Carefree Saturday

Thank you for all the notes you have left for me. I really enjoy hearing from all of you--it does get a little lonely here since we are still trying to get to know our way around! Well, we had a somewhat lazy day today. It's Thursday today, but it's basically our Saturday. It's hard enough to keep up with the time difference, much less the schedule difference!

We went to an area of Muscat today that the locals call the "road of romance." You can tell in the pictures that the sea views are phenomenal from the road, which is actually kind of a bridge over some wetland area. I use the term wetland loosely--it's not really that wet, except that for this part of the world it is! It was pretty hazy today--just gotta love that sand!

We dined on local fish fare at a restaurant called Japenga.  I'm still trying to adjust to the different tastes here, but I am making progress. The scenery today more than made up for the food!

The restaurant is to the right of me in the picture--the white building. The front of the building is all window so you can see the entire ocean view from every table in the restaurant. We will definitely be going back. When it gets a little cooler (it was 95 degrees today!), there's a Starbucks just down the road from where we were today that has rooftop seating. I can't wait for the cooler weather to arrive!

Don standing in front of a beach area. It's a more Americanized version of
beach in terms of how people dress. There's no swimming at this part of the
beach due to hazardous undercurrents.

In the far background is the Crowne Plaza resort--
one of the first in the area built to accommodate Shell
employees when they first started coming over to drill for oil.

New Experiences

Okay-- I'm going back in time to the first week we arrived here. I was truly overwhelmed by the strange smells, sights, and people. Of course, jet lag played a big part of that. It took about a week for my world to feel somewhat upright again! 

The pictures below are Don and I eating out for the first time. Two of Don's coworkers in the Expat Relocation department took us to see our apartment for approval and then out to dinner. This is a fresh fish restaurant, in typical Omani style. When you walk in, the raw fish and other seafood is in a refrigerated display cabinet. I didn't spend any time looking at it--did I mention it was the whole fish, etc.?  

We are drinking a wonderful fruit drink out of cantaloupe "glasses." Omanis are very big on fresh fruit drinks--and they are always very good!

You can see the fish on the platter in the middle of the table. They filleted it down the middle back, laid it out flat and grilled it. I was careful to avoid the meat around the eyes, but I did enjoy it very much! They also served us hummus--an eggplant hummus and a garbanzo hummus. I will let you figure out what I liked. By the way--Don has a very adventurous stomach and he likes everything!

Now on to our apartment; if you looked up the website I provided in previous email, you saw that they were advertising fantastic ocean views. As you can see from the picture below, that's not entirely true. We are, in fact, at least 5 miles from the coast line. You can see those views here in Muscat, but not at our apartment.

These pictures were taken off our small balcony patio. Those are giant stone mountains in the background. The ground all around here is hard stone covered with a layer of sand. The haze that you see over the mountains in both pictures is the sand that is always in the air. It is rare to have a perfectly clear sky--at least as I've observed so far. This was as clear a day as I've seen since arriving. Sometimes it is so thick that breathing is hard. I didn't think I'd experience much allergy problems here, since there is very little vegetation, but I was wrong!

The complex is nice; there are many more units under construction. It's a new area of development in Muscat, so there is construction all around us. That's okay--we like the newer buildings and it's very close to the new office site that Don is here to oversee.

My next blog: hopefully it will be about Don's first grilling experience here in the apartment with his "mini" kettle grill....