One of my favourite tweets of recent times was from a Qatari on holiday in the USA. “Why does every petrol station I’m passing seem to be closed?” he asked. You see, we don’t get out of the car to fill up our tanks in Qatar. A pump attendant does it for us, even during the summer, when it can get up to 50C outside. And that petrol – well, it’s cheaper than bottled water. A four litre 4×4 costs around £10 to fill out here. When we go home to the UK for holidays, we avert our eyes when we pay for our fuel.
We also never pack our own shopping bags, wash our own cars, and many also have housemaids who take care of the cleaning, laundry, and in a lot of cases, the children, too. Eating out is a national pastime; Friday brunches pack enough food in to last you a week, and if you sit outside a fast-food restaurant in your car and beep your horn, someone will come to take your order – and bring it to you when it’s ready.
I asked my followers on Twitter what living in Qatar – the world’s richest country by GDP per capita – means to them. One said that shelling out for an iPhone no longer takes any deliberation. Another said that when going on holiday, anything less than five star feels wrong. After all, this is Qatar, home of a forest of luxury hotels, and, of course, “the world’s five-star airline”, Qatar Airways.
