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October 16, 2003
A Relaxing Day in Muscat
Since neither Margaret nor I were going to take a tour outside of Muscat today, we decided to explore the city. After breakfast we took a long walk through the souk, which was busy with shoppers picking up spices, clothes and even gold. We made a detour to the post office to get stamps for post cards, then continued through the souk, navigating around the occasional hawker wanting us to buy knick knacks from them. Since we knew that everything would shut down from 1pm to 4pm in the souk and the surrounding area, we decided to spend our day at two of the few places that would stay open: the museum and the mall. But first, a quick visit to the Muttrah fish market.
Just a block west of our hotel, the fish market is a chaotic place right on the harbor -- a dock loaded with boats fresh from the Gulf of Oman, hauling in huge baskets of fish. Along the edge of the dock, rows of fisherman sold stacks of fresh tuna, marlin, squid, cuttlefish, pike and an assortment of local fish I couldn't identify. Further into the covered part of the market, you could take your newly purchased tuna and have it filleted to your specifications by one of several dozen men carving and hacking away with an intimidating assortment of sharp implements.
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Beyond the fish market, a more modest general market was crowded with shoppers purchasing fresh vegetables, fruit, cereals and other foodstuffs. At least half a dozen different varieties of dates were available, each in various stage of ripeness, from bright plump dates freshly picked off palm trees to shriveled, darkened dates that have weathered a lengthy drying period in the sun. For 100 baisa (25 cents) I bought a generous plastic bag's worth of dried dates -- sugary, sweet and sticky, with rather sharp pits in the center.
We caught a microbus to head to the Oman Natural History Museum, located 20km west of Muttrah in the Ministry of Culture building. The microbus picked up several other passengers, including three Indians from Andhra Pradesh who were very eager to talk to us about our visit to Muscat. By the time we reached their destination in Ruwi, several kilometers inland, they'd invited us to dinner later in the week. Unfortunately it was my last day in Muscat and I would be unable to join them but Margaret made plans to have lunch with them on Friday.
Having gone about 15 minutes out of our way into Ruwi, the microbus began to work its way towards the main highway along the coast via the Qurm Commercial District, a dense area of shopping malls, industrial parks and car dealerships, some of which were advertising "Huge Ramadan savings!" We drove along Sultan Qaboos Highway until we spotted the Cultural Ministry, home to the Museum of Natural History. The microbus took us as close as we could get to the entrance, and we paid 400 baisa ($1) for the both of us.
The museum itself is modest in size, not much larger than National Geographic's museum in Washington before they made it even smaller by converting much of their exhibit space into a television studio. The museum was crowded with school groups -- equally mixed boys and girls in traditional Omani dress being led around by their teachers and a museum docent.
The main museum hall showed us an exhibit about the historical biodiversity of Oman, from the earliest fossils to the present day. One hall also explained Oman's position on the tectonic plates, and how tectonic movements over the eons had made today's mountains, valleys and coastline, along with the biodiversity of their deserts and oceans. Many of the exhibits had interactive games in which you were challenged to identify a particular type of animal, or answer a question based on the science being presented. All exhibits were available in both English and Arabic, including the interactive games. As we walked through the exhibit we were even able to identify some of the sea shells we had collected the day before along Sawadi Beach.
The second building of the museum was dedicated to Oman's whales and dolphins. Built around the massive skeleton of a sperm whale, the exhibit contrasted the various cetaceans that are known the frequent the Omani coast, as well as rarer breeds that historically exist in other waters but have occasionally been known to appear locally. A group of students were thoroughly absorbed by an interactive exhibit allowing you to listen to the different songs produced by several whales and dolphins, explaining how the songs are transmitted great distances using the water as a conductor.
We left the museum early in the afternoon and walked back to the highway, trying to decide if we were in walking distance to the City Center Mall. We soon concluded we weren't, so we flagged down a taxi and offered him one rial ($2.50) for the drive -- knowing full well that it might only be a kilometer or two up the road. Given the stifling temperatures, though, there's no way we'd want to make the walk. As it turned out, we had to drive past the airport, probably a total of 20 kilometers -- and yet the taxi driver accepted our one rial. He must have been going that way anyway, because a similar drive starting from Muttrah would have probably cost us four times as much.
The City Center Mall is as modern as any mall in the US -- an air conditioned corridor packed with shops of all shapes and sizes, including a typically American food court, McDonalds and all. Even though I'm usually one to avoid Micky-D's, the fact that they were offering a McArabia (a chicken patty pita), I simply couldn't turn it down.
After lunch we split up to do our own shopping; I visited the enormous Carrefours "hypermart" -- a combination of a WalMart, a Target and an Indian grocer, it was an enormous, modern grocery store with exotic foods from all over Asia. I salivated at the selection of fruits and vegetables, and grabbed a package of Thai rambutans to nosh on back at the hotel.
Concluding I wasn't in the market for anything else at the mall, I caught a microbus back to the hotel and spent a couple of hours relaxing and taking a long bath, now that I finally had hot water my room after a day and a half without it. Around the corner I found another cybercafe and spent two solid hours checking email and updating my blog.
At 7pm Margaret and I met at the hotel front desk to catch a taxi to the Al Bustan Palace hotel. The hotel receptionist told us we shouldn't pay more than one rial to get to the hotel; the taxi driver asked for four. Margaret and I successfully haggled our way down to one rial, though the driver kept trying to raise it again once we were in the car. Once at the hotel we caught a bus for the brief ride to the site of our dinner, a campground on the far end of the hotel grounds that'd been decorated with bedouin tents and a handful of camels grazing by the gate.
Inside, a group of Omani singers and dancers began to perform as we entered the grounds.
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We were led to a tent and asked to take off our shoes and lean against giant red pillows. We were joined by 10 other people. Among the group in our tent were a retired British couple, the husband whom served as an engineer for the architecture firm that built the famous Burj al Arab hotel in Dubai. There was also a mixed Omani/British family: the sons, both in their 20s, were in traditional Omani costume, and the older one's wife, clearly British, wore a long black abaya that covered her from head to toe. Her British parents, in traditional British tourist costumes, joined them.
Ali, our waiter for the night, began the evening by bringing out a mezze platter with a dozen different appetizers, ranging from more typical snacks like hummus and tabouleh to unusual items like Omani date bread, dried tuna salad and pickled lemons. The 12 of us polished off the mezzes as if they were to be our only course during the dinner, almost forgetting the buffet that awaited us. During the mezzes I chatted with the Omanis, learning that the two brothers were half-Brit, half-Omani and had grown up in London but recently moved to Oman. One of the brothers had lived for a while in the US, including Orlando and DC, two of my own haunts. Amazingly, he worked as a 3D graphical artists at the post-production shop in DC where Susanne and I had done our audio mixing for our Thai Boxing film. What a small world.
The dinner buffet included a range of kebabs and curries, along with a spit-roasted goat, a pilaf the size of a small bed and a bottomless bowl of delicious lamb chops. Somehow I managed to make enough room to try most of it, and yet still not collapse from exhaustion before the desert course -- a wide selection of baklavas and Omani halwa. As we ate and talked, the musicians returned, performing a hypnotic drum beat accompanied by clapping, singing and dancing. I tried to get some video of the performance but the lighting was terrible, so you could barely make out anything but music and shadows.
After dinner, Margaret and I had some Omani coffee and shared a shisha topped with strawberry tobacco. Ali, our waiter, said he smokes his shisha three times a day, and his favorite flavor is a concoction of apple and grape, though he was also partial to mint. He prefered "herbal" tobaccos -- in other words, a blend of dried fruit and flavorings that didn't actually contain any tobacco, which apparently was the case of the shisha we were smoking as well. Given the fact that I don't smoke it explained why the shisha wasn't totally wreaking havoc on my lungs. Compared to the shisha I tried my first day in Dubai, which I'm convinced contained actual tobacco, this shisha was smooth, flavorful and pleasant. I could have spent hours there chatting with Ali and Margaret if it weren't for the fact I was flying back to Dubai the next morning and had to get up in barely six hours to catch my flight... -ac
Posted by acarvin at October 16, 2003 4:48 AM
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