Dallas to Doha: Date Night in Doha

Since life is so hard here in Doha (kidding) we deicided to give ourselves a break, ditch the kids (also kidding) and go out for a good date night!

Okay who am I kidding? Practically every night feels like a date night here with Zach 💗 We just needed a good excuse to go see a (mildly) overpriced movie! ;-)

Luckily for us, there is a movie theatre right across the street from us in a City Center Mall-- yes the same mall that has our grocery store in it. Why do no American malls have these added benefits? Get on Doha's level Gelleria! Jk

So like always we just went right across the street

Not sure what happened to my camera in these ones-- can I blame it on the humidity? Okay yeah let's go with that! That excuse will also bid well for explaining my fizzy hair hehe

And yes! This is Zach wearing a jacket in the desert! Even though we are in Spring, evenings and still some afternoons here are pretty chilly!

Is it weird that I am already used to seeing dudes in white dresses everywhere? Haha

The men here in white are actually all of the Qatari Nationals and quite proud of it. They say only real men wear pink but a dress takes it to a whole new level! Somehow this dress finally looks like a masculine thing to me----- except when you see them lift it to walk through a puddle or mud-- in those moments there is nothing that could make it look manly!

Such a huge mall!

We got out tickets here at one of at least 6 open counters. The cool thing is they have an iPad where they let you select your seat before you go in. So convenient but also risky because you have no idea who you will be placed next to O_o

Tickets were right at about $10 which I guess is normal for movie tickets now days -- nothing will ever compare to College Stations $4 tickets though ... Sigh..

Another cool thing is that they show movies from all across the globe. Leave it to us to see a typical American movie but still! Cool to have the options!

Here are our tickets-- nothing too special there.

Then when you enter you are immediately greeted by a much different smell than what you get in America! Don't worry, it's a good kind of different!!

Instead of getting that warm, buttery smell of salty and delicious popcorn-- it smells sweet. And me with my sweet tooth wanted at least a pound of whatever it was I was smelling.

Turns out, instead of having just your basic everyday butter popcorn, they sold two kinds. One was the classic, the other was the source of that delicious smell! Fresh caramel popcorn!! Mmmm!

This is not your typical cracker-jack or Christmas bucket caramel popcorn though. It is a very thin layer of dark almost burnt tasting caramel. It sounds weird and no good but holy cow it was delicious!! I am pretty sure that Zach and I finished out whole bucket before the movie even started!!

When we ordered though, we were unsure if we would like the Qatari style popcorn, so we got some "Maltesers" as a back up plan.

Turns out that they were both good and this date turned from romantic night out to fat slugs pigging out!

Another cool thing was this room where you can put down all of your shopping bags, strollers etc while you watch the movie. I guess there must have been some sort of number system or something to keep things sorted and safe? Nice feature!

So cool to see movie posters in Arabic! (If this is even Arabic?? I don't even know??)

Zach hates when we ask people to take photos of us -- I don't! :)

So anyways we went in and the layout was just like any other typical theatre.

I talked Z into seeing Focus 😊

I always look forward to seeing the previews when I go to the movies so then I can choose what movies to see next. Oddly enough though, here, the only previews shown were of other movies currently playing at the theatre. Maybe they don't know which movies they will get until they actually get them? Not sure but it was definitely different.

Another interesting thing that I hadn't considered until the movie started were the subtitles. Every movie, all throughout the movie had subtitles in Arabic and French. Another reminder that we are definitely not in America! I am just happy that they played the movie in its original language and that we weren't the ones having to read the subtitles!!