Our first stop in Qatar was a souk. Expecting run down stalls and dirty side-alleys we were pleasantly surprised to see how beautiful the souk was. Recently renovated to its previous splendor the Souk Waqif is a maze-like complex with beautiful cut glass roofs and intricately carved stone archways. I had always wanted to get a henna tattoo so this seemed like the perfect spot. We found a little shop where a woman with the hands of an artist applied the henna paste on my hands and foot.

It was a relaxing experience to be amongst Qatari woman, who feeling safe enough in the beauty parlor, pulled off their headscarves and chatted to me as if I was one of them and even asked me advice on which pattern to choose for themselves. The guys were getting impatient as I had left them outside – obliged by respect for gender separation - while I indulged in some girly pleasures, it was time to get going to our next item on the agenda. You don’t see many people walking around in Qatar. They are all in malls. Our host explained that this is the only place where people of opposing sexes can meet unsupervised. You see groups of young men looking very distinguished in white ‘thobes’ (long white floor-length tunics) and woman in different attire, ranging from fully covered with the ‘abaya’ (a floor length black robe) complete with veil across the face to simple scarves covering the hair or ‘Hijab’. We had no problem chatting to men even though the language barrier didn’t help. But the women were too shy to appear on camera. It was sad for me not to be able to have the women represented in our video but I did get to chat to some of them and they were oh-so-friendly.