Oman in Detail - Day 1

Goodbye Dubai, you beautiful tourist trap....

Hello, history and oil money!

As I had come to expect from two countries so ordered and on their games, the bus left Dubai promptly at 7am, with working air conditioning, a clean interior, and curtains that both closed and decently blocked out the sunlight - decadent! We even arrived slightly earlier than anticipated, around 12:30pm. This despite the fact that I had the audacity to need to use the toilets at the border for a full 40 seconds, including hand washing; something for which the driver yelled at me furiously. He then yelled at us again at the immigration office because the officer was trying to bribe us for visa money. Somehow, that was also our fault. Like I said, we managed to arrive early, despite such egregious wastes of time and had much more success at finding our hotel than we had in Dubai. Predictably for such a conservative Muslim country, there was a Christmas tree in the lobby of our hotel.....

Mutrah Hotel

Naturally, being the party animals that we are, we promptly took a nap. Then we went out to explore the city. The market was an easy 20 minute walk from the hotel and the waterfront an additional 10 minutes. There wasn't really a sidewalk per se for some of the way to the market, but living in Malawi has rid me of any expectations of pedestrian safety.

We wanted traditional Omani food to celebrate our arrival, but we were sorely disappointed at the area's offerings. All along the main road to the corniche and along the waterfront itself, the restaurants were all Indian, with one fancy French exception. Since Indian food constitutes the majority of "international" fare in Malawi, I was not interested. We eventually gave in and asked a taxi driver for help. Evidently, all Omani food is located in the center part of town so, once again, we had another 15-20 minute cab ride in order to do anything. 

Dessert

The Corniche at sunset

After eating, we checked out the market. While it is infinitely annoying (from a Western perspective) that everything closes down in the Middle East between 1 pm and 4 pm for their version of a siesta, it is convenient that things stay open late to accommodate the earlier loss of business time. We had a nice stroll and initial casing of the shops so we could plan our future monetary attack. Of course, every single shop keeper tried to get us to enter his shop, which got annoying after about 10 feet, but we just pretended that we didn't speak English... or French, or German (these guys know how to get customers!)

Winter Holiday 2012 in the Middle East - Oman

Oman is never a place I thought I'd find myself in. Much like all the other countries I knew nothing about before deciding to visit, Oman existed only in the periphery of my consciousness. When my friend suggested it as a possible destination for our trip, I was unnerved because, as a Muslim country located on the Arabian peninsula (and even as a Geography major, I had to look up exactly where on the peninsula), it surely was one of those 'dangerous' places that Western people, especially women shouldn't go, right? WRONG.

Facts about Oman:

• It is a Sultanate, also known as an "absolute monarchy", approximately the size of Kansas.
• It was originally colonized by the Portuguese in the 16th century, came under Turkish control for about 100 years and gained independence in 1741.
• For a time, the capital of the Omani empire was located all the way down on Zanzibar - an island off the coast of Tanzania in Africa.
• It only began allowing tourists into the country at the beginning of the 1990s.
• Women have been given the right to be elected to the country's Shura Council since 1997.
• In November 2010, UNDP listed Oman as the nation most improved during the preceding 40 years. 
• According to international indices, it is one of the most developed and stable countries in the world and certainly the most stable country in the Middle East.
• The central desert is an important source of meteorites for scientific analysis.
• The USA established a free trade agreement with it in 2009.

Granted, I learned all of this after setting foot on Omani soil, but I am so glad that I did.  This country, with its mercurial and hauntingly beautiful landscape, its welcoming people, peaceful and well-ordered society, and varied history as a center of trade captured a piece of my heart (and a decent piece of my wallet.) It's not often that I express an interest in returning to a place that I've already visited, but I started mentally preparing myself for a second trip before I had even finished this first one. Of course, it will be a long time before I make it back there because this country is expensive, but mark my words, Oman, we will meet again.

Dubai in Detail - Day 4

December 31st - the last day of 2012 was also our last day in Dubai. We started the day off on a quest to locate the bus ticket office in order to secure our tickets to Muscat for early the next morning (bought for 60 dirham each). Part of this quest involved proving the local people whom we asked for directions wrong; yes, it IS in fact possible to walk to the Al Khanjry Transport  office (Muscat phone: 24700600/Dubai: 04-2959390) from the closest metro station (Al Rigga). It is NOT necessary to spend money on an expensive cab when you can walk for 20 minutes. We are from Boston, okay? We walk everywhere, regardless of the pain or time lost in the process. It's a matter of pride!

After a nice walk and securing our spots on the 7am bus for a grand total of approximately $17 (compare this to over $100 + cab fare to fly), we headed off to confront my high school World History class nemesis. Well, to see the mall named after him, at least.

  

So this guy Ibn Battuta, he made a whole semester of my junior year of high school hell. I know he's not very well known in the West, so I'll  just say he was a world traveler during the 14th century who covered 3 times more distance than Marco Polo and who wrote extensively about his travels. Too extensively, if you would have asked 17 year-old me. We had to do a semester-long project on this guy that took forever, stole pieces of my sanity, and garnered me merely a B grade. I still cringe when I hear him mentioned and think back to late nights dying a replica of his journal in tea to 'age' it. Grrr....

The mall is evidently the world's largest themed shopping mall, which was cool to see but definitely lacked any interesting stores to actually shop in. The architecture was impressive and there were several in-mall educational exhibits that the nerd in me really appreciated. I mean, if we are going to be slaves to mass media-induced consumerism, why not at least learn a little in the process?

Tunisia

Learning about Arab contributions to math and science at the mall.

And finally, 11 years and 8,160 miles later, Mr. Battuta and I made up.

After the mall, we opted for some outdoor sight seeing and checked out the marina. Man, is that place dripping in money. The pictures speak for themselves; no other commentary necessary.

After being made to feel horribly financially inadequate, we decided to play up the role of paupers even further by heading to the nearby public access beach and napping and loitering like homeless women while awaiting the sunset.

 

The one thing we had planned the least before embarking on this trip was what we would do for NYE. We had seen several advertisements but assumed we would be able to find information easily enough to decide once we got to Dubai. In reality, we were so constantly on the move, lost, or passed out from exhaustion during our first three days that we failed to plan anything. We had stopped by an internet cafe the day before to look up options with the intention of calling the various places for more details. That turned out to be much harder than we could have imagined because 70% of the phone numbers attached to the ads were cell numbers. We learned the hard way that we couldn't use the hotel's land line to call these cell numbers and we had never bothered to buy SIM cards for our phones for such a short stay. After subjecting ourselves to the archaic activity of searching the phone book (a paper phone book!) for land line numbers to the venues and getting routed back to those same cell lines, we decided that we were too tired to get crazy anyway, since we had to be at the bus place at 6:30am the next morning.


We chose a Russian restaurant for our NYE dinner because it also offered hookah. While we thoroughly enjoyed the meal and the hookah, the notoriously poor customer service habits of the FSU evidently still hold true even in a place like Dubai. This resulted in our waiter ignoring our requests for the check long enough to ensure that we missed any opportunity to see the fireworks from the Burj Khalifa. (Curveball #4  thrown by Russians.) I wish I could say that I was upset about this but honestly, by that point, all I wanted to do was crawl into bed and start the next exciting leg of our journey - OMAN!