10 month expiration

Well, my last post.

My 10 month experience has ended. It ended a month ago and now I am back home. It’s been a strange and unique journey. I certainly didn’t expect to go to some of the places I went and do some of the things I did.

It was a timeline that was mostly a flowing busy, many times a frustrating ineffectiveness but also many times engagingly creative and fruitfully productive. It dipped into lulls of extreme boredom and near surrender and there were periodic spikes of pure wonder and exploration.

In 10 months, I wallowed in social isolation, watching sandstorms whip past my plot of sand. There were days when the only thing I did was wake up and then go back to sleep. I kicked a rooster out of my apartment. I hiked up to the Monasteries of Meteora, shrouded in mist and surreally perched on smoothly shaped mountain spires. I stood in front of the Acropolis of Athens and looked down on the deep green olive valley of Delphi. I stared up at the masterpiece of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel. I walked through the ancient Nabataean capital of Petra, carved into the rose-red sandstone mountains. I floated on the surface of the Dead Sea. On New Years Eve I saw fireworks explode from the tallest building in the world and was caught in a stampede of people. I saw the baptism site of Jesus Christ along the Jordan River and swam in the jacuzzi warm waters of the Gulf of Oman. I stumbled across processionary caterpillars. I ascended to the summit of Africa and watched the sun illuminate the glaciers of Kilimanjaro. I camped in the Serengeti, witnessing the fiery spectrum of a sunset framed by the complex branching of acacia trees. When the sun rose I witnessed hyenas crunching on zebra bones and a lion tearing apart the carcass of a buffalo.  I ate a lunch buffet at Dubai’s “7-star” hotel. I plunged thirty feet into the ocean and scuba dove among the diversity of undersea life. I snorkeled on the surface and saw eagle rays glide below. I woke up before dawn to glimpse the beauty of the green sea turtle circle of life, a reptilian bulk crawling onto shore to dig and lay eggs while babies emerged from the sand to face foxes, crabs, gulls, and the unsympathetic sea. I suffered the sniffling effect of wafting tear gas from protests in Greece, only to return to Oman to witness a protest of the Arab Spring in my very own Buraimi. I shared the road with armored tanks. I got my car stuck in the sand. I hiked up a Sahara Desert sand dune and saw Algeria from Morocco. I got lost in the medieval maze of Fes, dined at Rick’s Café in Casablanca, and watched a furious Atlantic thrash along the shores of Tangier. I entered Spain without leaving Africa. I got food poisoning twice, the second time sending me to a hospital with an IV from dehydration. I visited the sinking city of Venice, climbed the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and strolled around the Florentine birthplace of the Renaissance. I entered the Colosseum of Rome and in Istanbul, was caught between the dueling architectural marvels of the Hagia Sophia and the Sultan Ahmed Mosque. I rode a bus across the bridge between Asia and Europe.  I ate more gelato in a two week period than I had in the past 23 years. I saw man sized storks strolling the sidewalks of Nairobi. I saw rare black rhinos and a vast wildebeest migration in the cradle of Ngorogoro. On the desolate roads to Buraimi I eased up to 120 miles per hour and was spoiled by one dollar a gallon gas. I ate some of the best meals of my life in Paris and filled up on the art of the Louvre. I experienced the extravagance of Versailles and the stark expanse of white crosses at the American cemetery in Normandy. I taught myself how to drive a manual transmission in France and eventually arrived at the tidal island of Mont St. Michel. I went on “the least memorable journey in the world” to the coastal fog desert of Salalah, dodged wild camels on the road, and stood at the edge of the Oman Yemen border. I finally wore a dishdasha and a kuma and eventually had multiple ones tailored. I drove to another country and back just to buy groceries. I discovered the surprising deliciousness of avocado juice. I became the object of student obsessions. I rode a dhow through the fjords of Musandam with dolphins alongside the boat, got propositioned by a Filipino prostitute, and caught sight of Iranian smugglers on the Strait of Hormuz. I descended under Paris into the Catacombs, navigating through maze walls of stacked human skulls and bones. I was surrounded by the festive excesses of Marrakech and I walked into the charred remains of a fallen Lulus. I stopped meters away from a herd of elephants and saw baboons trying to take over a delivery truck.  Also I taught English.

That last one is probably important to mention. Most of my time was spent teaching English.

This has been my first experience blogging and it’s been an interesting project. I have a record of these 10 months to share and look back on and writing has helped ferry me though some bewildering, uncomfortable, and frustrating moments to reach the destination of stories I can laugh about.

I do feel extremely fortunate to have been given the opportunity to have these experiences in Oman (and other places) and hopefully my recollections have been a somewhat enjoyable and informative read.

Education in Oman, a look back

I guest taught in a class one day and one of the students was a man in his late thirties. He was married and had kids. We were going around the class and students were sharing their short term goals such as getting good grades, improving their English, etc. When it came to him, he said he was looking for a second wife. He said he had given his current wife a house, children, and a car, and now he could move on. I asked if he was planning on divorce and he said no, no, no, he was just taking another wife. I asked if both wives would be living in the same house and this time everyone in the class started shaking their heads and saying no,no,no, not a good idea, wives don’t usually get along. Separate houses, separate kids, separate cars. The man would just rotate between his families, one day here, the next day there. I asked if he would be going for the maximum four allowed in Islamic law and he said he would see how two worked out first.

That’s not related to the rest of this post but I wanted to share it.

Prior to 1970, during Sultan Said bin Taimur’s rule, there were only 3 primary schools in the entire country, located in Muscat, Mattrah, and Salalah, serving 900 boys personally selected by the Sultan (the schools were closed in 1970). There was a religious institute for 50 boys, 3 private schools for Hyderabadi Indians, and a U.S. missionary school for 50 foreign girls. With a population of 1.5 million, the Sultan banned public education, claiming that the British lost India because they educated the people. Every evening the gates to Muscat were shut, anyone still outside risked being shot, and people were forced to move around by lantern because torches were banned. There was only one dispensary in the city and it only stocked aspirin and it was forbidden to wear sunglasses, smoke tobacco, own books, and for women to travel abroad.

Eleven months ago, when I dipped my toes into the pool of higher education in Oman, things had obviously changed. Under Sultan Qaboos, government expenditures for education have steadily increased from 2.4% in 1975 to 11.2% in 1992 and the current level of 26%. Enrollment in primary school is nearly 100 percent of the age group and a number of higher education institutes have been created. The country’s flagship Sultan Qaboos University opened in 1986 and Sohar University, Oman’s first private university, began in 2001 with others like Al Buraimi University College following in 2003.

The country does a good job in providing access to higher education for its citizens. In high school, Omani students take a placement test and submit preferences for colleges and majors. Those that get into national institutions like Sultan Qaboos University get full rides. Private colleges tend to be less well regarded than the government colleges and catch the overflow that the government colleges can’t handle. There’s a price tag for private colleges but the government provides scholarships for those who can’t afford it. I had a couple of students who were on a scholarship. One girl had put her preferences down for engineering but as part of the terms of her award, the government chose the college and the major (English) for her. At BUC, where I worked, after two years students can receive a diploma, and after 4 years they receive a Bachelors. One student’s scholarship just covered him until his diploma and he would have to find another scholarship for the last two years of his BA.

College decisions often revolve around the family and students tend to stay close to home. A student from Buraimi or a nearby town will most likely attend college in Buraimi and continue living at home, especially if they are female. That can limit the choice of majors. The college I worked at offered only Information Technology, Business, and English. The University of Buraimi is the only other college and recently opened, offering engineering and health sciences. I had a student who wanted to go into Nursing but ended up doing English at Buraimi University College because the University of Buraimi hadn’t opened yet. I’ve had students say they decided against becoming doctors because it would mean going out of the country to study. English tends to be the dumping ground for the undecided and the resistant. Students have said that they chose an English major because their family forced them to or because they didn’t know enough about the other majors. But there are also plenty who say they chose English because they liked it.

When I asked students how they felt about their own education, I encountered serious dissatisfaction. And from what I saw in my brief two semesters of teaching, there was certainly much room for improvement. But to keep things in perspective, the college was only 8 years old. The undergraduate college I had come from was 147 years old. While I saw some great things and an effort to improve, there were also cracks that weren’t really related to age.

There were good teachers, but for the most part students felt that many teachers needed better training. While the country has been focusing on building up its own Omani teaching force, the numbers aren’t there yet and most teachers are imported from India, North Africa, and non-Gulf Middle Eastern states. In my English Department there were no Omanis. That diversity is great but students found the number of accents confusing. In one class they would hear an Indian English accent and in their next they would have to adapt to a Sudanese English accent. There were even students who felt that they spoke English better than some of the teachers. There was a common complaint that Arabic was used too much in class, even in the advanced classes. It might be fine for some smattering of Arabic in semester 1 and 2 but even in semester 4 the practice continued.

Students felt bored and unengaged when teachers tended to just go through a PowerPoint or read from the textbook. Teachers complained that students were not participating while the students retorted that they weren’t given enough opportunities to do so (and I suspect students also needed to be shown how to participate effectively).

They also pointed out that a class taught by one teacher was wildly different in content from the same class taught by a different teacher and that semester by semester, the classes didn’t build upon one another. One of my semester 4 student’s class schedule was Poetry, Short Stories, and Development of English Language where they studied Shakespeare and Old English from Beowulf. Normally I’d say that’s great but these were students struggling with everyday modern conversational English and I have to question the efficacy of introducing Old English when a basic foundation hasn’t been mastered yet.

Regardless of major, all students have to pass through the Foundation Department where they take classes about Speaking, Listening, Reading, Writing, and Study Skills. It usually takes one year to pass out and begin classes in their major but there were many students I felt should have remained in Foundation for longer. Unfortunately there is pressure to just get the students through and many students enter their majors unprepared to function in English, hence the common fallback on Arabic translations.

For the first semesters in the English Department, students take Listening and Speaking classes to continue building on the basic skills from the Foundation Department. Unfortunately those stop after the first year and students felt they would benefit from having those classes throughout their curriculum. I actually think there shouldn’t be classes called Speaking and Listening in the English Department. Those are functional skills, not academic subjects, and in every class there should be components of speaking and listening. I had students about to graduate who could barely write a one page essay. These skills of speaking, listening comprehension, reading comprehension, and writing need to be tested and reinforced in every class. For students who were about to be given Bachelors in English, I felt they were severely unprepared.

Many of my students were planning on becoming English teachers. Some were genuinely excited about that prospect but unfortunately many more seemed resigned to the fate. One of the more disheartening reasons students gave (always originating from their parents or a male member of the family) for planning on becoming a teacher was because teacher training programs would continue to be gender segregated.

When I was creating my program of workshops, my intention was for my classes to be supplementary to students’ regular curriculum, for me to build upon what they had already learned in their other classes and push it to a new level. For a couple groups of students, that’s what happened and it made my experience worthwhile. But more often than not I ended up going over basic foundational skills and grammar that students should have already learned at that level. The country’s English fluency goal is admirable and achievable, but it seems like they’ve imported educational systems without adapting them to their own people and culture and are running students through expecting the same result.

Students’ perception of school has to change. They seem to think of it as something they have to do time in rather than a resource to actively engage with. Their goal is to obtain proof that they spent the required time in school, a certificate or diploma, rather than a portfolio of their creative endeavors. When I said there wouldn’t be any certificate associated with my workshops, there was a huge drop off in attendance. When I asked students for input on what they wanted to learn, I received puzzle looks and they asked if I had a prepared lecture or a textbook. They think that showing up is enough. Cheating was a huge problem. When I proctored a quiz for another class, students were blatant about it, and when I confronted them directly, they didn’t care and there was nothing I could do. The test would start and like magnets students would suddenly squish together and a low whispering would begin.  It was ridiculous and students seemed to take pride in pulling one over a system that didn’t care to begin with.

I left right as finals were starting and I heard that students had begun to protest, refusing to show up to class. They were demanding that tests be easier, for their finals to cover only certain chapters, etc. I was glad my time was over because I wouldn’t have been able to deal with that.

There needs to be greater investment in and a better environment for teachers. There’s this whole Omanization initiative to get Omanis to run their own country. I was told that eventually the entire English Department would be replaced with Omanis and foreign teachers would be limited to the Foundation program. Oman has largely been dependent on a foreign workforce. The Omanization process is an admirable and necessary goal but it should proceed carefully and in a way that respects the expatriate population who helped shoulder the burden of bringing the country to its current state. Any expatriate workforce entails high turnover and little continuity. That’s especially bad in education. I was one of several teachers who left BUC at the end of the academic year. I’m not sure how exactly to balance this with Omanization but right now, whether they want it or not, my former colleagues have no long term prospects at the college. For many of the teachers I met, Oman seemed like a pit stop in a teaching journey circulating around the region. There’s currently no tenure system and the country should think about ways to make the country more attractive for foreign talent to stay and invest.

When I asked students about their careers, a vast majority, if they weren’t headed for teaching, said they wanted to work in the government. But they could never say what they wanted to do in the government. The best someone said was that she wanted to work in an office. I detected a distinct lack of entrepreneurship and initiative among the students I encountered. There was only one student who was adamant in his refusal to work in the government because he said his creativity would die there.

The government should be a creative place, an environment that fosters innovation. With limited oil production, there are some imminent and daunting challenges on Oman’s horizon. And with a central organization of political and economic power, the responsibility and possibility for action falls on the government.

Under the Sultan’s leadership, the country has made some tremendous progress. The Sultan provided a vision for the country, a progressive narrative that raised him, in the eyes of his people, to an untouchable status. He guided an explosive burst of development powered by the geological fortune and economic gluttony of oil. As this wealth sputters down, to sustain a narrative of progress, the Sultan needs to now awaken and harness the vast creative wealth of the Omani people. Right now the education system seems like an assembly belt, imported and ill adapted to the locality. Taking a page from Sir Ken Robinson, education needs a revolution into the organic. It needs to be about cultivating the ground in which a diversity of talent can flourish. People need to be empowered. They need to feel responsibility and urgency. All eyes are on the Sultan, waiting for his next move. He needs to look right back and ask if they have any ideas.

Democracy and The Burning of Lulu

About six and a half months ago, a couple hours past midnight on February 26, I drove past a dead of night deserted Sohar on the way back to Buraimi from the semester break. Later that day protests would first erupt around Sohar’s Globe Roundabout, reaching a flash point two days later on February 28 when protesters burned down the local Lulu Hypermarket.

A month later, on March 27, I drove to Muscat, passing by Sohar. Around the Globe Roundabout tents were camped, a podium had been set up, and young Omanis were lounging about. The entire area had been cordoned off with police officers directing traffic around the protest camp. About an hour later, on the other side of the road, going in the opposite direction, I saw a legion of tanks and police vehicles speeding towards Sohar. I would later learn that they had been headed to officially end the Sohar protests and arrest the remaining protestors.  Sure enough, the next day, driving back to Buraimi, the Globe Roundabout had been cleared of all traces of the protesters, workers already making repairs.

In the morning the students were beaming. “Did you hear the news? The Sultan put the protesters in jail”, a student quipped, holding up her hands in an it’s over gesture, “we feel more free.”

With Bahrain’s continuing protests recently popping back into news headlines, and Yemen, Syria, and Libya still locked into the news cycle, I thought it would be interesting to revisit what happened in Oman. In the initial stages, the New York Times kept a running tab of countries being swept up in Arab Spring protests. Within two and a half weeks, Oman was off the list.

It was around that time when I thought it would be safe to make a trip to Sohar. I had been making errand trips to Sohar every month. I had to pay my monthly car rental bill, withdraw cash from the HSBC ATM in Lulus, buy groceries not found in the local markets in Buraimi and for some reason I thought Lulus was already back in operation. I knew there had been a fire but I thought it was just some brief flash that caused some cosmetic charring. To me, Lulus was this untouchable behemoth, forever providing a bountiful one stop shopping experience at reasonable prices.

What I found was this.

Part of the inside had collapsed and everything had been coated with a cancerous black roast.

I know, I know, the protesters were standing up for their rights, testing driving a long ignored voice, but, man, that was my only Lulu’s of a reasonable proximity. That meant, on top of the hour it took to reach Sohar, I had to continue another hour for the next Lulus or I had to get a visa and cross the border into the United Arab Emirates. It definitely created a sore spot for me and I can’t help but internally glare when I think about the Sohar protesters. Too far guys, too far.

At the height of the protests, I thought bringing up the topic of democracy in class might lead to some interesting discussions. The discussion didn’t last very long but I guess the response was interesting.

The students were very reluctant to talk. Some just weren’t interested. Some said they might enjoy listening about democracy but they didn’t want to discuss the subject. They felt they didn’t know enough about democracy to say anything. One girl joked that she got a headache whenever she tried to think about it because it seemed so complicated. Another joked that “if we talk about democracy, maybe rockets will fall on us”.

These were college students, in their early twenties, adult Omani citizens, and I didn’t really care if they accepted or rejected the idea of democracy (they live in a functioning monarchy after all), it was that they felt they weren’t qualified or intelligent enough to even talk or ask questions, and I would expand that to any sort of political issue. It was a circular justification for ignorance, a pervasive self doubt that was unsettling to encounter.

There were a few bolder students willing to contribute. One girl said she thought democracy meant saying what you thought without being afraid. Another added that democracy needed wise leaders.

The impression I was starting to get was that Omanis, or at least this swath of interior Omanis, as a political society, didn’t trust themselves to govern and tackle pressing issues. The previous Sultan was a repressive tyrant and their current one was an export of Britain, having lived and been educated there. When I’ve asked Omanis about the future of their country, about what happens after the current Sultan, their reaction is a fatalistic shrug; we’ll see what the next guy does. There’s a canyon of uncertainty, the baggage of societal entitlement, and a void in civil courage, urgency, and responsibility. Supposedly the succession process has already been laid out. The royal family will vote and if no agreement can be reached, the current Sultan has already written down and sealed a name in an envelope. Some say it might be his cousin, Fahd bin Mahmoud, and there’s still that rumor of the existence of Faisal, a secret son living in Britain who might arrive at anytime to claim the throne. But the people of Oman are just waiting like its some lottery rather than a match that they need to compete in. They’re watching with biting fingers, hoping that the ball will roll into the goal rather than running up and directing a kick themselves.

And with the protests, not just in Sohar but all around the country, there was a flicker of that, a step onto the playing field. While they vigorously criticized and rejected the destructive actions of the Sohar protesters, most students thought the protests were heading in a good direction. The protests were overwhelmingly peaceful, banner wielding, supportive of the Sultan, and asking to work with him.

I asked my students what they wanted and in a rare and welcome venture into the political, the students said they wanted more rights (couldn’t get them to be more specific), more jobs, they weren’t happy with their education, they wanted certain ministers to be fired because they thought they were stealing money, and they wanted higher salaries. Previously the monthly minimum wage was 140 OMR ($363) which was then hiked to 200 OMR ($520) during the protests. I asked students what level they would be happy with and they settled on at least 500 OMR ($1300).

They also said the Shura Council, or the Majlis al Shura, a consultative body, should be granted more power and responsibility. The Shura consists of representatives from Oman’s villages, towns, and cities who convene in Muscat to voice the concerns of the people. However that is their only power. Representatives are elected by local vote and students personally knew Buraimi residents who had been elected such as an uncle or their mother’s cousin.

1991 marked the creation of the Majlis al Shura with 59 representatives. In 1994 membership increased to 80 and 2 women were elected. The current council consists of 84 representatives. In response to the protests, the Majlis al Shura was granted oversight and legislative powers although what those actually are remain to be seen.

There’s an interesting book called “Oman-The Islamic Democratic Tradition” by Hussein Ghubash. The dominant form of Islam in Oman is Ibadism and Ghubash claims that Oman “is the only example of an Arab-Islamic democracy” based on the tenets of the Ibadi model of the imama system which are the free election of the imama leader and the application of shura (meaning “consultation”).

The Ibadis evolved from the Kharjities, a group that rejected the authority of the final Rashidun Caliph, Ali ibn Abi Talib, the son-in-law and cousin of Mohammad. They believed that the appointment of the imam should not be hereditary but rather decided through free election of the most pious man in the community. In the Ibadi imamate system power was not granted through divine right but guided by the principles of Al shura wal-bay’a (consultation and allegiance) and al-ijma wal-ta aqd (consensus and contract). This democratic tradition dominated Oman until 1688 when Bel arab ibn bin Sultan was elected, the son of the previous imam, Sultan ibn Sayf I, and the next seven imams belonged to the same family, granting the state a hereditary power and indoctrinating the populace into a culture of inherited authority. In 1806 the title of Sultan was first used by Said ibn Sultan.

However, the Ibadi imamate, with a stronghold in Oman’s interior region, would periodically interrupt the Sultanate system with a brief revolution and overthrow from 1869-1871 and another in 1913 which caused the country, under the treaty of al Sib, to be divided into the Imama of Oman and the Sultanate of Muscat. That would be the last true imama in Oman and end with the death of Muhammad bin Abdullah al-khalili in 1954.

Omanis have a very rich and interesting religious political history, one with democratic traditions and a spirit of revolution. It’s unfortunate that all my students found their current political system to be rather boring (although in all fairness it kind of is when the basic gist is, well, that one dude decides everything).

When we turned to America, the students piped up a bit more. They pointed out the problems of homelessness and poverty and unemployment. With its current state of economic stagnation, infected social lesions, and huge gaps of inequality, they were very skeptical of the United States as a model to aspire towards. They believed the existence of these problems were valid criticisms of democracy. For them the merits of a political system were closely tied to the condition of its peoples’ livelihoods.

And of course the word “freedom” quickly entered the conversation. When faced with the word “freedom”, without first trying to figure out what my or an author’s conception of the word was, students immediately reacted defensively, the elicited response usually along the lines of “but we need rules or people will run wild”.

One student asked “America is a free country according to them, then why they don’t accept or respect the Arabs, especially when they are in America?” They saw a society that touted “freedom” as its highest value and then used that freedom to disrespect and humiliate. For them, the word had developed a film of negative connotation.

Despite an initial apathy and even resistance to topics about American history, politics, and culture (students just wanted to learn “grammar” and “speaking”) I tried dolloping those things throughout my curriculum anyway, particularly after that conversation about America and Democracy. I thought by introducing them to thoughtful articulations of freedom by Americans and exposing them to the best of American democracy, it might light a spark to learn more on their own.

In 1995 Hillary Clinton gave a speech at the UN Conference Women Plenary Session held in Beijing. I played the recording while students followed along with a transcript. Afterwards, the same girl who asked about how America could claim itself free when it rejected and disrespected American Arabs, underlined and shared a quote from the speech that she particularly liked: “Freedom means the right of people to assemble, organize, and debate openly. It means respecting the views of those who may disagree with the views of their governments. It means not taking citizens away from their loved ones and jailing them, mistreating them, or denying them their freedom or dignity because of the peaceful expression of their ideas and opinions.”

At best, a few students recognized the name of Clinton, most didn’t, same thing with Martin Luther King Jr. But by introducing them to the words of people who weren’t just repeatedly proclaiming “freedom” but speaking passionately about and articulating the concept in relation to basic human and civil rights, I felt a shift of interest. Their picture of America was growing more complex and diverse from perhaps the American subset of bickering disregard and outright violence focused on by their media sources.

Conversations started to become more interesting. We had a class discussion about the hijab (head scarf) and most girls replied that it was a personal choice. One girl said to forget about religion and society and culture, of course they were an important influence, but the primary reason she chose to do things or not to do things was out of personal dignity. And having heard Clinton’s speech talking about freedom as a way to safeguard, her idea of the word expanded from selfish unrestrained do-whatever-you-feel-like behavior to the more profound conception of freedom to protect her own personal dignity.

As an introductory activity in the beginning of the semester, I asked students to write down five words to describe Oman and five words to describe America. What surprised me was that, with the exception of one or two students, there were no religious or political abstracts like Freedom, Democracy, Christianity, Sultanate, Arab, or Islam. They used personal adjectives like” generous”, “respectful”, “kind”, and “interested in other cultures” for both countries. When asked to describe America, they chose to describe Americans and they often chose adjectives that they identified with themselves and it struck me that perhaps an important aspect of foreign policy, one that we can all influence, is the foreign policy of the good example, the efficacy of domestic progress and prosperity. If the goal is to increase the salience of democracy in the world maybe we should show democracy at its best, treating all its citizens with dignity, demonstrating the capacity to bridge differences in a richly diverse landscape and finding common ground to solve pressing problems. That perhaps the best way to talk about freedom is to show it being used wisely.

in Wisconsin: the slothful easing into reality

 

From Disney World, I was lured to Wisconsin by my brother, and subjugated to a week of servitude and manual labor. Ironically of all the opportunities where I could have been mistaken for a Southeast Asian expat laborer in Oman (and there was that one time in Buraimi when I was walking and some random Omani asked me to get in his car to go with him to the market), it was in America, by my own kin, where I was indentured. Oh Eric, Madison’s great, we can go sailing and I live right by a Whole Foods, NOW BUILD ME A BENCH!

Oh how far I have fallen from the quasi college professor and world traveler.

A week of dishwashing, dirt shoveling, sweeping, cooking, grocery shopping, and construction. I finished building a bench for my brother’s deck. I made dumplings from scratch. Oh Eric, you’ll love Wisconsin, the weather is perfect right now, NOW MAKE ME DUMPLINGS FROM SCRATCH!

A week of living in a luxurious vacation house to a week of sleeping on a couch. A week of watching a lot of TV to, well, another week of watching a lot of TV.

A week where no one waved at me and only some people smiled at me. And no one ever told me to have a magical day. I was severely disillusioned. Clearly The Mouse’s domain did not extend to Madison, Wisconsin.

It was cold, relatively.

I was able to do some cool things: I visited the free zoo and saw a young lion play with its father. It hid behind a rock and then pounced on the father, who was like, “uh, oh, okay” and just didn’t seem into it. Still, it was a cute moment. I hiked around a lake with my brother and his girlfriend, went sailing with my brother, there were BBQs on his deck, and I was able to check out the farmers’ market which wrapped around the Capitol building and had fresh baked goods and an abundance of cheese samples.

 

There was even a UW Badgers football game so I got to witness the local revving towards Big Ten football with tailgate parties, the streets flooded with supporters in red, and people getting drunk at 9 am in the morning.

I was just adjusting to normal life: navigating American supermarkets, relearning how to operate self-service gas pumps, but, there was no pressure and it was odd to just sit on the couch while the people around me had jobs and went to school and had responsibilities and deadlines. I think Disney World just postponed the culture shock. I was clearly slumping, constantly tired, energy leaking out of me.

It was especially odd to be newly unemployed around medical school students and they would ask me what I did for the day and I would reply “well, I ate a bagel, and I took several long naps” and on various days you could replace “bagel” with “donut” or “gelato”. And they clearly had been doing exponentially more: studying, diagnosing patients, maybe even saving lives, probably not taking naps and eating bagels, which is a shame because Bagels Forever makes quite the delicious lox bagel sandwich

When I met people, there was this lingering aura of frenetic stress and commiserating exhaustion (and sometimes excitement) and I didn’t necessarily feel guilty but I also didn’t feel relieved (well, maybe a little). I felt I was getting a fairly clear picture of the path their careers and lives were headed, a path that was highly structured and arduous and very long. It was like watching a train speed pass me, a glimpse of a parallel track, one that was growing very familiar to me but one that I probably wasn’t going to intersect with. And it was a little disjointing, particularly coming from the short trajectory I had just stepped off of, and I’m now realizing how strange and unique these past 10 months have been, how much and how little I’ve accomplished, and now I’m standing at a station with a bunch of empty tracks and I’m not sure which one to wait for.

 

Eric in America

Music. Loud. Vaguely African tribal. Undercurrents of Caribbean tropical. Primal rhythms syncopated by Disney™ celebratory harmonies.  Great creatures of the natural world, domesticated and stylized into abstractions of wooden sticks and bright colors. Fierce ancient cultures appropriated by the Disney machine, paraded past under the iron wave of oversized gloves. And at last, The Mouse, the emperor himself, crowned with a safari hat, garbed in safari shorts and vest, as though on an expedition to find me. He’s staring at me. He’s smiling at me. He’s waving at me. I’ve been found and everything will be magical.

My re-entry into America, after 10 months of living in the Arab Gulf, was through Disney World in Orlando, FL. If there is a good way to ease someone back into America, Disney World has it in spades. A week where everyone is constantly smiling and waving at you with professionally generated Disney™ enthusiasm and move aside reverse culture shock. Daily parades and nightly fireworks, catchy and inspirational songs about dreams coming true reaffirmingly playing in the background, what a magical welcome back.

I was bracing for the worst return. The last time I came back from the Middle East, my connecting flight in Europe got cancelled and I was stranded at the airport for a day, most of it spent standing in line with a crowd of other peeved passengers trying to rebook. My luggage got lost, the airline had to clear me before I stepped on the plane, and upon arrival, I was grilled by immigration on what I had been doing in Egypt.

Hurricane Irene was brewing.

But in a stroke of solipsistic fortune, Irene tiptoed around Florida and unleashed her fury on the Northern East coast, all my connecting flights were on time, and the immigrations guy just said “wow, you went to all these countries” and waved me into the United States.

The morning after landing, I woke up to a beautiful clear Florida day, stepped out on to the balcony, and immediately dropped to the ground. There was a radiating pain, the source drowned by what felt like an encompassing continuous electric shock. I jumped back inside, slamming the sliding door shut, and finally noticed the wasp nest directly on top of the entrance. I had been stung on the neck and forehead. I rubbed toothpaste on the swollen sites and then iced them with a frozen water bottle. Both helped with the pain but the combination resulted in the bottle sticking to my face and I had to very slowly and painfully peel the frozen bottle off. Had I later encountered a giant costumed Disney wasp character, I might have clubbed it with that frozen water bottle.

With four theme parks and two water parks, each with an admission price, Disney World was an expensive and exhausting endeavor. We got a 4 day pass for Animal Kingdom, Hollywood Studios, Magic Kingdom, and Epcot, and bought a separate ticket for the Typhoon Lagoon water park.

Unexpectedly, the visit turned out to be a decent summary of a great deal of the last 10 months. In Animal Kingdom there was the Kilimanjaro Safari ride which attempted to replicate a Serengeti safari. In Epcot there was the World Showcase with country pavilions that replicated sites from France, Italy, and Morocco. The Seas with Nemo and Friends had various aquariums and scuba divers were inside. At Typhoon Lagoon we got to snorkel with coral fish, sharks, and rays. It was strangely satisfying to come across all that and to be reminded, hey, I’ve actually been there/done that.

I had a lot of fun, I was actually surprised by how much fun I had, I suspect, mainly because I was with a family and witness to the bickering and genuine moments that erupt when families take trips together.

Being caught in the dynamics of all that was a comforting buffer to the sudden drastic change in weather, scenery, culture, and demographics.

Each excursion into a park was a full multisensory overloaded day, channel changing bouncing from ride to ride to show to parade. If there were any reverse culture shock symptoms, by the end of the day I was too over stimulated and exhausted to notice. But really, the only thing I had to come to grips with was that I was really back in America, everything else wasn’t real. The demands of reality, of finding a job, of the everyday mundane, were waiting at home, on the other side of the country, with no jurisdiction within Disney’s castle walls.

It was kind of staggering how much I started attributing to Disney orchestration. We were watching this Indiana Jones live show where holes appeared in the earth and there were great fiery bursts and then it started raining and thundering, canceling the show, and as we were walking out there was a bolt of lightning in the near distance with an explosive thunderclap and my immediate thought: was that part of the show?

After I landed in Orlando, while I was waiting to be picked up, I watched a new episode of Louie, a TV series written, acted, directed, and produced by Louie C.K, a crassly insightful stand-up comedian and an adeptly awkward comic actor. This episode, from the second season, was entitled “Duckling” and set during Louie’s USO troop morale boosting tour in Afghanistan. At the end of the episode there is a scene when their helicopter is forced to land due to a mechanical problem and they are approached by an armed caravan of Afghanis and a tense shouting match ensues that seems about to escalate into gunfire when the baby duck that Louie’s daughter snuck into his luggage escapes and waddles into the middle of the two parties and Louie trips and falls chasing after it. Everyone starts laughing and the Afghanis approach Louie and shake hands and coo at the duckling asking its name in which Louie replies “uh, ducky” and everyone starts repeating “ducky, ducky, ducky”. It’s all very endearing and humanizing and what stuck out to me in particular was the way one of the Afghanis held the duckling and brushed it and smoothed the feathers with his fingers in a playfully exaggerated way like dusting the shoulder of a suit. And even though the only English word the Afghanis say is “ducky”, it turns out to be a rich conversation of repeated “ducky”s where the tone fluctuates in such a range of meaning that settles into understanding and friendship.

It was moments of similar quirks and displays of playfulness that helped me bridge the strange unfamiliarity of living among a homogeny of dress, religion, and ethnicity in Oman. I remember shopping at Lulu hypermarket in Muscat and seeing a young Omani father casually carrying a fly swatter in his hands and every so often he would swat his kids’ behinds with a mock ferocity betrayed by the giggling that erupted from the kids. I couldn’t help but laugh at the oddness of the scene but it was a relatable weirdness, not necessarily in its familiarity but in that it was so strange that it normalized everything else. In Disney World I saw parents who had leashed their squirming toddlers, the leashes guised in a furry animal backpack to put a cute quirky spin on what otherwise might look really bad.

Amidst the measured and choreographed strangeness that Disney World infuses into its grounds, it was those random moments of oddity, smuggled in from reality, that you couldn’t help but smile at and helped ease me back into the burst and bustle of American diversity.

Italy

After I finished my time in Oman, I decided to make a trip to Italy before heading back to America. There would be fresh pasta, there would be ancient ruins and artistic masterpieces, there would be gelato, it was to be good.

Venice

I arrived in Rome’s airport and immediately took a train to Venice. Upon arrival, the city showed no mercy to those with heavy luggage. Dragging my suitcase and bags over the cobbled streets and up and down the repetitively reappearing arched and staired bridges, I was drenched in sweat by the time I found my hotel.

Particularly in the evening, while exploring the narrow and maze-like layout of the city, crossing bridges over canals, gondolas gliding by on nearly street level water, there was a familiar and entrancing aura to it all and I was trailed by a feeling that I was in some giant Disney ride.

I used the water buses to get around which provided some great views of the city. From various vantage points it looked as though the city were floating on water or had been midway submerged in some great flood,  giving off a range of impressions of a calm recovery from a recent disaster to a precarious beauty about to plunge into one.

 

Florence

Florence, birthplace of the Renaissance, home of Dante Alighieri, Machiavelli, and the possibly teenaged but definitely non-ninja and non-turtle versions of Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, and Donatello, was my next stop. The city was easily walkable and centered around the stunning Duomo that dominated the rest of the cityscape.

 

In the setting sun the duomo’s exterior was particularly stunning:  statues carved into the façade, the white marble intricately designed and framed by soft pastel greens and pinks

Michelangelo’s David was housed in Florence. I didn’t realize how large it was, particularly in the confines of the museum, and that it was biblical David of Goliath fame and not some random kid called David that big M happened to know. What stood out to me in particular were the veins carved into the arms. The naturalistic detail was incredible. It really was a stunning masterpiece.

Pisa

Pisa was an easy daytrip from Florence. The leaning tower was the big-name draw but it was also located in a square with a cathedral, baptistery, and cemetery. Time slots to climb up the tower quickly filled up but as I waited it was nice to relax in the square and read on the steps of the cathedral with a view of the leaning tower.

Rome

Rome was my final stop although food-wise I visited at a bad time when many Italians close up their shops in mid-August and go on vacation. Pretty much all the recommended restaurants from my guidebooks were closed and I had to get past this weird stress of feeling like I was wasting meal opportunities if they weren’t mentioned in a guidebook.

My museum visits in Venice, Florence, and later in Vatican City, left me overloaded and exhausted so I skipped the galleries in Rome. I did of course explore the Colosseum area and was able to finish reading Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom” as the sunlight dimmed on the curved façade of the World Wonder.

It was nice to just walk around, passing by classic spots like the Spanish Steps (the widest staircase in Europe) and the Trevi Fountain (throw a coin in there and you will return to Rome). I frequented the Pantheon area for restaurants and gelato shops. The Pantheon started off as a temple dedicated to all the Roman gods and then was turned into a church. The dome served as a paragon for later domed buildings throughout Europe. Around noon, the sunlight bursts through the dome’s oculus in an ethereal beam of light in front of the entrance.

I was surprised by the number of Egyptian obelisks in the city, and apparently there are more ancient Egyptian obelisks in Italy than there are in Egypt. The Romans appropriated the obelisks by topping them with a cross, effectively preserving them from destruction.

The Vatican

Physically part of Rome but politically a separate city-state, Vatican City issues its own passports and is protected by a force of Swiss guards in whimsical traditional uniforms wielding probably unwhimsically sharp halberds. Saint Peter’s Basilica is here and the Vatican Museum houses an exhaustingly vast collection including Michelangelo’s ceiling fresco and Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel.

Saint Peter’s Basilica, one of the holiest Catholic sites and burial ground of Peter, was enormous and in the late afternoon, crepuscular rays erupted through the ceiling windows in glowing white columns, adding an accent of celestial architectural to the solemn beauty of the interior.

 

The Food

Quick and cheap eats: pizza in Rome and a tripe sandwich from Florence.

Seafood appetizers: anchovies marinated in lemon and olive oil in Venice and grilled octopus with pesto in Pisa. The octopus was grilled to a perfect tenderness.

Main courses: a flaky and juicy salmon filet in Venice and a Florentine steak, a mouthwatering red middle, topped with Arugula and shaved Parmesan cheese.

Desserts: gelato, fruit tart, Italian ice

Seafood pastas: swordfish pasta from Pisa and a tuna spaghetti from Rome.

Prawn gnocchi from Florence and a pesto pasta from Rome.

More seafood: crispy fried baby squid and a clam, mussel, and shrimp spaghetti, both in Rome.

My favorites: spaghetti with squid ink sauce, a specialty from Venice, deliciously briny with tender pieces of squid, all tangled up in freshly made pasta. In Florence, classically hearty spaghetti Bolognese.

Perhaps at a different time, when more restaurants might have been open, Rome would have won me over, but on this trip, Florence offered me the best meals. I stumbled upon a restaurant where the menu had no English translation, the waiter barely spoke English, and old Italian men were eating and was served the Florentne steak and later returned for the spaghetti Bolognese. I didn’t have such luck in Rome in discovering good eateries. The gelatos and granitas (Italian ice), however, were universally delicious in all the cities I visited and were extremely easy to stumble upon. I will admit, with little to no remorse, that I had pre and post meal gelatos, for multiple meals, everyday.

Coffee flavored gelato has always been my go-to pick but I was very surprised by two new flavors that quickly rose to the top: pistachio and melon. My previous encounters with pistachio ice cream have ranged from unmemorable to off putting (and sometimes disappointing when I realize it is not green tea ice cream) but in Italy, I loved it; the flavor was very present with a delicious nuttiness.  The melon gelato was refreshing in taste and light in texture with a subtle, almost ghostly sweetness that snowballed into sublimity. The flavor had a teasing quality to it that compelled you to keep on tasting.

Buon Appetito.

The Green Sea Turtles of Ras al Jinz

Back in December, turtle watching at Ras al Jinz was the first trip I made within Oman.  The guidebooks say October to December is the best time to witness the entire process of turtles laying eggs and babies hatching while July is the period when the most number of turtles come ashore to lay eggs. So when it happened that my family would be coming in July, I had to take them.

Prior to their arrival, my family seemed the most excited about Dubai. But for all the effort and expense of getting and staying there, I think they left underwhelmed. It’s a big name city that can be interesting, but if tourism is your only reason for going, the main attractions of hotels and malls, as extravagant and opulent as they may be, are rarely worth a trans-Atlantic flight for the privilege of looking at, entering, and walking around.

Ras al Jinz was our destination the day after we got back from Dubai and it was the perfect counterpoint to all that. For all the staggering amount of manpower and money that the UAE has channeled into manufacturing an environment attractive to visitors, Oman simply has to protect its natural gifts and, with the exception of chelonaphobia sufferers, its neighbor’s record breaking towers and astronomically starred luxury hotels will rarely match the odd beauty of watching an illuminated sea turtle’s behind plopping out ooze covered golf ball eggs.

The turtle center at Ras al Jinz offers two guided tours, one at 9 pm and one at 4 am, each time costing 3 OMR per person. We went on both tours but opted not to stay at the center which, while nice and convenient, is also very expensive. My original plan was for us to camp outside, somewhere, I hadn’t really thought it through but I remember there being a lot of open space. I guess the family had expected a formal campground when I told them my plan and once we arrived, they balked at just picking a place off the side of the road and sleeping there. We found a nearby hotel instead.

If we had only attended the 9 pm tour, my family probably would have left content but unaffected. During the much more crowded evening tour, the guides basically try to show you four phases of turtle nesting: the actual egg laying, the burying, the crawl back, and baby turtles emerging from the sand. In December I was lucky enough to see all that on the evening tour.

But that July night we only saw two batches of already lain eggs and the turtles burying them.

When the tour was finished, my family wasn’t very enthusiastic about waking up a few hours later for another one, and my brother, thinking we would see the same thing again, was seriously considering sleeping through.

The dawn tour turned out to be a different and much improved story. At 9 pm there were multiple groups of 15-20 people. At 4 am it was just our family of four, plus another family of two, plus two guides, on the entire beach. Since we had already been on the night tour, the guides didn’t really say anything, but they showed us a lot of turtles. And we were allowed to bring along cameras.

 

As the light slowly trickled into the new morning, color flushed onto the scene of the turtles, clarifying a stunning background of sheer cliffs, battered by a continuous beat of explosive waves that reverberated ocean mist.

A female green sea turtle starts nesting at around age 27. She comes ashore only at night, digs a hole, lays her eggs, covers them, and heads back into the ocean, returning to the same nesting site every 2-3 years. While it only takes 15 minutes to lay the average clutch of 100 eggs, the turtle, usually weighing between 240-420 pounds in a 5 foot frame, and with only flippers to dig and drag her considerable bulk, clocks in at 2-3 hours to complete the entire process and return to the water, leaving behind a large sandy pit and tire-like treads.

Ideally, the turtles manage to drag themselves back into the sea while it’s still dark. It was beautiful that we were able to observe the turtles in clear bright sunlight, to study the delicate gradients of color on the shell and the intricately scored skin that looked at once both flimsily doughy and tightly coiled with strength. But these were the laggards, and in the intensifying daylight, we were increasingly witnesses to doomed nesting attempts.

Once a turtle lays all her eggs, she uses her back flippers to bury them and pat down the sand while her front flippers sweep open a decoy hole, a slight countermeasure to the damning evidence she leaves behind. While individually the nesting pit is conspicuously large, in the pre-dawn absence of predatory observers, it gets shuffled into the defense of an accumulated landscape of turtle nesting pits densely dotting the shore, many of them empty. But if the turtle is still in her pit and spotted when the predators emerge with the sun (namely seagulls and foxes), she loses that advantage and her nest becomes an easy and obvious target.

If she is just beginning the nesting process, as the sand soaks in the morning light, eventually flooding out into a scalding surface heat, the eggs are likely to be roasted to invalidity before being buried properly. The turtle herself is exposed to a fatal risk as she is stuck for 2-3 hours in the baking heat and then faces a slow wading crawl through scorching sand. Every morning rangers sweep the beach and move stuck turtles back into the water before it’s too late.

Meanwhile, newly hatched baby turtles were emerging from the sand, incubated and undisturbed for two months, a so far successful nesting attempt from a cohort of female green sea turtles in May.The temperature of the sand during the incubation period is a critical factor in the sex ratios of baby turtle clutches. For deviations from the target temperature of a balanced sex ratio, higher temperatures skew female while lower temperatures skew male, meaning nests made too far from the water are likely to be predominantly female while nest made too close to the water are likely to be predominantly male. Global warming forebodes a future sea turtle population skewed towards too many females.  We were also told that 1 out of 1000 eggs would make it to adulthood. That morning we saw two baby turtles; they had moved on to the semi-finals for a chance at an 80 year average lifespan, slightly better than the average life expectancy at birth of a human living in a developed country.

However the fact that we were seeing these baby turtles in the dawning light meant they were more than likely to become edible cannon fodder.

As the sun rose, it was like a reverse New Years Eve countdown, the fiery sphere’s intensity glowing from gaseous red-orange to blinding white as it floated upwards, signaling the starkly plummeting chances of baby turtle survival.

It was adorable to watch the baby turtles waddling lightly across the sand, until you noticed they were heading straight towards the rhythmic ferocity of the ocean waves, foaming with violent power. It took several tries for the baby turtles to enter, the water continuously rejecting them. A turtle would disappear in a gentle wash of receding water, only to reappear in the wake of a crashing wave, breached on its back, several feet further from where it started, at the mercy of another disorienting crash for a chance to flip right side up.

In the moist plain between ocean water and dry sand, crabs surfaced from their burrows to stalk their potential baby turtle breakfast. They were organized like pieces in a chess game, the crabs scattered about in front of the water, incrementally skittering, responsively converging for a positioning kill, and the turtle pawn doing the only thing it could do: slowly inch forward.

The natural drama of it all, distilled to life and death success or failure, was joltingly enthralling, overwhelming whatever remaining fatigue was left from sleeping for 4 hours and having to wake before dawn. Only half-way through our stay in Oman, my usually critical mom declared that this experience made the trip over here worth it.

 

 

Unfortunately whatever momentum of exultant excitement and anticipation that had been induced in my family for what the rest of the trip might bring was quickly lost when, on the drive back, I pulled into the guidebook recommended beach of Ras al Hadd and promptly got my 2WD compact Suzuki stuck in the sand.

Istanbul

My family was able to spend the first day of Ramadan in Muscat, which wasn’t very interesting because everything was closed, and then they left. My parents had a transfer in Istanbul and since my mom could spare a few extra days, she requested a layover and I joined her to explore the Turkish city, the former Constantinople and power center of the Byzantine and Ottoman empires.

Several teachers at the college had urged me to visit Istanbul and it seemed like a popular vacation spot for people in the Gulf.

I didn’t know what to expect. My mom and I had decided on a schedule at the last minute and I bought my ticket the day before we left so I had done little research.

On the descent, from the brief glimpses I got from the window, I was surprised by how beautiful it was. The almost universal housing architecture of red shingled roofs on white bodies looked really familiar, like something from a Southern California beach city. The buildings were very compacted and staggered along the curvature of the lushly green hills. With the Bosphorus Strait and the Golden Horn bay and the Sea of Marmara, water seemed to be constantly in sight. And then the bridges, it looked like a paradise.

As far as routes from the airport into the city go, Istanbul gives a captivating introduction. The road was right along the water, flanked by vibrant grassy strands dotted with trees and people taking morning walks, and as we approached the Sultanahmet area, the fortress like mosques with their minaret spires rose into view.

Around the Sultanahmet area, which is where we stayed, the streets were narrow and cobbled and fairly steep, with many old people and tourists. My mom said it reminded her of her parent’s neighborhood in Taipei.

The guidebooks warned of the August heat, but perhaps because I was coming from Oman, I thought the weather was perfect. It was hot but not humid and there was a strong breeze and in the evening, it was a comfortable cool.

During the daytime most stores were open and a fair amount of people were walking around. It wasn’t until evening, after iftar, that you realized it was Ramadan (or Ramazan in Turkish) and the streets become flooded with people picnicking outside and music playing. It was very festive.

The biggest draws were the Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque facing each other in a proximate standoff of architectural grandeur. Even with rushes of tourists constantly streaming past, being caught between the two structures was mesmerizing. The Hagia Sophia was completed in 537 and has been used alternatively as a cathedral, mosque, and currently as a museum. The exterior can look faded and mishmashed as it has undergone substantial repairs throughout its history. The Blue Mosque, completed in 1616 by Sultan Ahmed I, was built to rival the Hagia Sophia, and it does. It looks like a castle fortress and the symmetry and intricacy of the design is stunning.  It is still used as a mosque.

The Hagia Sophia’s interior was spectacular, a beautifully striking mix of Islam and Christianity. Hanging next to mosaics of Mother Mary with Jesus are Ottoman Arabic calligraphy plates inscribed with the names of figures from the Quran.

We mainly stuck to the street food, which in the Sultanahmet area wasn’t cheap but still reasonable. There were things called durum and donar kebab that were basically shawarmas. Sometimes they added raw green peppers which gave a nice crunchy bite and slight zing to the wrap. There were also sandwiches with crispy fried fish and we ate a nice meal along the Bosphorus where they served pistachio kebabs. In Muscat there is an excellent restaurant in Al Khuwair called the Turkish House which serves great local seafood and I didn’t find anything comparable but I guess we weren’t really looking. As we were walking through the Egyptian bazaar we passed by the aroma of a store grinding up freshly roasted coffee beans and of course I had to stop and try some Turkish coffee. Also Turkish coffee ice cream: need to import.

We took one of the hop-on bus tours which was a nice way to see the oceanic scenery of the city.

We checked out both the Topkapi Palace and the Dolmabahce Palace and witnessed the opulent remains of Sultan life. The Topkapi Palace was particularly interesting because it housed some displays of artifacts from prominent figures in the Quran and also had a treasury of spoils and gifts of gold and diamond and other precious things.

Istanbul was a nice respite from quiet and often traffic logged Muscat. It felt great to be able to walk outside again for the whole day and everything seemed so vibrant and bustling. The mosques were open to the public and my mom was able to witness people praying and it was nice for her to experience another country where the people are predominantly Muslim and to see a more festive and public display of Ramadan.

The Family visits Oman

The arrival of my family was preluded with disaster.

A few days prior, after an encounter with shark, I found myself in the hospital ER, with an IV needle taped into my wrist, dripping saline into my bloodstream.

My proclivity for trying new food stuffs finally got the better of me and after eating an undercooked shark steak, I suffered from severe/intense/astronomic diarrhea for four days (almost every hour) before I finally decided it would be a good idea to see a doctor. It was a painful and disgusting experience that I won’t go into detail but I will say that I did suffer from a bout of paranoia where I was convinced I had contracted worms and read some horrific quips about worms crawling out of the body and then attempted a dietary therapy of raw carrots, sunflower seeds, garlic, tomatoes, and beet root which turned my output into what looked like a smooshed up legion of worms that had burst inside out into pieces. Plus there was this vaguely ethanolic smell that kept on sending me back to dissections in biology lab.

Thankfully there were no parasites, it was just a bacterial infection, treatable with antibiotics. However I did arrive severely dehydrated so lesson here, at some point drinking water no longer helps with dehydration and can sometimes exacerbate the situation. Drink Gatorade. Also, if you think you have worms, go see a doctor and don’t freak yourself out by reading the internet.

On my parents’ front, the night before they were supposed to leave, I received an email informing me that both my mom and my brother had realized their passports were expired. One of my mom’s friends had called to remind her to make copies of their passports and as they were making copies, my dad noticed my mom’s passport had expired several months ago and then they looked at my brother’s copy and it had also been expired for several months. So the morning of their flights, unable to make appointments, my brother took a bus from Madison, Wisconsin to Chicago, Illinois and my parents drove to downtown Los Angeles to attempt to renew their passports within hours of their planes taking off.

The lesson here: if you find out your passport is expired on the same day of your flight, it is possible to renew it in time, if you live in the right city.

While my brother arrived on schedule, my parents flight from Los Angeles to Chicago was delayed, causing them to miss their connecting flight to Turkey by minutes and they had to wait a day to take the next flight and then once they got to Turkey, they had to wait standby for a flight to Muscat and just happened to snag the last two standby seats to Muscat.

Lesson here: air travel can really suck sometimes.

My brother was eager to wear an “Omani costume” (his words), and we picked up our parents from the airport both in dishdashas and kumas.

Over their 11 day stay I drove them from Muscat to Buraimi to Abu Dhabi to Dubai, back to Muscat, to Sur/Ras al Jinz, back to Muscat, and finally to Nizwa and back again for a total of at least 1400 miles, which is kind of like driving from Los Angeles to the middle of America.

My family was actually interested in seeing Buraimi, the town that Lonely Planet concludes: “it’s fair to say there is not much reason to make a special visit”. I showed them the outside of my apartment and once I made a turn off the road into the dirt, they were already laughing and I wished I still had access to my apartment to show them how my bedroom was the size of another Fulbrighter’s bathroom in Muscat and the water pressure was so pitiful that at full blast I was less showering and more drizzling myself clean.

I had hoped to bring them to campus to meet the teachers and students at the college but it happened to be Oman’s Renaissance Day and everyone was off.

From Buraimi we crossed over to the UAE and because my brother and mother’s passports were blank, we were sent to an office where the director repeatedly asked if my brother and mother had ever been to the UAE? Were they sure? This was their first time? They had never ever entered? Never? Ever? Were they sure? Until my brother showed them his expired one and they let us continue.

Lesson: if you just renewed your passport, take along your old one just in case.

In Abu Dhabi I had planned to take them to Ferrari World but it turns out they all hated roller coasters so we just went to the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque and the Emirates Palace Hotel. My brother was initially turned away from the Emirates Palace because he was wearing shorts.

In Dubai, the main thing we did was eat a lunch buffet at the Burj al Arab, which is often called the 7 star hotel. It’s really a 5 star hotel and 7 star hotels don’t exist, the term was just used by a journalist and it caught on.

We ate at the Asian cuisine restaurant which, coincidentally was filled with mostly Asian guests, and it was delicious but probably not worth the $90 per person entry price. I finally had sushi after 6 months and there was Peking duck and dim sum so I was satisfied. The drinks really bumped up the price though and my brother’s two cans of coke cost $20. Plus water for $10?

The weather was terribly humid and since everyone in my family wears glasses we had to stop for a few moments each time we exited an air conditioned building so they could wipe off the condensation.

We also took the monorail around the Palm Jumeirah which is an artificial island shaped like a palm tree and along the fronds, the houses each have a backyard beach.

We also went to the Dubai Mall with a view of the Burj Khalifa and inside was the aquarium.

In Al Ain we drove up Jebel Hafeet to see the evening electric city view.

After a brief stop in Muscat, we continued south to Ras Al Jinz to see green sea turtles nesting. That was probably the highlight for my family and I’ll have a separate entry for that experience in the near future. On the way back we stopped by the Bimmah Sinkhole although they didn’t seem too excited about it.

Then I went scuba diving at the Daymaniyat Islands with Michael, one of the last remaining Fulbrighters, while my brother snorkeled above us. The islands are about a 40 minute boat ride from Sawadi beach, between Muscat and Sohar, and are Oman’s only marine national nature reserve and protected by UNESCO. The diving here is supposed to be some of the best in the country and at Ras al Jinz we met a woman who had just dove there and had rescued a green sea turtle from a net. Unfortunately that day the visibility was really bad and we didn’t see anything notable. But that’s the nature of Nature. My brother seemed to have a more fruitful experience snorkeling. During the surface interval between dives I snorkeled with him and we saw a trio of eagle rays and a large circular ray resting on the shallow bottom. He even sighted a manta ray leaping out of the water. I just caught the descending splash.

Our final destination was Nizwa where we attempted to find Wadi Ghul, the Grand Canyon of the Arabian Peninsula, but the steep roads were a challenge for my little Suzuki compact and when the road turned from asphalt to rocky dirt, I pushed on through until we caught a glimpse of the canyon but then had to turn back due to the descending darkness and my mom’s complaints.

 

We also went on a guided tour of the Al Hoota Cave with stalactites and pools of blind fish. There was a charismatic and jovial old man on the tour with his grandchildren and he had a walking stick and a white beard and was in full Omani garb and there was a naivety and earnestness in the way he kept on mumbling friendly Arabic to my parents despite them not understanding which was very endearing. And then when we reached the pool of blind fish, he took his stick and just started whacking at the water with it. When you’re old, you can get away with so much.

Finally back in Muscat, I took my parents to see the Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque and at the end we were greeted by another friendly old man and taken to his office where he talked to us about Islam and then gave us a stack of free books.

My family became obsessed with Lulu Hypermarket. They pretty much wanted to eat all our meals there. It’s like if Omani tourists came to Los Angeles and just wanted to visit Costco.

One thing my family noticed was how frustrating traffic could get, both with cars and people. Getting in and out of Muttrah, with the narrow one way streets, was often a nightmare, and we would be waiting half an hour in stop and go traffic for what should have taken 5-10 minutes. And at Lulu’s, particularly during the first day of Ramadan, around noon, it was disheartening. Once we got passed the parking lot traffic jams, inside, the place was swarming with carts stacked completely full and lines stretching through the aisles. We were just trying to buy a hot lunch and we waited nearly an hour in the check out line. There was no other option, everything else was closed during Ramadan.

I don’t think my family was particularly taken with the country. I think I tried to fit in too much traveling and they were exhausted most of the time. Plus it was really hot and places were far apart, even within Muscat. They did comment that the older, more historic area where I lived, Muttrah, looked a lot like Taiwan with the narrow layout and building architecture and especially the souq compared to the Taiwanese night markets. Ultimately they did come to the Middle East, met Arabs, met Muslims, learned a bit about Islam, and it was uneventful and normal in the best possible sense. While I know they would never choose to live here, my hope is that they realized that they at least could live here; that while they saw many foreign aspects, they also encountered enough familiarity and commonality to feel safe and comfortable.

But now that my family has left, I realize I’m ready to go home as well.

Life in Buraimi

My time in Buraimi has ended and I have since moved to Muscat to live out the end of my grant period.

I was glad to leave but had also developed a comfortable familiarity with the town and during my first few days in Muscat, I did miss the simplicity of the town layout and generally quiet atmosphere. I lost cheap solid places to eat and an excellent juice spot but to balance that out I now have regular and convenient access to Lulu’s Hypermarket.

When I first arrived in Buraimi, the dean of the college gave me a quick tour by driving around in a square through the four main roundabouts and then exclaimed “that’s it! No need for a car, you can walk everywhere” and so for most of my time I stuck to that route. But a student finally gave me a fuller tour of the town and Buraimi turned out to be bigger than I thought, not much bigger, but still bigger. It was a much needed tour and he pointed out places I would have missed if I drove around on my own. There was a small soccer stadium called the Buraimi Club and nearby was a small enclosed area for riding ponies. We passed by some parks, one of which was built during the Sultan’s 40^th anniversary celebration. It was a nice narrow grassy area with scattered benches and we chatted and drank avocado juice while a mass of Indian kids wrestled nearby. He showed me a hangout spot where people could play billiards. He also showed me the drive through souq which sold fruits and vegetables and in the early morning even had fresh fish. Afterwards we ate dinner at a traditional Omani restaurant. There were private booths and also a large open carpeted area. We sat on the floor cross legged and they laid out a plastic sheet and a large plate of rice with pieces of rotisserie and grilled chicken. A side of raw veggies and cups of salsa accompanied the meal. I opted to try to eat Omani style which means with my hands and specifically with my right hand only because in Islam, the left hand is deemed to be unclean. The chicken was cooked nicely so the meat slid easily off the bone. You mix the salsa with the rice, ball the rice up, add a piece of chicken and some veggies and pop or flick the conglomerate in your mouth. Unlike sushi rice, briyani rice doesn’t lend itself to sticking together and I experienced much difficulty. The rice conglomerate kept falling apart and I was slurping it out of my hand and leaving a mess all over my clothes and the plastic sheet and I looked over at my student and his side was completely spotless. He finally pointed out that I needed to reduce the amount of rice I was trying to ball up and by the end I was gaining some finesse, still, I’ll accept a fork from now on.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For most of my time here I’ve been cooking myself. My two staples were a stir fried mix of dried pasta, frozen veggies, and frozen meat simmered in jarred Indian and Thai sauces and paratha soft tacos of cheese, meat, and fresh onions and peppers. But after the meal at the traditional Omani restaurant with the student, I was able to generate some semblance of anticipation for trying more foods around town and began eating out more. There was one Omani restaurant where I pretty much tried their entire menu, pictured below.

Charcoal-grilled and rotisserie chicken served over briyani rice.

Lamb and fresh fish from the Buraimi souq.

Malleh, dried fish in a box, and Awal, sun dried shark, served over briyani rice.

Malleh is salted fish preserved in a box or jar, it kind of looks like ceviche but not tender and with bones. The restaurant was surprised when I ordered malleh and the guy at the register replied in a questioning tone “malleh?” and I nodded and he said in a slightly laughing manner “malleh” and then with triumphant excitement, “malleh!” and then he told the waiter “maleh” and pointed at me and the waiter turned to me and said “maleh? Maleh?” and I nodded again hoping I wasn’t making a mistake with this order and when he returned with the food he said “maleh!” and I ate it and got sick afterwards.

A few days later I walked in again and the man at the register shouted “maleh!” in recognition and asked how it was and I said it was “okay. Different.” And then the waiter came up with a huge smile and asked if I wanted more malleh but the cashier said no, he’s just getting chicken today. But he said, next time, awal.

Awal is shark dried in the sun. For me, it also caused stomach problems.

When I told my students I tried malleh and awal, they bunched up their faces in disgust and said only old people eat those dishes. Back in the day, because Buraimi is in the desert interior, fish had to be preserved, but now with roads and trucks, fresh fish is available, and that’s probably the best way to go.

About once a week I would go to Al Nadi restaurant near my apartment. The owner is Syrian and the waiters were always very friendly and called me “doctor”, accented as “doc-toorrr”. They actually wrote “doctor” on my order slips. It had decent briyani, makbous, and tikka sandwiches but the main reason I went was because it was an easy walk from my place. I had a hard time distinguishing between briyani and makbous because both were basically lamb or chicken served over rice but students told me with makbous, the rice was cooked with the meat, while with bryani, meat was served over the rice.

I also enjoyed a Lebanese restaurant called Laiyet Bairoot that made decent fatoush (salad with crispy pita strips) and baba ganoush (like salsa but with roasted eggplant added) and had really good bread, freshly baked from a fiery oven and stuffed with melted cheese.

My students also gave me a bunch of food one day, including the much hyped but hard to find home-made harees.

Right: Home-made Omani crepes, tasted like any other crepe.

Left: harees (glutinous wheat mixed with strands of chicken)

Right: halwa (coffee flavored jello with nuts)

Once I started going to restaurants I began running into students, never my own, but they knew who I was and sometimes they were from the other college in town, the University of Buraimi.

I also started witnessing episodes of polite violence over who gets to pay the bill. For example I would notice three Omani men walking up to the counter to pay the bill and one of them would pull out some money from his pocket and start to hand it over to the cashier but then his friend would suddenly grab his hand and force it down and take money from his own pocket and hand it over but then the other friend would take his free remaining hand to retaliate and stop his friend’s hand before it was too late.

It’s always severely uncomfortable and hilarious to see people try to overcome the challenge of physically preventing someone from handing over money in a polite and subtle manner.

I would get flashbacks of my own family when we went out to dinner with other Taiwanese friends and relatives and at the end of dinner a tense showdown would occur over who gets the privilege of paying for everyone else’s meal.  There’s a rush of hands to grab the bill followed by pleading and exasperation as people articulate reasons why they should pay while simultaneously trying to rip the bill from the other person’s hands and when the bill is settled, attention is turned to the lucky individual who had the quickest hand and that person is mobbed as people try to stuff money into their pockets or their purse is grabbed in reverse robbery to add money into it, and if that person has good Chinese manners they will dodge the attempts and run around the table and block all opening in which a bill could be slipped in and the measures escalate and intensify short of headlocks and wrestling and then a lucky soul may gain traction on a hand and slip money into it and clamp it down and not let go until the original bill payer promises to accept and when the smoke clears clothes are ruffled, glasses have been rattled askew, and people are huffing as they mutter promises to pay the next time.

But the Omanis stop before a full out public scene, it’s more of a flare, but familiar enough to illicit some nostalgia.

On living in Buraimi, one girl said there were many people from different villages and cities and countries and I thought she was going to talk about how that made for an interesting mixture of cultural exchanges but instead she said that it was a bad thing because no one knew each other and no one talked to each other. People like to keep to their families and one girl even said her mother told her not to make any friends in school. And even though there are only two high schools in town, one for girls and one for boys, students don’t seem to know each other well before coming to college. Girls who were both born and raised in Buraimi and are about the same age and went to the same high school have said they had never seen each other before.

A girl living in the hostel said she looks out the window and never sees anyone walking outside.

Buraimi does have an interesting history although it would probably be more appropriately attributed to what is now the UAE’s Al Ain. Buraimi was once at the center of a dispute between Oman’s Ibadhi Islam and Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi Islam. The Wahhabis used the Buraimi Oasis, now the Al Ain Oasis, as a base for attacking Oman but in 1869, the Ibadi Imam Azzan bin Qays drove the Wahabis out and signed a mutual defense pact against them with Zayed ibn Khalifa I, the chief of the Abu Dhabi Bani Yas tribes. Upon the death of Azzan, the Wahhabis reestablished influence and the area would continue to be disputed until the Treaty of Jeddah, where the border between the UAE and Saudi Arabia was settled.

The UAE influence on Buraimi Omanis is evident in the male headdress, a mussar instead of a kuma, and students often talked about the large influence of the UAE. Some students spoke more highly of the late Sheikh Zayed, the former president of the UAE, than they did of Oman’s Sultan Qaboos. I made a quick dash to Mucat once and met some Muscat Omani teachers and when they learned I was based in Buraimi, they hesitantly said they didn’t think the Emirati influence on the Buraimi Omanis was good.

Back at the college, for about a week, right after the end of the first test, there was a spurt of campus activities. There was a poetry competition, some kind of opera, a soccer match, and a volleyball game. I was only able to attend the poetry competition. I didn’t understand anything. It was hosted at night and as usual, the male and female students were segregated in two columns. The competitors were predominantly male although there were a few women. There was a lot of interaction from the audience and they would repeat a word or phrase or complete a sentence, reminiscent of a game show host and his audience. The poems were long, they were more like speeches, some of them were funny, and even without comprehension I found it difficult not to at least break into a smile when everyone else was laughing. You could tell when the speaker was being playful. I asked my students the next day what happened and they said many of the men competitors talked about their ideal woman and the funnier ones for example used the very traditional poetry form to talk about a popular television soap opera.

The poetry was punctuated by interludes of dances. The dancers were Omani males and tended to be darker skinned and they did head and neck moves like turtles coming out of their shell and twirled around shepherd sticks and rifles and there were drums. I later learned the dancing was from the coastal region and I remember there were moves that made me thinking of rowing a boat. I was seated in the front row and the nice thing about that is that the most important people, like the local sheikh, are seated in the front and they usually bring out food to those people and include the entire row.

At the end, all the male students were yelling and forming dance circles and having a good time and the women just sat quietly in their seats and then filed away to their buses. It was such an odd contrast. I later asked my female students if women participated in traditional performances and they said in Oman, yes, but not in this region.

The road to Buraimi used to go through a slit in a mountain and continued for twenty minutes to reach the town center. In the past 8 months, that slit has been widened to make room for a bigger road and a gateway arch like that of Sohar (all still under construction). All along that road, development is taking place. Buraimi is turning into a city. BUC’s new campus is just about finished and the goal is to have future colleges and the hostels cluster in that area to create a college town. A Lulu’s is slated to be opened at the end of the year, which will include a movie theatre, and other malls are being constructed as well. It will be interesting to see how this place grows.

Living in Buraimi, and especially walking at night on the dirt sand and surrounded by dark open space, I felt far away, not necessary from home or America, just an unqualified far away. Sometimes I would walk out to drop off the trash outside and I would turn around and there would be the mosque, illuminated in the night, and it would be silent outside and I would be the only one in sight and I had to stop and soak in the eerie beauty.

When I discovered I had access to the roof of my apartment building, I started going up and planting a chair and reading, occasionally glancing up and there would be the mosque, cleanly white and commanding the center, at night, glowing softly. Behind it in the distance, Jebel Hafeet, at night a line of burning incandescence slithering up the mountain. Particularly after the rains tore down the usual curtain of dust, I got clear views of the craggy mountainous landscape surrounding Buraimi, and from the right perspective, it can be a beautiful place.