The sun rises here at 4:30, which was unfortunate for the room that forget to close their blinds. An informal survey of the group shows that breakfast in the hotel was the high point of the day. Trying to explain what the buffet was like would take up an entire entry in itself, and we probably couldn’t even do it justice with our description, but I might be willing to die for the French toast.

After breakfast, Darbi and Dave led us around West Bay, the downtown area of Doha where our hotel is. Everywhere we walked, there were construction sites—swinging cranes, gritty dust, and surly workers. A random cardboard box fell from the sky and almost killed us while we photographed it. And by we, I mean every single one of us has a camera, ranging from a RiteAid disposable camera to the Canon XH-A1, and it can be a bit ridiculous.

We managed to cross the street, leaving Sarah behind and Jessica shaking sand out of her heels, to reach Doha City Center, the second best mall in town. (We hear the Pearl has a shopping center with canals through it, if time allows Renee will be sure to investigate.) From there we were driven (or rather, looped around the roundabouts they use here instead of traffic lights) to Education City, where all the universities are located. Educational information: Virginia Commonwealth, Texas A&M, Cornell, CMU, Georgetown, and Northwestern are all in various states of constructing their campus, each a single building. CMU, Cornell, and Texas A&M have moved into their buildings, while the rest are temporarily housed.

Tour of the “city” began at the Liberal Arts and Sciences Building, which served as CMU’s temporary home, but we quickly moved onto the Ceremonial Court, an outdoor-granite-landscape-ampitheater that holds 3,000 people. It was last used for Carnegie Mellon’s building opening. More about the building later (including photos).

Other “highlights” of the day:

• Lunch at the “food court” aka Bateel, the only eatery in CMU’s building, was actually delicious. Paninis and peach-strawberry drinks for everyone.
• Loafing around on their version of the ‘black chairs’ and talking to students, we killed time until the tour of QSTP with the visiting Tepper MBA students.
• It’s not really important what the QSTP is. All you need to know is that we got a free Moleskine out of it, engraved with QSTP.
• Qulta, their version of Summit, included Arabic cooking (tabbouleh and some Qatari dessert that was doughy and fried), sword dancing, Arabic card games (bridge), Arabic dancing (basically, belly dancing), and an intense henna session.
• Dinner was Pizza Hut. They LOVE Pizza Hut.