To most Chinese, Arabia is certainly a land full of mystery.

It is not just because it is thousands of kilometres away and few of us have been there, even at a time when outbound tourism is booming in China.

It is because though many of us have read "the Arabian Nights" and can watch or read news about the region almost every day, few of us actually know more than that.

So when photographer Lu Zhongqiu and I were invited by the Qatar Embassy in China to attend an inauguration of a local educational project held in Doha, the capital of the country, this month, we happily accepted.

It offered us the chance to visit a country in the Middle East for the first time in our lives.

Logistics

The logistics part of the trip was intriguing.

It took us only two days to get the visa, the airplane tickets and board the airplane to Bangkok. We were told that there would be someone waiting for us at Doha airport with all the information we needed for covering the new education project.

When we stepped out of Customs at 2 am on October 12 after a six-hour flight from Bangkok, we looked around for our Qatar friends.

But there was no one, possibly because the flight arrived two hours later than scheduled.

We were lucky to get help from Wu Huixuan, chief correspondent of China Radio International's Doha Bureau.

He picked up not only us but also two journalists from the Beijing-based Global Times newspaper, who arrived in Doha with the same invitation to cover the same new education project.

Wu, who speaks fluent Arabic and has spent most of the past decade in the Middle East, told us that the event was organized by the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development (QF) for its Education City.

As the event had already begun the previous day, he knew that all participants from other countries were staying in the Doha Sheraton.

He drove us to the hotel, where we were assigned rooms after giving our passports to the receptionists.

"Everything will be all right once you get used to the ways things work here," Wu said.

Ambitious project

When we arrived at the new building of the Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar, we were amazed at the grandness of the Education City project. It is an ambitious project.

Under the project, top schools from some of America's most prestigious universities have been brought in to occupy an area of 8 million square metres in Doha. Qatar's new generation will have the opportunity to study at those universities without even leaving the country.

So far on the list has been the Weill Cornell Medical College, the College of Design Arts, a division of Virginia Commonwealth University, and a branch campus from Texas A&M University.

As well, the Rand Corporation of the United States was invited to establish the Rand-Qatar Policy Institute as part of the Education City. It was opened on October 13.

Under future plans, more world-class universities will be invited to the Education City and make Qatar a hub for education in the whole Gulf region.

At the well-organized ceremony attended by Qatar Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani and his wife and QF chairperson Sheikha Mozah Nasser al-Misnad, I began to understand Wu's words about the Qatar way of working.

The country has succeeded in attracting so many world-class institutions.

The thought was strengthened after a short visit to al Jazeera the next morning.

Wu Huixuan helped us get in touch with the most popular Arabic News Channel of al Jazeera in the plural Middle East and drove us to its headquarters in Doha.

Surprisingly, we found it tiny. There was only one newsroom with an area of less than 200 square metres, two smaller galleries and two studios in a two-floor building. More than 100 journalists were bustling about inside.

It looks packed. But it is in this place that news coverage from around the world with a focus on the hottest conflict airs 24 hours a day.

At al Jazeera, I felt Qatar take on a hectic pace.

Pleasant cafe

In my Lonely Planet guidebook about Arab Gulf States, Doha is described as the dullest place around the Gulf.

I couldn't tell whether it was right or not without making a comparison. In the morning, we tried to walk down to the National Museum and the Ethnographic Museum.

But only a couple of hundred metres away from the hotel, we found we had not become accustomed to the scorching sunshine of the Gulf, even though the "cooler autumn" season had already arrived. We had to take a taxi instead.

Most of the white complex of the National Museum once served as a palace for Shaikh Abdulla bin Mohammed, Qatar's ruler from 1913 to 1951.

With an elegant Arabian style of architecture, it looks beautiful from outside. But we failed to visit its interior as it was under decoration.

The Ethnographic Museum features a well-preserved wind tower.

But we didn't enter it as the museum in a traditional Qatari house was locked when we were there.

We had to find ways to enjoy our time in Doha.

Staying on the beach of the hotel and swimming in pleasant Doha Bay in the hot hours of the day were enjoyable activities.

We took a walk along the waterfront and watched the sunset in the late afternoon. In the evening, we found a cafe in the old souk (market) area in which we tried flavoured tobacco in the shisha, an Arabic water pipe.

The Coffee Shop of Abdull Rahman is a tiny two-room shop.

There, customers can smoke the water pipe while drinking Arabic coffee or black tea. There we met the local Qatari people.

Najat Jahromi, 45, is a frequent caller at the cafe. Speaking good English, he is an impressive talker.

He told us that the coffee shop had a history of 75 years and was the oldest and the only one of its kind in the old souk. Aged 45, he has smoked shisha in the shop for 25 years.

"I smoke here three times a day, in the morning, at noon, and in the evening," he said. "But I don't smoke cigarettes. Once you smoke shisha, you will find cigarettes tasteless."

He said that the name of shisha was derived from the tobacco it uses. It is also known as Hookah or Nargileh in the Middle East.

At his suggestion, we decided to have a try.

A small lump of shisha tobacco was placed on a small grid on top of the pipe and covered by a piece of aluminum foil, on top of which burning coals were placed.

The smoke then went down into the pipe and passed through a clay bottle at the bottom of the shisha. This bottle was filled with cool water.

I inhaled the smoke through a long bamboo pipe with a mouthpiece and found that it tasted good. Not as strong as a cigarette, it is smooth with a fragrance of fruits.

So I took a puff from time to time. I drank one cup of tea after another. Our chat went on. More Qatar smokers joined us. It took me almost one hour to finish the shisha.

At the shop full of the fragrance of shisha, I was intoxicated by the slow rhythms of the lives of the people of Qatar.

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