Last week there was a major football (i.e. soccer) game in Al Kalifa stadium, the beautiful stadium built for the 2006 Asian games and, the Qataris are hoping, the 2016 Olympics. We bought tickets, all tickets were general admission. When we arrived shortly before the scheduled start, the gates were already closed, and they were letting no one in. Thousands of people, many perhaps most with tickets, were still outside. We went to the first gate and they sent us to another gate, saying it was open. At that gate, we were sent to another gate, same thing. This happened five times before we gave up. Moving away from the stadium, we watched with some humor as the thousands of excluded fans, went from one gate to the next like cattle after feed. Two cultural observations about this. First, organization is not a strength. Second, there is great difficulty in saying "no." Since we leave in less than two weeks it was a good reminder of how different things are here, and how western expectations of how things should be run can lead to great frustration.