So, as you know we made it safe and sound to Doha. First impressions? This city/country has gone wild for the World Cup! Every single place you look, there is World Cup branding. It seems we have landed in the right place! Super excited!

First thing is first. We arrive at the airport, and we were immediately surrounded by World Cup things. Selling things, billboards, signs, every single thing you can think of. Here are just a few examples.

Then it was off to our accommodations. Luckily enough, Qatar had everything sorted out to try to make public transportation throughout the tournament (city, stadiums, and accommodations) as easy as possible. We immediately noticed this when we were told that we could take the metro to the station close to our accommodations and then there would be a shuttle specifically for us from the metro station to our accommodation. Great. On top of that, it is all free for people attending the tournament with our Hayya Card (similar to Russia’s Fan ID). So, after grabbing some free SIM cards to use while in Qatar with free data and minutes and texting, we headed to the metro. And look at who we found…

Getting to the accommodation was straight forward. The metro goes right into the airport, so it’s quick to reach. Each station is staffed by a literal army of volunteers who are extremely helpful to tell you where to change, what platform to go to, and anything else you could need. You may have seen some videos or news stories of them by their constant slogan of “metro! this way!”, pretty much the slogan of the World Cup at this point.

And, as promised, we left the final metro station, walked about 300 metres, and there was a shuttle waiting for us. Funnily enough, we had walked about 300 or so metres and the accommodation was only another 600 or so away. But my travel partner appreciated it because he was the one carrying all of the weight of our bags.

As you may have heard, getting accommodations was “impossible”. Well… we didn’t find it that way, BUT, we came at the very end of the tournament. At the start there were about 10 days of 4 games per day, so of course that is more people than now when we arrived, just in time for the semi finals. Only four games remaining, with rest days in between.

Something else you may or may not have heard of were the terrible conditions that the fans had to stay in. Speaking only for our experience in one of the Caravan Cities, first impressions aren’t bad. We will do a full breakdown of everything on offer at our Caravan City later on, but the main thing is the bed, and it is there. I was too tired to pose in these.

As you may or may not know from our other posts, my travel partner cannot sit still. So we immediately went back out to explore a bit. And we were immediately rewarded. From our Caravan City we saw this:

Terrible quality because it was so far away.. but what could that be? It was a nice drone show for the World Cup, clearly, but where and why? Hopefully we get to see it closer! Then it was back to the shuttle, then the metro, and we were welcomed by this view of Doha when we got off of the metro! Impressive!

But that can wait. We are here for the World Cup, and our first stop just had to be:

The FIFA FanFest! Always a good time. We have enjoyed them at the 2014 World Cup in Brasil (Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo), at the 2017 Confederations Cup in Russia (Saint Petersburg), and at the 2018 World Cup in Russia (Saint Petersburg and Moscow), so we had to stop by immediately.

But… the excitement was short lived… My travel partner had his GPS on him. It was not allowed through security into the FanFestival. No problem, same thing happened at the 2018 World Cup. At that time we placed it in the Restricted Items tent. However… here they wouldn’t accept it. So we either had to throw it out or leave. We left. It was too long to go back to the Caravan City and come back, so, our first World Cup event ended in failure. So we had to go wandering around to see what we could find. We were also forced to wander because the metro station closest to the FanFest is an “exit only” station so that huge crowds and congestion don’t form… so off we went towards the city lights we had seen before.

Thankfully we went in that direction. The city has gone into full World Cup mode. We saw one player on the side of a building, then another, then some more. Eventually we were hunting around for all of our favourite players. We didn’t do too badly…

Hopefully you know who each of those greats are. There were more, but no matter how much we hunted we couldn’t find one more player… Instead we found this artwork, the closest thing to him we could find tonight.

And the prize that everyone is here for.

Then my partner started to get a bit tired. After all, he carried me around for more than 10 km already this morning in Kuwait! After searching for so long we ended up in this mall.

And inside the World Cup was still going strong as with literally everywhere else we had gone today.

And at the very end there was a display case for all of the past mascots.

And with that, it was time to go back to our Caravan City and go to sleep. This time in the other direction, but it is still metro, then a second metro, then the shuttle, then a tuktuk that takes us directly to our caravan’s door. Our first World Cup game is tomorrow! Good night from Doha!