Where in the World is KaitieKatt? : When in Doha-ha

Hello everyone! So it has been a few weeks since I last posted, and so many things have happened since then! I have been here for one month now, and time seems to just keep flying by. I have been teaching a ton of classes, which I actually really enjoy! It makes the days go by super fast and it’s so fun getting to know all of the hospital staff. The people are extremely nice and hospitable. They always want to make sure that the Cerner trainers are loving our time here and they love bringing us Arabic coffee. Arabic coffee is nothing like coffee at home, and I really am not a huge fan of it. But it has about 3 cups worth of caffeine in it, so I always kindly except their gift because an energy boost is always neededJ

I have become really good friends with a lot of my coworkers on this trip, so it makes for a fun time! The cool thing about working out of Cerner Middle East is that there is not as many employees as there is in the Cerner US, so we get to become very close to all of the high up management. It’s a cool opportunity to be able to sit with the people who are making all of these big decisions for the company and the clients and actually talk through some of the decision making with them. It’s definitely something I didn’t think about when coming to Doha, but I am very fortunate to have that kind of opportunity!

Although we work extremely hard, we also like to play hard as wellJ There was a huge tennis tournament here in Qatar that all of the big name tennis players played at. We got to see Federer play singles (he won) and we got to see Djokovic’s double team play Nadal’s. Nadal’s team came out with the win! We got to sit 2 rows off the court from some of the best tennis players in the entire world! Not bad for my very first tennis matchJ

I also took a little trip to Dubai with some of my friends. It was such an amazing trip! I couldn’t have asked for a better weekend. We took some time to explore the city and sightsee. Dubai is such a crazy City in the sense that they have different pods of huge cities everywhere. You will be driving down the road and drive through a ginormous city, but then as you drive a few more miles down the road there is another area that looks like another huge city. It so beautiful and extremely wealthy. I went to the top of the tallest building in the entire world. The Burj Khalifa is 2,722 ft tall and when you are standing at the top all of the other buildings around it look so little! Another fun thing we did was go to a brunch. Brunches are a huge thing in the Middle East, so we thought we would try it out. They had a ton of amazing food and drinks. They also had live music playing! It was fun to just chill out with everyone and eat with all of the locals. That night we went to an outdoor club called White. It was a little bit out of the city and it was inside of the huge horse racing arena. The club had an amazing view of Dubai and such a fun atmosphere! It was such a great weekend and we always talk about how we wish we could relive that whole Dubai trip!

After getting back from Dubai we all continued to keep teaching all of our classes and then trying to plan a few fun things in between. We went to the Vellaggio mall, which is a gigantic mall made up of every store possible. The mall is so big that there is even a little river in the middle of it that people can take Gondola rides in. I will definitely be making my way back to this mall sometime soon. We are also still hanging out in the lounge most nights or going to the Souq Waqif to walk around, shop, eat, or smoke Shisha. Another funny coincidence is that the annual professional handball tournament is always in Qatar. For the past 2 weeks our hotel has been full of 6’10 guys walking around in their countries uniforms. Apparently handball is a huge sport around the world and all of these guys are pretty famous wherever they are from. People here always ask them for pictures and autographs. We never really understood why they were so cool, but it was still neat to be able to see and meet some of them!

I have another 3 day General Laboratory Foundations class with 25 people in it. This is the most people I have ever had in a single class, so I am curious to see how it goes! After this 3 day course I will be off again to Istanbul, Turkey! One of the oldest cities in the world. It should be a great time and I can’t wait to tell you all aboutJ

XOXO all the way from Qatar.