Salalah and another week done

Last Tuesday I left the center with 7 friends and caught the 13-hour bus to Salalah, 7pm – 8am, skipping class on Wednesday. Saturday was Eid al-Nahda, National Renaissance Day or something like that which I’ll get into later, so we had ourselves Wednesday-Saturday for Salalah.

A friend of mine who had lived in Salalah spearheaded the planning .We spent the first two nights in a cheap apartment in the “mintaqa al-sina3iah” which means “industrial district” and it was exactly that – autobody shops and carpenters. And our apartment. Here’s the view from our window:

The price was right. We started the day lazily, appropriately, and then met up with a PF’s friend who drove us around some fun places. We visited what is allegedly Job’s tomb, competing with a spot in Syria for the title. We visited an ex-spring now sinkhole.  All the while I was gaping at the nargila – coconut trees. I can’t remember ever seeing these before! They’re significantly taller than nakhil (date palms) and their trunks are smooth. And wiggly – it looks like Dr. Seuss drew the place.

This month there’s been a festival in Salalah with cultural dancing, goods for sale, and carnival rides. We swung by at night and saw some dancing, and I got a little judgmental. About ten men wearing their white dishadeesh stand in a row, glancing sideways furtively at one another, and bounce their canes from the ground up to their shoulders and back down again in time to music. They are terribly self-conscious. I decided that this cultural dance was not only boring as hell relative to the crazy Namibian war dances I witnessed in a documentary, but was in fact OBJECTIVELY boring as hell. Tar and feather the imperialist, cultural relativists… It’s simply not fun to watch and seemed not fun to be a part of. We finished the evening off with food at Baalbeck, a Lebanese place. I liked having been to the real Baalbeck last year.

The next day we visited a souq by the sea with tons of luban and bukhar – flammable scents and frankincense, for whose trade a few centuries ago Salalah is still famous. The summer months in Salalah are the “kharif,” which confusingly means fall in Arabic. It means the monsoon season in this context, I suppose, and the result is dense fog and often rain and beautiful temperatures. The oceans are mamnua3 al-siba7a (forbidden of swimming) because of their intensity. Walking along the smooth beach and taking in the crash was a nice time. We came across a long stretch of huts overflowing with coconuts, bananas, and various other fruit and had some fun there. I bought a coconut and the gentleman selling it hacked into it with a butcher’s knife in such a way as to convey a small opening for a straw. The milk was not that disgusting, but certainly strange. I had some of the meat from inside but we concluded the drinking coconuts were at a different stage of development, or differently raised, so their meat actually tasted like rubber. Actually. The bananas were the best I’d ever had – dense and sugary.

A piece of Paradise.

We chilled out for a little while until we rendezvoused with our teacher’s friend, a Palestinian woman now living and working in Salalah. She was a firecracker: muhajiba, but invited to go smoke shisha and had one to herself. Spoke about freedom of choice and independence from inane pressuring traditions and how she likes boys and the lack of significant “tafkir” (thought) in the Arab world. I probed her liberalism and she delivered consistently with US university student responses, except for the homosexuality point. Because it’s a mental disorder and we need to treat our friends who have it, not shun them. That’s progressive of her, I suppose? As a side note, the Palestinian counter continues up up and away on the attractive scale, furthering my case that if for no other reason the Israelis and Palestinians should get along to make lots of beautiful babies. The night ended with very late Chinese food.

Our last day in Salalah we rented two cars (24-hr rental) and drove out of the city to a place where natural fountains occur. We stood on cliffs overlooking mountains crashing waves. Somewhere beneath us were submerged caverns that had been burrowed by nature and reached the ground so that when the waves came in huge sprays of water erupted from the top of the cliff. Oftentimes it was air and violent spray, and in this way very reminiscent of the sound a dragon makes. When you hear them.

It was a relaxing day and we ended it at the Crown Plaza hotel for some drinks on the beach. We then slept at the Crown Plaza hotel, in the parking lot. That was an uncomfortable evening. The morning eventually came, alhamdilulah, and we made it to the bus station and took off on the 13-hour return trip, sleeping most of the way.

School resumed on Sunday with a celebration arranged by our PFs in honor of the National Renaissance Day. This is the 40th anniversary of Sultan Qaboos’s coup glorious ascension. (We’ll see if wordpress gets blocked after this post).

Today we began a new schedule, which will only happen once more because we only have two weeks left and the last week is different. After Fosha and Media class we made our way in groups of 6-ish to houses of Omanis in the area. The program really should have instituted this aspect from the get-go, it was fantastic. We had coffee and lunch and chatted for several hours. This is the fourth of fifth time I’ve been in an Omani home, much higher than the number in Egypt (2?) but it was the first time the men and women ate in the same room. It felt nicer that way. Some of my colleagues got into a dense but good-natured political conversation with the man of the house I half listened to, something about Turkey pulled between or rejected by Europe and the Arab world. When I tuned back in it was “How could Osama bin Laden, in the mountains with camels, have orchestrated the attacks on September 11th?” “Well then who did?” “Al-yehud!” So much for the comfort zone. A discouragingly high proportion of residents in this part of the world subscribe to this theory, and it becomes seriously more disturbing in Oman where the education level is seriously higher than I encountered in Egypt. Although not high enough to distinguish between Jews and Israelis, which really should be an uncontroversial point particularly to monotheistic Muslims, “awlad al-3am” (the cousins).

Well there are about two and a half weeks left here. I like Oman a lot, and I really like my comrades-in-flashcards, so I can’t put my finger on why I’ve been a little off this summer and itching for some ‘merca. Going to see Inception tonight.

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