Lesson learned

I feel like that last post was a little too lofty and theoretical. So, in an effort to come back to earth I’m going to tailor this cyber space briefing to some more practical measures that I experience on a daily basis here in the capitol of Oman.

                                                          No tickets for these rides…

First off, I want to talk about taxis and “Baisa Busses”. They are the bane of my existence. I’m restricted from driving on my own: one, I don’t have a car and two, SIT does not permit its students to drive while they are enrolled in the program even though my US drivers license is valid in Oman. So I depend on these OMR (Omani Riyal) consuming locusts to get almost everywhere. Ok that’s a harsh exaggeration, for the most part they are very nice guys and I get to practice my Arabic while en-route. But the death is in the details…there is no meter in the cabs, price fixing, racial stereotyping and general greedy subjectivity is rampant. At face value it’s just a massive horde of little cars that speed through the city honking and flashing their lights at every man woman and child who aren’t already driving… ok mostly just men on the side of these roads. But the point is, that it’s all about guessing with these guys. Nobody actually knows how much a certain distance or time in a cab should or does cost. There is no consistency. I’ve gone to the same place twice in one day and been charged two completely different costs. There are prices for Indian customers, Omani customers, and British customers and of course everybody’s favorite…the young American moneybag who doesn’t know where in the hell “Al-Hail Mamalis” is in relation to the “Ghubra Roundabout.”
                      I have paid and overpaid substantially on numerous occasions. But I’m getting a little wiser. I’ve developed three strategies to thwart the ability of the cabi to rip me off. 1: agree on a price before you get in the cab…ok but this doesn’t work if you don’t know how to get to your location…2: the best solution I have found is to just take a complete shot in the dark and hand the driver some money as soon as you pull up to your destination and get the hell outa there. They are left not knowing how much you really know about the “right” price and they won’t leave the cab to chase you down…well in most cases. I didn’t know that if a cab drops you off on the main road and doesn’t take you directly to your destination, he can’t really charge you that much… but if for example you want to go into the neighborhood and up to your house cause walking 300 feet at 1 o’clock in the afternoon means sweating through every piece of clothing you have and maybe even your backpack straps, then you get the driver to go the distance. I had a guy drop me off inside a residential area. I paid and exited the vehicle all in one motion…as I walked up to my house, the driver got out and threw the money on the ground and started yelling “I’ll call police, police!!” He wanted 4 OMR for a ride that I thought should have cost 1. I thought he was trying to strong-arm me cause he knew how to dial 9999 (911 here). I didn’t pay and just said “No habla engles”. I feel bad about that and wish I would have known about the unwritten neighborhood drop off clause in the non-existent ‘How to ride a cab in Oman statute of the state.’ I need taxis and they need me, things should be different. Also, it is legal to ride in a car without a seatbelt on if you are in the back seat. Most cabs have cut the belts out. I just don’t know why.
                      “Baisa Busses are an interesting trip to take… and although you don’t buy a ticket, it surely is a ride. Imagine a bus a little larger than a Volkswagen that drives up and down stretches of the highway as it picks up pedestrians who just need to get into feasible cab riding distance. The bus is really inexpensive, about 1-2 hundred baisa or about 20 cents… but if you don’t know what roundabout to get off on you’re screwed. The bus goes way to fast to see any signs, there’s no seatbelts and the driver is sometimes texting on his cell phone while taking a near 90-degree turn. Speed limits and red lights in Oman are really more of a suggestion than an order. There are little to no police officers patrolling the highways. Ride one of these busses at around 6pm: rush hour for those who go to a mosque to pray and eat at home after work (which is 90% of the city)…and you’ll undoubtedly share the ride with 19 (the max seating) Indian men who just got off of construction duty and smell kind of like… well, it isn’t curry. Indian immigrants perform most if not all of the laborious and sanitary jobs in Oman…their allotted role is akin to that of the Mexican immigrant in the USA. Their ‘no slack afforded’ treatment by the natives is similar as well.
                          I rode the bus last night and a couple Indian men fell asleep in the back, one on my left shoulder…the driver just kept driving around, up and down the highway as long as there were people in his transport. To stop the bus, everybody just bangs on the ceiling frame and the driver comes to a screeching halt. Passengers have to crawl over one another and hand the driver a little cash before jumping from the nearly moving vehicle, these guys don’t waste time or for that matter, money. Women who venture onto the speeding steel beetle are afforded an unfamiliar amount of respect (Not by Omani standards, but by American). Men won’t sit next to them. At first this looks offensive, but I don’t’ even want to cuddle up next to Kimji after he gets off from laying bricks all day, let alone brush whiskers with his brother to get off the coaster. I was on the bus the other day, and an Asian woman hopped on… the bus was full and even then, three men army crawled over their compadres to let her have her own three person seat right next to the door. This does not happen for young white men. I crawl and squeeze and cuddle and hyperventilate and pass out and jump off just like everybody else.

                                                                  The Streets
Gas is cheap in Oman. There’s a Shell station less than a hundred feet from the PDO oil filed which supplies it, so we’re talking roughly 10 cents a gallon on an off day. This is good and bad. Cabs are cheaper here as a result of less overhead. On the flip side, everybody is always driving everywhere. Oman is a car-oriented culture. Traffic jams are about as predictable as the call to evening prayer and the car horn is a common sound in Muscat’s urban symphony. As I mentioned before, there are little to no police on the sides of the roads. Lack of manpower…lack of resources…lack of control…etc. all contribute to a vehicular jungle where the Peugeot is king (A small economy car…Europe’s version of a Honda has a lion as its emblem)...roads, stopping signals and speed limits are mere suggestions in a place where 80% of the population is under 32 years old. Nobody had a car in Oman before 1970, and if they did…there wasn’t a road to drive on. So there’s kind of a triple cocktail here that makes up a very dangerous driving situation: There’s nobody around to enforce the traffic laws…most Omani drivers are young kids who may or may not have taken a drivers education class and think speeding like Tom Cruise in Days of Thunder is cool. Despite the fact that the greatest contributor to Omani deaths each year is car accidents…everybody drives, a lot, and at any cost, monetary… or human.
Some people can’t afford a car. So they walk. Across the street. When traffic is moving at roughly 144 kilometers per hour (90mph). It’s like frogger. “OH shit that guys gonna get hii… oh phew. OH shit those guys are about to get smash…oh phew. I saw an Indian guy get hit two days ago. A car that jumped the curb to pass stalled traffic hit him. He rolled up and over the windshield and off the trunk…he got up and limped over to his buddies wincing in pain. I’m not sure if the car even felt him.
There aren’t really any street signs here and most of the roads are under construction…big wooden boards serve as privacy protectors for road workers…but really they just hinder any ability to view the other side of the road from a low riding cab. This is quite the issue if you have to look at business signs to determine your stopping location. I get dropped off short and long most of the time and have yet to hit my target spot on.

                                                                       Buildings
Most of the physical structures in Oman are built somewhat pragmatically. Houses are white to minimize sun absorption, mosques are conveniently placed all over the city so praying on the go is relatively easy…(although that is a terrible term as praying should be a patient and deeply reflective span of time)… coffee shops literally dot the highway roadside and you can always find one or two within a couple hundred feet of one another in every neighborhood. Similarly, I have seen five tailoring shops in a row in the Seeb Market. The Dishdasha and female covering are long robes and thus most everyone requires a tailor. Small business is the norm in Oman. A couple families dominate the import export market so real wealth and power have been traditionally concentrated in the hands of a few, the Shanfari family/ business conglomerate has a three story office building in the heart of Muscat…the first floor is an entirely glass walled Ferrari/ Maserrati dealership. Thus, the average Omani most likely owns a small coffee shop, or electronics store, or “hair saloon” like “The Wazoo Saloon” by my house… (throws me off every time and I start thinking about Oktoberfest). Or a convenience/ food store or something that basically provides for one specific desire. This has been a problem in recent years because the government will subsidize an Omani owned store and pay the owner double what he would really make on his own. Some shops, like the coffee shop 10 feet from my house are never open because Omanis take advantage of a system similar to welfare in America. Also, nobody keeps regular hours at these stores…go one day at 2 o’clock and buy a bottle of water, the next day at 2 the place is closed. The shops around the city are not in a Yellow Pages, and they don’t have Internet “Contact us” sites. You just have to guess and test your way to consumer paradise…the good thing is that most shops are duplicates of one another and something is always bound to be open. Even Indian owned shops stay open during prayer hours.
                           Every building in Muscat has a strict height regulation imposed by the regime. They can’t be very high at all… every building except for the mosques, is roughly 20 feet tall. Mosques are strategically placed everywhere…and there are new ones being built everyday.
Muscat is a small city with a large population. Houses are generally built up and not out. It is not uncommon to see a middle class or more well to do family living in a 5 -story house. My perception on the socioeconomic relation between the size of these houses and the family’s income is somewhat jaded and or inaccurate. I live in a one story 6 room house attached to a tiny mosque (the speaker to signal the entire neighborhood for the five times a day call to prayer is five feet above my window…gets a little bizarre in the heat of the afternoon…just laying in bed sweating, the sun bouncing off the wall opposite my bed, the defining “ALLAH U AKBAR, ALLLAAAHH UU AKBAAR...Allah Akbar… shit gets weird when you play around with words in your own head.”) Essentially, every house in Muscat looks big to me. Also, Omanis are a modest people, only some wealthy families choose to show their income with frivolous opulence and others… like my friend Al-Jisr’s family, choose to remain level despite the ability to run awry with money. Some houses are so intricately designed and shaped so uniquely I just want to stop and snap a few pictures…although I have been instructed otherwise (just be on the lookout for a few in the near future). Houses in Muscat, except mine…have walls around their grounds... 10-foot tall stone walls with pretty substantial gates protect children and cars from being tampered with. Houses here do not have basements for some reason and when I asked about the idea of a garage I got bombarded with criticism for wanting to spend money on my “things” rather than my “kids”…who knows what that guy was saying.

                                                       A Few Recent Adventures
I’m sick. My family has all gotten sick as well…first my home-stay mother, who has a literal hand in preparing at least two of my meals every day, then the six year old boy who shakes my hand every time I walk in the door, then his sister who may or may not take a nap in my bed while I’m at school, then my home-stay father who I share a meal with nearly every night. And finally me. It was inevitable. The only member of the family who hasn’t gotten sick is our maid…not sure what her secret is but considering she leaves the room every time I walk in, I’ll probably never know. I don’t know why she does this; some of my advisors at SIT said it might be that she has had bad experiences with Americans or with men in general. I’m not going to press the issue. It started as a common cold…my home-stay father blamed it on the weather changing rapidly…yes, 95 all the way down to 89. Frigid fast. I tried to go to the hospital cause I was pretty sure I had a fever and just wanted to make sure it wasn’t typhoid…and then I realized that even though the Qaboos regime provides free healthcare to its citizens…there are no hospitals. Seriously though, I think they’re two legitimate medical centers in the city. Everything else is a privately owned medicinal odd-job which sets its self apart from the rest by touting a cure-all plant or mineral or some other hogwash. I just drank a lot, I mean a lot of green tea and water…I feel much much better now and I just sniffle every couple of seconds. Hell, I’m allergic to almost everything that grows in the mid-west…so why should the hottest sandiest place on earth be any different. I have had three different Omanis whom I trust tell me to only drink warm water and to not drink cold water because my cold could get worse…is this true??? My mom never said this, and I trust her more.
I had an interesting experience in my house the other night…I have never been sure why we keep the bathroom light on all day and night but consistently, and turn the electricity off to certain rooms of the house when they are not in use. I get it now. Yesterday I instinctively and reflexively flipped off the bathroom light switch. “Oh shit,” is right. I came back about 20 minutes later after a thousand and one cups of tea…the floor shifted when I opened the door…something crawled off the door -frame onto my arm and onto my face. I freaked out and stepped into the bathroom while swatting the little bugger off my eyelid… why did I step into the bathroom?? I felt a few squish under my feet and I sprang for the light switch…hundreds of tiny lizards were trailing out of the wall and through the broken/covered window in the ceiling to soak up the cool porcelain oasis. A few more reflexive tones resounded throughout the grand hall and into my family’s ears about 7 feet away… everybody knew what happened before even rounding the paper thin wall that separates the TV room from the rest of the house…I’m beginning to wonder if their laughter was an indication of their knowing about the lizards/ the light being off and wanting me to learn a good lesson…either way; lesson learned.
Speaking of bathrooms in Oman. Or at least at my house. Toilet paper is not used immediately after responding to nature’s heavier call. A small hose that is attached to most bathroom walls is used to spray off the dirty parts of one’s body…the idea is to leave the paper relatively unscathed so it can be odorless when stored in the trash can until trash day. Septic tanks are expensive to get drained and they fill up slower without paper waste.
This morning I am getting on a plane to Salalah. I have been looking forward to this excursion since before I applied to the program…expect a lot of pictures and a vividly detailed description of the place.

Pictures to come soon...