World Cup 2022: What to do, see and eat in Qatar
DOHA, Qatar — It was 115 degrees on the summer day I arrived in Qatar. That answered my first question: Why had FIFA, among the most hidebound and conservative of international sports bodies, agreed to buck nearly a century of tradition by playing the World Cup in the winter?
The second question was a bit more complicated: Why had Qatar, a tiny, conservative, Islamic emirate in the Persian Gulf worked so hard and spent so much to play host to the tournament?
The World Cup kicks off Nov. 20 and over the following 28 days, more than 1.2 million people are expected to flood into a country that is smaller than Connecticut and has a population about equal to Chicago's. The country and its unfailingly polite people have neither the space nor the patience to deal with more than a million rowdy soccer fans, many of whom know nothing of the country or its culture.
That, however, is the point, said Fatma Al-Nuaimi, executive communications director of the Supreme Committee for Delivery & Legacy, the local World Cup organizing body.
"A lot of people will be coming here and they might have their own perceptions from what they read and what they hear," she said after a late dinner at an Armenian-Lebanese restaurant in the trendy Katara Cultural Village, a sprawling waterfront collection of shops, restaurants and museums. "When you come here, it's totally different. You learn about new things, new culture, new traditions. It gives you a different perspective. For a lot of travelers, this is what they would be keen to look for and to explore and to enrich the experience
