for the two eye exam rooms. I got in the queue that I had previously walked through. This area was near the door to the outside world and was very hot because of it. I soon became one of the sweaty men I had noticed on the way in. When my turn arived, I entered a small room with a window a/c unit that was blowing on high, as far as I could tell. There were two women. One was wearing an abaya with her face covered and the other a sheila with her face exposed. The woman with the exposed face ran through a traditional eye test with me and I passed.
I then exited the room, sat with Steven until the other two had finished, and finally, completed the trek, in reverse, back to the WCMC-Q campus.
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