No longer the new kid on the block, seven weeks in!

I'm nicely settled in now and we have a new Director at work - hot from England - so he's replaced me as the new kid on the block at work. Although I think he has had a guardian angel looking over his shoulder since he seems to have sailed through the bureaucracy extremely well and quickly. Two weeks and he already has a residence permit and a driving licence, a new apartment and a promotion - not bad going.

I have now got my Qatari driving licence which I am pleased about but which also fills me with dread since the prospect of driving out here is really quite frightening. The drivers really don't follow any particular highway code and do pretty much anything they feel like - road rage seems to rule and size definitely matters. Anyone who doesn't have good lane discipline on roundabouts would feel very much at home here. Still, I have a rental car booked for Tuesday, so I am going to have to bite the bullet and get on with it. Apparently, the best time to go out and practice is Friday morning - the roads are quietest then because of Friday prayers and it being the weekend. So watch out Doha, here I come.

Some of you may have seen the camel pictures on Facebook - these are in a part of the car park near to Souq Waqif which is in the city centre. I'm not sure what they are doing there - there are no facilities for them and it doesn't appear to be a riding or tourist centre. Maybe it is just for the visitors to take pictures, exactly as I did. Strangely, they all seemed to be looking in the same direction, every time I looked. Maybe they were looking to Mecca.

Have I mentioned the senior Arabic men with the wheelbarrows in the Souq. There are a number of them when you are wandering around and they will follow you with your shopping - they are a version of the supermarket trolley and will take your shopping back to the car. When they are not engaged, they sit in the wheelbarrows.

Although the apartment block I am staying is serviced, ie it is cleaned and the linens changed twice a week, the cleaning is really a bit of a lick and a promise. Those of you who know me well, will know that I am a bit of a dusting fanatic although I have been a bit lax since I've here and had someone doing it for me. The other problem was I've been unable to buy a duster anywhere. So imagine my total surprise and pleasure when I came across a Lakeland shop in the City Centre Mall. A breath of fresh air and a reminder of home - one of my favourite shops.

Another thing that it's hard to get is white sugar - you can buy sugar cubes and brown sugar but loose white sugar is not so easy to get. So I've become adept at leaving conferences and coffee shops with a few packets of white sugar for my cereal in my handbag. Other things are very common that you would expect to be hard to find - Kellogs cereals are all over. If you ask for English breakfast tea, you get Liptons Yellow Label. Quite often though, they will serve it with hot milk, unless you ask for cold.

I'm developing a strange "pidgin" English which I use for speaking with non-English speakers or people I meet who are not fluent in English. Unfortunately, I think if you do this long enough, I imagine your own English would be affected, Conversely, when you are communicating by email, you need to adopt a more polite and stilted, even old fashioned style, almost how we would have once written a letter to introduce ourselves. It is customary to be polite, pass the time of day, express gratitude etc even in an email to get anything done. This can be very time consuming. It's a bit like learning a new language. After years of constantly being annoyed with spellcheckers trying to Americanise words with a "z" instread of an "s" in organisation for example, at ictQATAR, our style guide instructs us to use American English. So now I have to type center instead of centre.

Well, having used up another day of my weekend at a conference, it's back to work tomorrow, so I must go. The conference was, however, very interesting, at Qatar University, about education reform and I made some useful contacts for my programme.