Hot town summer in the city

Because, as women, we aren’t allowed to wonder around the Corniche on our own, much less any other less-touristy area of Oman, we delicate female souls had to resort to listening about all our male companions’ solo adventures out and about Mutrah. A few mornings prior, Scott had stumbled upon the local fish market so he took Rachel and me on Tuesday morning. The low lying building is separated into two parts, the smaller being on the water and composed of tiled stalls with faucets for the gutting and cleaning of a day’s catch. Nearer to the road, the rest of the structure houses aisles situated between raised platforms where men in plastic sandals sat on their ankles near thick piles of slippery wide-eyed fish. There were heavy, meat-rich fish and tiny thin ones, sharks and squid, yellow, grey. Fresh slices of juicy pink flesh still bleeding freshly within the grout-filled veins of the market’s floor tiles. Unlike the frankincense-fogged alleyways of the Mutrah Souk, no one peddled their wares to us. Perhaps they couldn’t picture what we would possibly do with the rubbery wings of a skate or 10 kilos of blue crab.

Our assignment for the morning was, once broken into mixed-gender groups of three, to locate a museum specific to our group, hail a taxi and explain where we needed to go, explore the museum and acknowledge any disparity or inconsistency common when explaining Oman under Sa’id versus Oman under Qaboos, and grab a cab back to SIT for lunch by 100.

Our museum was in Muscat proper, and was basically the private collection of a Sheik named Al Zubair who was a friend of Sultan Qaboos’ father. Lots of guns, women’s jewelry, regionally specific costumes and photographs. By the time we left I had khanjars coming out my frickin pores. We had plenty of time before we needed to start our one hour cab ride to SIT, so we walked the few thick and cement blocks to the Sultan’s palace. Interesting… with all the astoundingly beautiful architecture in Oman that never fails to catch your eye or make you whisper in awe “wa-allah…” this building is… well… in a league of its own i guess…

When we arrived at SIT, everyone was having individual meetings with Sultan, our Arabic teacher, to discuss the level they tested into. After having been with myself throughout the length of that exam, I knew fairly certain that my score should probably place me in the special-ed version of the beginners’ level – I had barely looked at Arabic all summer and the language hadn’t been exactly a piece of cake even when I had daily interaction. So I must admit I was surprised when, after Sultan asked me to talk about my family in Arabic and I said something along the lines of “Err, well… dad is ‘ahb’ and mom issss ‘ohm-ma’…?” he said I should be in the advanced class.

Come again?

I asked him very politely to put me in something lower, I told him that I would much rather be in intermediate but he insisted and so I sit here still very confused. Eh, it’ll all work out “en sha-allah”.

David Fenner, the SIT program director for Oman gave a talk that afternoon that was extremely entertaining. He and his wife did Peace Corp work in Oman some 30 years ago and just recently returned to take on this project. It being our last night before the initiation of the homestay, a bunch of us went to an “Indian” restaurant along the Corniche, whose title should be used loosely since they sold pizza, burgers, sweet and sour soup, AND curry. Afterwards, Chris, Sarah and I crept through a scattering of back alleyways to get to the most seedy and fabulous section of the Souk in order to buy kilos of beautiful moist dates. The feral cat population, a constant and unnerving presence no matter where you are, jumped in number exponentially as we wound tighter and tighter into the food-rich region of the market. We were going to meet up with Scott and the gang at the Souk entrance and thus had to find our way back through the startling glitter of plated gold from jewelry store after jewelry store, back into the frankincense heart of the market.