What am I doing here, travel diary, day 35: the World Cup ends and the “go ahead, go” trend

We can’t say for sure because we have never known, since we got here, normality Qatar. In these 35 days everything has been hormonally, or rather, globally altered in this small emirate located on a peninsula bordering the Persian Gulf. However, hours before the final comes with Argentina and France as stellar protagonists, the foam begins to fall little by little on the streets of Doha. And everything seems to flow differently.

In the last post I told you about this obsession with being helpful and keeping everything clean to the extreme. This is maintained. However, we note that in the last few hours there is some relaxation in everything related to the endless checks to pass every time you wanted to get somewhere.

Want some examples? It goes one. This Saturday we went to the Qatar National Convention Center. The Media Center of Fifa. It’s that place where I told you it is mum, the giant spider sculpted by Louise Bourgeois, is where all the journalists of the world gather to work when we’re not going to the stadiums. Also, this is the site where you can print the tickets we need to enter the courts as a complement to our accreditations. And that’s where the coaches and players of the various teams also held press conferences on “-1” days, i.e. the days before the matches. This Saturday there were Hugo Lloris, Didier Deschamps, Dibu Martínez and Lionel Scaloni.

The point is that the first few days, upon arriving in this country so foreign to our customs and traditions, entering the Media Center was like trying to cross the border between Russia and Ukraine in the midst of war. To do this by car required bypassing several checkpoints and having a sticker on the windshield with a QR code that was scanned once or twice before leaving the car in the parking lot. Then, once you entered the building, an imposing and very large mass with hundreds of escalators, you had to cross a barrier of police and private security personnel always on duty. First they checked the accreditation and then – and I warn you that I will use this term in the form of noun and verb many times – they scanned it.

Once this formality was completed, the notebook had to be taken out of the backpack, placed on a gray tray and the backpack placed on another gray tray, albeit a slightly larger one. That conveyor belt – there are five of them – ran it through another scanner, like the one at airports. In the meantime, one had to pass, without possessions, through a metal and temperature detector. Maximum security. And it didn’t end there.

Before collecting our belongings, notebook and backpack, another policeman ran another hand scanner over our entire body. And once the backpacks were collected, they didn’t always do it, nobility obliges, you had to show another policeman what we had inside. Sometimes, not always, they confiscate you temporarily power banks or portable chargers. And you shouldn’t forget to get it back on exit. A bother.

That whole scene was replayed like a ceremony every time we went. But also in the training sessions of the selected teams and in the stadiums, where they jealously and repeatedly scanned your credential at the entrance and exit, as well as checking the corresponding tickets for each match.

Well, this Saturday the checks were very relaxed. “Come on, come on…”, as a remembered referee said. It happened in the parking lot, where only a policeman reluctantly checked the credentials. So the backpack must have been scanned, but the person responsible for the matter did not attach too much importance to it. So much so that inside the backpack there was a bottle of water – which they always asked us to take out – and no one paid any attention to it. It happened to me. It caught my eye and everyone had the same experience. Total relaxation.

But this is not the only sign that this World Cup it began to deflate. In the Metro there were no longer so many volunteers to indicate where to go or so many billboards and streamers to order the entry and exit of passengers. And the carriages are much emptier than on four match days a day. The only thing that remains equally intense is the traffic. It’s amazing how little patience and how little respect for maximum speeds in this city of endless highways. We’ll have until Tuesday to see how the tent is removed from this great dancing circus.

Doha, Qatar. Special delivery.