Qatar

 If there is one place on this earth that C-17 pilots love to hate, it's Al Udeid AB in Qatar. Imagine a hundred square miles bulldozed flat and strewn with gravel, with no natural feature visible on the horizon in any direction, and you’ll have some idea. In the summers the heat is intolerable. The glare of sunlight off the permanent haze is so intense that my squinting eyes water even behind sunglasses. The buildings are ugly and utilitarian: row after row of identical rectangular structures, arranged in a mathematically precise grid that even the most unimaginative engineer would abhor. Al Udeid is the largest coalition air base in the Middle East, but many of the personnel demonstrate an astonishing obsession with irrelevancy. No one will ask you how the war is going, but every Master Sergeant on base will berate you for having your shirt untucked or failing to wear your reflective belt at dusk. The Deid is a curious little parallel universe, and most C-17 pilots will thank God when they throw up the landing gear handle and fly on to bluer skies.

So it was a rather odd decision on my part to voluntarily return to Al Udeid this week. I wanted to take the Defense Language Proficiency Test (DLPT) for the Levantine dialect of Arabic, but the test isn't offered in Jordan. The math was pretty simple. I could pay around $800 for airline tickets, a hotel room, and a rental car in Qatar. Depending how I scored on the test, I would earn between $100 and $300 of bonus pay each month for the next year. The trip would more than pay for itself.

The first thing I'll say is that Qatar looks much better from the window of a 5-star hotel than it does from the Deid. I'm reminded of Orson Scott Card's fantasy novel Hart's Hope, in which visitors to the capitol are presented with a totally different city depending on which gate they enter through. Doha International is definitely the gate you want.

Doha is a curious city. One evening I sat along the corniche for a while, dangling my feet over the turquoise water of Doha Bay, staring at downtown and trying to figure out why it looked like a science fiction painting. Then it hit me. After 3D artists build virtual cities for movies, they apply textures like red brick, transparent glass, or glossy white plastic. In the hands of an inexperienced artist, these textures never look real. They're too perfectly uniform, too flawless. It's easy to make a gleaming city of the future, but it's much more difficult to add the dirt, grime, and broken windows that make a city believable.

That's what's wrong with Doha. Nothing is old. It's too shiny, too perfect, all neon and sparkling glass. The city feels like a vast construction project. Cranes are everywhere. Alongside many major roads you see orange and white barriers, bulldozers, and piled construction materials.

Doha looks like a pleasant place to live, but like the other Gulf states I've visited, there's not much sense of history or culture. Doha has some impressive sights like the world's largest Islamic art museum, but these can be seen in a day. Its historic souq--or market--is full of franchise coffee shops and Baskin Robbins. It pales beside its ancient counterparts in Morocco, Egypt, or Syria. I could be wrong, but it seems like culture in Doha means getting rich off oil, then loading your family into the luxury SUV and going to the corniche for a picnic.

I was pleased to see how diverse Doha is. Exploitation of migrant workers does occur in many contexts, but it also seems that many workers find a good life here. For every Arab family lounging in the grass at the corniche I saw two or three Indian, Sri Lankan, Pakistani, or Indonesian families doing the same.

It was a little surreal driving my rental car from Doha to Al Udeid. If you spend any time at the Deid, you start to feel that it's a remote island in a separate universe.  Believe it or not, Doha and Al Udeid do actually share the same universe. You can drive to the Deid in about half an hour. Thank God, if you're an Olmsted scholar and aren't actually assigned to the base, you can also make the drive back.