I like Mozzarella.

I love it, actually, which is weird considering I don't really like cheese. Well, not raw cheese. Cooked into stuff; on toast with Worcestershire sauce; melted on meat; it's mostly good. So when I read this in the room service menu tonight, I expected something of reasonable quality:

Sandwiches

TEXAS LONGHORN
Grilled Steak Sandwich with Grilled Vegetables and Mozzarella Cheese served with French Fries. 22 QR.

Sounds good, no? The price (about 3 quid) should have set alarm bells ringing, but I ordered anyway. It took almost half an hour to arrive, so my expectation was even more heightened. They don't spend that much time on crap.

Wrong.

I took the metal lid off the plate, and was faced with a stale baguette filled with blackened thin strips of some kind of meat topped with this:


Now, forgive me for nearly throwing up all over the plate, but THAT is not Mozzarella. It's not even cheese. It's probably been closer to a penguin than a cow. I was so anguished and upset that I didn't even notice that the Grilled Vegetables were also stretching the terms of the Trades Description Act: they were sliced, cold salad vegetables. Still, I managed to peel the "cheese" off and devour the food. The chips were OK.

But there we are. I've vented my rage and have howled at the moon, and have perspective again. That said, thinking back, I can count the decent meals I have had since returning to Doha on one finger. That was the huge rib-eye steak I had last night. Other than that, the food here has proved to be fairly shite.

The breakfasts at this hotel are crap. The sandwich I had at the Ramada hotel was crap. The lunch at work today was...interesting. I don't want to seem ungrateful, because it was free, but it was stone cold. I might actually lose some weight here, without even trying.

Before the moaning gets too insistent, I will relay some good news: the job is interesting. I've had a good first day, and have already got stuck into some juicy contractual issues and exchanged points of view with a Lebanese QS. Lebanese people are weird. In a nice way, I mean. They throw you with their accent, which sounds at times French and other times German. I digress. Work was good.

It wasn't what I expected, to be fair. I had worrying preconceptions about the place, being on a huge Industrial City up in Ras Laffan (North East of the country). After a very early start of 7am (I'm still at 5am), the drive there was quite long, and then there was a bit of a wait to get through security, and then there was more of a drive through desert to get to the project I am working on. The constant sight of sand and sky was suddenly punctuated by flare stacks and petrochemical storage tanks. The roadside was suddenly littered with giant metal vessels, like some giant's discarded Mechanno set.

Finally we arrived at the site offices and I was pleasantly surprised at how good the facilities were, with clean toilets, good AC, modern furniture and the ubiquitous little man with a tray offering drinks and fruit. The biggest surprise came at lunchtime. A very helpful chap showed me the way to the canteen, and I assumed it would involved buying something very basic, but when I was guided into the little cabin, I was greeted by the sight of about ten plastic patio tables adorned with metal food trays (like the ones from Chinese take-aways) and plastic bags containing Arabic bread and cans of fizzy beverages. Every place setting had these, and people were sat here and there helping themselves. I turned to my guide, probably with a very stupid expression on my face, and grunted, "Wha?" He just smiled and motioned to the tables and then left the hut, so I took a place at an empty table and started opening the lucky dip boxes. There was salad, humus, rice, chips, fried chicken and some kind of chicken casserole, and all of it was stone cold (as I might have mentioned). Never mind, thought I. Free grub is free grub, whether it's cold or not, so I ate it up and went back to work.

The evening drive back was an experience, in much the same way waking up surrounded by scorpions is an experience. The "driver" was less of a driver than the "cheese" was Mozzarella. He didn't seem to know what to do with a gear-shift vehicle and seemed to have a powerful magnet pulling him towards other cars' bumpers. I had to distract myself by holding a conversation with my fellow passenger, a gregarious, well-travelled Scotsman with an uncanny Sean Connery impression for a voice. I washn't shure if he wash taking the pish oot of me. Anyway, he provided some good entertainment as he shouted and swore at our hapless driver whenever he made another life-threatening mistake at seventy miles per hour. After an hour and a bit, we finally arrived back in Doha, and I nearly got down on my knees and prayed in thanks. Nearly. It might have been deemed provocative here.