Hehehehe, time is a funny cultural thing, isn't it?  I know that many of the Europeans and North Americans in Doha get frustrated by the Arab approach to time, but when I lived in Japan it was the opposite.  The Japanese often saw the North Americans/Europeans as the ones who couldn't be punctual and had a flexible relationship with time. I often wonder about my old Japanese co-workers and how they would function in an environment like Doha and its flexible approach to time.

I've often wanted to show my students an old Japanese train timetable that I have in storage.  It show trains leaving at weird times like 10:42 or 7:58-and the trains left on those times, not two minutes before or two minutes after. Maybe that new monorail that they are talking about will work like that?