Day 3 - Doha
Up early and out into a clear day we managed to find a surprisingly good coffee nearby. We then walked down to the Corniche, the long promenade along the Doha waterfront, and on to the Museum of Islamic Art, located in an impressive building on the water. We enjoyed the visit as we wandered through floor after floor of beautiful art history from all over the world.
Through the parkland and further along the waterfront we found a small kiosk near the waters edge where we had lunch. We have had opportunities for Doha stopovers at other times but the extreme temperatures have always put us off, this time we'd picked the best time of year as the daytime temperature is in the low 20s, making for very pleasant site seeing weather.
Everything in Doha is immaculately kept and incredibly clean, including the Souk, there were always people cleaning and sweeping, we even saw someone cleaning the back of the traffic lights!
Souk Waqif has the old world charm of alleyways and nooks and crannies, with exotic shops selling weird and wonderful products, but everything is clean and there is no hard sell, in fact almost no selling at all. We found ourselves in the pet section with hundreds of birds crammed in cages, tiny tortoises and scared little bunnies, you wonder how many will end up surviving, let alone flourishing.
This time of year the sun sets around 4.30pm and by 6pm the air is cool enough to need a jacket. We headed out for an early dinner at one of the restaurants in the souk, by this time everyone is out and about, so the souk was very busy, quite different to out first impressions from the previous day.
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