Greetings from Do-hot! Yes, my friends, we are back in Qatar, where the current temperature (according to weather.com) is 37 degrees Celsius...with a "feels like 52 degrees Celsius" in smaller print. For you Fahrenheit folks, that's HOT. That's 99 degrees, feels like 125. Ouch. Even stepping out of the airport last night at 11pm was an experience. Have you ever been in a sauna? I used to think I knew about outdoor saunas after having lived in the South, but I tell ya, New Orleans and Mississippi are not like this. How bizarre to walk out into thick hot air at 11pm! But enough about that. That will just be a fact of life here until we leave, and that's that! At least we have air conditioning (praise the Lord!!!!).
We arrived last night without incident after spending five nights in Germany visiting Markus's mother and sister. Ellie finally got to meet her Oma and Tante Ulla! Hooray! Much of the days were lost to jet lag (from which Jennifer and Ellie are still suffering), but it was wonderful to see them and we had a very nice visit, despite the fact that it was also record heat in Germany (35.6 degrees...preparing us for our return?). One big advantage over Germany that we have here in Doha is AIR CONDITIONING (praise ye who invented that lovely contraption)! Europe doesn't traditionally have the kind of heat they are experiencing now, so very few places (or homes) have A/C. That made some logistics of our visit (and sleeping at night) a bit challenging. We wanted to get out and about more, but the heat posed a few restrictions we hadn't anticipated.
The first day was our best, with a visit to a 11th century monastery and its surrounding gardens and lake. The gardens were very impressive...hundreds of varieties of plants, beautifully cultivated and also available in a public greenhouse for purchase. However, my favorite part was the traditional kaffee und kuchen (coffee and cake) on the terrace of the restaurant. Keep your German efficiency, forget BMWs...the best German invention I know is kaffee und kuchen. Any excuse to eat yummy cake on a daily basis sounds good to me! (and again somehow Jennifer's blogging devolves into drooling over food...)
Later in the week, Ulla came with us on a visit to Bonn's German History Museum (fairly interesting and well laid-out, but I HIGHLY recommend you be fluent in German if you want to grasp more than a fraction of it). We dined one night in a fun, Gaudi-inspired restaurant high in the vineyards near Ahrweiler. The vineyards there are all on the steep hillsides lining the Rhein valley, so it was a beautiful view and particularly nice given that I've been at sea-level or below for quite a while now. All in all, it was one of the nicest visits I've experienced there, despite the temperature. Those were the first real days of downtime we've had as a family in ages, and I really enjoyed them. Thank you, Rita and Ulla, for making everything so easy and relaxing for us!
Now it's time to get going again. I think the blogging-devolving-into-foodie-drooling means it must be lunchtime.
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