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.