The beautiful Oman

I was pumped for Oman before I even got into the country.  Rob had lived there for one year before he moved to Georgia and had nothing but good things to say.  I knew I was going to have a good time visiting Chas and Lauren.  

I brought in too much booze at the airport.  I had a bottle of vodka each for Lauren and Chas.  Then I had also picked up a bottle of wine in Georgia to share for thanksgiving.  The customs guy was not amused.  I told him they were gifts.  But he just gave me a stony glare, even after I tried to give him a bottle of wine.  He and just about everyone else in Oman is Muslim, I'm not surprised that he didn't want it.  Then a guy, who was picking up friends behind me, talked to him and he let me through with the extra bottle of booze, just don't tell anyone.  How lucky was that.

Chas picked me up directly from the airport.  She had a friend with her, who she had just met a week before; Yunis.  Yunis drove cab part time and went to the police academy full time.  These two were lucky enough to meet in the cab one day and Yunis took a likening to Chas, and her strange ways.  They have been hanging out ever since.  Yunis was super nice and chatty.  I have found Omanis are quite witty and playful.  I really enjoy their humor.

The next day was a holiday, so Chas and I just relaxed.  I forget how important it is to relax on vacation at times.  Being with friends always makes it possible.  Chas and I watched the L Word and then eventually helped her new/old neighbor move in.  I guess there had been a transition in schools recently, because Chas had only been in Muscat for two weeks and the neighbors were just moving in when I got there.  The old school was having some legal problems, so almost everyone was changing schools.  This happened often in Korea as well.  The ESL world is the same everywhere.

We also got to go to the city center.  Now you are probably thinking that this is some glorious out door market.  Incorrect, my friend, incorrect!  The city center is a mall and it’s all inside and all air-conditioned.  This, I am told, is quite normal for Arab countries.  Why be outside when it is 150 degrees?  They do have traditional markets or seoks, but I never got to see one.  Which is too bad, but what a  good reason to come back to Oman and visit again.  

At the mall you saw men and women.  This was strange, because outside on the streets of Oman I had rarely seen women.  But the women I saw in the city center were much different than what I saw in the streets.  Women who were usually covered from head to toe in a Hijab were now slightly less covered.  The hijab gaped open allowing glances at designer clothing, purses, bags, shoes.  Even the hijabs seemed to be designer quality.  Some were colors other than black, or had pretty embroidery or trim.  Also women were done up to the nines.  Makeup, hair nails… just the works.  It was an interesting transition.   

The city center is one of the few places where women are allowed to be seen in public.  It’s not like Saudi Arabia, where women need an escort.  It’s just tradition that binds women to the home in Oman.  It’s also up to the women and their family weather they follow the traditional rules of Islam.  So because this is a socially acceptable place to be seen, women dress differently than they would on the streets.  

Also because the culture, Omani men don’t get much exposure to women.  The gendered culture is very separate.  Women do their thing and men do theirs and they rarely met each other in the middle.  It makes teaching university courses difficult, or so I'm told.  The girls and the boys are distracted by each other, because they have never really associated before that point and they are looking for marriage material.  So this means lots of staring and embarrassment. 

One thing that was odd was that there was no Omani food in Muscat.  Muscat is just a hodgepodge of so many different cultures that they have adapted western food, Turkish food, Indian food… you name it.  This might not be entirely true.  But that is what I experienced when I stayed with Chas.  She had only been living in Muscat for two weeks.  So she still didn’t know the little corners a traditional restaurants could be hiding in.  When I go back to Muscat, I’m sure she will have everything figured out.  Unless she is like me and cooks all her own meals, and after two years living somewhere still doesn’t know where to take guests for dinner. 

After a few days with Chas in Muscat I took the bus to Salalah to meet Lauren for thanksgiving.  The bus was torture.  I know better than to expect to sleep on a bus, but I took the night bus anyway.  It was cold on the bus, you know, because we were traveling through the middle of a desert… at night.  

 I also acquired a stalker on the bus.  Not dangerous, but annoying.  The manager of the company took an interest in me, because I was a white woman traveling alone.  He got me a seat in the front of the bus, which I was warned to do in order to avoid being groped by Indian or Pakistani men.  (Don’t look at me, every country has its prejudices.)  Well, he slept in the two seats across from me and even lent me one of his pillows.  Sound like a nice guy.  Something a manager of a bus company would do to be nice.  But then during the night he kept touching me with his feet.  I eventually just curled up in a little ball as far away from him as possible.
 

I would have never seen him again, except when I got off the bus Lauren wasn’t there and my phone was out of money.  So I had to talk to the manger/creepy man to find a way to call or get in contact with Lauren.  In the end she was sleeping, and came a few hours later.  Through this ordeal the manger acquired Lauren’s number and incessantly called us that day and the day after.  Eventually one of Lauren’s Omani male friends picked up the phone and chewed him out in Arabic. I was hoping that was the end of it again, but I knew there might be a chance I would see him when I took the bus back to Muscat.  I changed my return ticked to stay an extra day with Lauren, but still managed to bump into him on my bus out.  This time he wasn’t riding the bus, which was great.  But he did make a scene by escorting me on the bus, finding me a good seat, continuously saying he was sorry and making sure the drivers knew to take care of anything I needed on the trip back.  That was more than a little awkward. 

 After all that the bus ride back was great; full of beautiful dessert and mountains.  I don’t mind long rides during the day.  I can read, stare out the window at the scenery and listen to music for hours in cars.  Visiting relatives across state lines since before I can even remember might have something to do with that.

So why would I endure a 10 hour bus ride across Oman, without sleep, through a dessert?  To see Lauren of course.  Lauren and I were neighbors in Korea for almost three years.  We cooked together, watched Sex in the City, learned the our new city together and partied together.  So when Chas moved to Oman and shortly after Lauren did too, there was no doubt in my mind that I would be taking a road trip.  I was warned, by other friends who have worked in Oman, that Salalah might be boring.  I could see why that could be the case.  I mean it’s very far from the capital, it’s a pretty small town, you need a car to get around and you know… it’s in the country.  That is my favorite part.  Give me rural over urban any day.  There was so much to see and we saw it, on my second day there.  But first on my agenda, was sleep.  Lauren needed it too, so we took a nap.  

The day I came in was thanksgiving, and Lauren was hosting!  One of my favorite things to do is host dinner parties and Lauren hosting one was just as good.  It meant I could cook!  We made a lot of food.  Lauren’s amazing cranberry sauce with candied orange peel, homemade dressing, the turkey, mashed potatoes, and pumpkin pie.  We probably made more that I’m forgetting, but with our spread and the stuff that the South Africans brought (traditional Christmas salads) it was more than enough food to feed three times the people we had.  Just like thanksgiving should be.  It was super nice to meet everyone.  

 That was also the night I sacrificed my dreads to the bad hair gods.  Oh were they horrible.  If only they were longer, it would have been worth the tedious grooming process you have to do with new dreads.  But they weren’t.  They were short and made me look like a crazy woman.  We had fun cutting them off.  We cut half off at a time, did a Mohawk and then at the end left me with two little antenna.  Those came off the next morning, but for the night I was a butterfly.

The next day we headed out early with some of the people from the night before.  One of the couples had a visitor as well, so a whole day of sightseeing ensued.  We saw the mountains and the plateau that makes up the majority of Oman.  And there were camels EVERYWHERE!  Just hanging out in the road and eating scrawny desert grass and looking at us through car windows.   Camels seem very chill and unaware of how much of a pain in the ass they can be.  People drive pretty carefully in the country because if you hit a camel, not only is it expensive damage to your car, but also you have to go through the hassle of finding the owner and then negotiating how much you need to pay for killing it.  Camels are important man.  

We also drove in and around the mountains and the tribal areas.  Lauren and I missed most of information of where we were and what tribal lands we were driving through, because we had taken two cars.  Our car did not contain an Omani, so we enjoyed the view and stopped in a local village for traditional flat bread and tea.  I loved that the men wear skirts, long (usually plaid) ankle length skirts.  It must be comfortable to wear, especially with how hot it gets in Oman.  

After the rural exploration we headed down to a coastal town called Murbat.  We devoured traditional bread that was just amazing.  It’s a flat bread filled with a canned creamed cheese (don’t make faces, it’s not uber processed like nacho cheese) drizzled in honey and then sprinkled with nuts and apricots.  It should have probably been dessert, but oh man, I didn’t mind it being an appetizer or eating the majority of it.  We also had delicious mix seafood stir-fry, grilled fish and rice.  At this restaurant, we ate with our hands.  My first experience of doing so, and I’m not very good.  I’m always dropping rice on my lap.  I need to work on my technique before I go to India. 

After that Lauren needed a break from driving.  By this point she had been driving for a good 5 or 6 hours, so we headed back for a nap, but really ended up interneting.  That night we all agreed to go out for camel meat, which was delicious.  It was fatty and melted in your mouth, well most of the time.  Sometimes you came across a tough piece.  It reminded me of horse in Korea.  You had to cook it just right, usually marinated, to get a tender delicious meat.  

The very last thing we did was smoke hookah on the side of the mountain overlooking the city lights.  It gets quite cold in the mountains at night.  We were on a little terrace on the mountain and almost decided to take one of the more sheltered spots.  It’s a good thing we didn’t because they found a poisonous snake in it later.  Everyone cleared out real quick and then the staff chased it and beat it with a stick.  I kind of felt sorry for the snake until Ibraham picked it up and started chasing people around with it.  After that people were pretty keen to leave.  We stayed for a little bit longer and then headed off.  It was a perfect day.  What made it even better was that Lauren’s friend Ibraham wanted to make sure I had good memories of Oman, so as a gift in friendship he gave me a camel necklace.  It was very sweet of him.

 

 I absolutely loved Salalah.  It was pure luck that I had scheduled my trip during one of the Omani holidays.  Because it meant that Lauren could take me around.  There was a down side too, because the bus took so much time, and I can’t sleep on buses, I missed out on seeing all the awesome things in Muscat.  By the time I got back Chas had work again, and we were limited to evenings.

I did get to see more of an Omani side in Muscat.  Yunis really enjoyed hanging out with us, so after work he would take us around in his car.  We went bowling and he took us to a “Korean” restaurant after.  The food was great, but it was really Thai food.  “Same, same.  Right?”  Chas and I giggled a little over that.  The next day we made plans to visit his family and have dinner with them.  

The next day was spent with me unable to find a hairdresser to shave my chopped hair.  The women salons just don’t carry clippers and the barber shops were all closed.  I guess that just means that I will get my haircut in India.  

Chas got sick that evening.  She even took some time off school to go to the hospital and figure out what was wrong.  So I ended up meeting Yunis’ family without her.  She needed the rest, but I could tell the family was excited to see Chas.  When I first arrived, they asked me about Hawaii and living in Oman.  They had heard so much from Yunis.  When they discovered I was just visiting, there were no hard feelings and we talked about Korea and traveling.  One of Yunis’ cousins was so happy to be talking to foreign woman.  She monopolized most of my time with the family.  She had so many questions and so much to say about the Omani life.  It was refreshing.  

Out of all the people I met Yunis’ Auntie was one of my best acquaintances.  She was polite and a great host.  She also had a lot to say about the family and what they did.  I don’t think I have met such a sweet woman before.  I can see why Yunis loves spending time at her house.  I also got to met Yunis male cousins.  They were a bit shy, except for his youngest cousin with downs syndrome.  That little guy was everywhere.  When we first came in he was shy, but by the time I left he was showing me his robot that dances to goengnam style and his array of super hero costumes.  He even kissed me on the cheek when I left later, saying “I love you” and I was now his girlfriend.  Cute little guy.  

Yunis’ Auntie prepared some great food.  For dinner we had some traditional African food.  I believe their family is originally from Tanzania.  So she prepared spiced chicken, fried potato dumplings, a salad and an assortment of other food.  It was quite good.  At the end of the night I promised everyone I would come back to Musact and visit and that it was my best night in Oman.