An Omani Wedding

Yesterday, I attended an Omani wedding and it was a great experience. Most people dress up when going to a wedding by wearing a dishdasha with a khanjar (basically a decorative dagger). Some people don't wear the khanjar, but rather carry a walking stick that kind of looks like a cane. A few people bring decorative swords, and I even saw one guy wearing a gun. I wore my dishdasha and borrowed a stick from one of our friends from the university. The first thing we did was go to the mosque where most of the people prayed and I think there may have been some signing of a contract between the groom and the father of the bride. I am not 100% sure of what happened inside the mosque because we did not go inside, but my friends said they sign a contract and pray. After that, everyone who had come to the mosque (all men except for two women who were carrying burning Frankinsence on their heads) gathered in the street along with the groom and his brother, and we started on a procession from the mosque to the place where the party was taking place. We walked right down the middle of the street, stopping all traffic, and walked probably about a mile or so. The entire way, we were singing and everyone was holding their canes in the air and dancing. Every 5 minutes or so, we would stop, while one person gathered the group in the front of the procession and taught them a few lines to chant, and then taught the second group another few lines, and then we would sing or chant those lines as we walked down the street. It is kind of difficult to explain, but hopefully the video will give a pretty good idea of what it was like.

Once we got to the end, the dancing continued for a while and then they formed a little area where two people would dance at a time, holding unsheathed khanjars, and people would throw money up in the air around them while they danced. We left before things ended, but talking to one of my friends he said that they would continue doing that for a while, then take a break, then people would come back later in the evening and they would continue the dancing and celebrating until late into the night.

Another interesting point is that the party today was for the men. There were a few women sitting around and the place we ended up at, but they weren't participating in the dancing at all, and we never saw the bride at all. On Thursday, there will be a party for just the women, and they get a closed tent or someplace that is closed off from everyone else, and have a party for the girls.

So, the wedding was pretty interesting and a lot of fun. Otherwise, things are pretty calm around here. I spend most of my time at school, and the rest of the time playing basketball with some Omani friends we met here at the sports club, doing homework, or sitting down on the beach with some of my Omani friends.

A few answers

Sorry for not explaining what the pictures were in my first post. I couldn't figure out a way to label the picture in the post itself, but I will explain them here. The first picture is of the Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque in Muscat. The mosque is beautiful and the main prayer hall is extremely large and elaboratly decorated. There seems to be a pattern throughout the Middle East to build huge elaborate mosques and it is interesting to examine the motivations behind doing so. When we were in Morocco we saw the huge Hassan II Mosque in Casa Blanca which is also very beautiful and massive.

The second picture is the back side of the Sultan's Palace in Muscat which sits right on the water. I thought the color on his palace was interesting, and he has a great view out into the bay. The palace sits in a little cove that has a narrow opening and on both sides of the opening are forts, which I believe were built by the Portuguese and which guard the entrance. You can't really see from this picture, but the palace currently has a few more modern guns pointing out to sea if it ever comes down to that.

The next picture is a banana stand that we stopped at after a day of playing soccer down on the beach. There are just a bunch of identical stands all lined up next to each other selling bananas, coconuts, and sugar cane. I had a "glass" of coconut milk, and bought a few bananas, but I didn't try the sugar cane. One of the Omanis taht was with us did buy a little section of sugar cane and you just chew on a piece of sugar cane and enjoy the sweetness.

The car out in the desert is our campsite when we stayed the night in the Rub al-Khali. We rode across the dunes in landcruisers until we reached this spot and decided that it looked like a good place to set up camp, so we parked the cars, set up some tents, and spent the rest of the night there. Nightime in the desert is really nice, and we had a cloudless sky allowing us to enjoy the stars and a night in the desert. I slept outside though, and I am still suffering from the mosquito bites that I must have picked up during the night.

We then have some cows grazing on some green rolling hills as we left the desert and reentered the mountains. A lot of people think this is the land of Bountiful from the Book of Mormon, and it is not hard to imagine why they think this is the place as it is such a stark change from the desert just a few minutes away.

The final picture is a view from Ayn Jarziz which is one of the sources of water for Salalah, and has a great view of the mountains, although it is kind of hard to see them at this time of year because it is always foggy.

As far as what people do here for work, I am still trying to get a good sence of that. The government is the #1 employer in the country, so many people work for the government in a variety of capacities. Most of the really visible jobs are done by the many Indians and Pakistanis who live here. At the suqs, almost all of the stores are run by Indians and Pakistanis, all of the workers at restaurants and stores, construction workers, mechanics, etc. are all Indians or Pakistanis, with few exceptions. At the grocery store, however, all of the checkout workers are Omani women. A lot of the coffee shops have Arabs working at them, but a lot of them are from Morocco or Egypt and are not Omanis. My sense is that a lot of Omanis work for the government, and a lot of them work for companies such as banks, communications companies, oil companies, the tourism industry, etc. One interesting note is that all of the taxi drivers in Oman are Omanis. The government has been involved in an Omanization program attempting to get Omanis to work in a variety of different jobs, and one way they have done this is by allowing only Omanis to work as taxi drivers, and they must give some incentive to Omanis to do so, because there seems to be an adequate amount of taxis avaliable. The Gulf in general is struggling with the issue of labor force, as many citizens refuse to do certain kinds of work, so there are huge expatriate populations in their countries. Oman has to deal with similar issues, although for now, it is not on the same level as the Emirates and other Gulf countries.

Hello from Salalah

Well, I have been here in Oman for almost 3 weeks now, but I am just barely getting around to starting this blog. We arrived first in the capital of Muscat where we spent a couple of days before flying down to Salalah where we are spending the rest of the program. The difference between Muscat and Salalah is quite stark. The first thing that jumps out is the weather. The day we left Muscat, the temperature was 47 degrees Celsius (about 117 degrees Farenheit) and that was at 11:00 am. The temperature here in Salalah is much more pleasant. Today it is 29 degrees Celsius (84 degrees Farenheit). We are here during the monsoon season, which means that it is almost constantly cloudy and there is quite frequently fog and a constant mist. The humidity here is much higher than in Muscat, but the weather here is much more pleasant than in the rest of the country, and the rest of the peninsula for that matter. Every year at this time, people from all over the gulf and from other Arab countries come to Salalah to spend the summer and escape the heat in their home countries. A few have started to show up already, but next week we should start seeing a lot more of them.



There are also cultural differences between Muscat and Salalah. Salalah is a small town and as such is much more relaxed and runs at a slower pace. Almost every night I go down to a coffee shop on the beach with a couple of friends I met on our first night here in Salalah, and we sit around and talk for a couple of hours while I drink juice and they smoke sheesha (sheesha is basically just a fruit flavored tobacco that is smoked from a water pipe). For me it is good practice of my Arabic, and it is nice to sit right on the beach with the waves crashing in.

Every night, the entire area is filled with people sitting at tables all along the beach, some drinking tea or smoking sheesha, and some just sitting around having a picnic on the beach. Weekends (Thursday and Friday here in Oman) are especially busy, and there can be maybe 100 people at the coffee shop that we always go to all just sitting around, talking and relaxing.

Another thing that people like to do here is go up into the mountains, which are about 10 minutes away, and have picnics or visit family. The mountains have started turning green and they are amazing. We just returned from a trip to the desert and as we were driving back to Salalah and entered the mountains, in about 10 minutes time we went from a dry, hot desert with almost no vegetation and very little sign of life, to green rolling hills with cows and other animals grazing and it was amazing. As we were approaching the mountains you could see a wall of clouds ahead of us and once we entered the clouds, the temperature dropped 30+ degrees from well over 100 to somewhere in the 70s with a pleasant mist and beautiful green hills. It is difficult to describe the abruptness of the change, but it was quite an experience.

Salalah has been really nice so far. Our first night here we went to watch a soccer match in the European Cup, which is where I met a couple of guys, Ahmed and Salem, who I sit with almost every day and practice Arabic. Classes are nothing to rave about, but the atmosphere of being here and studying Arabic all the time has really improved my language and hopefully will continue to do so for the next 5 weeks or so that we have left.

Well, I don't plan on this being my one and only post, so I will finish now, and add more later. I hope you enjoy, and let me know if there is anything you would like me to write about or include in future posts, and I will do my best.