Back home in BC, it’s pretty exciting to turn 19 and legally buy alcohol for the first time, but from then on it’s a fairly typical and uneventful experience. Well, it’s been 20 years since I could first buy alcohol and it’s never been more challenging to buy wine than it is here in Doha.
Since Qatar is an Islamic country, alcohol is not legal here, but there are rules in place for expats consuming alcohol:
1. It is illegal to import alcohol into the country.
2. It is an offense to drink alcohol or to be drunk in a public place. People breaking this law may be deported, fined or imprisoned.
3. Alcohol should not be transported within the country, except to take it home from the distribution company.
Sports clubs and hotel bars serve alcohol to tourists and expats, but in order for people to purchase alcohol to have their homes, they must have a liquor permit. To qualify for a liquor permit, they must have their Resident Permit (RP), which, for us, took about 7 weeks to process (that’s another whole blog post!). Then they must obtain a letter from their work place stating their salary, marital status, religion and job title. The expat must pay a returnable deposit of 1000 QR (about $275CAD) before being issued a liquor permit. Based on your salary, the Qatar Distribution Company calculates what your alcohol quota is per month, and it cannot exceed 10% of the your basic salary. Yep, they tell you how much booze you can buy!
So...we have the letter for Andy to get the liquor permit, but we haven’t gone yet. I did however tag along with our friends Glenn and Cathy on one of their recent trips to the liquor store. We decided that our story of me being Glenn’s second wife would probably not be believed, so he had to ask for special permission to bring in two women. He told them I was just looking...yeah, just browsing at the liquor store.
I was surprised by the small size of the store; it really was no larger than one of the small liquor stores in BC. But it was packed and of course, everyone had a huge Costco-sized shopping cart because they were not just there for one bottle of wine or a six-pack. There was very little room to move around, but fortunately things were quite well-ordered and easy to find. Sadly, no Oyster Bay or NZ beer. But plenty of Bombay Sapphire. And Andy was excited to have some VB (Aussie beer) for the first time in a while. We filled up the cart, and Glenn had to buy his order, my order and another friend’s order. A hefty bill.
And just because one shouldn’t be surprised by anything that happens in Qatar, I should tell you that there is a pork section in the liquor store. Pork. Yes, all kinds of pork products, including cans of “pork and beans” and packages of “pork rinds”. While this is not terribly exciting to me, as I don’t eat pork, I could see by how busy this section was, that many of my fellow expats were very excited about the bacon.
Once you have visited the liquor store, you must drive straight home with the booze in the trunk. You may not stop to shop or visit with anyone. If you were to get in a car accident (which let’s be honest, is fairly likely here), and you had beer in the trunk of the car, you would asked to produce the receipt. Of course, you would tell them that you were driving straight home from the liquor store, but they would check the time on the receipt to see if you were telling the truth. I have been told a story of a man who went to the liquor store and on the way home, stopped at work to pick up something he’d forgotten. He opened the trunk of his car to give a colleague at work a few beers from his purchase. A photo was snapped of this exchange and the man was sent home days later.
I wonder if the same rule applies to pork?!
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