The immersive experience promised by the program is all well and good, but there is something to be said for taking the initiative and spending some time lost with other Americans doing touristy things.  We had an afternoon scheduled to be off, so we decided that we were going to take the advice of some of our families and visit the beach at Qantib. [Clever way to streamline travel writing: don’t bother pausing to explain that maybe the name of the actual place you visited is in some question and that you’re hoping the name refers to one of the two places you visited.]

It started off as a fairly tame beach trip.  The shall we say problems, started when we talked more and more about it.  For instance, we were planning on bringing a picnic.  Between three of us who have a fondness for grilling, this eventually led to our buying a small travel grill, and loads of food.  I bought enough food to last me a week so I would no longer have to ask my hosts to take me to the market and ended up eating it all in the one day.  

It started off with our group coalescing as two of us made pancakes to fulfill a strange fixation we had been having for a few days.  I made the Swedish ones, Chris added bananas to his, and there was more than enough to go around.  Slightly more lethargic, we piled ourselves into besa buses that were not in the habit of transporting seven confused American students all at once, eventually hiring one van to take us out to the beach and back.  A little more expensive since he decided to just wait for us, but not too bad and he got a nap out of it.

The custom is to find a fisherman or random boat owner and ask them to take you to the nearest empty cove.  The beaches are surrounded by high cliffs and pretty much only accessible by boat, so privacy is guaranteed once you get there.  We piled all seven into one boat [something we thought was risky at the time, but wait for another story to judge] and got dropped off, splashing with all our gear to shore.  

The Middle East is not the first place I think of when I think crystal clear water and absurdly beautiful beaches.  In fact, the mental connection was so hard to manage that I was simply grunting for an hour after arrival.  Lounging in the water staring at the cliffs around and enjoying not being modestly covered in the Omani sense, I finally got out “This is Oman?”

I will have to post pictures for you to believe me, but this little cove was perfect.  Two long peninsulas of cliff on either side, one too steep to climb, one that would have been perfect for jumping into the water if not for our program’s rules.  Because seven students all alone definitely followed the rules to the letter.  Responsibility.  What else are college students known for?

Borrowed a snorkeling mask from some British divers for a little while.  Never put much stock in it before, but I can now say I am quite the proponent.  Most of the group were distracted with exploring, so Wes and I set up shop and began to grill.  It was the first time, so we settled for ready made kebab meat with onions and green peppers.  Followed up with grilled apples and chicken franks. 

There is one thing about cooking in Oman that we have discovered.  Everything that has followed can be traced to this root.  We forgot the olive oil to oil the grill grating and lacking any other way to flavor, we put our faith in hot sauce and haven’t looked back since.  I learned to cook in dad’s well stocked spice cabinet but I’m relearning everything with Wes and an oversized bottle of hot sauce now.  Delicious food, a pretty start to the sunset and a leisurely swim before the boat arrived made the day one of the best reliefs I have found here yet.

To top it all off, the boat owner offered to take us on a tour around the local Shangri-la resort and through some beautiful rock formations as well.  This just happened to be just at sunset.  It’s nice when luck takes the place of any planning.  

Getting home, sandy, smelling of salt water and covered in dirt was interesting.  Nothing can quite match the level of pride you feel when entering a fairly fancy place to meet friends and one of your friends has to be held back to deposit his grill, charcoal and lighter fluid at the coat check.  Qantib was one of the easiest and luckiest experiences possible, fooling us into thinking that maybe luck was on our side.  So the decision was made to be slightly more adventurous and take a weekend camping trip in three days.  Turned out sort of different.

-k

Salalah is a tourist spot because of its weather.  During the monsoon season there is actually green on the hills.  I don’t know how many times I listened to locals explaining that it had been a dry year or there would be even greener.  “This entire [insert hill, mountain or rocky plain] will all be green if it rains.”  Next to dusty Muscat with its carefully watered gardens surrounded by brown, I was perfectly willing to accept a less than perfectly verdant Salalah.

As a tourist in Salalah, you get the impression they are not quite used to being a popular destination.  It’s as if the city knows what any tourist city should have by name at least, but hasn’t quite fully embraced it in spirit.  There are historical sites and ruins aplenty but they aren’t your typical Western style sites.  We drove out into the desert and stopped in front of a set of ruins where the Queen of Sheba was supposed to have stopped on her way to visit Solomon in order to buy Frankincense.  The ruins were very nice but what I have written above is all we were told about the place.  Then when we became lost in the ruins, it was much easier to just climb up on the walls than it was to bother to wind your way through.  No one seemed to mind, though in the back of my head I heard a curator screaming at the sacrilege.

Most of the historical sites in Salalah were like that.  We would be given a basic orientation in a few sentences and then allowed to explore.  The sites might have been a total bust except for the fact that they are located in Salalah.  That meant even if visiting a tomb of someone we had never heard of and knew nothing about except that he was very important to somebody, we could always wander off to explore the scenery.

The scenery is where Salalah really shined.  I wish my camera could even capture a fraction of how beautiful the backdrop was there.  You would turn away from whatever you are looking at, no matter where you were, and could take in mountains and seascapes.  Also an occasional camel or two.

One of our group is named Chris.  Chris is special.  He always has an enthusiasm to explore and so ends up leading the rest of us.  He is also damned photogenic, which is nice because he ends up caught in just about every shot anyone takes.  There are already plans to compile a single album of all the pictures people have ended up taking of Chris whether they wanted to or not.

We also had the chance to break our fast out at a campsite with several University of Dhofar students.  There was so much food and it was a great chance to sit around and pig out.  There were only a few students but it was a great chance for little groups of us to wander out under the stars and talk about anything not to do with Oman.  Then we visited perhaps the one recognizably Westernized museum in all of Oman.  There wasn’t that much information but what was there was readily available in easy to read signs.  The night concluded with another visit to a coffee shop and thankfully much cheaper tea.

The last day in Salalah we were all inspired by Chris the intrepid explorer and were willing to hike through the mountains and climb out near the ocean.  I took some amazing photos along with some twinges in my knee from it, but it definitely balanced out in my favor in the end.  I will see how many of the photos I can put up here, but the first day I narrowed them in half to 110, so it might be easier to see them on Facebook if you can.

We flew in on Wednesday morning, the equivalent of Friday here.  There was a moment where all conversation suddenly stopped because the ground we were flying over shifted abruptly from monotonous brown to green.  I’ve described Salalah as being the closest you can get to Kentucky in Oman and I’m fairly sure it is true.

We landed, met our tour guide and found ourselves and all our luggage crammed into a bus that would have trouble seating all of us without the bags throughout the trip and made our way to the port.  We were given an extensive tour of the facilities by two American ex-pats in pretty senior positions there and pretty much given the royal treatment.

We drove down along the gigantic cranes where the ships were moored alongside for loading.  Apparently, the port is mainly a transshipment site, which means very little actual originates or ends up staying here.  Instead they swap out containers based on which ship has the space and is going to the right destination.  Despite this, the port does more business than any single port in the United States.  To top it all off, they gave us a ride on a tug boat to get a different look.

Then we headed to the hotel.  You know you have been out of the country for a while when the availability of a Western style bathroom can fill your eyes with tears. The funny thing about being abroad is how much of an effect it will have on group dynamics.  The students in the program had gotten along pretty well so far, but I felt it wasn’t until this trip when we were really pushed together.  My guess is that we have all been starved for English conversation with native speakers who understand our jokes and who we can speak freely with about any subject.

We sat around talking, waiting for sunset and then walked in the general direction we had been told the local souq was in.  The families had given people shopping lists especially for the frankincense the area is known for and I was supposed to buy a dishdasha for Eid.  We had a general direction but it was getting time for dinner and we had just found a small little market for fruits and vegetables.  There was a Lebanese restaurant we passed which we had been told was a good place to eat, so we temporarily abandoned the search and sat down.

This was some of the best food I have ever eaten.  We ate the traditional Ramadan sweets to start off which are always delicious.  One of our group had spent the summer studying in Jordan so we let him order us a metric ton of appetizers before each ordering the fish that the waiter recommended.  I wish I could remember half of what we ate.  I just remember discovering that it was possible to eat everything with the bread they gave us for the hummus and wiping up the plates with it.  The food was delicious and we gave ourselves up to being Westerners enjoying ourselves in the Middle East, talking loud and generally enjoying ourselves.

We received some confusing directions from our waiter about where the souq was located, but had a direction again, so we headed off.  He told us it was much too far to walk, but remember this is Salalah.  We had just come from Muscat, capital of Oman and humidity.  The fact that we were able to walk without immediately having a sheen of sweat meant that we were perfectly willing to sacrifice some time lost to enjoy the experience.

We switched directions several times, but the fearless leader of the group was confident so we followed down some back alleys and through the rain forest.  Oh, yeah. There were parts of the trip where the landscape would have been much more appropriate to the Caribbean than it was to our preconceptions of Oman.  There was also a dishdasha clad scarecrow which was absurd enough to warrant a long time trying to get decent pictures in the dark.

The souq was just as I have come to expect.  Small jammed alleys with row after row of stores and me ending up stiffed by a recalcitrant bargainer in the end.  Still, I found an appropriate dishdasha and kuma.  My friends with the shopping list for the various types of frankincense were in a much more difficult plight, having to look everywhere to buy according to very specific instructions.

We decided it probably wasn’t worth getting absolutely lost again walking back so five of us squished into a taxi back to the hotel.  I told you excursions were for getting closer right?  Anyway, we met up with the rest of the guys and visited a shisha (hookah for Americans or the hubbly bubbly for Brits which one Omani tried to convince me was the proper name for it in English) bar.  Very nice place with relaxing couches where I managed to buy an exceedingly overpriced cup of tea.  Still, an extremely good night and break from the immersive lifestyle of living with Omani families.

The first I encountered Ramadan was the first full day on the ground.  Travelers are not expected to fast so the plane ride was perfectly normal.  It was on the first day when we were told that we would not be able to bring any water with us into the heat that it really struck home that things would be different.

Now some students actually started fasting with the beginning of Ramadan and continued to follow the proscriptions straight through to the end of the month.  My hat is off to them but I was perfectly content to secrete myself in a shut up kitchen to sneak food for lunch.  I fasted one day, that was on the second last day of Ramadan more out of lack of energy to go get food from the store than anything else.  I also slept until noon, so it wasn’t even a full day.  Let me tell you though, as soon as it was time, I ate everything on the plate I was given, even though I was telling myself there was no way I would be able to finish it all.  Five minutes to consume more food than I would normally be comfortable eating in half an hour.

Most people during Ramadan will get up to eat an early breakfast before the sunrise called al-Suhoor.  Then there is no eating or drinking of any kind until ‘iftar in the evening, which is slightly different than the Catholic fasting I grew up with.  Sundown hits early here so that is about 6:30 at night.  Everyone eats dates and sweets and drinks laban and coffee.  The food is amazingly good, even though with every bite you taste how bad it is for you.  The laban is butter milk with various spices mixed in.  It is a little bit strange but can be quite refreshing.  Only the guys I live with decided once to grind up extra garlic and hot peppers to sprinkle on top.  It was the first time I ever drank spicy milk.

One of the first things they did was teach us how to properly eat a date.  Now the instinctive thing for me was to just pop it in my mouth and spit out the pit.  This is seen as rude here, so you roll the date in your fingers until you pull out the stone and then you eat it.  The director of the program then presented us with a thing of coffee and a date and pointed out it had the exact same amount of caffeine and sugar in it as one can of Coke.

Ramadan’s main impact wasn’t on what I ate.  Along with most of the other students, I ate lunch every day, usually making the walk down to the nearest gas station to scrape among the slim pickings there.  I ate cheap croissants, donuts and bread with the exact same composition.  I started to bring food of my own later on which made my lunches a sight better for me.

What I meant to say was, Ramadan’s main impact wasn’t on what I ate, but on the way I slept.  It’s more common for people to sleep throughout the day during Ramadan.  Office hours are restructured and lessened so that most everyone is asleep during the afternoon.  We continued with a regular 9-5 schedule at the school.  Then I would return to the apartment where I’m staying and either nap for less than an hour or kill time until it was time for ‘iftar.  Suhoor was eaten the day prior and after everyone returned it was eaten usually about 1:30 in the morning.  This meant I wasn’t getting to sleep until well after 2 most mornings.  I got sick once because of this, but the food left nothing for me to complain about.  Now the schedule will apparently be completely different, but I don’t quite know how yet.

Now the differences between Omani dress and your average American’s is readily apparent.  The dishdasha is almost universally embraced by the Omanis I have met.  It is a long dress like piece of white cloth that covers from the neck to the wrists to the ankles.  I have only worn one once, but it was not as cool as had been touted.  Plus the thing is just uncomfortable for someone used to pants and shirts.

The women here wear abbias (ah,bay,ya-s) though the spelling here is completely made up.  They are uniformly black and cover the hair in addition to everything the dishdasha does.  I don’t want to go into gender issues here, but I would like to point out that the differences between abbias are much more readily apparent than any between one dishdasha and another.  The last time I wrote about my very primitive understanding of the issue, it stretched on to five very dry pages.

What is strangest almost for me is that we are held to a similar degree of modesty and decorum.  So guys generally wear long sleeve button up shirts and khakis and girls were skirts or other loose fitting clothing.  They don’t have to cover their heads, but many choose to in order to make it easier to fit in with notions of family.  There was only one girl expected to wear an abbia and she changed families early on.  The Omanis generally just expect us to wear business casual clothes at any time.

In the home, expectations differ widely.  I live with four men who spend the week in Muscat and return to their village every weekend.  I get to wear athletic shorts and a t-shirt, which nicely conserves on laundry.  Others remain in the same clothes in case of visitors, but generally standards are relaxed inside the home.

It is just strange for someone coming out of the grungiest phase in his life, where a ball cap, t-shirt, jeans and construction boots were the norm, to wear decent clothes every day.  These are the shirts I would wear to formal, but otherwise leave hanging in the closet all year long.

Once again, I made some quick introductions and shadowed my host for a little while, then wandered off on my own.  I don’t think I can cover every little encounter but I’ll try for some of the major ones.

The team seemed to have adopted on the basis of having seen me before.  That meant I could easily just wander up dumbly and smile at any of them and be introduced to whoever was close.  I sat for a while talking with one and this was easily my favorite conversation of the night.

The day before, I believe Mohammed had pointed him out as being someone who immediately wanted to visit me in America.  We hadn’t talked the day before, but he came over and sat in my general area, then edged closer when I wasn’t talking with anyone.  He didn’t have much English at all, but we kept the talk to simple subjects which we could both cover in our respective languages.

It was a pretty long conversation, starting off with the general exchange of information about who I was.  It was interesting when I talked with him about the English language because he told me how it was difficult to work here without that particular skillset.  I had heard it before, but mostly from people with near impeccable English.  Here, we struggled to understand each other.  He told me he was in the army because he couldn’t keep up with the English class work in university.  I’m paraphrasing terribly here, but he had a great quote along the lines of “Doctors need good English, Police shway shway [some], army none.”  He was a great guy and I’m thinking about doing research into the impact of English on the lives of people who have none.

I set out to circle the whole area where the festivities were taking place.  Less than a quarter of the way around, I was hailed and told to come sit down.  I’m pretty sure they used my name too.  I rushed over and popped a squat because I thought I recognized a member of the family who I had met previously.  Turns out that I had never seen anyone in the group before but they wanted to know who I was.  I sat down with them and one of them had pretty good English so it wasn’t too hard to get concepts across, though I did speak primarily in English.  It was nice to just be expected to talk to them easily and openly.  At one point they doubted my ability to write in Arabic so one made me write out his name in the dirt with my finger.  They were happily surprised at my ability to do so, so happy that I was allowed to continue with his last name as well.

I also had a conversation, I don’t remember precisely with which group, where I only had to supply half the information.  A gleeful young shibab who had apparently met me somewhere else before was happy to do the rest.  Of course, he didn’t tell me this, he just started acting like he was psychic which is a bit unnerving to have someone suddenly telling your story for you.

They had your useful tug of war, 100 meter dash, soccer juggling and shoot out that you would expect from a soccer club anywhere.  They also had bobbing for apples where the goal was not to grab one with your teeth but to eat it without using your hands and presumably without drowning first.  I didn’t get close enough to see but there was an event where the goal was to blow out I believe ashes before anyone else.  I had a conversation which managed to get to the blowing part but stalled out before we managed to hit the direct object.  Then there were little kid chicken fights.  I remember walking over to a circle of men hooting and hollering and seeing little kids with balloons tied to their ankles trying to pop each other’s balloons and thinking it might as well be chickens.  The most impressive feat of all for me was when the runner up in the 100 meter dash competed in bare feet running on rocks and no one seemed to notice.  I was wincing the entire thankfully short race.

Mohammed talked me into playing one game of Playstation soccer where I managed to shame all American gamers everywhere but losing by a total of 8 to nothing.  A sheepish shrug hopefully translates correctly, but I provided a nice buffoon for the club.

I never knew the least bit of my schedule, so I wasn’t too surprised when a member of the family I was staying with came to collect me and take me to the soccer club he used to play for.  They have an Eid tradition of putting on a sports festival for all the local children.  I went on two days, once when they were just preparing and the day after for the actual event.

I went with Mohammed just to see how the preparations were going and meet the team on Wednesday.  Interesting note, this is actually the first Mohammed I have met over here, despite the fact that there were a trio of Omani Mohammeds studying at UC when I left.  I would be more thankful if it was easier to distinguish the myriad other names that sound very similar to foreign ears.

I don’t know what I was expecting when we went, but the field was a little hard to look at.  I have spent my life complaining about the state of fields, were they the graveyard of the old school at CovCath or rock hard Long Field at Northwestern.  I don’t know if I can ever again complain about lack of grass in good conscience again.  Their field was an open expanse of rocks raked smooth with a set of lights at either end and one across the mid line, afternoon games not being too much in favor here.  This field convinced me rugby is not likely to ever catch on in Oman without drastic climate changes.

The team was standing around, marking out racing lanes in chalk and making sure the electricity worked where they would host the Playstation tournament.  Mohammed circulated, telling me who was who and making sure I would never be able to keep the various nicknames and real names straight.  The funny thing was that despite the fact I didn’t understand the jokes behind the nicknames or the names themselves, I half-expected to recognize these guys.  They were wearing the same old dusty jerseys and most of them had the same builds as guys I would see at sport clubs back home.  Some of the faces even looked suspiciously familiar.

There was the old man of the club at a ripe old age of 35.  The brothers who it seemed were pretty much in charge of it.  The loudmouth who is easily recognized across any lingual or cultural barriers.  I saw them taking the same cheap shots, faking knees to groins in hugs and lightly threatening taps with hammers while others were working.  It felt good to be among people who seemed just like everyone I knew from back home.

It was nice because I felt adopted almost instantly as well.  I was told several times previously that Omanis might not like the American foreign policy, but they loved Americans.  It was a good time.  I started off making the mandatory rounds shaking hands and forgetting names.  Then I shadowed my host for a little while then ended up sitting and talking with one guy in particular for a bit.  Big guy perfect for a forward in rugby.  I don’t even know what we talked about.  It was actually nice, because his English wasn’t that good and we had a good back and forth going. It felt great to be somewhere the others weren’t so much ahead of me on the language front and where just smiling awkwardly was as good as any passport.