French Lessons

Now that S the Wunder Domestic has the house well in hand as evidenced here both by her salad,

as well as here by my newfound ability to lay in one place and enjoy bonbons and National Geographic,












we have become a stop on the Europe-Dubai-Muscat-India-Muscat-Dubai-Europe trail. As matter of fact, if things carry on in the same way that they are headed now, we will soon have our own entry in Lonely Planet.

 

We have joined couchsurfing.org, the website that matches travellers up with potential hosts all over the globe. And right now everyone in chilly Europe (more specifically, Germany) wants to come to Muscat, and they all seem to be seeking space on our third floor.  Frankly, it seems to be the cat that is attracting everyone to stay with us as, more often that not, people's request to crash at our place begins with, "Nice cat".

At first, we joined couchsurfing in order to find a place to stay in Germany other than a hotel as staying in a hotel has become increasingly challenging as the children have become larger and noisier. For one thing, we can no longer hide them in pillow cases and sneak them into a double room which means we actually have to pay for them.

And for another, they make so much noise that the hotel guests around us increasingly have to resort to borrowing broom handles from housekeeping in order to bang on the ceiling and shut them up. Then there was the time that Tehva was discovered at 5:30 a.m. wandering around reception naked. And the time that Tian got a massive nosebleed and drenched a hotel's mattress, two pillows, and sheet set after a long flight.

Hotels have become a last resort.

Now that we have done our surfing, we have graduated to host status on couchsurfing which means that complete strangers write out of the blue and ask terribly nicely whether or not they can stay at our place, share our chow, and get pointers as to where to visit.

I am such a sucker that I almost always say yes and Tony, playing the part of the beleaguered spouse, says, "Whatever," and before we know it we are preparing the third floor for another visitor. Silas goes upstairs and puts clean sheets on the bed, arranges towels, and writes notes of welcome in the language of wherever the Surfers are from. Tian sweeps out all the corners and cleans like the obsessive soul that she is. Tehva mostly yells at the other two as they busybody about.

Our Surfers thus far have mainly come from Germany, although we have also hosted Americans and, more recently, someone from France--Nordine. Nordine made couchsurfing exactly what it is supposed to be--an exchange of ideas, an education on both sides, and a feeling of joy at being with and connecting to other people.

He determined that he would teach the children some French during his time with us and then devoted afternoons and evenings to getting them to at least listen to and understand some of the language. He sang them songs in French and filled the memory of one of the computers with programs and music for children. He brought cakes and treated all of us to shwarma. He took Silas and Tian up the waterfall inside the swim-through cave in Wadi Shaab and scared the crap out of them by jumping from high ledges.

Thanks to falafelfeast.blogspot.com!

 

In the car, as we drove here or there, he let Tehva play with his iPhone, wearing the battery down to nothing while using a geography app. We talked food, education, travel, culture, identity, the future, the past, and connected so strongly that on so many levels that Tony and I started to suspect that we were long lost family of some sort. You know, that French side of the family.

He not only surfed our couch...he made a huge positive impact on our family, and that is the kind of education I was hoping for for all of us when we came here.




 

Confession #1

Yes, yes, it's been awhile, hasn't it? Actually I have been writing this post in my head for ages, trying to find a way to throw this on the table. Its admission speaks tomes about shifts in our collective mentality as a family living in the Middle East.

We have hired a house maid.

There. It is now out in the open and thus allows an examination of its implications from all angles.

Yes, we have a house maid. How we came to employ a housemaid is pretty straightforward. We simply convinced ourselves that by employing this woman, whom I will call S, we would be doing her a world of good by supplying her with an extra bit of money. Naturally we would be doing her far more good than she would be doing us.

By convincing ourselves of the goodness of our deed, we handily steered past the need to consider the fact that we not only would be underpaying (by American standards, although not by Omani standards) this woman severely but would be doing so quite happily simply because "everyone else is doing it."

Done.

I found myself needing to unburden my soul to someone within minutes of this monumental decision and upon confessing to a friend was met with a snort of laughter and a sarcastic, "Oh, well, how civilized of you. And she's only coming in two days a week? Well that makes it all right then, doesn't it?"

Doesn't it?

Another friend, also an American, sat with a shocked expression on his face and finally managed a "Wow. That's very colonial of you."

It is? Yes, I suppose it is.

As an individual with almost no experience in employing and underpaying people for menial tasks, I realized I had a long way to go and a lot to learn when it comes to having domestic help. And what better person to guide me through the ins and outs of this than the housemaid herself. On our first meeting, I confessed that I was not sure how to have a housemaid and asked if she could help me know how to do things. "Yes, of course," S replied. "I have been a housemaid for 18 years. I know just what to do. I will teach you."

On her first day of whipping my house into shape, I got up early and cleaned so that S would not think us total slobs. I also made the kids get up early and do their chores so that S would not think our children lazy. Silas was hanging underwear on the back balcony when S arrived, which painted the picture of non-laziness that I was desiring.

S took a quick inventory of my cleaning supplies and a walking tour of the Marble Mansion and, I suspect, secretly divined that we were in fact total slobs. Not only that, but she quickly decided that we were completely lacking on the cleaning supply front and placed an order for all sorts of scrubby things and chemicals that I had never considered necessary purchases during my time here. Now, however, I own them all plus I have spares, just in case. Gotta keep S happy.

Having gotten all of that nonsense sorted, she launched into a bi-weekly ritual that we now have down pat. S arrives at an ungodly hour two mornings a week, which is a challenge as it means that I have to get up even earlier to arrange the house into some semblance of order. She traumatizes the cats with the vacuum and then sets about mopping and scrubbing while I jump around the swishing mop and try to get breakfast made for the kids.

S hugs the children as they get up, encourages them with their studies. and generally plays the good patient mother-figure while I step on cats and slop tea on the floor in an attempt to stay out of her way while feeding the children. We then leave the house for the school's morning exercise routine, but not until I have plunked a bag of produce on the counter and asked S to work a miracle.

She asks, "Supper, ma'am?"

And I say, "Yes. Here is a bag of ____________" (fill in the blank...okra, eggplant, lentils, tomatoes, wilted green stuff, etc.)

S eyes the bag suspiciously and then says, "Ok, how bout ________________" (fill in the blank with some Sri Lankan word that I have not heard before).

I nod and then walk out the door.

We come home an hour later and S has taken that one bag of veggies and from it made an enormous pot of rice, a beautiful salad with colorful vegetables arranged in rings, a curry, and a cooked vegetable dish. I have come to suspect that Jesus may have been something of a Sri Lankan housemaid what with that loaves and fishes trick.

This is all well and good, but there is more to it than this. Having a housemaid means that we really live in the Gulf now. It is like putting pictures up on the wall, or planting annuals in a flower bed around your house. Having a housemaid says, "I have bought into this culture." In a sense, the housemaid thing is expected of residents of the Gulf, whether expat or local, and truthfully everyone here seems to have at least one housemaid. As a matter of fact, our landlord has two housemaids, plus a houseboy and a driver. Tony says that when he gets seven cars he too will employ an underpaid driver.

So that is our latest confession from Oman. Tune in next time for another stunning confession from the Middle East. I will leave you guessing...

I Think I Just Drooled on Myself

Aside from the fact that Oman is seriously lacking on the affordable English-medium school front, and I am doing a little something about that, this post has very little to do with Oman. For those of you who troll the blog in order to live vicariously through me, sorry, this one is a bit of a downer. I promise the next blog will deal with the new housemaid or the return of the Big Car, or something equally expatty.

No, this blog is about The School and the six children I pack into it every day.

That's right, my little school has grown again to six warm bodies, with two tweeny girls in to replace the two boys who left at the end of last year for greener pastures. Our school, which last year was pure insanity punctuated by small stretches of intense concentration, has become a place of surface calm. However, with the introduction of more girls, it is now also a sounding place for anxieties great ("My mom is so down today") and small ("I think my armpits stink. Do you have any deodorant I can borrow?")

Silas, who never enjoyed being part of the masculinity movement last year, has asked twice recently when we are going to get more boys. "Honestly, Silas? You didn't even like having boys here last year. They were too loud for you, remember?" And then he remembers and drifts off to bemoan the fact that he has to spend several hours every day bending to someone else's will, with that someone being me.

Ya' know, I just want to put this on the table right here...girls are a whole different ball of wax from boys. Perhaps my late realization of this fact is one of the reasons that the international schools here have been loathe to give me any consideration at all in their hiring over our two years here.

But boys...boys go for long stretches without noticing anything aside from their impulses--whether that is to jump on the nearest boy or spray water on the cat sauntering by. And then they will buckle down for fifteen to twenty minutes of glorious and intense concentration, pounding through an hour's worth or work in record time. They roll all over the floor, fiddle with tidbits, clap loudly, fart, scream, and generally raise the dead, but they get their stuff done without much more than loud noises.

Then there are girls. Girls want to discuss everything, intensely negotiating several facets of the assignment before anything has even begun. Then they will sometimes commence their work by commenting on their general inability to do what is in front of them. They comment on how stupid they are, or act the cheerleader, telling one another to be confident in their abilities. They hem and haw and chit and chat. Finally, in the end, they get on with it and finish their work very competently, usually with a flourish and an extra spritz of deodorant, just for good measure.

In my ongoing endeavor to console myself that this is all good, I have been cruising other home schoolers' blogs as well as teachers' blogs for the answer to the never-answerable query: Is this girl thing normal? And the thing is, I don't find much commentary on this phenomenon. I do find lots of talk about teaching boys but I don't find much on the girl thing.

Strangely enough, this negotiatory behavior seems normal for my five girls--it's beginning to feel like a compulsion, this rearranging their thinking and developing their communication abilities while they chatter amongst themselves. And their chatter is somewhat exhausting, full of language that suggests they are both doubting their abilities and supporting and encouraging one another--like a manic school day each and every day without the option for medication.

I am intrigued by these girly girls as I am not sure I ever was one. At any rate, by the end of each day I am fairly exhausted by the split-personality mood they set and, thus, I think I just drooled on myself. Don't worry, happens all the time.

I Swear...It Was an Accident

Tehva is trying really hard these days to figure out how far she can take the word, "accident". She will clock her brother and swear it was an accident...drive her sister batty by making off with her pencil during school and claim, "Oops...accident." She will pick the cat up by the collar and claim ignorance of the fact that the cat was slowly asphyxiating because, "It was an accident."

Just the usual violent tendencies that every first grader has, right?

Perhaps there is something in the water here...desalination does carry its risks, doesn't it?...but I think Tony and our lovely big blue Hyundai Santa Fe met Tehva's behavior doppelganger last night. Don't worry, though, it was an accident.

Road rules are a bit fuzzy here, but only after you have taken your driving test. While you are taking your driving test (which costs $60 a pop payable directly to the instructor) the rules are strict and unbending. As a matter of fact, statistically speaking, you have a 99% chance of failing the test the first seven times you take it, unless you are a leggy Russian blonde...that segment of the population passes on the first try 100% of the time, or so I hear. Being neither blonde nor leggy...nor Russian now that I think of it...I know about the Russian pass rate only based upon gossip, which, you probably know by now, is the main source of reliable info in Muscat.

But I digress. As I had begun, road rules are a bit fuzzy here once you hold your license. As soon as that card is in your hand, speeding maniacally while flashing your headlights and nearly rear-ending someone to get them to move out of the passing lane becomes legal. Actually, speeding for any reason becomes legal. Changing lanes without signaling? Legal. Drag racing down public thoroughfares? Legal. Passing in no passing zones? Totally legal.

And overtaking on the left while the person in front of you is making a left hand turn also is legal. Especially when you have had six previous accidents, drive a Mercedes-Benz, and rolled the Lexus you had owned previously.

Let me pull my tongue out of my cheek in order to inform you that Tony, Silas, Tian, and the Santa Fe were on the receiving end of the "legal" left turn, while I was at home with Tehva trying to get dinner finished like the responsible housewife that I am. Thus, I was only allowed to bear witness to the aftermath of the accident. However, when we pulled up in the plastic Kia Rio I was hardly prepared to see the front end of my car laying in the middle of the road, the left bearing jutting out from the left wheel well, and the headlamps dangling like disconnected eye sockets.

"It was an accident," shrugged Tony, as a figure in a black abaya skittered away from the wreck and climbed into a fancy saloon car off to the side. The other victim, the aforementioned  Mercedes, appeared largely unscathed, although it seemed to be haemorhaging oil the longer I stared at it. And the longer I stared, the more I noticed that there was an inordinate amount of traffic on this dead end road, and that the men driving those cars were attracted like moths to flames by the spectacle of five whities standing in the middle of the road staring dumbly with, "Whadda we do now" expressions on their faces.

It occurred to us as we stood there that we really had no clue how to proceed with an accident report in Oman. What's more, aside from the words, sierra, tissa riyal, haram, mobile, and maktab, I could understand almost nothing of what was being discussed between the men who had shown up on the scene. The growing cast of characters gradually, and very kindly, introduced themselves like a misplaced wedding party--"I am the Husband. I am sorry for my wife's behavior." "I am the Brother. This is not my sister's first accident." "I am the Random Stranger who speaks English. I have come to watch the show." "I am the Towtruck Driver. I sweat a lot."

We did an inordinate amount of standing around, just the nine of us. Strangely, the perpitrator who had slunk off after the crash never did turn up on the scene again...she just sort of disappeared and left the boys to work things out. We negotiated who was to blame--the men decided that the woman was definitely to blame. We chatted with the police, who did nothing more than examine Tony's license. And then we were told who would pay. 

We would.

We were told our insurance would pay because in Oman that is what we do. No, no, that is not called insurance fraud...that is called taking care of one another. Not having been aware that I was inadvertently living in a communist state, I was confused, and even now the logic continues to baffle and amaze me. I guarantee there is more to it than that, but that is the essence of the reason that we were given for our insurance paying.

As we gathered up the last miscellaneous bits and pieces of our car, the Husband philosophically intoned, "It was an accident but no one was hurt, hamdulillah. And money comes and goes, but life is precious, hamdulillah." And then he shook Tony's hand and walked off.

Like I said, nothing to worry about. It was just an accident.













 

Protests...Or Not

On Thursday, this message made its way through the cell phone/email grapevine:

Demonstrations have begun in front of the U.S. Embassy in Muscat. It is possible that the demonstrations could grow in size. U.S. Embassy personnel have been instructed to avoid the area of the Embassy. There may also be additional protests in the coming days. In light of recent attacks against U.S. missions in Cairo, Benghazi, and Sanaa, U.S. Embassy Muscat is carefully monitoring the current security situation in Muscat and throughout the country.
We remind U.S. Citizens to avoid areas where demonstrations are occurring, and recommend that you avoid the Embassy area. Even protests that are intended to be peaceful can turn confrontational and possibly escalate into violence. As always, please be aware of your surroundings and monitor local media.

The Embassy advises U.S. citizens to maintain valid travel documents and enroll with the Department of State through the Smart Traveler Enrollment Program. By enrolling, U.S. citizens make it easier for the Embassy to contact them in case of emergency.

And with that, a flurry of forwarded messages commenced, finally resolving in a repetition of the same message upon everyone's phones until we were all whipped into a frothing frenzy.

Then the frightening thought arose: 
Where do we go if we have to get out fast? And what do we take? What would happen to our house? Our cat? Our cars? Our stuff? Crap, where are the passports?

Rational thought counters:
Come on, this has happened in every foreign country in which I have lived. It happened in Korea after an American army tank accidentally plowed two little girls walking home from school.

It happened in China in the early 1990s as the Taiwan issue arose again. An American aircraft carrier positioned itself in the wrong place in relation to Taiwan, and for a week solid there were air force jets doing low fly-bys over our little town. We had black out practices nightly. Students anonymously left disturbingly ungrammatical and what I construed as possibly threatening letters on my podium: "Okay, teacher. I sorry. American home. Good bye. You!"

It happened last year when Da Boys started using their local grocery stores as torches.

But it all blew over.

But then another frightening thought arose:
Where will we go if we have to leave? Do we bag it and just head back to the home country? Where can we drive that would offer some sort of safe harbor--not Yemen. Duh. Do we go and bunk up with friends in India--but what about the visa? Maybe we could jump the border to the UAE--no visa required there but will they have protests, too?

Rational thought counters again:
Get the lowdown of what's happening on the streets.

We did what many did and visited this link:

http://www.muscatmutterings.com/ 

which is generally a good source for the gossip going on in Muscat. Then we visited this site, which does the same for Salalah:

http://dhofarigucci.blogspot.com/2012/09/protests.html

and began to decompress.

Since Thursday, I have kept an extra ear out for news of protest activity here. The radio news stations are closely monitored and tightly controlled so there has been no news from the traditional media outlets. Instead, everything here spreads via word of mouth--or cellphone or blog posts.

So the news is that there is very little news to report regarding protests in Muscat. The Kiwis report that their government's perceived threat level within Oman has remained at moderate. The Canadian government reports no travel warnings for Oman. And the Australians advise travelers to take nothing more than the regular travel precautions.

And so from now on, when I go out I will wear my Canadian flag on Saturday/Sunday, my Australian flag on Monday/Tuesday, and my Kiwi flag on Wednesday/Thursday. And on Friday I will have a nap to recover from the stress of posing throughout the week.

Oman's Omens

 

At the outset, the plan sounded fool-proof.

Leave less than an hour before sundown, explore a site in order to lay a Hash run later in the week, and then return home to prepare dinner. In order to make the plan even more viable, it was decided that Silas would accompany me and that we would ride to and explore the proposed site with Heather, who has issues with depth perception when it gets dark and the terrain gets rough. Can you see where this is headed?

Heather had chosen the Hash site based on the fact that it is right off of the Lollipop Roundabout (aka The- Roundabout-to-Nowhere), which has a certain romantic appeal, especially as the sun is setting over this cement circle in the middle of a road that truly leads to nowhere. We headed off-road and plunged down the ungraded dirt path, severely testing the shocks on her Pajero, and rounded a bend to reveal a looming support wall for the new highway. This, we decided, would be the best location from which to start exploring.

Exciting stuff.

"That wadi," I pronounced, "is the best wadi. Let's look at that one first." I really had no idea where we were going but the wadi looked so inviting. I know, I know, you are thinking wadi like this, aren't you?



And it kind of was like this, minus the water. And the trees. And the cooling shade. And those plants on the left. Now throw in an uneven floor strewn with knee-deep sandy gravel and rocks that are slippery even when dry, and that was our wadi. It wasn't long before things started to look ominous.

Ominous sign #1: A giant grey and blue scorpion went shooting across our path and skittered under a rock. Or maybe it was a blue desert lizard. Ah, scorpion looks more ominous, doesn't it?



Ominous sign #2: A racer snake slithered under my boot, timing its plunge just right to make Heather shriek.

                           

Ominous sign #3: Somewhere someone began artillery practice, positioning the practice shots in such a manner that it sounded like they were taking potshots at us three idiots.

Ominous sign #4: The sun went down and we were a thirty minute walk up a wadi looking at The Old Man of Muscat aka Cock Rock before we noticed the sudden absence of light.

Ominous sign #5: Silas, the human GPS, began to advise us in the most grating, whining, cry-ridden voice that we were nowhere near where we thought we were.

I know, with the scorpion-lizard we should have packed it in for the day, but the Hash must go on. So on we  went.

"Not to worry!" I told Silas. "Just over that rise is the Lollipop Roundabout. We will just scale this massive, scree-ridden rock face and BOOM, we will be on the road and can walk back down to the car." Silas grabbed his crotch and jumped up and down, looking doubtful, shaking his head and protesting: "No! It's the other way! We are in the wrong place! This is all wrong!"

And sure enough he was right.

Just as full darkness fell, we were feeling fairly confident that we were back in the wadi we had originally wandered up, but the walk out was still fraught with stressful hyperventilation, silent thoughts of the feasibility of building a makeshift tent from four boot laces and a sweat-soaked t-shirt, and a curiosity regarding how long a quart of water and two shriveled dates might last three mildly-dehydrated individuals before we would be forced to eat one another.

I would like to use some colorful verb to describe the way we walked out of the wadi in the darkness. I was thinking "skipped" or "strode"--you know, something that would suggest we were full of confidence and overcoming the elements around us, but truthfully the best one I can come up with is that we "minced" out. As a matter of fact, I minced so carefully that I ended up mincing so very gracefully onto a snake.

The snake, not enjoying the mincing, began to flail--I could feel it knocking against my boot, and I could see its body in the dull light of the highway next to which we had parked. As an extra bonus, I could hear it hissing madly. At that point, well, I'll admit it--I screamed. This in turn caused Silas to scream continuously until Heather was ready to clock him and feed him to the wildlife. I jumped two and a half meters into the air, releasing the snake and calming Silas somewhat. Once the adrenalin levels had leveled off slightly, we set off again for the car, which we could now see under those lights, shining beacon-like. A Pajero never looked so inviting.

Thinking a goat path might be more snake-free than the rocks that we had been on, I carefully led Silas
toward the hard-packed dirt just visible 20 meters away, only to nearly step on another snake. Silas again started to scream, frozen into place, wailing, "A snake! A snake! A snake!" My suspicion is that Heather used some secret magic power to levitate him off the path and over this latest road block because from where I was standing it looked like there was no moving him.

The remaining three minutes' walk was punctuated by residual screams until we finally were safe again in the Pajero. However, it wasn't until we had climbed up the dirt road to the Lollipop Roundabout that we felt we had arrived back in civilization. And that roundabout? That is obviously not the Roundabout-to-Nowhere--it is the Snake Wadi Roundabout. And I do not recommend a nighttime visit. Especially with Silas.

Legally Yours...

It is time to unburden my soul and divulge that until last week I had been driving illegally here. For two years.

It started innocently enough. Upon arrival in Oman two years ago, I heard the rumor that it was okay to drive on an American driver's license for two months before getting one's Omani license. However, if one were unfortunate enough to hold an Indian license or an Armenian license, or a license from any one of countless and seemingly arbitrary countries, one would not be able to drive on one's home country's license. But being American does have its advantages and so away I drove.

Two months passed, and it just seemed so inconvenient to go down the road and obtain that Omani driver's license. And so the months dribbled by and before I knew it, a whole year had passed. Then in our second year, the ROP went through a stage where it was pulling people over and checking for licenses. Friends of mine got pulled over while still holding their British or Canadian licenses and the cops simply waved them on, reminding them very kindly to go down and get their Omani licenses.

I heard these stories and very quickly rationalized that if the only punishment I would receive was a kind smile and a badly constructed, grammatically incorrect reminder to get my Omani license, then I would just continue to drive illegally.

But then my husband started to hound me and so, in a moment of absolute obsequiousness, I agreed to be dragged down to the licensing center for the grand event, along with three whining children, two passport photos, one crabby husband, and a slew of documents, photos, and payment options. This promised to be an event.

At first blush, the office itself rivaled any Department of Motor Vehicles in the US. It was populated by disgruntled workers dressed in uncomfortable-looking clothing who were being stared down by a room full of individuals whose behinds looked like they had become fused to the seats upon which they had been sitting for quite possibly three to four hours. And of course there was the universal "PING" of numbers changing to call up the next individual.

And right smack in the middle of the entrance way, positioned in such a way that there was no way to skirt around it, was the Number Desk, run by the Number Desk Dude. His job was to scrutinize anyone who walked through the door and then thrust a number at them. He took his job very seriously, scrutinizing everyone carefully before blessing them with a number. And I should know, because he scrutinized me four times while I was there, beginning with the moment we walked through the door.

 The Number Dude did not speak. He simply arched an eyebrow as if wondering why I had walked into the licensing issuing center. So I did not speak either. I simply thrust my American license at him. He scrutinized and then thrust a number at me and waved me toward the Ladies Only seating area. Because I am a lady. Shocking, I know.

My number came up almost immediately which was disconcerting because my support crew (i.e. Tony) had stepped out to take the leaky Churtle to the toilet and I was left to forge this first interaction alone, armed with nothing but two photocopies of my license, my residency card, and the original of my American license. I dragged my heals over to window 2. "Lessons?" murmured the Licensing Lady.

"Yes." I had had lessons in driving long ago. Yes seemed the right answer to this.

"No. Lessons?"

"Um..." Where was Tony? "American license?"

"Yes!" She smiled and took my license. Duh. License, not lessons. Next question. "Coffee?"

"Yes?" Wow. Omani DMVs offer coffee? Sweet!

"Yes." And with that she grabbed the two photocopies from my hand. Copy, not coffee. 0 for 2.

The Licensing Lady then requested money: "200 baisa."

200 baisa. That's 50 cents US, or therebouts. Hmmm...what could this be for? I sat and pondered a bit too long because she again demanded 200 baisa. Was this a low-level bribe? A coffee fee? Copy fee? I lamely started, "My husband took my daughter to the toilet and he has all the money so..." She glared and then made her request, "200 baisa," and then shooed me away.

When Tony returned from the toilet he tucked 200 baisa in my hand, which I handed over to the License Lady in exchange for a blue and white form in Arabic. "Great. Arabic?" She nodded. My bureaucratic Arabic is about as fluent as my Sanskrit. She waved me off again to negotiate a translation from an unsuspecting bystander, which Tony managed to do within two and a half minutes.

Form filled in, I took it for another scrutinization from the Number Desk Dude. The Arabic must have been arresting because the Number Desk Dude smiled slightly as he punched up another number for me and waved me again toward the Ladies Seating. Once again, my number pinged up quickly and it was back to the Licensing Lady.

She read the form with great interest until her friend Licensing Man came through the side door. He had a quick chat with her, which sent her into gales of laughter and caused her to lose her place on my application so she had to start all over again reading all the intimate details that the nice Bystander had written. When she flipped the application over, though, she grimaced, pointed at a flimsy door, and said, "Go."

So I went. Inside the door were two ROP cadets clad in tan and sitting at a heavy, metal, government-issue desk with hands crossed, staring at the door through which I had just walked. As I walked in, one clapped and jumped to his feet. He handed me an eye cover and went over to an eye chart, pointing eagerly with his pen. He pointed. I read. He pointed again. I misread. He pointed again. I misread again. I must be getting old, but that's okay because he must be getting deaf; he made a note on my chart indicating that my eyesight is perfect...a seven out of seven!

Now back for another number from the Number Desk Dude. At this point we were getting to be quite good friends and he hardly needed to scrutinize at all as I was a known quantity. He simply slid yet another number toward me after only a cursory glance at my application.

What luck, I got to visit with a different bureaucrat this time--Licensing Lady's friend Licensing Man! He took my photos, perused all of the information on my form once again, looked carefully at my American license, asked, "Coffee?" to which I responded, "Yes" without expecting a cup of joe this time, and swiped the credit card.

"Okay," he said, returning my credit card. "Sit." So I sat, but only after consulting Number Desk Dude once more. After a mere 45 minutes I was holding my brand new Omani license, still warm from the laminater, and with an expiration date exactly 12 years in the future.

While it did not come with coffee, and no lessons were required, acquisition of my license did force a new appreciation in me for being a member of the fairer sex. While I breezed through the process in just under an hour, the legion of men who were there when I came in were still there when I walked out. Perhaps they were just there to observe the amazing efficiency with which Number Desk Dude and his associates were working. Or perhaps they were there to catch a couple episodes of HGTV as it was being shown on the overhead screens. Whatever their reasons for their extended stay at the Licensing Department, I breezed by them very happily on the way out, excited to finally be legal.

I Don't Eat That

Silas has learned how to read labels and in that learning he has become, well, somewhat intolerable.

So we were starved creatures one day while we were in Virginia, having just finished an exhausting tramp through the local library. The cure is to get a snack, obviously. However, as quickly as I could put yummy snacks into the basket, Silas tore them out again.

"No, Mom, not this applesauce. I won't eat it."

"What? Okay. How bout some granola bars?"

"No."

"How about these nuts? Some juice? Crackers?"

"No, Mom. It all has high fructose corn syrup in it." He placed everything back on the shelf methodically but sternly, as if he were the newest Anti-Corn Syrup Enforcement unit. And finally, after nestling the last item--some lovely peaches in light syrup--back on the shelf, he gently sat down on the floor and buried his face in his hands. "I can't eat anything here!"

And he didn't. Somewhere along the way he blithely jumped onto the "I-don't-eat-high-fructose-corn-syrup" wagon and waved at us as it pulled away. I, however, was too busy doing something...something...who knows what. I never saw him make that jump until it was too late.

Our entire summer was spent with Silas sneakily reading labels and refusing the sweet stuff. At one point as he went whizzing down a gigantic hill in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, he yelled, "I don't like the United States for eating but I love it for the bike rides! Yahooooooooo!"

So now we have returned to Oman, where finding much of anything that contains high fructose corn syrup is a challenge, and the boy is like a starved dog outside of a sausage factory. He sucks the air up in great greedy gulps, dissecting the odors that are all around us. "Oooo...I can smell curry. Oh, is that adobo? Mmmmm...I smell someone cooking rotis."

The air is thick right now with the heat and humidity of the end of summer, but the ocean breezes are starting to give us an occasional cooling puff and carry the smell of food far from the place it is cooked. This morning, in the quiet just after fajr...the dawn prayer...I was wrapped in a blanket of ocean air and then the breeze shifted and I was surrounded by the aromas of what smelled like Filipino food--garlic, vinegar, soy sauce, coconut oil. If Silas had been out with me, he would have left a trail of drool back to the house.

And it smelled like breakfast. But not the kind with corn syrup in it, for that would make the boy child cry.

German Lessons

Germany is closed on Sundays. This is what you learn when you fly with a six-year-old tyrant who has an earache and needs a strong infusion of ibuprofen. Or an attitude adjustment.

Germany is also a place that makes nine-year-old boys giggle because innocuous German words look like naughty English ones.

To go to Germany as a non-German-speaking-mother-turned-tour-guide was, as a good friend suggested, possibly one of the oddest things I have ever done. The internet was loathe to give up its secrets regarding what a family could do in Germany, aside from drink beer and eat sausages. While Tian was extremely eager to undertake the drinking of beer if only to secure bragging rights, I was not so enthusiastic about the proposition. Imagine.

So at first blush Germany did not promise much in the way of a good time for my accompanying minors, but the stopover was courtesy of the Sultan so stop we did, and learn I did. But I didn't run into Yoda.

Not surprising, my children had an agenda upon touch-down in Franfort. Item number one on their list was pork sausage acquisition. Within Frankfort Airport, aside from a small city's worth of pharmacies, grocery stores, and bookstores, is a sausage store that serves up grilled tubes of meat at all hours of the day.

Having forgotten that much of the Western world thrives on astonishing serving sizes we each ordered a plate of sausages with french fries. We also forgot that pork takes some getting used to after 9 months away from the stuff. That is as far as Tian could get on her plate. Sad stuff, I know.

A train ride out of the airport propelled us into the countryside before we could say "Sparkasse", and landed us in Rothenburg ob der Tauber.

This was the most German town we four tourists had ever seen (outside of Germany at Busch Gardens Williamsburg) and we learned that it is the only town in Germany that has a chemist who is open on a Sunday and willing to sell painkillers for a six-year-old tyrant. We also learned the value of brushing teeth at least once in 24 hours, as well as what it takes to make three children look abandoned within the town square of any given European city. 

There is great value in sleeping on a stranger's floor, especially when that stranger also has a boy who loves to make fart noises and can play a mean game of war.

  This may have been the most powerful lesson that we learned in Germany, and the one I most want my children to take away from these years of being able to travel the world. Strangers are not strangers after just a few hours spent together. Imagine what would happen if we would require soldiers and generals from opposing sides of  any battle to have a sleepover. One evening spent making fart noises, running around in town, and eating spaghetti does so much to allow one person to know another.

We learned so much in Germany in 72 hours that our heads still spin with the experience, and when the once-stranger's mother and I mentioned that this arrangement we had undertaken--an American family sleeping peacefully on the floor of a German family--would not have been possible not so many decades ago, the children were baffled. Inconceivable. How could this not have been possible at any point in time? We had such fun.

And Germany does have a lot to do. Especially for families. Anybody up for a German excursion next summer?

Did You See That? Never Mind.

Seals. They lay around on flat surfaces. They make funny noises. And they must eat a lot judging from their size.

Silas. He lays around on flat surfaces. He makes funny noises. And he eats a lot. Obviously my son gives all signs and indications of being a seal. And yet recently he has begun to move away from sealdom and toward what may be a promising future in...noticing things. Sometimes. Okay, rarely. Maybe.

A few days ago, Tehva poured herself a bowl of Heart-to-Heart Kashi cereal. You know, the kind that resembles little hearts in structure and sweetened cardboard in taste and texture. As Tehva poured on the organic whole milk, rejoicing in her new found ability to fill a bowl to the rim without spilling a drop, tiny black bugs floated to the top.

"Ewwwww!" Tehva whined. "There are bugs in my cereal!" I gave Tehva a Tupperware and showed her how to skim the bugs off the surface and into the Tupperware so that she could chow down on a bug-free breakfast. (Of course she ate it! That was organic milk and that stuff ain't cheap!) Silas silently looked on and then uttered a single syllable: "Ew." See? He noticed!

And then we visited Jamestown National Park, nestled along the James River. We were all peering intently at an archaeologist screening dirt in order to find tiny bits, heads bent in concentration, knotted tightly in a group of tourists, when suddenly Silas screamed, "Whoa! Mom! Look!" Everyone paused and did a collective readjustment, squinting or bowing heads to look more closely at the dirt in front of us. "Look! A cargo ship! On the river!" What an observant boy.

And then there was the top of the hour news stories that we were listening to on NPR the other day. After the five minutes of talk about Syria, Israel, Palestine, Afghanistan, and American troops, Silas sighed. "Why is this always about war?" Wow. He noticed and judging from his use of the word "always" he has noticed this trend before. I was nearly dancing in the driver's seat.

A Google search on "observation skills in boys" yields nearly one and a half million hits, so obviously someone other than Silas has issues with this. The first thought that comes to mind when I consider his inability to see any further in front of him than a video game at arm's length is to Google, "Ways to improve observational skills in boys." All of the solutions that surface are decidedly feminine and include sketching flowers, writing journals, and staring for long periods at photos of random individuals doing odd things like wearing umbrellas on their heads (my apologies to you men out there who enjoy such activities...I didn't say you were feminine...please keep your head. Er, heads?). And Silas is so not into any of those things.

My intention by doing this search, of course, was to find a way to incorporate observational skill development into this year's curriculum along with the thousand other things we all hope to incorporate in the school day. However, this past year I came to realize that in my little homeschool there is not enough time for everything I (or they) want to study, and that even if we really really want to study something, most days we are mentally finished by 2 p.m. And that's on a good day.

And so if anyone out there has any ideas about ways to develop observation skills in boys that don't involve flowers, sketching, writing long entries in journals, or bizarre photos, please let me know.

Fahal Island Swim Complete

Swimming is hard work and my body is not designed for it. Period. Or, as Tehva now likes to say, "Full stop." But, in the name of non-aerodynamic people everywhere, I decided to give this Fahal Island thing a go.

In the weeks leading up to the actual swim, info leaked down the chain to reach me and said information would either paralyze me with fear or lend a brief respite from the nerves: "My friend Mohammed says that he was fishing at Fahal Island last weekend and the waters were teeming with bull sharks!" This riveting story falls into the paralyzing category--bull sharks are known as vicious long-distance swimmer consumers, at least in my imagination.

"My friend Adel was out fishing near Fahal Island last weekend and he said the waters were full of jellyfish!" This allayed my nerves because I figured that bull sharks must hate jellyfish as much as I do and, thus, they would stay away.

"A few years back they cancelled the Fahal Island Swim because of ..." fill in the blank with a.) red tides; b.) choppy seas; c.) bull shark invasions. In fact, two days before the swim the sky over Muscat looked like this:

 and I thought, "Oooo, with those clouds I bet the seas around Fahal Island will be rough on Thursday. Maybe it will even be cancelled!" And yet Thursday dawned and the sea was like glass--somewhat choppy glass. Okay, it looked glassish between the teeny-tiny waves.

But there were no bull sharks evident and so I donned my highly attractive red swim cap and into the water I went,

along with 87 of my closest friends, only one of whom saw a shark. Kathy very wisely kept her mouth closed regarding the shark which, she later said, looked very confused about the sudden and unexpected presence of 5 power boats, 70 kayaks, one stand and paddle board, one canoe, and 88 humans 4 kilometers offshore. See the one with the goggles and red swim cap? That's Marlee, our "trainer". See the other one with the red swim cap and goggles? That's Nick. He backstroked the whole 4 km!

The Fahal Island Swim is a BYOKayak event (old lady sunglasses not required) and so I brought my own. Isn't he cute? If this were an endurance event in the USA, I would suspect that the requirement of a support boat was an avoiding-litigation thing. In Oman, I would suspect it has something more to do with safety, shipping lanes, and potential bull sharks. At any rate, finding my support kayak in the midst of the other 160 bobbing beings proved to be less of a challenge than I had been warned, mostly because no one else's kayaker was wearing granny glasses.

The swim, once it began, felt easy and smooth. The water was a perfect temperature. The "smell bands" that sometimes permeate the waters off the coast of Oman were absent that far out. Instead, my nose was filled with off-gassing from the brand new red swim cap I was wearing (required by the FIS organizers), the fumes from the support boat that was supporting two nearby swimmers, and the sudden need to vomit that overtook me about a kilometer into the swim.

I will spare you the gory details but simply add that it is possible to vomit in the sea and not drown while expelling one's...you get the picture, even though my kayaker didn't. Instead of photographing the vomit incident, he reportedly was waiting for me to drown and, at the same time, considering jumping to my rescue. This, however, would have endangered his old lady glasses and so he remained safely within his kayak.

Two hours on and I discovered that my plan to swim the right way had resulted in actually swimming the wrong way. In this photo you can see the point toward which I was told repeatedly NOT to swim.  But not to worry, it ended being a very scenic point to tootle around, and harbored all sorts of reef fish and a black and white speckled manta ray. 

Out of the water at 2 hours and 19 minutes. I finished in the bottom ten percent of the pack but I finished! No bull sharks sited.

Omanization

This country is going through the sometimes painful process of Omanization, and I have realized this because our toilets stink.

Now that the temperature of our tap water hovers at a steady 120 degrees F, the bacteria have taken over and the stink seems here to stay. On top of that, one of the pipes that connects the toilet to the wall (and ostensibly the plumbing system behind the wall) has begun leaking, leaving a sludgy puddle on the floor, and the shower plunger no longer works on the garden tub in the master suite.

As we are merely squatters here, we do not have to deal with these problems directly. Instead we can call the landlord, who is actually a very attentive guy, but who is not so talented with plumbing.

The landlord's solution to the toilet leak and chronic puddling was to come up, pinch the pipe a few times, and advise that we begin to turn off the water supply to the toilet tank when it is not needed, which means that the toilet doesn't get flushed as regularly as it used to, and that leads to more stink.

More stink led us to our friendly neighborhood Carrefour for more toilet cleaner, which we go through at a frightening pace. In the States in our little three bedroom rancher with one bathroom, we went through one bottle a year. Here we have gone through approximately 143 bottles since our arrival in Oman nearly two years ago.

So we were prowling through the aisles of Carrefour, sniffing the different toilet cleaner flavors when we drifted around the corner to the sugar aisle and found ourselves face-to-face with what looked a heck of a lot like a fellow American. "Are you British?" she asked in a lovely Mid-Western accent. "Because I just heard you say the word 'sugar' and you sound like you are British (can you really tell that from just the word 'sugar'?--apparently not) and I really need someone to tell me about all these different British sugars..."

We then stood for ten minutes, as one will, chatting about sugar crystals; however, eventually the conversation ambled, as it will in countries where a certain percentage of the population makes way too much money, to hiring a reliable driver here. She recounted her trials with her current-but-soon-to-be-fired Omani driver who spent the majority of his time fiddling with the automatic locks in the car, and his absolute inability to open the door for her or to accept the wages she offers. She finally threw her hands up and swore that she would next hire an Indian. They, after all, will open the door for an employer and happily accept those wages. And I guess they can keep their fingers off of the auto-lock button.

This begs the question, how much should one pay a driver who is on duty just until 2 p.m. and is only accountable for driving one expat oil worker's wife to the gym, social engagements, and the mall each day? Apparently not as much as the Omanis are asking.

Back to the house and fast forward four weeks, which brings us to today. A person who knows about plumbing is in the bathroom fiddling with the pipes and apparently having some success. He is not Omani, naturally. I have just returned from another ordeal at the grocery store, where the executives in charge of decision-making cannot decide whether they want to employ Omanis who are generally nightmarish at the registers but are, in the end, Omani, or they want to employ Filipinos, who are lovely and efficient at the registers but are decidedly NOT Omani.

Last week my checkout girl was Filipino. She did all the things we Americans like: she smiled and greeted me before she started scanning everything. She didn't stop to examine her nails half way through the job. She   didn't stop at any point to chat amicably with her BFF who just happened to wander up. She very ably scanned everything on the belt and did not bark at me to slide my own bag of flour/6-pack of sodas/insert- any-item-weighing-over-2-pounds here.

Today my checkout girl was Omani. It pained me to watch her scan my order, mostly because, before she scanned anything, she first asked me in Arabic, "Is this yours?" Then, in spite of my answer to the affirmative regarding the case of water, she refused to scan it as it was too big and heavy for her to move along the belt. Instead she told the man standing behind me to pick it up and hand it to me. I frankly am not sure if it ever got scanned. Such is the price of Omanization.

This is such a trigger topic and everyone here has an opinion. Of course it is necessary to have a population that is trained to take care of itself, even in the most rudimentary ways. The gas money will not last forever and, when it is gone, it will be up to the Omanis to fix their own toilets, scan their own groceries, sweep their own streets, flip their own burgers, repair their own cars, do their own ironing, clean their own houses, and raise their own children.

And yet, as we are witnessing here, these jobs make for dirty dishdashas and broken fingernails and as of right now no one in a white dishdasha or with a nice manicure seems to want to do them, which makes for lots of jobs for the rest of us. But only until the petroleum money is gone or until there is another political swing and it is decided once again to strictly enforce the employment of Omanis in jobs which they clearly don't want to do.

Long live Omanization. It makes for good entertainment at the very least.

Fahal Island Swim--No Sharks Allowed

Driving north to reach the beach is contradictory to an East Coast gal like myself. For the entirety of my growing up it was east to the beach with the sun rising over the Atlantic. Now, and I still can't get my head around this one, the beach is solidly situated to the north. Even writing this I struggle with the ocean being in the wrong place, but I am trying to move on. This may take counseling.

This impacts my thinking directly every Thursday morning as I pull myself out of bed at a ridiculously early hour and head north to the ocean. Although we are just mid-way through April, the sun has gone from friendly and warming to intense and blistering in what se

ems just a handful of days and, for as early as it is, it is just peaking over the buildings around our house--to the east, but not over the ocean. This feels wrong.

The drive to the Rat Beach (child-named for the gigantic rats that inhabit the riprap there) takes me east then north then east and finally north again. Always waiting there on a Thursday morning is what I could refer to as my "training group" but that would intimate that we are fit individuals and strong swimmers with rapidly improving times. In fact, taken as a group, we are all of those things, but individually none of us has managed to be all three of those things. However, in spite of our individual limitations, we are "in training" for this:

Fahal Island/Shark Island

It has been commanding my attention for almost two years, sitting temptingly off the beach in Qurm and, what luck, it plays host to an annual swim every spring. In spite of appearances, it is nestled 4 km offshore and my "training group" has determined that we will, in fact, be participating this spring because that is, apparently, the cool thing to do during the month of May.

Thus, as it has been decreed by the most senior members of our group, and as we have evolved into a tribal little group, in five weeks we will be swimming, at 6:30 in the morning, from Fahal Island to Qurm, along with 100 other individuals. It is said that some of those swimmers will take just under an hour to complete the distance. Unreal.

I am hoping to just complete the swim without being bitten by a sea snake or eaten by a shark, although that would make a good blog, wouldn't it?

School Photos

Teaching. It isn't the job it once was--0ne that came with a long-term pay off in the form of a guarantee of job security and a generous pension. As we were leaving Greensville there were daily reminders as to how the state of education was changing, with talk of reduced or cancelled pensions. The spring was lay-off season for the next school year. With each day leading up to the inevitable announcement of job cuts, the school felt more and more like a shark tank...the questions was always one of "Who will get eaten next?"

I felt like I was teaching constantly, which was ironic since my job was often one of support instead of one of pure instruction. When I wasn't teaching, I was running recovery for some crisis or another with a student (referred to as "putting out fires"). And when that wasn't happening, I was planning for what I would teach next. And when I wasn't doing either of those things I was recovering from teaching and putting out "fires". I liked the work and loved the students, but I found in the day to day schedule that I felt I wasn't really teaching much, and in the three seconds a day that I had free I would reflect upon the questions of "what is learning?" and "what does it mean to be educated?" and "why are we doing this anyhow?"

And then some other student would show up, a teacher would call, or a crisis would brew. And those questions would be set once again upon the back burner in favor of the more immediate need to respond to a parent who was looking for a translation, or to feed a child who hadn't eaten since the day before, or to help someone pass a benchmark test or a quiz, and there would be no more time to think upon such things as "why are we doing this anyhow?"

It took me months to rehabilitate myself after four years of the exhausting teach/extinguish-->plan-->recover-->teach/extinguish-->plan-->recover cycle. In retrospect, the absence of time to reflect upon why I was investing so many hours a week in something that didn't clearly justify such immense and intense energy was sapping. However, just this year, I am feeling like I have recovered enough to start to reflect on the whys of education again. This, of course, brings me no closer to an answer but at the very least I am feeling like I have the clarity of thought to entertain these questions once again, and that clarity of thought is affording a bit more freedom to move beyond pencil paper and look at the possibility of education away from what is conventionally thought of as education.

Last month we did the unthinkable and took a whole day off from school to travel to Nizwa, about an hour away, and study things unrelated to our regular course of study. We looked at dungeon designs and torture techniques in the historic Nizwa Fort.

We studied cultural differences in non-verbal communication and toilet signage.

We looked at big rocks and then climbed up and down them.

We studied armory and battle techniques.


And we practiced looking like punks in photos. It was quite the day.

The forced me to reflect back upon the last time I traveled anywhere with a large group of school-aged children, since we had traveled to get where we were, and all 11 of the kids were definitely of school age. I was teaching in Greensville and we had taken the entire second grade on the annual voyage to North Carolina to visit a life sciences museum. The museum itself went down a treat but two of the buses inexplicably broke down an hour from the Virginia border on the way back.


All 240 students were wonderfully patient and, even though countless baseball games, scout meetings, and church functions were missed, everyone was understanding. The museum was great fun, of course, and properly aligned to our science standards for the year. The kids were threatened within inches of their lives that they must behave properly in this public place and they behaved accordingly. It was a really nice field trip and went off without a hitch--more or less.


Now fast forward two years to the trip to Nizwa. It was totally unaligned with any suggestion of a standard that I might have been following. The kids ran and screamed like banshees through the dungeons, which were a health and safety nightmare with no lighting, extremely uneven flooring, and thick authentic chains hanging from the walls. There were no guard rails on the stairs but we managed to not lose a single attendee.


Tehva found the historically accurate toilets and went so far as to pull her pants down before I could stop her. No one read many of the well-written informational plaques. Many of the children nearly wet themselves with fright after they stepped on a motion sensor and triggered a recording of bomb blasts, meant to simulate this passage during a battle. No one signed a permission slip.


My teacher brain kept muttering that this was quite possibly the worst field trip I had ever coordinated, simply because there were no standards, no outcome goals, and no clear way to define what the kids had learned.


And yet, this is the trip they keep coming back to day after day in school on their own, without my prompting. They have painted pictures of the mountains surrounding Nizwa. Silas wrote a fictionalized account about a battle fought in nearby Tanuf after we visited the remains of the mud village there. They look at the photos and laugh at how goofy they are. They have looked on the internet for additional information about the "murder holes" we saw built into the side of Nizwa Fort, from which defending troops would dump boiling date syrup on intruders.


And throughout this spring I keep asking myself about the nature of learning and what it means to be educated, simply because we have done more of these types of trips this year and less of the worksheets and book work with which I had become more comfortable while in Greensville. I am sure that the quality of the education they are getting is enough, but does it allow for enough quantity? Muscat is a competitive place for quantity of educational input and, in comparison to the ones going to the gold standard schools here, I question what I am doing.


Many of the children around us attend the Choiefat School, which is known as "the test factory"--kids are hit with several tests every week. Their job is to study study study and then score high on these exams. Failure brings instant remediation classes. Others attending the Indian School here memorize large portions of text to prove their academic acumen. We do none of that (although Tehva has inadvertently memorized long sections of The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere this week) and sometimes I feel bad as a result. In comparison, what I am doing seems not enough, especially when we go joy riding off to Nizwa or other surrounds on a fairly regular basis.


At the end of each day I ask myself, after reflecting on the lessons du jour, "Did we do enough paper-pencil work today? Hmmm...not sure. We did do a bit away from the school room today. Hmmm...Maybe tomorrow we should really sit down and write for six hours straight. Does it really matter, when 13 years of primary and secondary education are done, whether one has been outside of a school building? Does it matter whether or not school has been undertaken as a paper-pencil experience rather than a hands-on one? What to do...what to do?"


The general feedback I get from people in reaction to hearing about these types of experiences we have undertaken in school this year is, "Wow...that is an amazing education those kids are getting!" Many of these people are other parents who say they wish their child was getting such a rich and varied education. And yet I wonder, what kind of education is it that they are getting? Yes, others are exuberant about what we are doing, and yet it often still feels like I am jumping off of a precipice when it comes to actually doing these things.


In the end, because I lack the enormous fortune it would take to enroll three children in the English-medium schools here (does anyone have a spare $60,000 to $70,000 just sitting around that they would like to roll my way?), this experiment in education will continue as, quite likely, will my anxiety level. Stay tuned.

Holidays...I Mean Vacation

Time trickles by...like sands through an hour glass...so are the days of our lives...when there is a sandstorm...or we go outside...or we go camping...or we even look at our front door. Sands in an hour glass. And on the front stoop. And in the hallway. And even on the inside staircase. Sand and sand and sand. And it doesn't even have the decency to be proper desert sand. Instead it's dusty, gritty, fine stuff that you see best when the light shines just so...and it all seems to shine just so.

Ah, but back to where I started, which was in a pensive sort of place. Our second year is nearly up here and we will soon be returning to the States for our annual Sultan-sponsored respite in our legal place of residence. Thanks to continuing Omanization at the university's administrative level (and if you can see the relationship between Omanization and the following statement then you get a prize), our previously enjoyed Sultan-sponsored stopover in the European capital of our choice is no longer Sultan sponsored. Sigh.

The other expats we know here are a philosophical bunch who enjoy giving their two cents, as do we all, and have lately been warning of a coming shift in our thinking regarding the States. They pontificate upon the something-something that occurs during the third contract year. "You will go home and stay home for as long as you can in the first two summers and then, after that, you might go for a couple of weeks...three tops."

This is the crowd made up of individuals who, during their first two years here, purchased a little place in Cypress or an old farmhouse in southern France and, once they retire from life in Muscat, will move there. They have the sweet furniture collected over years of travel in Asia, and awe-inspiring wall hangings, instead of the press board furniture given by the university, and the blank walls we sport. They have stories of wild adventures gathered throughout their lives of expatness, and a laundry list of other countries in which they have lived. They are the crew who jumped on this teaching abroad boat back when no one did it. They are largely childless and terribly adult. In short, they are not us.

We look at our rotten snot-nosed kids and wonder how we could NOT return to the States every summer for as long as possible. Muscat is very kind to them in so many ways. This year they have developed new social connections, taken up music, studied art, been entrenched in a weekly drama class, and raised a cat and tadpoles to adulthood. They have decorated our press board home with dozens of canvases of all sorts of artistic interpretations. They have become adept climbers and hikers, swimmers, and explorers. While they have become all of these things within a very friendly and supportive foreign country, in just as many ways they need to maintain their connection with their home country and to do what is purely American, at least for a few months.

Curiously, this year has brought them into a study of the American Revolution and the events leading up to and immediately following it. Our tag-along students who are not of the American persuasion our fascinated by the story that unravels at the hands of our history book one battle and famous colonial at a time. However, my little Americans do not seem equally fascinated. Silas will jolt and squeal when he hears a place name he knows but that is the most they give.

As a matter of fact, while Hamid wants to examine the American climb to independence and world dominance with an eerily despotic inquisitiveness, and Alfie wants to role play George Washington's every move, the American crowd hangs back with, at best, an aloof detachment. What do they want to know? "So what was England doing at this time?"

Yes, they continue along that slippery slope of Britishness and I feel hopeless most days to stop them. Tian returns from weekend play dates with a marked change in her vocabulary and phraseology. She has ceased using the words "kind of" or "very" in general parlance and now opts for "a bit" or "quite" instead. Tehva describes things as "horrid" and pronounces the word "bottom" with a strong "t" instead of using the good American "d" as in, "My goodness your bott(strong T)om looks big in those trousers." They are small changes, and amusing ones. Changes are to be expected of course. But balance is important, and balancing out 9 months here with three months there is barely a balance at all.

In light of this, we will continue with the Sultan-sponsored extended holiday time. I mean vacation.

Footie With the Girlies

Evenings here as of late are cool, bordering on downright chilly when the breezes whip just right off the ocean. It is just the right sort of weather for a sweaty game of soccer. The problem up until a few weeks ago, though, was that I did not have anyone to play with. The only ones ever on the pitch have too much equipment (if you catch my drift) and women just do NOT play with men here. Even the thought of such a proposition would give men the willies to such an extent that they would trip over their soccer cleats and that would be the end of the game.

However, a few weeks ago one enterprising woman decided that she would try and see just how many women were interested in a girls-only round of soccer, and it turned out that a lot were. So, on Sunday and Friday evenings the soccer pitch is strictly NO BOYS ALLOWED, and thus has begun my education on Arabic women and "football".

Learning Point #1: Abaya-clad women make really good goalies. Most of Da Girls get to the pitch and throw off their head scarves, shed their abayas, and jump onto the pitch ready to roll. However, there is a tiny minority that insists on playing covered and NOTHING gets past them when they are in the goal. As an additional bonus, it is easy to discriminate between fielders and goalies when the goalie is wrapped in black.

Learning Point #2: Everything is negotiable in soccer, even the ref's calls. These women do not argue calls...they negotiate them, asking the ref for some give, then asking the other team for some give, and then, after everyone has had a chance to catch their breath, play resumes without a change in the original call.

Learning Point #3: "Hustle your butt" sounds the same in Arabic as it does in English. That's not to say it is a cognate, but when Soccer Momma is screaming, "Eem-shee! Eem-shee!" you know what she is saying.

Learning Point #4: When a player comes late to the field, all play must stop so that she can go around and kiss everyone hello, check in (Sa-va?), and adjust her headscarf. This routine must be immeasurably important because everyone comes late, everyone goes through it, and everyone is willing to wait through it for every single woman who enters the field.

Learning Point #5: Goals or exceptional plays call for field-wide celebrations. The opposing team gets just as goofy, giggly, and clappy over a goal as the team that scored it.

Learning Point #6: In spite of the way this sounds in the points above, these women play for blood. Thus far I have suffered violent bruises and scratched arms, Tian has been run over and tripped, and another woman recently broke her foot during a game. Funnily enough, fouls are rarely called as there seems to be a concensus that a little violence makes for an interesting game.

Footie with women--what better way to spend your evenings in Oman?