Originally Posted on March 20, 2021

It’s the difference between window shopping and walking into a store. Exploring a new city is exciting—but exploring a new city with a friend who lives in that city is magical.

Yesterday, my friend and I spent 11 hours adventuring in Doha. The afternoon began at the National Museum of Qatar. As we stopped to read the descriptions of historical artifacts, ranging from pearls to riyals, I asked my friend, who speaks Arabic, French, and English, “Do you prefer to read in Arabic or English?”

He paused for a moment before replying, “You can’t read about an Arabic thing with English; it loses its Arabic touch. When you read it in Arabic, it has more feeling.”

On our way out of the museum, we stopped at an outdoor café called Thalatheen, where I drank an Arabian latte while he taught me the Arabic alphabet—and demonstrated how to pronounce every sound.

“Look. This sound is like a cat,” he said, putting his hand to his throat. I then mimicked his purring. He also taught me some Arabic basics of “hello,” “yes,” and “no”—along with a random word: fosheeka.

He asked me whether I remembered the little fireworks that we threw when we were kids. He said his friend named his dog after those, then he showed me a photo of his friend’s Pomeranian, Fosheeka.

After maneuvering around the multiple-lane, bumper-to-bumper Friday night traffic, we made it to our next stop, Almazaya Carthage, a local Tunisian restaurant characterized by red leather booths with square pillows and hand-woven canvases adorning the walls.

His home country is Tunisia, a country in North Africa—and he introduced me to the food he grew up eating. A few minutes later, the server arrived with plates upon plates of food—fresh pita bread with flour still on the bottom, frick soup, “BBQ” salad, Tunisian salad, and ojja merguez.

As we ate, he described the ingredients. “But if my mother were cooking this… ” he said with a grin, “... even better.”

The night still didn’t come to an end—we drove to Haagen-Dazs for ice cream and shopped around the Mirqab Mall before watching “Nobody” and eating caramel popcorn at Flik Cinemas.

Approaching midnight, we headed out to the Marina Food Arena, which reminded me of the Oklahoma State Fair with food trucks galore—only instead of families walking on foot, there were lanes of Rolls-Royce, Lexus, and Mercedes-Benz.

But we parked, walked on foot, and weaved in and out of the lit-up color-changing palm trees to reach the arena. He picked out one of his favorite juice joints, Rotana Restaurant, and we climbed to the second floor of the food truck.

Looking out at the cars below and the city around, I took a deep breath. It’s after 1 a.m. The air is cool. The arena is alive. The night feels like day.

As we sipped on fresh pineapple juice, we continued conversations about our home countries, life in the pandemic, and the value of a moment shared without distractions.