Oman in the Heat of Day
Nothing of any particular importance has been happening here. It being the middle of Ramadan, with the accompanying sunup-to-sundown fasting incumbent upon all Muslims, not much is happening around the city, politically/culturally/socially or /economically. As opposed to Egypt, in which the streets and alleyways of major cities become carnivals of lights and laughter, Ramadan in Muscat, Oman is a much quieter affair. Major activity involves going around to visit every last relative, alternating with visits from every last relative to your own house. Stores have much-reduced hours, and few people are out and about during the day. Needless to say, this leaves me, a non-Omani with no car, in a bit of a lurch. Not much to do, and fewer people to do it with. At this point, owning to vacation time the age gap surrounding me in the Embassy community has widened to 11-year-old kids in one direction and their 30-something parents in the other.
Medinat Qaboos, No Longer Home Sweet Home
As it worked out, though, the Embassy’s housing units got a bit muddled and I was politely asked if I knew anybody I could move in with on or before August 13th. Luckily I did, and so I recently moved in with Isaac, a friend who works for Amideast (a U.S.-funded organization that handles education programs in the MidEast). Admittedly, a government property did open up at the last minute, but by that point I wasn’t exactly in the mood to rely on the State Dept. to manage my housing affairs. Plus, it’s been getting a bit lonely living by myself. This all explains why I was standing over a frying pan, cooking meatballs and tomatoes in the dark last night.
Khuwair - the New Home Sweet home
Well, I guess not. Let me go back a bit. I only have two weeks left in Muscat, so I suppose it’s high time I explained a bit of what exactly I dohere. As I’ve probably mentioned, I work as an intern at the U.S. Embassy, taking care of odd jobs that nobody quite has time for. I work in the Public Affairs Section, which handles education programs and media contacts – or, as I describe it to some Omanis I meet, “I have nothing to do with visas.” Working in the Embassy has taught me that no matter how much cultural outreach the Embassy does, 95% of people who come into contact with us have one interest – visas. Fair enough – it’s what we’re here for. For the most part.
The Embassy Decides Some Literature is Out of Date...
I once described what I do here as “Split between things too boring to mention and things I probably shouldn’t talk about”. To be honest, the latter makes up about 5% of what I get up to here, if that. On the flip side, I’ve worked on a bunch of projects not exactly crucial to national security – closer to routine maintenance. You’ll forgive me for not regularly updating you on my exploits here when I mention that a large amount of my work has been putting together website-update requests for the computer help desk, collecting information on other embassies’ Twitter and Facebook accounts, running our own accounts on Twitter and Facebook, reading Omani online forums.
The U.S. Embassy in Muscat
I am also two months into processing a request to purchase a new sign for the Information Resource Center. It’s slow going.
A few things have been a bit more interesting, though, such as
Section Chief and Omani Co-workers
analyzing all forms of Media in Oman and following all newspapers on a daily basis. You start picking up trendlines after a few weeks, watching Azzamanslowly push the envelope further and further in terms of press freedom, following the Ministry of Higher Education’s planned 500 scholarships to the United States, noting the mounting death toll from
Adil and I
traffic accidents along Oman’s winding desert highways and spotting visitors to the cool weather of the khareefwinds in Southern Oman. I’ve chatted with the head of Rolls-Royce dealerships in Oman at a going-away party for my immediate superior, attempted crowd control and answered questions in Arabic at a massively-overcrowded information session on the aforementioned scholarships, and talked with the Embassy’s contracted Arabic tutor about life in New York. There’ve also been innumerable random spur-of-the-moment tasks, from finding a bunch of doorstops to helping the Information Resource Director find a staple gun to put her new bulletin board together.
My Office
Life outside the embassy is pretty low-key. At a decent estimate I’d say half of my days involve going home, sleeping for a bit, going running and
Shafiq and Ali
then cooking dinner. Still, I’ve managed to meet up with a few interesting folks around town. This explains why I took the beiza bus out to Mattrah on Friday, to meet a Pakistani I’d met months ago named Muhammed Ali (no relation). Muhammad’s combined English and Arabic could fit on the back of a small business card, but he brought along his cousin, Imtiyaz, and Shafiq, an Arabic-speaking Bangladeshi. We met in front of the Marina hotel in Mattrah, where they took me to the rooftop restaurant where they work (business is slow from Ramadan). We talked about their lives as expats in Muscat, about Oman compared to Pakistan (“Nice, but just not the same”), Oman compared to Saudi Arabia (“So much better”) and how to get a U.S. visa (“Probably pretty difficult”). As the conversation rolled along in a tangled bundle of English, Arabic, Urdu and all requisite translations, we made our way through the town and back to a Pakistani restaurant by the water – huge pieces of bread and spicy hunks of chicken cooked in small metal bowls.
Late Night Driving
Going out inevitably revolves around food. The other night I went to an iftar dinner (for breaking the Ramadan fast, or close to it), with a group of Omanis who had studied in the United States. This put the group at 26 Omani 20-somethings wearing dishdashas and kumas, plus one American 20-something wearing a t-shirt and khaki pants, all in a Turkish seafood restaurant where plates of meat kebabs and grilled fish were interspersed with massive pieces of bread (spotting a trend?) and plates of hummus. In contrast, the Pizza Hut iftar dinner I went to with a bunch of US expats and their Omani/Egyptian friends was downright disappointing, at least food-wise. I figured that a Pizza Hut buffet would consist largely of, well, pizza – which doesn’t exactly explain why I paid RO3.5 to eat fish sticks, chicken lasagna, pesto bread and one thin slice of pizza seized more through chance than through anything else.
Night Lights in Mattrah
I met the US expats mostly through a couple of friends who work at Amideast, and I’ve seen at least some of them every other week or so since I’ve been here – probably more often now that I’ve moved in with Isaac. A typical evening (if there were such a thing) involves meeting up in a large, unwieldly group at a moderately-priced restaurant somewhere in the city – Darcy’s Kitchen (British/American Diner food), Beirut Restaurant (Assorted Middle Eastern), Automatic (Lebanese), That Chinese Restaurant (name uncertain), Somebody’s House (location may vary) – followed by a session of tea/coffee accompanied by shisha (hooqah tobacco) for those that are interested. Throw ample amounts of laughter and ridiculous stories of living abroad or (for our Omani friends) dealing with expats, the occasional movie, and a rotating cast of friends of friends of friends and you more or less have the picture. Oh, and a high probability of being in a long but high-speed car ride with techno music being blasted out of every speaker as if to ward off the plague. Or something like that.
This, in a nutshell, is life here. To fully wrap things up, the one drawback of Isaac’s apartment is that the light in the kitchen does not work. Thus, while trying to cook my post-iftar meal last night at about 10pm I kept having to carry the frying pan out into the hallway to see if the meatballs were cooking through – that or use the LED flashlight on my phone to figure things out. Go figure.
[Author's Note - I am now without internet at my home apartment. On the upside, though, we foigured out that banging the kitchen fixture with a broom will flip the light on. Genius.]
