Author: Robin Chartier

So you know I hate pictures without people in them, but today we drove around and explored the area by car, so this is all I could get. Unlike Egypt, you have to have a car to get around here. It’s basically a city connected by highways so that rules out a lot of walking tours.

I know nothing about any of these places/buildings, but they are different than anything we have in America and gives you a good feel for the style of architecture here, so there you go.

Near the souk (marketplace). I didn’t take any photos in the souk because since we’ll be here for a year, I’ll have lots of other opportunities to take pictures there. (Hello Egypt, have you met my friend irony?)

A cruise ship next to a special kind of boat that Josh told me the name of, but now I forget. Not really important except you can rent them. I’m sure we will and then I will take lots of pictures and tell you what they are really called.

The mountains/hills here are just like what we have in 29 Palms. Josh and I agree that Muscat feels a lot like old town Palm Springs. It’s more exotic than Egypt, but it feels more familiar. We were driving around and aside from the domed structures and the sultanesque flair to the buildings (most windows have an Aladdin-like shape), we could be in America. Except the roads here are better and most of the cars are nicer.

This Omani is stylin’ in the pinked out car with the Pink Panther hanging from the rear view mirror. We saw crazy things like this all the time in Egypt, but this is the first non-conformist I’ve seen in Muscat. Most people drive neutral colored BMWs or other luxury cars. There’s also a fair share of mid-range cars, but all cars are in good shape. There’s no “beater culture” here.

Finally, a people picture! It was 85 and humid, but breezy. Perfect weather. We ate lunch across the street from here at a place called Gulf Fast Food (or something like that). We had chicken tikka (spicy chicken), kabob, and schwarma (meat/tomato/cucumber/lettuce with a white sauce wrapped in flatbread). Lunch cost about $15 including 5 waters.

As I was sitting there it reminded me of when we ate lunch on the street in Egypt (yes, I know, everything reminds me of Egypt or is different than Egypt — I’ll get over it soon. I’m getting sick of it myself). Anyway, as I’m eating, I hear meowing. Seriously. I’ve seen exactly one cat in the three days we’ve been here so I think, “Aw, the kids are remembering the time in Egypt when we ate lunch and the cat scared me” until I see this scrawny creature come running out from under the table. Then Caleb got all excited and started freaking out and wanting me to take a picture of the cat and there we are . . . back in Egypt. And once again I’m the crazy lady taking pictures of stray cats. Here you go.

At least it’s not another boring picture of a building . . .

Our first day in Muscat went much better than our first day in Egypt. But since everyone (except me) woke up at 3 or 4 in the morning it made for a really L O N G day for our already overtired kids.

Our goal was to keep everyone awake until 8pm so around 4 we headed out to run a few errands. We went to Lu Lu’s hypermarket which is like Super Wal-Mart. The bottom floor is all groceries and the top floor has electronics, clothing, appliances, etc. I’ll have plenty more to say about Lu Lu’s another time, but for now, this is what our kids thought about this shopping trip.

Poor Caleb was so tired he was whimpering with every step. He’s holding a bag because he said he felt like he was going to throw up.

I know it seems mean, but if we stopped moving, they were going to fall asleep. Josh did end up carrying Caleb for a while and thankfully, we didn’t need to use the bag. 

On the way home I had to keep poking Bob and Carter to keep them from falling asleep. It was 5:30 and we had to keep them going long enough to go to dinner at 6 at the Thai restaurant in our hotel. We had a yummy dinner of spicy prawns in coconut milk, fried fish fillets in chili sauce, chicken in peanut sauce, and fish cakes. Food here is supposedly much more expensive than in Egypt and so far we’ve found that to be true.

After dinner the kids were begging to go to bed so we let them crawl in at 7 and they all were out within 5 minutes. They each slept a full 12 hours and are much happier today. Of course I woke up at 3 am and couldn’t go back to sleep so today I’m the one wanting to go to bed in the middle of the day.

I think this post is boring and not very informative at all, but I’m too tired to revamp it. Give me a few days to adjust to the new time zone and I’ll be back to my old self.

but we can still buy local strawberries! Yep, halfway around the world in a grocery store in Muscat, they have Driscoll strawberries, grown in Watsonville, CA.

 Of course you’d have to pay around $7.50 for only 8 oz of strawberries, but aren’t they beautiful?

The other brand of American strawberries (I have no idea where they are grown)  are more white than red and just as expensive. Good thing I ate loads of strawberries while we could still afford them — straight from the fields!

*** This post is mostly for my mom and dad who have friends that grow Driscoll strawberries. Kind of a 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon thing. 😉

So it’s a good thing that I couldn’t get online last night when we arrived. Josh got the wifi code from the front desk and signed in on his ipad and then I couldn’t get logged in on my computer. I was annoyed because I just wanted to post an “I’m here” message and send an email to my parents before going to bed, but his happy self was clicking away while I kept getting “login failure.” So I decided to take a shower because in my world a hot, turn your skin red shower solves all problems. It really does. Babies can’t cry when you’re in the shower, children can’t yell at you, migraines are stopped in their tracks. The world looks like a glorious place when you’re surrounded by a steaming waterfall of water.

So I turn on the shower. Hmm . . . no hot water. I tried the sink faucet. No hot water there either. Stupid Oman with their stupid no-hot water bathrooms and their stupid non-working wifi and all sorts of other stupid things that I haven’t discovered yet. But I’m sure they’ll be stupid. Unlike glorious Egypt, where everything was always wonderful and perfect and angels sang when I got in the shower and the hot water was always the perfect temperature and it never ran out and I never had any internet problems.

So yeah, I was having an irrational pity party. Then Josh found a switch outside each bathroom that turns on the hot water heater (something about it being so hot here that sometimes you don’t need to heat the water?!) and then I had my hot shower and climbed into bed and slept until 7 this morning when things started looking a whole lot better.

And Josh figured out that each computer needed its own wifi code. So there we are. Simple fix. Maybe Oman isn’t so stupid after all.

I’m currently sitting at our gate, waiting for them to call for our flight to board. Sounds peaceful, right? Well, in the hour or so that we’ve been at the airport: The baby screamed all the way through security (but we got to go in the family line so no naked pictures and a shorter wait. Josh swore that he heard Calvin’s name being paged over the loudspeaker so he went off to go solve that mystery about 10 minutes ago. I don’t know how anyone can distinguish anything anyone says over those paging systems. I hear things like, “Your mom freesia – please come to the carnival house yesterday” or “will passenger Gi Yu Romania, please go to the dog latch.” But Josh is convinced that they called Calvin’s name and he’s usually right about these sort of things so who knows what that’s about. Meanwhile I am sitting with baby girl who managed to dump an entire container of puffs in her lap – I think I rescued most of them but there are crumbs and puff dust everywhere. I thought she would just play with the jar, but I guess she’s smarter than I am. I tried to get on SFO’s free wifi, but it either wasn’t working, or I just didn’t connect properly. I’m betting on the latter. Then a loud, shrill BEEP BEEP BEEP (pause) BEEP BEEP BEEP started and I was sure it was some sort of fire alarm and was just waiting for them to announce we had to evacuate when it stopped.` Josh just came back and said that one of our bags is locked and he has to go all the way back through security to figure out which bag has the problem. It’s probably the guitar. Baby is yelling and teething so I gotta go pull out the Motrin. Happy travels to us!