We are very poor at this blogging thing. It’s been awhile since we posted anything. I’ll go ahead and blame that on returning from vacation, catching up at work, etc, etc. The real reason is probably a combination of factors, lack of motivation perhaps being one of the larger ones.
Things have been going well here for the past two months. We’ve made a few more friends (its amazing how people can be influenced by repeated offers of food and booze). Before we knew it, we had things to do practically every weekend. We also went on another vacation at the end of October – back to Italy with the Netherlands and Croatia thrown in or good measure. We got a passport stamp going through Slovenia and stopped by the side of the road to talk to a guy selling cheese, so we’ll count that as a country visited as well (which brings us to 10 on the year for this little adventure). All in all, the last two months have been fairly packed with excitement.
As this adventure draws to a close, I’m only just now getting the hang of living as an expat, and only just now starting to understand this little country we’re living in.
I’m particularly fond of the Omani countryside, once you get outside of Muscat. As I’m driving around between the various project sites I visit on a regular basis, I’ll occasionally stop and try to capture the sense of the place. Its difficult. Nonetheless, here are a few pictures of the roadside attractions:
Its my contention that the ratio of goats to people is easily 10 to 1 after you get outside of Muscat. I don’t even know where they find food. My Omani friend Khalid tells me that every goat is accounted for. He says if you touch one hair on the goats head, the shepherd will know (he also says that goats from the countryside are the most delicious, on account of all the roaming around they do).
The landscape in Oman is very dramatic, and dictates how the Omanis live to an incredible degree.The top picture shows the desolate plains that lie between the mountains and the sea. No one lives here. The bottom two pictures shows a wadi in the foothills and one of the falaj that deliver water. Although looking pretty desolate itself, the wadis are where most inland Omanis live, and the falaj are the systems by which they survive. Water from natural springs is collected throughout the mountains and transported great distances to the people that make their lives down in the wadis.
A very typical Omani house. The Omani government grants citizens land to build a house, with the land being selected on a lottery system. Notice the walls surrounding the house? This is very typical for Oman. Behind the walls, women can dress freely around their other family members, so they don’t have to be covered all the time. Its all part of a strange dichotomy about the people here. They’re extremely outgoing, friendly, and generous; but they’re also very private. An Omani I was talking to said something to the effect that “hospitality only extends so far amongst a people that surround their houses with high walls”.
It just so happens that we are in the waning days of this leg of our little adventure. We have tickets booked to return to Denver on December 4. We’re trying to squeeze in as much as possible in these last few weeks. We usually explore every weekend as it is, but we’ll be kicking it into overdrive. We’re trying to make it to a camel race, visit some more of the interior mountains, and get together with our friends here more often. We’ve promised our expat friends an authentic Thanksgiving dinner (we even found a place to buy a turkey). As our days here draw to a close, I am reminded of an apt quote by the great Aldous Huxley: “To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.” Perhaps never truer than this day and age in the Middle East.
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