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?

Hiking With the ROP

"Hello. Are you busy today?" At 8:40 a.m. the phone had rung, which is bizarre since nearly everyone I know texts instead of calls. Calls are pricey but texts are practically free. In the name of looking like I am not a lazy bum I was trying my best to make it sound like I had been wide awake when the call came through.

"A little." Not really but the lazy bum thing once again...I have an image to maintain.

"All right, well the police are here and they want to go out and find that grenade. I cannot remember the way exactly to find it. So you need to come. I will see you in 20 minutes." **click**

I have such nice friends here, and when we go out walking together we tend to find things like shell fragments and hand grenades. The finding is not such a problem, but when my friend reports those explosives to the police and the police want to go out and recover the explosives early on the days that I am on school holidays, well, that sucks.

Joy was still around when this all went down and she is organized enough to dump the pictures from her camera's disc every night. Her camera with plentiful memory instantly qualified her as the trip photographer. Srey met the two of us at the university's administrative building and guided us into the perfumed depths of the vice-something-or-other's wing where we were greeted by three very wise-looking, portly Omani administrators dressed in immaculate white dishdashas, and two policemen wearing tan jumpsuits, black woolen berets, and shoes with absolutely no tread on them.

Greetings were exchanged all around, hands were tentatively offered (Joy, Srey, and I ARE women after all--*danger*danger*) for limp-wristed shaking, and the police indicated that they were ready to go after that grenade. I couldn't help it...I had to do it...Honestly, how many times in your life can you look at a man and say, "Those are some beautiful shoes. But can you walk in them well enough?" The police were dismissive, as if they wandered into mountains everyday in suede camel boots with no tread.

We arrived at the trailhead, marked by a monolith, a washed-out dirt road, and a fossilized oyster bed. The police hopped from their tan Land Rover. "Okay, where is the grenade?" they asked, and looked a bit disappointed when we three women responded with, "That way. Up." Immediately one of the coppers volunteered to stay with the car lest a group of marauding camels come through and try to eat the mirrors, while the other cop started up the trail behind us.

He huffed and puffed, chugged and snorted up the first rise, smiled when we reached the top and asked, "Where is the grenade?" He asked twice more as we walked and then resigned himself to a long hike through the hills of greater Muscat. He chatted about his family, his bomb squad trainings abroad, his travels overseas, and the universality of the middle finger. He sweated through his tan jumper and declared that this was a very fast walk.

After 30 minutes we came to the valley of the grenade at which point he phoned his partner and explained that he was taking so long because this bomb was a LOOOOOONG way from the cars, like 5 or 6 kilometers! (As if) And then the moment we had been awaiting all morning--we spotted the grenade. It was lime green and laying on its side surrounded by dirt and stones; on its side "Grenade" and "CCC" had been clearly stenciled.

Being the local bomb expert he strode right over to the thing, nudged it with his toe, and picked it up. Then he started shaking it. Srey threw her arms up and we three women backed away (actually I think Joy snapped photos while Srey and I backed away). When a former Cambodian refugee throws her arms up and backs away from an explosive, one tends to follow suit.

Instead of exploding and throwing bits everywhere, the bottom of the canister dropped its plug of stone and dust poured out its bottom end. "Yes! It's dead this one! Yes. It is just an old grenade. See?" As Joy busily snapped photos, he explained the mechanism of the pin you pull and how you arch your arm to throw it. He showed where the smoke pours out and how the smoke's color is different according to the canister's color, and...

"Hold the phone. This is not an exploding grenade?"

Our expert laughed. "No, no, this is a signaling grenade, like for the army if they want their friends to come find them after an exercise and pick them up."

And with that our expert started out of the valley with the grenade in hand, tan jumpsuit sticking to his back, smooth suede shoes carrying him smoothly down the goat trails and up and over the rocky cliffs back to his car. So it wasn't an exploding grenade, but it was worth getting up for--how often do you get to hike with a bomb-laden Omani man in smooth-bottomed camel suede shoes?

Making Amends

The Kia Rio has now been retired as a faux wheel drive vehicle and has begun a life of luxury. On weekends it sits in the covered parking space instead of dune bashing in the Empty Quarter or chugging up and down wadis. It has become a true saloon car instead of an almost four wheel drive.

And in its place we have the Hyundai Santa Fe. Previously owned by a friend of ours who has moved onto greener pastures, it is tricked out with tinted windows, royal blue paint, and cruise control. We no longer even have to exert the effort to unlock the doors individually with a key--with

the push of a single button all doors unlock simultaneously. While all of this is nice, Silas most appreciates the individual air conditioning vents and reading lights, and the fact that the cargo area folds out into two extra seats, allowing Tehva to have her very own "cage".

Driving the Santa Fe allows me to feel less of a peasant here. It is big, which means that by default all of those itty-bitty saloon cars must respect me. It has four wheel drive which means I can take it into wadis without worrying about whether or not I will ever come out again.

And the windows are darkly tinted which means that Joy can change in the front seat without that Omani bus driver seeing her--until he got right in front of the car and looked through the windscreen--the tinting there is almost nonexistent per Omani law. Then he nearly wrapped that school bus around a cement wall. Best of all, the Santa Fe looks like we paid more than 10 riyals for it, unlike the Kia Rio which possesses an air of plasticity and appears to have come out of a vending machine. You know, the kind where you insert a quarter, turn a knob, and get a plastic ring. Or a gum ball. Or a Kia Rio.

So feeling less the peasant, I decided to pack up Joy, Rachel, Abigail, and my own brood, and head to Qurm where, you no doubt will remember, there is a skating rink and lots of other people who drive nice, big cars. We thundered down the highway, burning lots of fossil fuels all the way. As we drove along the engine purred instead of doing the Kia Rio Whine. We looked down upon other people on the road instead of hoping, as in the Rio, that they would notice us and PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE not hit us. The children, content with their individual vents and bounty of space, never even noticed one another. It was pure bliss.

And there was the skating rink after a trip that felt all the faster for the comfort experienced during the ride! But just as quickly as I pulled into the skating rink's lot I also noticed that the parking spaces are itty bitty there, made for a Kia Rio, not a hulking Santa Fe. So I did what any SUV owner would do--I decided I would make the car fit, dammit. I pulled up and then reversed and then pulled forward and then reversed. And just as Joy offered to get out (not to worry, she was fully dressed at that point) and help me negotiate this anorexic parking spot, I hit a tree.

The tree wasn't big--as a matter of fact it was little more than a collection of three unassuming branches sticking up out of the ground. However, it was big enough, and I was going fast enough, to allow the tree to leave an impression on the back of the car.

Did I mention we had owned the car for three days at that point?

Needless to say, my argument that Tony had dented AND scratched the Rio within a month of its purchase, on a cement wall that was right in front of him, in broad day light, held absolutely no water. Apparently denting the Santa Fe is a sin much worse than scratching and denting the plastic car.

Although I am reassured by many that body work is cheapy-cheap in Muscat, and that dents are so commonplace here as to be almost not worth mentioning, I still am being made to rectify the situation. And so, if you find a few weeks go by without a blog post, well, you will know that I am busy making amends.

My knees are killing me.

Culture Crash

It seems as if the vibes in the universe that modulate weirdness have bent just enough that the bizarre is coming through loud and clear. Back in my politically correct grad school days, the bizarre and incomprehensible encountered in a foreign culture was labeled with the very benign term, "culture bump". Alrighty, then, we can go with that if it makes some of you more comfortable.

In just one week I have tripped across so many weird culture bumps that they are starting to more accurately resemble culture pot holes. Great big deep pot holes.

Be careful! Oh, no, wait...you're driving an automatic. Well done, ladies!

As I drive Tony to work in the morning in our manual Kia Rio I am supposedly breaking the law. Women here are not supposed to drive stick shifts because, errrr, they're suggestive? Tony speculates that someone in the Omani lawmaking body heard that urban legend about the girl who took Spanish fly and, well, you know. Not sure the whys really, but when the driving test is administered here, women are to take the test on the much less erotic automatic transmission, while men must fondle the stick of a manual in order to pass the same test.

Girlfriends are for wusses. Manly men ice skate with other manly men. Period.

Muscat has a new skating rink in the very swank section of town called Qurm (no need for a vowel between the r and m in case you were thinking, "TYPO!") Qurm is where we lowlings (mostly teachers) can go to stare greedily at the other half (mostly petroleum engineers) who have lots of money to spend on niceties such as furniture, Land Rovers, Hummers, and organic products imported from the more cultured parts of the world.

Needless to say, we don't spend much time in Qurm since it makes us feel like peasants.

Anyhow, today we did venture into Qurm for a birthday party at the new skating rink. Tehva wore her very ugliest fur-lined shirt and clashing paisley flowered pants for the occasion, while Silas wore his cleanest pair of floods, and Tian, in her carefully matched duds, rolled her eyes at both of them.

As we made our entrance there was nary a soul to be seen--just one abaya-clad woman sitting behind the cash desk looking thoroughly put out at having to be there at all, and a tiny collection of ten-year-old girls ready for a birthday party. The ice was empty with the exception of a clutch of boys scooting tentatively across the ice.

Fast forward two hours and the ice rink is awash in boys and men dressed in the most stylish fashions that Oman has to offer--Michael Jackson gloves; tight black jeans made all the more attractive by a white belt full of holes--think spiked belt with the spikes pulled out but the holes left behind; t-shirts printed with English phrases such as "I Hate Girls" and "No girlfriend! No problem!" (I am NOT making this up); and to top off the ensemble, a net baseball cap like was popular in the US in the 70s, with the plastic doohicky in the back that you can use to adjust the size of the cap. The cap is the most important part of the fashion statement as the plastic doohicky must be adjusted to the very smallest size and the cap must rest upon the head in such a manner that it makes the wearer look like he has an itty-bitty pinhead.

The horde of 20, who range in age from 9 to about 23, skate around and then perform a showy move for one another--some throw their bodies in the air and slam onto the ice, their momentum carrying their bodies through the trajectory of other skaters. Others do breakdance moves, digging the toes of their skates into the ice and then, for good measure, eating the flakes of ice that result. Then suddenly and without warning the boys begin whistling, making what sound like camel calls, and skating while holding hands, careening back and forth across the rink at top speed. And just as quickly they converge in the center, still holding hands, and spin one another around as fast as possible.

My first thought, being a red-blooded American, is that they are doing this to show off for the girls in the rink but silly me there are only about three girls in the rink and they are tending to a friend who has fallen and hit her head on the ice. The girls have no time for the boys, which isn't a concern anyhow as the boys are in fact NOT doing this for the girls. They are doing it for each other. And those t-shirts seem to be a statement of fact.

The new Muscat Opera House is haram so STAY AWAY!

Religiously speaking, Oman is still a bit of a head-scratcher. Yes, the predominance of the population is Muslim, but the sect of Islam that they follow, Ibadi, is one based on a more liberal interpretation of the Koran. The word haram, which means "forbidden" in Arabic has worked its way into our vocabularies, but we don't have to talk about haram very seriously very often because followers of Ibadi say it's all good. We don't worry too much about haram in Oman. Until now.

One of Oman's top emirs has announced that the new Opera House, which cost about a bazillion riyals to build and dominates swanky Qurm's skyline and its social scene, is haram. Strict Muslims regard music as haram and guess what they have been doing at the Opera House. Yes, making music. Naughty naughty.

He could have raised this issue a couple years ago when they started building this collosus.

Ladies! Get away from the pool! And stay off of that exercise bike! And no treadmill for you! Away! Away!

This week I overheard an interesting statistic--the average Omani woman's resting heart rate (while in her twenties) is 80-100 beats per minute.

And that, apparently, is okay, because maintaining a healthy heart rate would require some sort of exercise, which might involve displaying some flesh, and that would be unacceptable, even in facilities designed for exercise.

The Staff Club, to which we belong here, is a cross between social outlet and exercise center. Think YMCA crossed with Parks and Rec with a Shoney's stuck to it. If you are affiliated with Sultan Qaboos University, it is the place to be for dinner, swimming, jogging, soccer, basketball, tennis, playground, and hanging out around the pool. While the kids enjoy a dip, the adults can have a cup of tea, served at poolside by nice men wearing crisp uniforms carrying silver trays. The tennis court is the only place on the campus that women can comfortably wear shorts, and the club is the only place on campus that Muslim women can uncover their heads and go for a dip (but only on Sunday and Tuesday evenings).

This is a bit much, though. A gentleman stood up at the last Staff Club general meeting and suggested the Staff Club become a "Gents' Only" facility. The facilitator, whose name sounds an awful lot like Ghengis Khan, startled at the suggestion (much to his credit) and then asked the man to repeat it for good measure. "Yes, how about we make the staff club 'Gents Only'--I put it to the members." The members stared back. End of discussion.

Usury is bad, but I hadn't realized that until now. That's what the US banks must be doing for us! Saving us from eternal damnation!

The Staff Club, for a little bitty facility, has quite the budget and pulls in a tidy sum of money each year, which is placed into an account where it bears a bit of interest. It is not a lot of interest but it is enough to allow members to afford niceties like a crisply uniformed staff that will serve tea by the pool.

During the meeting, when the Mongol Conqueror announced the year's income and outflow, a hand shot into the air. "Can we place the money in a non-interest bearing account?" I dredged my ears clean. Huh? No one else reacted with the least bit of shock or surprise. As a matter of fact, many rolled their eyes. The woman next to me sunk in her chair--"Typical. Happens every time."

"What is going on? Why would she say no to free money?"

"An interest-bearing account is usury. Haram."

Oh. Just when you think the culture bumps are no more and that a place is so familiar it again becomes unfamiliar, confusing, and surprising.

How exciting!