Moving to Qatar as a woman, whether you’ve come for your own career, followed a partner, or arrived with a family, involves a specific set of adjustments that the generic expat experience doesn’t fully capture. The social landscape, the practical daily considerations, and the particular version of “starting over” that women navigate in a new…
Nobody warns you about the loneliness. You’ve done the research on salaries, sorted out your QID, found an apartment, and figured out which supermarket has the best produce. And then about six weeks in, you realize that you’ve been having the same three conversations with colleagues all week and you haven’t made a single genuine…
Ramadan in Qatar is unlike anything most expats have experienced before arriving here. I’ve been through multiple Ramadans in Qatar and my honest assessment is this: your first Ramadan will probably be your most disorienting, your second will be your most interesting, and by your third you’ll wonder how you ever thought of it as…
Qatar’s dress code is one of the most Googled topics by people planning to move here or visit, and most of what they find is either so vague as to be useless (“dress modestly”) or so alarmist as to be inaccurate (“cover everything or face arrest”). The reality is considerably more nuanced and considerably more…
No amount of reading about Qatar’s work culture fully prepares you for the experience of actually working here. I’ve seen highly capable professionals arrive in Doha with strong track records from Western or Asian corporate environments and spend their first six months frustrated, confused, and convinced that nothing works. Most of them eventually figured it…