Month: April 2011

This is our house – one half of the nicest duplex we’ve ever lived in. You can click on any of the pictures to see them up close.     Our front entry. The doorway on the right leads to this living room.   and connects to the dining room through the archway. Then into our kitchen. No dishwasher, but there is a washer and a dryer.   Upstairs is the master bedroom and bathroom. The bedroom is the size of a living room, but it’s nice to lie on the couch and read while the baby plays on the rug. Especially when the boys are playing with Nerf guns in the living room downstairs. I also love the huge bathtub, but the small hot water tank runs out before the tub is filled (each bathroom has individual hot water heaters). Still trying to figure out if it can be adjusted so I can fill the tub up all the way.   Looking from our bedroom down the hallway toward the boys’ bedrooms. Carter’s room has two twin beds so Caleb likes to sleep in there with him.     Calvin’s room is also the guest room. It has it’s own bathroom and is almost as big as the master bedroom. Caleb and Camille will eventually share this room on the right. When she moves in there, I’m sure he’ll want to sleep in his own bed again.   Now head back downstairs and out front. . .   Josh pulling in our front gate in our tiny rental car. I need to get a picture of all the kids in the backseat. Once we had to give someone a ride and it was me and the four kids all in the backseat – the 4 of us crammed up against Camille’s car seat. You can take the family out of Egypt, but you can’t take the Egypt out of the family . . . The picture on the right shows the cutout detail that is in several places on the exterior of the house.   The back of the house from the kitchen door. There is quite a bit of space to play soccer, except they keep kicking the ball over the (really tall) walls. Calvin has had to make a few surreptitious rescues already and his hands and feet are getting raw from scaling the rough walls. Someone must have known I was coming. Tomato plants! These will die because of the heat, but Lucy said she loves to garden and suggested planting in October when it gets cooler: tomatoes, basil, cilantro, parsley, and more. This is where we’re putting down roots for the next year — unless they kick us out sooner. Come and visit – we have plenty of room for you!

That is my new name. I can’t say that this is true across all of Oman, but all the house help I have met so far call their employers “Sir” and “Madame.” As in, “is Sir at home this morning?” (he wasn’t.) or “Madame, do you want me to hold the baby for you while you eat breakfast?” (I did.)

Crazy, huh? I feel like I’m faking it most of the time – I couldn’t possibly be old enough or powerful enough to have someone call me Madame. It’s like I’m the ruling class in a Jane Austen movie or something. And it sort of does feel like royalty when you’re finished eating breakfast and you get up to clear your cereal bowl and Lucy swoops in and says, “Oh no, Madame! I will get that for you.” CRA-ZEE.

She gets here at 7am, lets herself in with her key, and by the time I get downstairs around 7:30 she has already washed the dishes from the night before, wiped down the stove and countertops and has probably swept the backyard or taken the clean clothes in off the drying rack. I asked her to help Caleb get his cereal one morning so now whenever Caleb comes down she gets his cereal bowl out, pours his cereal and milk, and carries it to the dining room for him. She treats all the boys like little princes and would wait on them hand and foot if I would let her.

She does everything I can think of around the house until 3:00 when she heads home. Washing dishes, clothes, ironing, making beds, sweeping, mopping, taking out trash, putting away groceries, baby watching . . . I was even cooking beef stew this afternoon and she came in and helped me prep all the vegetables.

I talk about her being our “housekeeper” because I think it sounds more empowering (or PC) than “maid,” but in the embassy information packet they had an entire section devoted to Hiring a Household Servant, so I think calling her our “maid” might not be so bad after all.

Tomorrow is our weekend so Lucy has the next two days off. The boys (and I) are going to be in for a shock when our dishes don’t magically disappear from the table and we actually have to clean up after ourselves. Only four days in and Madame is already spoiled.

That’s what I was whispering to myself as we were driving out into the middle of nowhere on our way to Wahiba Sands. We went from highway to winding two lane roads to a single lane blacktop to sand. And then we kept driving. For another 45 minutes. I swear it was well over an hour, but Josh promises me it just felt that way.
It was bad enough on the winding roads through the mountains when the impatient drivers would pass on blind corners with no regard for anyone coming the other way. One dude was the best “chicken” player I’ve ever seen – he pulled straight into oncoming traffic to pass a slow moving bus and didn’t blink as the oncoming car swerved onto the shoulder to avoid hitting him head on. The crazy part was that the oncoming driver didn’t seem phased by it either.
Whatever. I’ve seen bad drivers before. But driving out into the middle of endless sand just about put me over the edge. I should have known when we pulled into a gas station at the end of the blacktop and had to let air out of our tires so we didn’t get stuck in the sand that it was not going to be as easy as pulling up to the local motel 6. I knew we were going camping in the desert, but I pictured it kind of like the Palm Springs/29 Palms desert – out by the windmills. Drive off the main road a few hundred yards, bumping a little bit over the sand/gravel and there you go. Not so much.
This was slipping/sliding/Laurence of Arabic sand dunes. Big ones. And inside my head, a small voice kept telling me, “You’re crazy. Do you know how far away you are from any type of emergency services? What if your car breaks down or you roll off one of these massive hills of sand?!” Since we had driven through at least two hours of nothing even before venturing out into the sand, I knew it was a really long way to any sort of civilization. And driving over the sand felt like hydroplaning on the freeway – 45 minutes of feeling like your tires didn’t have secure contact with the road and you could go sliding out of control at any minute.
Of course I was the only one having these logical thoughts – the rest of the family was having fun riding the sand waves. Meanwhile I was wondering if I had packed my special yellow pills . . .

a whole lot of nothing but sand . . .

You know you’ve gone too far when you see camels roaming free . . .
Logically I knew we were fine, but the safety girl inside me was having a fit. The drive back out of the desert was much easier. Partly because I realized that the sliding feeling was normal and didn’t mean that Josh had lost control of the car, but mostly because safety girl was happy we were finally headed in the right direction.

I felt at home in the Bedouin tent. We should have had one of these for the past few months. It would have made all our comings and goings much more convenient.

inside the tent the walls were made from beautiful and heavy woven rugs that were pieced together and draped over a wooden post in the middle of the room and one at each corner. The door at the back of the tent led to our bathroom.

Completely enclosed on all sides, but open to the sky. Camping with hot private showers? Heavenly. No trudging down to the public bathroom to wash our feet in the sandy shower stalls on this trip (Hicks family vacation reference).

There were some mesh “windows” in the sides of the tent to provide airflow. The temperature in the tent wasn’t too bad in the middle of the day, but when it cooled down outside in the evening, it was still really hot in the tent which made falling asleep difficult. It would be unbearably hot in the middle of summer. It has been 90 degrees here every day and really humid. Like Indiana humid. I would say “Florida humid,” but I’ve never been to Florida in the summer. I have been to Indiana though and it felt like I was breathing in hot, wet air. It’s not that bad in Oman, but it’s close. 

More woven rugs covered the floors. We had two beds and 2 pallets on the floor for the boys. Everyone slept really well except I was woken up around 3am when this pesky mosquito kept buzzing in my ear. I couldn’t see a thing in the pitch blackness, but I could hear the little sucker getting closer and farther away and then really close . . . until he landed on my hand and all was silent. I grabbed at him and I’m assuming I caught him because I didn’t hear any high pitched “zeeeeeeee!” in my ear after that. Just call me “Mr. Miagi.”

These boys were obviously not bothered by any bugs. They slept like rocks. Especially since the tent kept things cool and dark in the morning after the sun came up.

We had dinner and breakfast in this beautiful open-air restaurant. One section had traditional-style dining with pillows on the floor and the other section had couches with pillows at regular table height. The food was delicious: lamb that had been roasted over coals in a pit in the ground (we watched them dig it up), BBQ chicken, cucumber salad, flatbread, rice, vegetable bisque with cilantro and lemon . . . mmm.
I really hope we’re able to go again when camping season starts again in October (it’s too hot between now and then and most camps shut down). My verdict is that it’s worth the drive. That’s saying a lot coming from me!

I haven’t had internet or tv since we left the hotel on Saturday morning. I guess it’s really only been 4 days, but it feels like an eternity. Not a bad one. Just different. I was walking by a tv in a store yesterday and the news was on and I realized that all sorts of things could be happening in the world right now and I wouldn’t have a clue. Brangelina could be adopting more babies, there could be freak blizzards in Florida, world leaders could have been overthrown in the last 4 days, and I would be here in my happy little bubble of ignorance.

Speaking of happy bubbles, I’m enjoying mine. I currently have in hand the best cappuccino I’ve had since arriving in Oman (this particular Starbucks barista knows what he’s doing, everyone else has just made me a latte with extra foam), I have my free wifi and am kid free for a few hours. Unfortunately I ran out with a netbook that was low on battery life and the European outlets won’t fit my charger so the dream is going to end soon. In 48 minutes, to be precise. 

Josh is at the embassy getting paperwork filled out so we can get a connection to the rest of the world at our house, and the kids? They are all at home with the maid. Today is her third day working at our house and I have all the confidence in the world that Camille is in capable hands. She’s more cautious than I am. She asked us go out and buy outlet protectors for all the electrical outlets in the house because she wanted to make sure the baby didn’t get shocked. Meanwhile I was thinking, “Eh, she can hardly crawl yet. I bet we have a long time before we need those. And doesn’t getting shocked count as a Logical Consequence?” Just kidding about that last part. Then when Lucy installed them she even protected the outlets above the kitchen countertop. I bet she’s worried about Bob shocking himself too. The poor lady doesn’t know I’ve been letting him handle electrical appliances for years, but I’m not going to complain about her being too cautious!

Anyway, Starbucks is only 2 blocks away from our house and I figure Camille has 4 babysitters at home so she is a very well protected baby. So much to tell, but so little battery life left. Ma’salama until my next Starbucks run. Back to my information-free bubble!