Soccer Chicas

Last month, just before leaving Oman, I witnessed a group of girls discussing a bizarre phenomenon. It was odd really and the girls could not get their heads around it. They had observed that all of the non-Omani women they had met that summer were good at sports. The Omani women, in contrast, with the exception of a tiny handful, were just awful at anything having to do with a racket, a ball, or a bat of some sort. Even moving faster than a slow stroll was too much to ask for some. The girls were puzzled.

As they sat and conversed about how strange this was and pondered how this could be, they asked one another, “What strange forces are at work?” (Okay, they didn’t say exactly that, but you get the idea).

“I have heard,” one of the girls suggested, “That Omani women are just more delicate.”

All of the girls nodded their heads. “It is the heat,” another replied.

And then they all sat and nodded their heads some more. End of conversation. Yes. It is the heat and the delicacy of that nationality. That was their end conclusion.

I watched them and was also completely flabbergasted. But I was thinking about how strange this conversation was and, further, that they had drawn upon this conclusion so automatically and without any sort of apparent demonstration of critical thought upon the matter.

In spite of images like this--

Thanks to www.sail-world.com for the image of the
Oman Sails All Women Team at work.

And this from the 2014 Olympics

Shinoonah Salah Al Habsi (in the middle) in the Summer Olympics, rockin'
the Daily Mail. I hope Reuters doesn't mind that I borrowed the image.

And the others you get to see if you do a search on "Omani women sport image", the girls (or at least the ones I talked to) don't see themselves as people who need to be or even can be physically active.

Fast forward a month and here I am in the good ol' US of A. Tian must have been feeling lonely for some mom time as now I see her for all of two hours each day. She invited me to come to one of her soccer games. Wow. I must be the coolest mom in the world if my teenager wants me to come watch her do anything.

Because I was totally flattered to be invited to a middle school sporting event and because I am only minimally employed (okay, I am pretty much totally unemployed), I said that I would come and watch her team play. 

It was amazing.

This is what girls look like in America when they grow up with the expectation that they will move their bodies.

Look! There is Tian at the end of the bench! Go Tian!

They end up taking it for granted that they are supposed to move their bodies, and they just do it. They play like little soccer demons every day of the week and go to bed wondering what they will do with themselves after soccer season is over at the end of September because they love playing the sport so much. And then they hear that there is an indoor winter soccer league and subsequently quit whining at their mothers all the time.

After my month-ago-conversation, I am eternally grateful for the belief that girls can and should play sports here.

And so is Tehva.

Date me, Baby...It's Fast Breaking Time

The weirdest potluck that I have ever been to started like this:

We all gathered in a gigantic circle of the grassy lawn in front of the host’s home, cradling our dishes that we had brought. Then the introductions began, innocently enough at first:

“Hi, my name is Raven.”

“Hi, Raven.” (Yes, it felt a bit AA, but in fact it was just New England hippy).

\

“To share with all of you tonight, I have brought a potato salad.”

Oh, that’s nice, I thought. I’d never been to a potluck where we identified our food before people started to eat it but it was New England. Here’s where it gets weird. “My salad contains potatoes, so if you’re allergic, don’t eat it. Oh, and it has mayonnaise which is soy-based, so if you have an intolerance, don’t eat it. And I put onions in it. And salt.”

My thought: people have potato allergies? And who DOESN'T know that potato salad has potatoes in it?

At Southern pot lucks we always just plunk our dishes on the long table with the crepe-papery covering in the social hall and maintain a quiet vigilance over whatever we’ve brought. It’s a matter of church lady pride to see your mac-n-burger casserole go first and then hear the Preacher call out, “Now who brought that mac-n-burger? That was delicious!” The anonymity is a sacred Southern ritual within the potluck itself.

But back to New England and on to the next person in the circle. “Hi, my name is Ocean Leaf Lovesalot.”

“Hi, Ocean Leaf Lovesalot.”

“I brought a roast chicken that I raised myself on organic, vegetarian feed, but if you are vegetarian, you should not eat it. I seasoned it with salt and pepper and garlic.”

From the crowd comes, “Now, Ocean Leaf, did you use ethically raised garlic this time?”

“Oh…oh…I’m sorry. The co-op was out. It's conventionally raised...”

"Oh darn. No chicken for me tonight."

And on we went around the circle with each person warning us of gluten, dairy, soy, sugar, seeds, garlic, spice, gelatin, honey, nuts, and non-vegetarian-compliant foods. I was half starved by the time we were allowed to eat, so I ate a bit of everything, but not before others went through the line, discussing their limitations as they went.

“I’m not eating gluten now. I really feel like I have so much more energy these days.”

“Oh, yes, I also am gluten free. And I have read about soy and its hormone level link so I have cut out soy. My moods feel so much more stable.”

It was something akin to miraculous that this gathering had gotten off the ground at all because how do you throw a New England hippy party for a largely vegetarian crowd with a high incidence of Celiac’s disease that will not eat anything processed or containing sugar or dairy? Or that is unethically raised?

This all comes to mind because it is Ramadan. As I write this, we have just finished up the second week and are into the third. While I thought in the first week about getting arrested, in the second week I have thought a lot about food because, in spite of Ramadan being a fasting period, this month is still very much about food. But it is about what we eat, but it is also about when we eat and how.

Ramadan’s fast exists in part to encourage patience, purity and modesty. It also serves to heighten people’s awareness of the plight of the poor. By forgoing food and water from sun up to sun down, the feeling of desperate wondering about the timing of one’s next meal should trigger a feeling of empathy for those who go without every day. In that way, people will give more freely to charity in order to support those less fortunate while developing patience, purity, modesty, and a closer connection to God.

At least that’s what Nasser told me.

And yes, I have seen people giving to the poor in the streets, as well as free meals distributed in the evenings by mosques throughout Muscat, so it does work. But more interesting to me has been to watch how people eat at Ramadan.

Iftar, the evening meal that breaks your day’s fast, begins at 7:03 p.m. but in actuality, even if you are eating your iftar at a restaurant, it starts earlier. We attended iftar recently and found that it involved a lot of staring at plates of food between 6:40 and 7:03 p.m. Everyone arrived at the restaurant a good 30 minutes before the maghrib prayer call sounded in order to secure a table. A miniature table off to the side was loaded with dates, yoghurt drinks, juices, water, and fried tidbits like eggrolls and samosa.

Everyone took a small plate of these things and placed it at their seats. Then they all went back and loaded up plates of dinnery foods so as to be ready when the maghrib went—chicken, rice, mutton, dal and salads all featured heavily at all three iftars we attended. And nobody said anything about allergies or ethics. Imagine.

 After all drinks were arranged neatly and the dates were in the optimal position, everyone commenced with the sitting and staring portion of the evening, except for Tehva and the other under 10s. They all quietly snitched little pinches of food and sipped from the tops of their cups while asking frequently about the time.

And then the moment of release—the prayer call. With the first Allah akbar, everyone silently picked up a date and broke their fast. After a slug of yoghurt drink and an egg roll or two, many men got up to go pray, and then returned to the table to join their families in seriously breaking the fast, shoveling in the chow as quickly as possible in order to go back for more. And, for some, this was followed by more. And more. And more. And all the while, the eating was accompanied by happy chitchat and some serious gustatory appreciation.

The iftar lasts as long as people care to eat and then the good times begin, lasting until the pre-dawn meal, the suhoor, which is hearty and meant to carry you through the day until your next iftar.   

In this context, the dietary restrictions of that potluck of yore seem vapid and superficial. At Ramadan, everyone is so happy to break the fast and so prayerful as they proceed through the process of fast breaking that you can’t help but pick up a date and joyfully join in. To speak up at the serving table and question whether something has garlic or gluten or dairy would be to break the spirit of iftar. The whole idea, I think, is to have an enlarged sense of God’s bounty and the patience to wait to enjoy it.

And that is something to take to your next hippy potluck--a big dish of potato salad, a part of God's bounty, made with immense patience, and sprinkled with gratefulness and happiness just to be eating.

Ramadan Week One

I received this message via email a week ago:

“Beware those of you who will stay in Oman for Ramadan. If you are a woman, you must cover everything, from your ankles to your wrists, or risk flogging. DO NOT eat or drink in public at any time or you will be arrested.”

Yikes.

So naturally, with this type of fear mongering crowding my inbox, I was very eager to see what Ramadan would be like here. Based on the above message, my neurotic side, developed carefully and over many years through such venerable news outlets as CNN and FoxNews, was expecting a month of surreptitious sustenance seeking and sweatiness. The rest of me couldn't wait to see what would happen next. So here is what did happen.

In the expat community, the days leading up to Ramadan felt like an enormous hurricane churning off of the American East Coast. The dread amongst some was nearly palatable. Would we lose power? Would groceries be available? Would restaurants ever be open? OMG…would the windows break? What if I were to have my car break down? Or have a medical emergency? How earth shaking would this all be?

In fact, the days leading up to Ramadan in the local community were matter of fact. The landlord finally harvested the dates that have been ripening on the palm trees out front. Paper suddenly appeared over the windows and doors of food outlets that would stay open during the month. People started buying enormous quantities of yogurt drink. Pretty mundane stuff. None of it suggested impending imprisonment.

The night before day 1, we went out to do a bit of grocery shopping since rumors abounded as to when food and grocery outlets would not be open during the holy month. Imagine Black Friday bundled with the crowds that come out for the returns and sales of Boxing Day/December 26. Then infuse the situation with the panic of the approach of a major blizzard and mix in some uppers for good measure. 

That was pre-Ramadan shopping. To say the shops bustled would be an understatement. They nearly burst with the pre-Ramadan shopping.

So you're probably thinking that this was in the busy part of the store?
No, it was just the store. The whole store. Wall to wall people.

And everyone was buying like crazy. Of course there were dates (you need dates to break the fast at sundown), but there were also piles and piles of frozen chickens. People were walking off with two and three 25-kilo bags of rice. Fruit and veggies galore. I was endlessly impressed. 

But the the next day the unthinkable happened. I realized that I was out of vinegar and would have to go back to the store during Ramadan. I feared for my liberty. After all, that email had said! Remember? No ankles, no wrists, no food. Whatever would I do? 

I grabbed my camera of course! And here is what met me at 1:00 p.m.

It was like the zombie apocalypse had hit the mall and left me behind as the sole survivor. Of course the utter lack of people allowed me to see all sorts of decorations that were up for Ramadan all over the mall. 

The toy store had this promotion going on. 

Marks and Spencer had beautiful Arabic script painted across their windows, wishing me a "Generous Ramadan". 

Without three bazillion people at the mall with me, I could see all of this. And I could also see that no one was out to arrest me. In fact, during the first week of Ramadan I have been most impressed with how calm and quiet everything is. People are keeping their energy levels very low and are making extra efforts to avoid anything that requires putting out any extra effort beyond praying, fasting, and breathing. Perfect serenity.

I like it. But I still have all of my joints covered all of the time, even if the mannequins don't. More to report next week, at the end of week two of Ramadan.

Shipping Cats from Oman to the USA--Step 3

Step 3 is involving getting the cats booked on an airline. Let me tell you, getting a straight answer out of the airlines regarding whether or not they ship cats as hand luggage, checked luggage, or manifest cargo only is like trying to get a cat to roll over and play dead on command.

Our first forays into this part of cat export were ridiculous. Etihad and British Air both swear up and down on their websites that they love animals and take the greatest care in shipping them, but when push comes to shove they really want nothing to do with the family pet. Or at least that has been our experience.

And since we are flying those airlines, that is where we put our initial forays into information gathering. Etihad's pet representative hung up on us after spitting, "NO! NO PETS!"

British Air gave a long convoluted answer, the end of which was, "Even though we representatives sound like we are British, and even though your ticket says you are flying British Air, you are actually flying American Airlines. And they don't fly pets through London. Have a lovely day."

And how can you be angry at someone who wishes you a lovely anything?

After much pursuing, calling, and actively seeking answers, we have discovered that in our haste to leave Muscat at the end of the summer, we booked ourselves on the wrong airlines.

KLM and Lufthansa are the way to go when it comes to flying with cats. Anybody else is not.

So since Etihad and BA/AA apparently hate us because we have cats and want to take them when we go, we had to go outside our booked routes to find someone who will ship our cats as manifest cargo.

Cost: Just the cost of sitting on hold on the phone, only to be snapped at. Let's call it 2 OMR, because it never took anyone too long to say NO CATS.

Hassles?: Yes. See above.

What to expect?: Expect to have to do a lot of leg work to get answers. Or just let it go and book Lufthansa or KLM.

Timeline: 2.5 months prior to departure

Shipping Cats from Oman to the USA--Step 1

You know what just ain't out there? Information about shipping cats from Oman to the USA. So you know what I am going to do for you all? I am going to track this venture from point A to point Z for you.

Step one 
The export process began with getting the felines checked over and immunized, which we should have been keeping up on more thoroughly but weren't. They needed a valid rabies shot to get in, and we opted for feline leukemia as well, just so that they would be shipshape.

Since the cats involved are one-step-removed-from-being-wild-bin-diving wadi cats, they had to be sedated throughout this process because the whole wrapping them in towels and speaking soothingly to them thing just wasn't cutting it. The sedation, which I highly recommend for difficult to handle animals and small children, seemed to get wrapped into the cost somehow--one of the miracles of modern veterinary medicine in Muscat.

Arm ripper # 1--Harry

Cost: 80 OMR/cat, including a quick physical, a blood test, deworming pills, rabies immunization, feline leukemia/HIV immunization, sedation, and the individual attention from a vet for 45 minutes. And we got some new nifty stickers in their record books.

Hassles?: None. The vet was very clear and helpful with all parts of the immunization process, even calmly explaining that, although both cats looked dead after he had sedated them, I should not get my hopes up (he didn't say that really, but I said it to myself...yes, bad, I know).

What to expect?: Going to the USA, expect to have the vet react with relief. Shipping cats to the US is reported to be a streamlined experience. Here's to hoping.

Timeline: 3 months prior to departure

The Star Party

“Do you have a GPS?” asks Srey as she climbs into the car.

“No, you are it.”

“Oh, well do you know where you are going?” Srey asks.

“No, but you do…don’t you?”

Srey pulls the door shut and nods authoritatively. “It is easy to get there.” Srey doesn't mince words when it comes to adventure. So off we go, me hoping that it is actually as easy as she has said, for I have neither a clue nor a contact number if we are to get lost. 

Srey scopes the course

The road to the desert, it turns out, is a straight shot, with the exception of one left turn off of the highway, which we take with the able guidance of Srey the Human GPS. 

The girls sit in the back and wear down my cell phone’s battery with trivia games while Srey and I gossip (mostly my job) and navigate (mostly her job), simultaneously keeping our eyes peeled for produce stands on the side of the road. What else do you do on the way to the desert?

After we leave the highway and start to curve our way through the stubby mini-mountains, the terrain melts into monotony, broken by the occasional camel and prickly shrub, until two hours into our trip when we come to a screeching halt in the middle of the town of Ibra.

Oh no. Juma’a prayer. 

It is just after noon and we have ground to a halt in front of the only mosque we have seen in miles. Friday is the Muslim equivalent to Sunday—the holy day. And what we have just driven into is the equivalent of the after-church lunch rush, where all of the well-dressed and recently- churched head to the local diner to cash in the church bulletins for 10% off the Sunday special. 

Except in this case no one is headed to the local diner. They are headed back to the labor camps.

Headed back to the labor camp at a turtle's pace

And they are not in a hurry.

We sit and watch dozens, hundreds, thousands of men stream out of the mosque and climb into trucks or slide easily into SUVs and 4x4s. Then we watch them sidle their vehicles up to one another for a chat. 

After their chats, they pull out in front of where we sit in the road and they also sit, engines idling, still chatting. A few of them smile and give us the “just wait” signal, which always reminds me of a stereotypical Italian gentleman gesturing to make his point clearer. They pinch the fingers of their right hands together and point them straight up in the air, shaking their hands toward and away from their heads.

We sit and sit and sit, wondering how far we are from the Mintrib Roundabout. 

And then, as if the Red Sea is parting, the traffic parts and off we dart to Mintrib, sliding into the meeting point just in time to be, well, extremely early.

This is the meeting point for the monthly astronomy tour which is in the desert this month. For just

5 OR per trip, we are allowed to follow the Astronomer Guy, we will call him AG, into any of a dozen far flung locations around Oman. This monthly adventure usually comes at the new moon and includes hours of star gazing, both with and without telescopes, laser pointers which shine beams that seemingly touch the stars, and a varied group of people to chat with for an evening.

We pull into the Shell Station and AG comes stomping up to the car. Since we are the only ones present, he can take the time to instruct us in tire deflation (“No more than 20 psi in the desert!”), sand driving (“Keep those tires straight and don’t stop moving no matter what or you will be stuck! And we don’t want that!”); following distance (“No closer than about 200 meters please”—as an American I am still somewhat metric challenged and thus fail miserably at trying to visualize this distance, resolving instead of follow a really long way behind everyone else); braking in the sand (“DON’T!”); and red light use (“Be sure your lamps have a red light setting—white light will destroy our night vision—set the lights on red please.”)

People begin to trickle into the meeting point--Belgians, Sri Lankans, Brits, Emiratis, more Americans, Australians, Canadians, Venezuelans, Colombians—and then, after an hour of tire deflating and gassing up, we are off. 

The "road"in

I am white knuckled into the first kilometers of the desert. I let the others drive so far ahead that they look like nothing more than puffs of dust in the distance. I NEVER touch the brakes. But then I realize that driving in the sand rocks! The orange sand is fine like no beach sand I have ever seen but is also supportive of the Santa Fe, and as the desert cools the chilly temperatures cause the sand to compact and become even more solid under the tires.

Who would fuss at these cherubs?

We stop in a particularly solid spot, on top of a massive dune, to have AG yell at us for allowing the girls to hang out the windows.  Okay, in truth they were actually sitting with their bums on the windows and their upper bodies nearly slung across the roof’s luggage rack, but they were channeling their inner Bedouins and loving the feel of the wind in their hair and the grittiness of the orange sand in their teeth. 

They grumble and groan and pull themselves into the car but are recovered enough by the time we reach the camp to good-naturedly set up the tents. 

The evening is an astronomy feast with views of Jupiter, the stars, nebulae, constellations, and even the Andromeda Galaxy, followed by the sun the next morning.

The solar scope revealed more sunspots than AG had ever seen before 

And sand...lots of sand. In the morning the wind picks up a bit and carries it in curls off of the dunes. 

There are many places in the world that have deserts and dark empty spaces where the stars look close, but I would bet that there are precious few AGs walking around with telescopes and an interest in explaining celestial bodies to absolute strangers. And even fewer who will tolerate teens hanging out windows as they cruise through the desert.         

  

See, There IS an Omani Christmas

Some of our well-meaning but more neurotic friends get extra neurotic at this time of year because it is Christmas and, well, this is not considered by many as a Christmas kind of place. And, although we do have Christmas church services and masses that run through the season at the Church of Oman, it seemingly does not exactly meet the Christmas criteria laid out by Bing Crosby et al. many a moon ago. We are missing the snow, the mistletoe, folks wrapped up like Eskimos, blazing fireplaces, the pink cheeks, and the fresh pine trees that shed needles all over the living room.

However, take heart! What we do have is the other stuff that goes with Christmas.

We have the Christmas displays in the hyper malls which feature an international assortment of chocolates, advent calendars, made-in-China ornaments, plastic Christmas trees, and tinsel galore.

Okay, so the color scheme is a bit off--pink Christmas anyone?--and last I checked, Frosted Flakes were not really considered Christmas fare, but we must fill in the gaps with something, and why shouldn't that be a tooth-rotter?

What the stores do very well is start up with this Christmas thing well ahead of the event. Tony was outraged this year when the Christmas stuff came rolling out before the Thanksgiving turkeys even had finished flying out of the Al Fair deep freezers. “What is the world coming to?” he complained, “When Christmas starts before Thanksgiving is over?” 

Really? What is the world coming to when people thousands of miles from the US and not even of the US know that Thanksgiving is even happening?

I swear.

We have the pop-up Christmas bazaars that have been surfacing with increasing frequency in the expat enclaves of Muscat. This year, Tehva’s Girl Guides troop swore to honor and protect the Queen even at Christmas and then carted their loads of crafts to sell poolside in a bazaar at a gated community which houses primarily British military families. The Brownies walked away with nearly 160 Omani riyal (about $400 US), all grossed through the sale of clothes pin reindeer ornaments and flip notebooks.   

Durn.

The church cranked the A/C to the max this year, putting everyone in the Christmas spirit, and  threw their own bazaar complete with choral music, orchestral pieces, overpriced coffee and snacks, and a stunning raffle away from which we walked with...nothing. 

The church bazaar

Christmas concerting for the church bazaar. None of these belong to me. As a matter of fact I have no pictures of my children performing that day because this seems to be my lot in life. Missing the big stuff is the name of my game lately.

We also know it is Christmas because every organization and high-end hotel here on God’s brown earth hosts a Christmas dinner, Christmas party, Christmas concert, Christmas play, or Christmas event of some sort.

Check this out and keep in mind that the exchange rate is $2.50 = 1 OR. Don't let the sticker shock bowl you over.

Even our own three children have been swept away in the Christmas madness, participating in Christmas caroling, Jesus birthday parties, Advent-themed beach barbecues, Christmas movies, and gift swaps.

Because we are too poor to attend those Christmas dinners at the swank hotels (and because we spent all of our money on that church bazaar raffle), we instead threw our annual cookie exchange, which was much more fun than hanging at the Hyatt. Except at the Hyatt they have a chocolate fountain, which is pretty fun.

 Nancy, Katrina, Claude, Lasandika, and Heather, clearly swept away by Christmas!

And we also know it is Christmas because it is the season in which we trek out into the desert with 70 of our closest friends and attend the Hash House Harriers Christmas feast, which includes a table decorating contest, a festive Ho-Ho run, and meal complete with a Yule log, professionally catered by Oman Air.

No, this is not our table, although that might be our car in the background

This is not our table, either...we actually forgot to bring a table this year and so had a very Bedouin Christmas by sitting on a borrowed mat adorned with a half dozen also-borrowed votive candles

So see, we do have Christmas in the desert! Be not afraid.

       

Single Women...How Do You Do It?

I don't like to complain but I certainly am not so opposed to it that I will not do it now and again. Buckle yourself in for a mad rant because here I go!

So last year I confidently launched myself willy-nilly into the world of smartphones with this lovely right here

Thankfully I was given only one of these monsters and not two

and then heralded the milestone with an enthusiastic announcement on my Facebook page--"For my ivory anniversary my true love gave to me, an ivory colored smart phone. How is that for romantic?"

The romance lasted less than a week. I won't go into the gory, phone-fail details, because really the details are not pertinent to my rant. What is pertinent? I lack a penis.

But first a bit more background. So finally having decided that I had had enough of the Duos's free fun features--dropped calls, stalled processing, inadvertent/unplanned shutdowns, delayed response to repeated button pushing, and daily phone freezes--I checked out customer reviews (I know, I know, I should have done that a year ago) only to find that the Samsung Duos is famous for all of the above.

Crap. Now what?

Having been married for a good long time, I know that the best way to get a new anything is to complain loudly and often and so I channeled my inner five-year-old and--voila--a new phone materialized on my pillow on the morning of my birthday. This time it was the Samsung Fame.

The Samsung Fame. Spoiler alert--also a fail.

I

Being uncharacteristically on the ball, I read its customer reviews right there in bed on the morning of my birthday only to find that the Fame, to summarize all 135 reviews I read that morning, "Is a piece of doodoo." Tony had opened the box and charged it the night before but I sure as heck wasn't going to touch that thing, so I didn't. I just slipped it, box and all, back into its bag with its receipt.

Okay, now the penis part for those of you who have been waiting on the edge of your seats. Fast forward about a week and Tehva and I traipse over to the mall behind our house in order to return the Fame to the Samsung store. I also am planning on requesting store credit so that I can buy something that won't make me bald with frustration. I swagger up to the register only to encounter a heavyset, pasty, salesman with an embroidered dishdasha and an unnerving giggle.

**Snicker giggle** "Oh, you opened the package a week ago? No, no, we cannot take that phone back. Maybe if it was one or two days after, but you opened it a long time ago!"

"A week is a long time?"

"Yes."

"And I could have opened it and returned it two days afterward but not now?"

"Yes...No...Yes."

"Can I speak to your manager?"

Now the woman next to him chimes in, moving her mouth carefully so as not to disengage the cake makeup from her face. "We cannot take that phone back. It is yours. No manager."

I don't move. PastyMan adds to CakeWoman's suggestion by pointing out that maybe the store in Ruwi would be able to help me. (Ruwi, for the uninitiated, is a durn long way from our Muscat burb).

"But my husband bought it here at this store. The salesman is here."

"You can go to Ruwi."

"Can I talk to your manager?"

"You should go to Ruwi."

This is the point at which I feel like foaming at the mouth but I cannot because Oman's is a non-confrontational culture and so I make the big but docile move: "I don't know where your shop is in Ruwi. I will just send my husband over to talk to you and get directions when he is finished with work." I smile my best wifely smile, which I have been refining throughout our time here. I didn't used to have one of those but I have a killer one now.

"No husband."

"Yes, it's okay, he will come and chat with you later...your name is...Fred (name changed to protect the quasi-innocent)...? I will tell him to look for you."

Fred makes a quick swipe to try to cover his name tag to no avail, mutters, "It will be okay", and I creep out of the store, cursing my lack of dangling anatomy.

Tony heads to the Samsung store two hours later. Within ten seconds of his arrival there he texts and asks which phone I would like in place of the Fame. I bury my head in my hands, picturing Tony and Fred exchanging high fives and chest bumps, and wonder how single women get anything done here.

Single women, how do you do it? If it weren't for the spousal thing, I am sure I would be visa-less and license-less, without electric power or running water, talking on a crappy cell phone in an unregistered motor vehicle.

What is your secret?

Birthday Season Begins

THE SEASON is upon us and our six-week succession of birthdays, major holidays, and anniversaries has pushed us into the annual frenzy of parties and celebrations. So this week, the story around here is birthdays and what to do for them.

The birthday scene in Muscat is pretty grueling. As the magical day draws nearer, expat and Omani parents alike struggle with the annual festivity. Should it be an indoor arcade and junk food combination? Muscat suffers from a small handful of these indoor arcades which are generally festooned with grossly enlarged, happy photographs of content children riding rides and playing innocuous video games but are frequented by children who scream, pull their nannies from ride to ride, and shoot passers-by with the video game guns. They are always nestled in a cocoon of fast food restaurants: McDonald’s, Hardee’s, KFC…they are all faves.

Tehva, predictably enough, thinks these indoor arcades would make the ideal birthday party location but I disagree and, since I hold the purse strings, we have yet to suffer through such a party.

Of course there is always the pizza party option, the movie theater option, and the hire-the-magician-who-always-says-“YES BO!” option. There is the pool party option, the party in a park option, the rent-a-restaurant option, the DJ dance hall option, and the party tents in the front of the house option.

We are swimming in options here in Muscat and yet I live in mortal terror of most of them because they all seem to be colossal energy suckers; frankly, my energy banks are almost depleted just with day-to-day life here. And here is a brutal (and, possibly, revolting if you are an über parent) confession--I have, through overt manipulation, managed to avoid throwing birthday parties for my own children each year by forcing them to choose between having a birthday party in Muscat or doing something fun and moderately expensive in Dubai each January. They always choose Dubai. **SCORE**

This year, though, Tian decided she was going to have a birthday party. As she laid it out, it promised to be a low-energy affair so I agreed but with hesitation. After all, her judgment remains teenage-ish and her fantasy birthdays seem too out of the box for a crowd more accustomed to malls and pizza parlors than nature. Her party last year (an epic trek up a wadi about an hour and a half away) was rained out against all odds TWICE, much to most of her friends’ relief. Based on that experience, I decided to, well, I don’t want to say manipulate, but as the mother of a now- teenager I am seeing that I have to subtly encourage the shaping of certain situations in order to make them feasible. You can read feasible there as acceptable to and convenient for me if you like.

So here is how Tian managed to have the best birthday party ever, in spite of her history of party fails.

      1.) Party guests--I kind of accidentally booked three Couchsurfers in to our place for the weekend which meant that we had a French author-illustrator of children’s books staying on the third floor, an Argentinian biker sleeping on the futon in the school room, and a South Korean university student sleeping on the spare mattress. Bringing those three to the party with us provided immense entertainment. Once we got to the beach, the author-illustrator set to work carving the cartilaginous inside of a squid into a Maori-like mask and presented it to Tian as a gift. The biker juggled tennis balls much to Tehva’s delight. And the student dragged the kids around the tide pools fishing out creatures great and small for observation and possible consumption. 

Their presence also added a quirky, bizarre twist to the general ambiance, firmly maintaining our status as “that weird family that carts perfect strangers around on weekends”.

      2.) Party food redefined--We convinced Tian that shwarma wraps, pigs in a blanket, and finger food requiring advance preparation are not acceptable party foods (due to the fact that I would have to trek out and buy them/make them the night before, during which time I wanted to be out enjoying a Christmas party on someone’s roof instead of chasing down birthday snacks). Tian now believes that French stick and lunch meat straight from the package make better eats and, more importantly, so do her friends.

     3.) Sun-proof party tent--In order to avoid carting along more than the basics, we took along a huge tube of sunscreen instead of that sun blocking party tent we had considered. Okay, honestly the only party tent we considered was in passing: “Do you think anyone will get sunburned at the beach? I guess some people hire tents to address this possibility. Do we have another tube of sunscreen?”

     4.) Birthday bonding--We provided snorkeling equipment to teens, some of whom had never really been in the ocean before, timed the party so that it was almost low tide, and forgot to warn them about the sea urchins. No worries. Only one ended up with spikes in her hand, feet, and stomach, which provided a sort of bonding moment among the kids in attendance.

     5.)  Instant party favors--We also inadvertently timed our visit with that of a spear fisherman who impressively skewered four enormous squids and then decided to clean them on the beach. He tore out the “backbones”, ink sacs, and guts, and left everything on the rocks while explaining his vivisection. That was worth every cent we spent on his time which was, oh yeah, nothing.

     6.) Face painting--The kids squeezed the squids’ discarded ink sacs, smeared their faces with the black oily stuff and then ran around the beach screaming, “War paint, war paint!”

      7.) Birthday cake--We forgot to bake a cake so we gave the kids Dixie cups full of fruit salad instead. We also forgot the spoons so they drank the fruit and claimed it a great adventure. Tony reckons that only a group of homeschooled teens would happily finish off a gallon of fruit salad and not complain about the absence of a cake.

The two hours of beach time passed in a flash and before we knew it, it was time to pack everyone up and head home. It was the best birthday party ever and I would guess that if anyone wanted to make one of those credit card commercials about it, it would go something like

A collection of dead squids and their innards--$0

Three entertaining gentlemen from various parts of the world--$0

Beach front party location--$0

Who needs Visa?

The Return

I am back.

Every now and then a blog needs a year off and so I indulged myself and took the time to indulge myself. But now with life in Muscat beginning to churn again after a long summer away, I NEED to write. Or at least I tell myself that I need to write, since I am being pressured from left and right to pen something.

What I want to create is a top ten list of all of the things that have changed over the last year. I like top ten lists for the very obvious call out to David Letterman, but I also like them for the neatness and structure that they impart. As a writer I know where I can stop writing. As a reader you know exactly how long you have to out up with my blog.

However, I can’t think of ten changes to share. I only can think of eight. And really they are not top…they just are changes. So here are eight changes, in no particular order, that have occurred here in the last year or so since I blogged.

     1.) Puberty

          That’s it. Just puberty.

     2.) Sailing

The sailboat that sat in our driveway for nearly two years? If you visited us at any point between 2010 and 2012, you remember that boat. It was the one you practically had to climb over to enter our house. Last year we donated it to a sailing club here in exchange for the occasional sail session on it, and replaced it in our drive with a table which we have covered with skulls. Muscat has contributed to the look of the skulls by covering them with dust. It gives the driveway a very white trash sort of feel. Homey.  

     3.) Chickenpox

The Varicella fairy visited us during October. In classic American style, instead of treating the Varicella, we spent a lot of our time trying to figure out who was to blame. And with each speculation as to the responsible party, another eruption of pox occurred until Silas was covered in spots (this is what we do in Muscat when we have chicken pox...we go out for Indian food, which is probably why the virus has gone around town twice already since August).

In the end we eliminated most of Muscat and narrowed the suspected Varicella transmitters down to two individuals. Suspect 1 was a friend who had had shingles many moons before, but was the most obvious suspect because she had had Varicella and was foolish enough to admit it. Suspect 2 was some random British child encountered at a birthday party two weeks before the breakout. I blame the British.

    4.) The Black and White Cat

Harry the Cat has never gotten a mention on the blog and so I mention him now. We found him under the new expressway, probably having been thrown from a vehicle, and took him in as a favor to a friend, who promised to take him off our hands within a few days. Did I mention that this friend is British?

Harry looks like a Jersey cow. He complains loudly, drinks from the toilet, and has inspired Silas to write an epic which intertwines all of the pets in Muscat. Visit it at www.sisstoryblog.blogspot.com

    5.) A Contract! A Real Contract!

For one month this summer, I taught real students at a real school for one whole month, and was contracted to do it! Having been out of the game in an institutional sense for three years, it was validating to work in a concrete box again. And that sense of validation made me question my sanity. Trying not to think too hard and moving along…

    6.) Reading

Tehva reads. Finally. 

Poser.

Each morning she reports on the number of chapters she conquered in the previous 24 hours. This morning it was 57 chapters. I was not aware that we had 57 chapters in easy chapter books available in our house and so, while it is exciting that she is finally reading, it is questionable as to exactly what she is reading. This may be contributing to her growing penchant for racy material, whether it is in an online or paper medium.

    7.) Muscat International Airport

The construction site, just minutes from our house.

After gaining and losing a number of friends who were associated with the new airport’s construction but ran screaming from the country in frustration over how the construction was proceeding, it is comforting to see that the airport is coming along. To celebrate, Muscat Municipality has been closing lanes and roads throughout the area to enlarge them, reroute them, redecorate them, or sometimes to just erect little wooden men who have orange flags taped to their hands next to them.

If you are smart you can infer why I have included this in the list—getting anywhere on this side of town anymore involves some major road wrangling, which leads to the next change...

  

    8.) Socialization Opportunities

Many a moon ago when I started homeschooling, I was followed by the specter of potential unsocialization. No one was worried about my children academically, physically, or nutritionally, but I was questioned constantly about socialization. “What do your children do for socialization? How are you teaching them to relate to other people? How will they learn to play with others if they don’t go to school?”

And so, folding to peer pressure, we spend a good amount of time in the afternoons carting the children to socialization opportunities and our week is shaped by rugby, Girl Guides, violin and piano lessons, homeschool co-op classes, tennis and swimming lessons, pottery class, playdates, the Family Hash, and kid-only mountain walks.

In spite of all of that socialization, they remain who they have always been.

It is an expensive lesson, both in time and resources. Ah well.

So that is as things stand now. If I am as consistent as before with keeping up with this, you just might get to read a new blog post again in the next year. If you are lucky.

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.