Salalah Pictures

A large wooden dhow filled with cows from East Africa docks in Salalah Port.

Traditional Coconut stand.

Banana farmers.

A man heating up some traditional Yemeni 'Mushkak' at a bustling local restaurant.

Sailors.

These guys are policemen from Muscat about to start a tour in Salalah. We talked over some juice.

'Mushkak'

Shop keeper at the Haffa Souk...he is making leather holsters.

"Look at all those white kids getting off that big bus"

The Valley of the Witches is believed to be ruled by black magic.

'Jabal Akhdar' or Green Mountains

A mountain family on the move.

This species of tree is believed to be the oldest in the world. The concept for Rafiki's tree home in The Lion King?

Deep Contemplation.

Vegetation Abound.

Salalah Port.

Salalah

Wednesday morning I flew from Muscat to Salalah. Salalah is the southern most area of Oman and it shares a border with Yemen.  In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, the broader region containing Salalah, named Dohfar, was the site for the infamous Dohfar Rebellion. Before going to Salalah, I had specifically read about this insidious insurrection that Qaboos had swiftly and mercifully dealt with during his early reign in an effort to fully unite the distinct geographical and cultural divisions of Northern and Southern Oman. Per my Pre-departure preparation, I also understood that the modernization that is so prevalent in Muscat, i.e. shopping malls, car dealerships, movie theatres, has slowly and incompletely trickled down the face of the country and only recently landed in Salalah. In retrospect, the Salalah I witnessed last Wednesday is much more complex in its expression of the past and much deeper in its roots than I imagined. However, this idea of trickling-modernity; where frivolous amenities and gaudy hotels along with healthcare facilities and better schools come down slowly and tactfully… seems more like an inevitable monsoon than a couple of random raindrops from above.

                                                            Oman Air

Oman air runs exactly one flight a week to Salalah from Muscat… if you miss your flight or can’t afford the ticket or just want to see the countryside and take pictures … It is roughly 1010km or about 550 miles and a twelve-hour bus ride from to your destination. I wanted to drive. SIT bought me a plane ticket. I flew.

            Oman Air runs a luxurious service in the skies of Arabia. Judging airlines is an interestingly subjective process as almost every passenger has different needs and “comfort ability” levels when their lives are in the hands of two hopefully well-trained and sober individuals whispering orders over an intercom at 10,000 feet. I like a meal, some legroom, and a cool air-temperature, in that order. And of course a solid landing but that’s not my point.

            The in-flight meal was delectable and even had some semblance of traditional Omani nourishment…rice, beef or pasta, salad, water or tea, a roll and a piece of cake were politely and delicately dished out in solid golden colored plastic dishware on our one hour flight. The seats in coach were situated unusually far apart and provided more than ample legroom for me to stretch out and pass out without feeling guilty about constricting the passenger behind me. From my window seat, I could see the hot air outside the plane wearily waving and weaving its way off the grey tarmac into the boiling Arabian atmosphere…I didn’t sweat a drop.

            Interestingly, per my good Omani friend, Al-Jisr… pre-departure, I had the regal pleasure of meeting face-to-face, one on one, with the CEO of Oman Air. We chatted for a few hours over some delightful fish and a little hookah. He was really a nice guy with a very apparent knack for efficient management. I have one constructive suggestion for him if we ever meet again… do some research on cell-phone/ computer use on the plane…maybe Oman Air has…all I know is that cell phones can be used in contention with a computerized internet connection at any time during the Oman Air flight…per my American streamlined conditioning, I still turned my phone off and read a book.

                                                Salalah’s Great Juxtaposition

            Salalah should be un-refined, raw, non-materialistic and basic… the tribes should be ruling and defying the North via guerilla style insurgency. The streets should be rampant with thugs and vandals, unsafe for women and weaker individuals. Right? There was a revolution here? People died, bullets were fired and foreign armies were called in for assistance. Where is the chaos and where are the violent politico-tribe clashes? Where’s the thick tension between the natives and foreigners who bring un-pure influences? They’re someplace else, and certainly not in today’s Salalah or for that matter the greater Dohfar region.

            Salalah is less modernized than Muscat. It’s an observable fact in the town of Mirbat. In some places, houses remain vacant and dilapidated. Shops and supply stores are all seemingly locally owned. There is no Starbucks, no McDonalds and certainly no disco club. Modernization has spread top down in Oman in two ways…one; the government and the commercial elite have been the chief catalysts for change as they have imported cars, chain restaurants, and various other types of foreign capital. Also, and secondly, this change his physically travelled from the North of the country to the South since 1970. It is only natural that a place like Salalah would be less technical and far less reliant on today’s parsimonious machine-gadgetry. Ok, so where’s the gritty farm landscape and short-lived mud huts with half starving natives? Is that a Toyota Land Cruiser?

I wanted Salalah to be unrefined and raw. I wanted to see a place untouched by the selling’s of America. Someplace exclusively in touch with nature and unfiltered through a movie screen perspective. Well dammit, that rustic pipe dream of an idea got flooded and evaporated quicker than a wadi riverbed in the middle of summer. Our first stop off of the airplane and the metaphorical catalyst for my neural water vapor was the Ministry of Tourism.

            Salalah is going to be an amazing tourist haven by 2020. At least 10 different hotels and miniature villa cities are going to be tactically and expediently erected so that they may blossom into refined, distilled and fettered zones of vacation land fun for the whole family. “Ehhemm,” the whole wealthy probably Saudi or Emirati family. Salalah may very well save Oman in the near future or it may spread the roots of destruction…with roughly 60 years of oil left in the ground and the Sultan nearing his pass, God forbid…Oman needs a new thriving sector of the economy to support its current life choices. This brings to light an interesting juxtaposition that I observed on my visit. The government’s view of Salalah as an investment opportunity and a proverbial goldmine and the residents of Salalah’s view of their home as just that, home, “what could go wrong here with Sultan Qaboos, a former Salalalien himself, at the helm?”

            There seem to be a lot of juxtapositions in Salalah that call into question this same “government opposite the native Omani perspective.” From high up in the mountains, standing right by a weathered and self-sustaining farmhouse with tires on its roof to keep the semi-leak-proof tarp from getting displaced by the strong Northern winds… I could see both the Salalah Port and the Salalah Free Zone. The Port is a massive stretch of cranes with loading and unloading apparatuses mixed with gargantuan container ships and tiny wooden dhows afoot a network of stored shipment containers and section fencing with a few naval armaments sprinkled around the seemingly bottomless maritime salad bar. The Salalah Free Zone is a vast expanse of desert land to big for the human eye to capture in one panorama even from atop the surrounding mountains. I was told that Oman is doing a lot to encourage international capital investment in the form of factories in the Free Zone. The idea is that companies exist tax-free for the first 30 years of operation in this designated area of Salalah. The Port exists as a modern art-full eye sore on an otherwise pristine coastline. The Free Zone would just be empty desert, but I’m sure the plans for a methane plant in the near future will surely increase the need for some pungent perfume. And that’s just it. At what cultural and natural price does Oman declare it’s future economic investments… worth it? How much is the government willing to risk in terms of heritage preservation and do the people of Salalah get any say in the matter?

            The traditional coconut stand I visited would suggest that natives to Salalah are already saturated with tourist benefits. The stand was roughly 100yards long and had the allure of being “off the beaten pathway”… The vendors were friendly and more than happy to satisfy my coco craving as well as provide me with some sugar cane and a few nice pictures. The only other consumers present at the market were a few Saudis debating which produce to buy. As I stood sipping my coconut and waiting for the group to pack up and ship out, I noticed an older man walking in his under-garments out of the thick banana trees that grew behind the market. He seemed angry as he exchanged some harsh words with one of the vendors…he was brushed aside with a sweeping hand gesture and sent back to the banana forest from which he came. As he was walking back I could tell that he took a fleeting interest in my camera. I followed him. About 30 yards behind the market I found him sitting near a flowing ‘falaj’ or a long slender irrigation canal…this suggests that the land was very fertile and the soil was saturated with water. He motioned for me come over. I walked slowly toward him and by that time his friend had showed up. They were friendly and didn’t understand any of the classical Arabic I spoke. The man scooped up a palm full of water from the ‘falaj’ and directed it spritely into his mouth. He motioned to ask if I wanted any…I did my best to say that the water would make me sick… I think he understood as he then dug a shallow hole in the ground with his hands and drank the murky water that bubbled up. He laughed and made a motion to flex his muscle presumably saying that he could drink the water because he was strong. I walked back toward the coconut stand with his laughter resounding in the background. The coconut stand was filled with tourists. To a Westerner, it had the allure of an older world and an unrefined dining experience. Maybe that is Salalah’s future in a nutshell. Seemingly old and unrestricted but wrought with a fleeting sense of appreciation that can only be held by one who stays somewhere definitely, a tourist. All the while, the natives who nourish themselves strait from the ground with their bare hands will be cast into the background laughing at their un-adapted guests.

            Salalah is beautiful to say the least. The mountains are daunting and the coastline is private and colorful. At times, I felt like I could have been in Africa. Wild herds of camel, goats and lush green vegetation give Salalah an authentic sensibility. This unique place may very well save Oman’s economic future. However, just as Salalah was the revolutionary tipping point for change in the 1960’s and 1970’s… this second round of change will again come at some cost.

           

-        

A few from Muscat...

I'll be writing a nice post about my wonderful excursion to Southern Oman...in the meantime, because I just got back to Muscat this evening, these photos should suffice. They are all taken in Muscat and should relate to my last post.  The last picture in this post is just a taste...

It is very common to see Omanis having a picnic on a median in the middle of the city.

This Indian man walks past me every morning with a smile while I sit at the bus stop...he sanitizes dumpsters for a living.

New mosques are always being erected.

 Salalah is a truly breathtaking region of the world... I will go back someday.

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...

Juicy

I have been living in Oman for almost one month. I think it takes about a month in a new setting for a paradigm shift to occur in one’s perception of their unfamiliar surroundings. Over a period of about one month, the fast paced excitement and blinding opportunity of a new place can sluggishly drift into dim, albeit not dark, reality. In other words, my experience is no longer a vacation and I can perceive it. Work, as it always manages to do… has meticulously labored its way in to my string of adrenaline packed adventures and destroyed my ability to just pack a light backpack on a Monday afternoon and go out looking for an adventure. Essentially, life has set in. It probably flopped into my lap like a dead fish as soon as school started two weeks ago, but I was still backpacking around for a good sushi place and didn’t bother to do anything with what was right in front of me. I still haven’t found a sushi place in Oman but that’s not the point. I’m actually living here now. Waking up, eating, schooling myself and getting schooled in the classroom, eating, exercising, doing homework, eating, doing homework, talking with my family in America (“In Islam, entrance to heaven is written on the foot of the mother.”-‘Shama’) at least once a week… and finally going to bed. Repeat. Repeat. Not a bad way to live, not at all. I’m still learning more in one day than I could grasp in three and I have a lot to look forward to in the coming week. But recently, I have had to stow the drip-control for my adrenaline reserves and buckle down. Laundry, dishes, studying, staying healthy, studying, they’re here now… and as Lil Wayne put it so parsimoniously, “…and I’m grindin’ until I’m tired this, and you ain’t grindin’ until you tired, so I’m grindin’ with my eyes wide, lookin’ to find a way through the day, a life for the night.” And that’s just it, I want to get as much out of this experience as I can…not just based on the schedule I was given when I got off the plane, but throughout every minute of every day in every experience I encounter no matter how minute it seems… even if that means sacrificing adventure in the desert for information in the classroom… and I’ll rest when I’m dead.
I have begun to accept the historically boring as thrillingly educational. I can see my Arabic paying off!! I still take issue with the kind of Arabic that I’m being taught but I’ve gotten over chiming in like a grandfather clock in a cab full of beeping Omani wristwatches. Strangers definitely understand me and I’m able to conjugate verbs in past, present and future almost instantaneously. The precious little sliver of this fascinating lexicon that I have managed to get a hold of is currently landscaping the deserted linguistic peaks and valleys of my brain laying literal verbal foundations and paving the way for my future communicative endeavors (every verb in Arabic has a root and a pattern that it shares with like-minded verbs, most words are alike in that they have the same “foundational” stem or ‘root letters’ this all ads to the idea that Arabic is a logical language.) If you want to learn something difficult, do it every day.
Similarly, I have adopted an old Buddhist proverb to aide in the absorption of my fact based studies as well as the recollection of more subjective lectures and experiences. “The palest ink is worth more than the keenest memory.” I refuse to let my experience here wash over me in hopes that I will leave with a cleaner and more polished view of Oman. No, no, no. Reflection is key. Whether I am dealing with a text, a movie, a speaker, or a road sign, I write everything down on paper. Perspective and fairness are only achieved with patient contemplation. Such patience cannot be properly allocated in space and time without notes to reference. Humans get distracted and forget. As much as I want to believe that hearing, seeing or reading something once will resound in the hollow corridors of my mind for longer than it takes me to enjoy a delectable Arabic, or Turkish or Indian shwarma filled with tasty chicken morsels spiced with traditional goodness and special Istanbuly sauce, slightly grilled and pressed to perfection with a side of roasted vegetables and French fries served hot and ready to eat…get my point. The written word is valuable. It can withstand time like no other reasonable construction and thus is the greatest informer to use, ex post facto. I have hand written journals to go along with each and every post…scribbled notes, sketches, streams of consciousness… a plethora of pages to be deciphered in the directors cut of this blog.
A mentor of mine once said, “when you squeeze an orange…juice comes out…and the same thing happens when YOU get squeezed.” Essentially, when the pressure is on, you see what you are made of. Travelling abroad to study in the Middle East is an experience riddled with high-velocity and high-pressure situations. Language barriers, cultural divides, subconscious tendencies that collide with societal expectations and a gamut of misunderstandings serve to make time here both stress full and rewarding. With that being said, culture shock is a real phenomenon. It occurs during various types and durations of trips broad and at various stages. Kalervo Oberg, in his article “Culture Shock,” defines the internal strife as… “(A)n occupational disease of people who have been suddenly transplanted abroad.” He claims that, “Culture Shock is precipitated by the anxiety that results from losing all our familiar signs and symbols of social intercourse.” Travelling abroad to Oman has been a bit of a culture shock. However, like most things in life, it’s not how hard you fall… but how you can keep yourself from falling in the same place twice that matters…and how high you get or jump. Studies abroad are as much about gaining knowledge on a specific region of the world as they are about learning how to deal with Culture Shock. Developing a set of skills to keep your self grounded, as well as tolerant while maintaining a lust to learn are positive methodologies that can be applied to every aspect of one’s life. Taking risks that allow me to navigate Omani culture, learning to be aware of myself and of my surroundings, using the Arabic language, and most importantly taking personal responsibility for my learning experience are just a few skills that I’m currently working on. Guess and test is really the only way to find out what works, this involves a bit of embarrassment, a little failure, and touch of humility to brew an unparalleled self-confidence. Drop someone thousands of miles from home and place a few rigorous and time-consuming expectations on them…and the juice flows.

Some pictures from the interior

Fishing is a major industry in Oman. This man was proud of his catch.

A little picnic on the beach. 

His parents were just around the corner.

An intense football match was taking place at the beach.

The enormous 'Jabal Akhdar' mountains loom over the fertile date trees in Rustaq.

Mothers tend to the youngns at the Wadi Nahaal.

Children playing in the Wadi.

The "Wadi Cools" shared some drinks and some chicken with me. Good guys.

Water from the river is often hauled off for cooking/bathing purposes.

The chillest Omanis I've seen yet.

A hard climb for a great view. Taken on an island in the Arabian sea off the coast of Rustaq.

Some friends of friends at the beach.

My guide didn't say much.

Cool'n off at the Wadi.

The beach extends about 100 yards into the ocean with a shallow sandbar.

Takin a bath.

Lonely kid and drying Dishdasha

The sun does set on an Omani.

A lookout fort in the Arabian Sea off the coast of Rustaq.

The Wadi Kabir