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Qatar convention
Jun. 28th, 2005 04:09 pmI have decided that the truly bizarre thing about being in Pittsburgh is that half of the people I know in Qatar are here right now.
Naturally the English department people were here last week, and last Wednesday the Thorpes had a dinner for all the Qatar-related people in town, so I got to see a number of faculty and staff who have already moved back or who are just here for the summer.
Yesterday morning alone, though, I randomly ran into four different people from the Qatar campus. I walked into the lobby of the UC to check e-mail, as I have every morning for a week and a half, and lo and behold Leland was sitting in "my" chair. So I sat down next to him and was checking e-mail on my laptop when Pascal, one of our IT guys in Qatar, walked in. (He pointed out that, last time he saw us, we were sitting together with our laptops in the CMU-Q student lounge.) A little while later Leland noticed Imran, one of our students who's in town taking summer classes, walking by, and called him over to chat. I had to go to work then, but within an hour Mona, our other student here for summer school, came in to our office.
It's pretty surreal.
The exciting thing, for me, is that I really didn't have any close friends in Pittsburgh before we moved to Qatar, and now I do. When we do eventually move back to Pittsburgh I'm really going to miss the community that has developed in Doha, but I hope we'll all stay in touch.
Naturally the English department people were here last week, and last Wednesday the Thorpes had a dinner for all the Qatar-related people in town, so I got to see a number of faculty and staff who have already moved back or who are just here for the summer.
Yesterday morning alone, though, I randomly ran into four different people from the Qatar campus. I walked into the lobby of the UC to check e-mail, as I have every morning for a week and a half, and lo and behold Leland was sitting in "my" chair. So I sat down next to him and was checking e-mail on my laptop when Pascal, one of our IT guys in Qatar, walked in. (He pointed out that, last time he saw us, we were sitting together with our laptops in the CMU-Q student lounge.) A little while later Leland noticed Imran, one of our students who's in town taking summer classes, walking by, and called him over to chat. I had to go to work then, but within an hour Mona, our other student here for summer school, came in to our office.
It's pretty surreal.
The exciting thing, for me, is that I really didn't have any close friends in Pittsburgh before we moved to Qatar, and now I do. When we do eventually move back to Pittsburgh I'm really going to miss the community that has developed in Doha, but I hope we'll all stay in touch.
