Vol 39 Dubai

Sigh. How I wish I could tell you my first trip to Dubai, the largest city in the UAE, (United Arab Emirates), was a wonderful, wild success, full of laughter and shopping and scenery. But it just wasn’t. Though there was some shopping.

My friend Mahfoodh and I, (yes, I know, I used to spell his name without the “h” on the end, but this is closer to how it is pronounced), had agreed to get an early, 6am start. I got up at 5 to get ready and called him at 5:30 to make sure he was up. No answer. I texted him. No answer. I called again. No answer. Again, again, again. I started getting pissy. I texted him again alleging to disrespect. He finally called at 8:30. He had gotten up early, for morning prayers, then fallen asleep on his prayer rug. His phone was not with him. We hit the road at 9am- him apologetic and quiet, me pissy and quiet. I was just so disappointed to be hitting the road so late. It takes at least 4 hours to get there and here in the gulf region all businesses close in the afternoon for “siesta”. So we were going to get there just in time for everything to close.

Eventually we started chatting and he got me laughing again. We hit the first border crossing, where we had to show ID and pay an exit fee from Oman. Then, a bit down the road we hit another post where we had to show ID and the receipt that we had paid our exit fee. Then a bit more down the road we hit another post where we had to get out of the car, buy 10 days worth of car insurance at one booth to drive in the UAE, then go to another booth to prove we had bought the insurance and to show my passport, Oman ID and road pass. Resident aliens in Gulf countries all must have a road pass to travel by car from country to country. You have to have oodles of ID, passport photos and a letter of permission from your employer to get one.

Then we were in the UAE. A few miles later, we were back in Oman. A few miles later, we were back in the UAE. On a map the border zig-zags across the highway. No border crossings though. Just switching back and forth between countries.

And, of course, the UAE looked exactly the same as Oman. I was a bit disappointed. But then, after just a few miles, I freaked out- started shrieking for him to pull over. Sand dunes! I know it’s silly, but it’s one of the things I’ve wanted to see since I arrived. And he knew that and so he purposefully didn’t tell me we would drive through a large patch of desert. I was ecstatic. They were huge and golden/orange/red. And sprawling. And hot. And he wouldn’t pull over! He was hell bent on getting me to Dubai. I took some video out the window, but I’m afraid it’s pretty crappy. The side window has tinting on it so I can’t shoot through it and I can’t open it because it’d be too loud. So I just stared and stared.

When I saw camels in the dunes I freaked out until Mahfoodh pulled over. You may call me a dorky Canadian girl, but I think anyone in my position would have pulled over. It was camels. In the dunes. ‘Nuf said.

We rolled into the outskirts of Dubai around 1:30 or 2 in the afternoon and found the big mall that the IKEA is attached to. Happily, the mall and IKEA were open. We wondered through the mall briefly where Mahfoodh asked if I wanted to check the shoe stores to see if they carried my size. The first two didn’t but then, a minor miracle- the Naturalizer store had 4 pairs in my size, one of which was not ugly. After 6 months, I finally have a new pair of shoes. I freely admit I have a thing for shoes. Buck used to restrict me to buying one pair of shoes a month. When he worked overtime he’d jokingly call it “shoe money”. In one of the more stupid decisions in my life I left all of my cute shoes in Washington, packed in a box, buried somewhere in my attic. Not a day goes by that I don’t think of at least one pair of my shoes. I’ve been in shoe withdrawal since I got here and it hasn’t gotten any easier. I tell you all of this so that you can understand my happiness upon finding shoes, in my size, that weren’t men’s shoes and weren’t ugly.

Then on to IKEA. We wandered through the showroom floor and I’m sorry to report, the Dubai IKEA is EXACTLY like every other IKEA I’ve ever been to. Only the prices were different. They are lower. I had my sister, Michele, on the phone last month and we were comparing prices from our IKEA catalogs. After we made it through the showrooms, we had lunch in the cafeteria, where for some reason, perhaps ravenous hunger, Mahfoodh ordered 3 meals and 2 drinks.

And he ate almost all of it.

At this point we discussed him going to Sharjah, the next city over, to hunt down an engine for his Volkswagon Beetle, while I finished my IKEA shopping. “No, no”, said he. “I’ll have a nap in the car then wander around in the mall. Take your time.” "ok. I said". "I shouldn't be too long". Honestly, what was I thinking? Have you ever made it out of IKEA in less than 2 hours? And I had an entire apartment to furnish! It is with great embarrassment that I must admit, (because he’s going to read this and he’ll correct me if I don’t), that I was in IKEA for 5 ½ hours. But some of that was eating lunch. Does that count? And then we took my overfilled shopping cart and two big trolleys to the SUV and stuffed it to the gills. Mahfoodh was keen to get to Sharjah before the auto wreckers closed at 8 or 9pm. Because businesses all close in the afternoon, they stay open late when they re-open. So we hit the road. And then the road hit us. In a stroke of unbelievable bad luck we drove over a piece of re-bar on the side of the road, instantly blowing out the tire.

So now we’re stuck. On the side of the highway. In the desert. With a flat. And the spare is buried under all that IKEA stuff, which has now become all that stupid IKEA stuff. We limped the car a bit up the road to the next exit, where we could see a gas station. But there was no garage, just gas. We talked a couple of Afgani guys into emptying the stupid IKEA stuff out of the car and changing the flat. This is when we discovered there was no jack in the car. This might be a good time to inform you that the temperature that day was around 43C. That’s 110F for you Americans. So we’re sweating our brains out and I suggested to Mahfoodh that now would be a good time to start swearing. “F*@k” he replied.

At this point a very nice Indian man came along to see if he could help. He had a jack and we were back in business. The Afgani guys got the tire changed and the stupid IKEA stuff loaded back in. We gave them all the money I had left and some sodas and hit the road to Sharjah where we promptly ran smack into a traffic jam.

Poor Mahfoodh. He drove all the way to Dubai, waited around for me at IKEA, and now we were stuck in traffic so bad he was sure we would never make it to the wreckers by 9. And we didn’t. But they were open when we finally got there anyway.

A word about the way stores work here in the gulf. They clump together. If you need a computer store, you go to one street and there are a bunch of them. Need your cell phone repaired? There’re 5 stores in a row that can help you. Need a new engine for your super cool Beetle, (it’s the only one I’ve seen in Muscat), go to this street in Sharjah. There were 5 shops in a row selling Volkswagen parts. I jumped out while he looked for parking and asked at each one for an engine. The last shop had one. They also had a giant cockroach with 4inch antennae that put my measly roaches to shame. I fetched Mahfoodh and then went and sat in the car, with the air conditioning on, while he negotiated a price.

By the time we got out of Sharjah and back on the road we decided to just head home. I never saw Dubai. It’s beautiful skyline and waterfront. We were tired. And stinky. And hungry. And broke. And a bit grumpy.

We stopped in Mahfoodh’s village, an hour from Muscat, to eat and we ran into his best friend, Ahmed, and 3 of Ahmed’s sisters. They were in high spirits. The girls all but begged me to come spend the night with them. They want to practice their English and yak about the US. They were enthusiastically insistent. You know I don’t like to refuse invitations, but it was 2:30am at this point and we just wanted to get the hell home. I promised the girls I would return in a couple of weeks to spend the night with them. Future blog perhaps. I fell into bed at 4am and slept until 1pm the next day.

So, ok, there was some laughter and shopping and scenery on my trip to Dubai but it was not a wonderful, wild success. I do have a chair now though. And a dining set. And, and, and. Things are looking up in my once empty apartment. Next weekend I’m off to Abu Dhabi, the second largest city in the UAE, to meet my friend Brian, from Seattle, and do a little more shopping at the IKEA there. I ran out of room in the SUV in Dubai...

By the way, the bing-bong, bing-bong noise you hear when we're driving is not a seatbelt reminding alarm. We're wearing our seatbelts. It's the alarm that goes off whenever you go more than 12okmph, the maximum speed limit on highways. Every car here bing-bongs when speeding. Mahfoodh generally goes 130kmph, so you'd better believe I wear my seatbelt.

Vol 38 Road Trip

Road trip, road trip, rah, rah, rah! There is a song my brother sings at the start of every road trip with his kids. Damned if I can remember it though. Mahfood and I took a road trip on Friday. We left at 9:00am and got back around 9:00pm. We borrowed the company SUV in case we needed it.

The sloppy pink line is our route. We started in Muscat. Then Izki, Nizwa, Tanuf, Ibri, Bahla, Rustaq, As Sib and home.

Unremarkable landscape for the first bit.

Then Mountains. Beautiful. Then into Izki, where we saw….actually, I can’t remember much about Izki…. Whoops. I really should write stuff down right when it happens. Mahfood says I need to upgrade my memory…..

Then into Nizwa. Nizwa was once the capital of Oman (until the current Sultan came into power and moved the capital to Muscat). The most notable feature in Nizwa is the huge fort. Dating from the 1600’s, Nizwa fort is built on a stone foundation from stone and mortar and has been completely restored.

The adjacent fort is from the late 800’s. And someone's house is a couple of feet from it (on the right). Imagine having a building from 870AD in the US or Canada? That's 1100 years old. Old to us is 200 years. Now imagine building a house right beside it! They are living in the midst of their history.

Ummmmm....... I'm trying to think of an appropriate remark for this photo.

There are several wells inside the fort.

The architecture is beautiful.

This is a bathroom. The little round dots are pipes coming out of the walls.

And this is the potty.

These images are scratched into the original mortar.





Gotta little staircase theme going here.....


Inside the huge tower.

Took this right before I realized I was getting heat exhaustion. It was only 38 degrees that day (100), but running around in the heat and sun, climbing all the stairs, basically, I was exercising in a sauna. Whoops. When I got to the top of the tower I was whoozy and feeling sick. Took some view shots and came back down. We hightaled it out of there. By the time we got back to the car I couldn't decide which to do first- pass out, crap my pants or vomit. Mahfood said I was bright red. He took me to an air-conditioned hotel lobby where I enjoyed a cold beverage and some time out of the sun. 40 minutes later I was right as rain (pretty much) and off we went to Tanuf, the ghost town Katie had told me I must visit.

We 4-wheeled our way into this area where we saw this wall:


There are staircases cut into the wall leading to Tanuf. It lies on the other side of this rock wall
This falaj is right as you enter the village. A falaj is a man-made series of canals that carry water where needed. Oman has many ancient, functioning falaj systems. It's how farmers get water to their fields and they run through palm groves too.



Tanuf is a mud brick village that was bombed by the British in the 1950's. Quite similar to the ruins I found in Fanja, though Fanja had not been bombed.







This is one of the staircases that lead to that big rock wall. No, we didn't go down it. Too scary.

Then we were off. To Ibri. Then Bahla, where we had lunch and stopped by Jabreen Fort, which was closed for the day. I'm going to have to go back to Bahla. It is a walled city and the main fort there is a Unesco World Heritage site. Also in this area is the Al Hoota cave and in Bat and Al Ayn there are beehive shaped tombs from the 3d millennium BC- another Unesco World Heritage site. We had no time to explore these in detail.

Then we hit the road again and as we were heading into the mountain pass it started to rain. And then it poured. Within two minutes of it starting to rain it started to DUMP. And it was ridiculously windy. At one point, for about 20 seconds, we literally could not see the pick-up truck right in front of us. It was raining and blowing that hard. I have never seen rain like that in my life. And I'm from the Pacific North West. The road was flooding in one spot.

Then, as suddenly as the rain started, it stopped.

This was taken maybe 5 minutes after the rain started.

This was taken maybe 2 minutes later. You'd never have know it was raining a couple of miles away.

After we got through the mountain pass, we came back out into plains. Nothing for miles around. And in the middle of nowhere were these guys. There are wide strips of plastic sheeting stretched along the ground and on them are dates, drying in the sun. We were imagining these guys saying to each other "So where do you want to lay the dates out to dry? In the back yard? Beside the house?" "Nah! Let's drive out to the middle of nowhere and do it there. You know, along the highway, so they can get dusty as they dry."

Then just outside Rustaq: it happened. One of the things I have been waiting to see since I got here. There on the side of the road- camels. In the wild. Back home we see deer. Here, it's camels. And let me tell you, they're cool. They look pre-historic.


We 4-wheeled our way off the highway to get close enough for these photos. I was one happy camper. Or road-tripper. Or whatever. Now I need to see the sand dunes in the desert. Visiting the Wahiba sands will be another road trip. Mahfood wants to wait until the weather is not so hot.

And now, your reward for reading this far. My first real video. Meet my friend Mahfood. And since the poll has ended it looks like the next video will be of Mahfood dancing in a fountain and then enjoying a meal provided by me.

This video was so much fun to make. We laughed and laughed all day long.

In hindsight, we should have washed the car window before starting our journey. Did you hear him telling me not to get sick when we reached the top of the hill in Tanuf? And no, that's not his real voice.

Vol 37 Poll

Blogger's latest feature is polls. As you can see, if you look to your right, I have added one to my blog.

My friend Mahfood always wears traditional Omani clothing- the dishdasha (robe), kouma (cap) and sandals- but he has told me that he owns western clothes for when he visits England. I just couldn't imagine him in western clothing so he showed up tonight in jeans, a t-shirt, a ball cap and nice shoes. Too weird!

Anyway we were walking by this fountain at a hotel entrance and I suggested he run through it dancing and I'd video it for the blog. I keep meaning to add video to the blog but never have a good enough subject. He laughed. I told him I was serious. He laughed again and said "Come on! I'm not going to do that". I told him about the polls on blogger and he agreed to let my readers decide, though he did try to make one of the options "Yes, if you pay him 100 rials". That's $260 US. I don't think so. Much laughing and negotiating followed. We agreed to the 4 options you see. I believe you can only vote once.

So what do you think? Let your democratic voice be heard!

Vol 36 Phone Numbers

Alrighty then. If you could all be so kind as to e-mail me your phone numbers. Or leave them in a comment. (Feel free to praise my blog at the same time).

My fabulous ex-husband, Lane, has set me up with a Skype account with unlimited calling to the US and Canada. You can also use it to call me anytime you see me online. It's a Seattle phone number, so much more affordable for you to call me than calling my Oman number. And then I suppose we could hang up and I could call you- for free!

My number is 206-201-2371. So if you see this number on your caller id, it's me.

I hope it works, I hope it works, I hope it works.

Vol 35 Fanja

Today I was supposed to go to Dubai to buy furniture at IKEA but the office PRO dropped the ball on getting me a road permit so that trip is delayed. Non Gulf country residents need a permit to drive from country to country. I told Ahmed, our PRO, 4 weeks ago that I wanted to go. Aaaargh! Getting anything done is soooooo frustrating sometimes. Now I have to wait 2 weeks before I will have another 2 day weekend. With Petra still gone I am still working a half day every other Thursday. (Remember, Thursday is our Saturday). So I will continue to come home to an empty apt for another couple of weeks.

Since my brain was geared up for a road trip I got in my car and drove out of the city in search of cool stuff. And cool stuff I found! About an hour from Muscat I stopped to use a bathroom and stumbled upon a town called Fanja, a town seemingly like any other. I was just driving through the streets, wandering aimlessly when I came upon this:

I kept going because I could see a couple of old look-out towers on the hill above the town. I thought I’d see if I could figure out how to get up there. I figured I could get some good photos of the town from up there.

I crossed a bridge over a wadi and stopped to take these pictures. This is looking from one side of the bridge.

And this is from the other side.

I started going up little back streets, which got more and more narrow as I went.

I passed some incredible houses with beautiful entrances.

And still the road got more narrow as it went up, up, up. At the top there was an old mosque set into the palm trees. A few men and young boys were going in to pray. Just past this mosque and around a little corner the road abruptly turned into a footpath too narrow for my car. Those of you who know me well know I am not a skillful driver and I am not fond of reversing. I am especially not fond of reversing down a crazy narrow street. I got stuck at the little corner. Couldn’t get around it in reverse, it was just sooooo tight. Fortunately a man came along and started giving me directions. Turn you wheel to the left, straight, straight, now right a bit, and so forth. Eventually he figured out that I am somewhat inept and he offered to get in and do it himself to get me out of there. He got me back to the Mosque and turned around. Yay! I wanted so much to stop and take photos of the mosque and the ridiculously narrow streets and the general gorgeousness of it all but I was embarrassed and I chickened out. But as I came back down the road I saw this:

So I parked and got snoopy and went exploring.

Through this entrance. And found this:

So cool. I had one of those tingly, tearing up moments.

It was so beautiful. So old.

And it is right up next to a new neighborhood. There is a date palm grove that runs all along the wadi.

And there are two newer houses in the middle of it being lived in. Wacky, huh? See the satellite dish? And the dates drying on a large piece of metal on the ground?

Here’s one of the towers I saw from below that led me there.

And here's the other. Seems this was some kind of fort. When I got home I looked up Fanja in my guide book. It mentions it very briefly. It mentions a tower on the hill and the view but there is no mention of these ruins. In other parts of the book it talks about mud-brick buildings so I'm thinking that's what these are.

And yes, I got a good photo of the town using the photo stitching feature on my camera. Who needs a trip to Dubai? Today was better than new furniture.