Flashback!

Sporning: (That's a spoiler and a warning) All of my pictures from China are locked in a hard drive in New York, so you're going to have to use your god damned imagination for once. You know like cave-men did before the IPhone 3G came out.

This is the entry I wrote a long time ago for the blog about China that never materialized. I thought a drunken bender my first day in Shanghai made for a good contrast to my first days in the Middle East

Apparently it’s more difficult to pack for a year than I remembered. Mom sat in my room folding all my button down shirts so that they didn’t resemble paraplegic origami like the first few I folded. Dad and I were looking rather skeptically at the proposed two suitcases I was to use for this little adventure. One was large but not huge, and the other was less than large. Suffice to say it was apparent after packing half the large suitcase that the small one would have to go and we’d have to go to the bullpen for another monstrous square box.

At about 9 PM the Egans showed up, which with Irish visitors is a metaphor for alcohol showing up, it just happened to be connected to hands. I put a hold on packing and went upstairs to greet my booze. After the parent Egans went home to prepare for work their offspring Ryan stayed up drinking with me in preparation for the ungodly flight I had ahead of me. This wasn’t to be like the ole’ days of preparing for finals with a baptism of Milwaukee’s Beast and Natty Ice, we only had 12 between the two of us, it was just a merry farewell.

As the drinking got underway and the packing accelerated, it became apparent that some adjustments might have to be made to the packing strategy. “God do you really need that many shirts?” Ryan would say, “Of course, how else could I justify bringing all these ties?” I would respond. But in the end Ryan would be right and I would be horribly, horribly wrong.

After it took three of us to close up the big suitcase Dad brought down a scale to weigh the baggage, I imagined I was well over the allotted 50 pounds we were allowed to carry without penalty…only by a little bit. The two bags together came in at 140 pounds! Including my computer and the stuff in my backpack, I had packed more than my body weight worth of crap. I looked up the rules for weight on American Airlines website and proceeded to get rid of 20 pounds worth of crap, or transfer more of the weight to my carry on. After packing was finished there was only one thing left for Ryan and I to do, the activity necessary before breaking any boundary from one segment of life to the next. I would cross the ephemeral curtain of two life stages on the back of a few glorious and overpowering victories of Magic: The Gathering, our teenage claim to geekitude. I won’t go into details about my perfectly timed counter spells, creature management and land destruction, but suffice to say it was a thing of beauty. Afterwards I showered, shaved, put on some obnoxiously bright clothing, said my goodbyes and left for my next great journey.

It began as all great journeys do, with a smaller and much more manageable journey. I had the good graces to fly out of Newark airport in “Joisey” rather than its more congested New York equivalents. Mom drove, and I think we were both on the verge of passing out, I hadn’t slept for a solid day and a half or so, thus it was an unusually quiet drive. We parked at the terminal and I carried my heavy ass luggage to the counter.

I have to say the best way to take care of overweight luggage is to check in at the counter with the prissiest, bitchiest, I’m going to murder your baby looking employee you can find. This will most likely be a woman, but a gay guy will probably work just as well. They have to look like the world has conspired to beat them into a shapeless mass with little will to live and no motivation or drive remaining to them to accomplish anything. Suffice to say they’ll process you without a word or smile, but they’ll ignore the fact that your luggage is pounds over the limit give you your boarding pass and send you on your way.
On the plane to Chicago…I slept…moving on.

After a brief stop in O’Hare I was on my way again, this time on a 15 hour flight, across the USA, the Pacific, Japan, and then eventually to Shanghai. I stayed up just long enough to watch the ground and Chicago disappear under the clouds before I passed out. I went under and didn’t recover until some mush in a compartmentalized plastic tray was staring at me from my tray table. It was a good start to an otherwise arduous flight, I slept straight to the first meal. My communication with my neighbor was a sort of combination between head nods, guttural clicks, and drooling on my tee-shirt. Sometimes to add inflection I’d scratch myself or roll my eyes.

After another meal and another few solid hours of sleep I began spoken communications with the life form next to me. As it turns out the guy was unbelievably well preserved, he looked like he was in his early 60’s, he looked the kind of guy that played a good Santa if you gave him some padding. He was actually 83 years old, and meeting an old friend from Singapore. I usually manage to end up sitting next to someone with a story to tell when I’m stuck on a long flight. So our conversation continued broken only by 2 hour gaps to watch Spider-Man 3 over and over again.

We landed without fanfare and I stepped foot on Chinese soil for the first time, it was incredible…how much the International Airport in Shanghai resembled every other international airport in the world. Went through customs, changed some money over, and went out into the massive crowd outside the arrival gate to find a placard with my name on it.

Toward the end of the line a Chinese dude had a little sign with my name on it, he spoke English, well a little bit, with a massive accent, so I decided to just get in the cab and keep quiet for a while. As we streaked out of the airport, sticking mostly to the passing lane, I let the city fill me, the traffic, the trucks with piles of hay between the cab and the cargo, the horns with their high octaves from tiny cars, and the endless squealing of breaks that needed changing.

Everyone had warned us about the smog before we left but my first day here, the sky couldn’t have been bluer, dotted with white puffy cumulus clouds. The cab driver and Frank, an employee of my school, were deep in conversation and my eyes slid from the right window to the left, letting the geometry of the city unfold into its grids and towers and slums around me. From my vantage point, slightly above the city on an elevated highway, it didn’t seem much different from any other city, but the one thing that stood out in my mind as a “we’re not in Kansas anymore” moment, was when I spied the nuclear reactor, right in the midst of the city.

I haven’t been able to find it again, though I haven’t searched particularly hard, but there is a large nuclear reactor very close to, if not within Shanghai proper. This is something that to my knowledge has never been done in the US, for seemingly obvious reasons. It took a little while for the cab to hit traffic, but hit traffic it did; and one thing I did notice was some odd configurations on motorcycles and mopeds in the city. For instance one might see a motorcycle body with one wheel in front, two in back with a canopy hovering over the rider/driver and a little table on the back. People in this city have somewhere to go, those who can’t afford a car get a moped, those who can’t get a moped get a moped/bike combination, like an electric bicycle with pedals and a motor, and those who can’t get one of those get a bike. I haven’t seen a single rickshaw to my complete and utter dismay.

We pulled a few turns, ran a few red lights, and finally pulled into my humble hell hole; which for the purpose of anonymity we’ll call the Fortell Business Institute. The school happily paid for my cab ride which was nice, but no good deed goes unpunished. We rolled my luggage a whopping 12 feet from the front door into my new apartment on the first floor. It’s actually not such a bad place, about the same size as my apartment in Japan, and my commute to school is about a three and a half second walk.

After I set down my luggage I went to talk to The Boer in her room down the hall. The Boer is a South African lass who is the closest thing to an arch-nemesis my Jesus Camp of a grad program has offered. I suppose I looked more familiar than the Chinese guards who didn’t speak a word of English. So we exchanged pleasantries and I delivered her deodorant to her. I know that sounds like a strange greeting, but those are the customs of South Africa… Ok, seriously some of the people in the grad program had a two week stint in South Korea teaching at an English camp before coming back to the states and then off to China. However, The Boer under the advisement of P. Diddy MarkyMark, our program coordinator, only took a photocopy of her green card, and as a result would not be admitted onto the flight or into our fair land of freedom. Thus a multitude of items had to be fetched for her in the states, I was on deodorant duty. So remember kids, if you have a document that you think is important to your survival, livelihood, and entrance into a country – remember to take a photocopy AND the actual document with you on your travels.

As I was packing I was soon introduced to Kim-Kraut, a mulatto girl from the states. She is a perfect 50/50 Korean to German and proud of it. The introduction was short, but the evening would prove a little on the long side.
Myself, Kim-Kraut, and The Boer endeavored to a nearby Wal-Mart…called Trust-Mart. Goooooo Globalization! Kim-Kraut had been in Taiwan for a year so she went to track down some Taiwanese cookies or other such confection, The Boer and I knew exactly what was going to happen when the boys arrived, I bought about 20 beers and she bought a bottle of wine and Champagne…and nothing else.

The beers hit the fridge, I continued unpacking and then the boys stumbled, ambled, and staggered through the door. Wino, Longboard, and Crimson Cowboy were still in various stages of drunk, recovering, or poorly recovering from a real flight that had free booze. Wino had apparently taken an ambien and collapsed through the final hours of his flight as Longboard challenged a Chinese lad to a chugging contest and proceeded to vomit in a trash can and Crimson Cowboy proceeded to vomit on himself, shirts were discarded and replaced from carry-ons and the boys were for the most part better for the experience.

Everyone dropped off their luggage and then the whole group of us went across the street for noodles and beer, and/or some kind of non-beer beverage for the girls and Crimson Cowboy. My noodles were unbearably spicy and I got through about a third of the bowl and a third of the beer before my stomach went on the warpath. Something was rising through my bowels and it wasn’t happy thoughts. Once I stopped eating the devil’s noodles things were beginning the slow decent to normalcy, however, it was fast approaching 10 PM or 9 PM. The important thing is that it was getting late, and a decision was bearing down on us, after or still drunk, would the boys spend their first night in Shanghai resting off the plane ride, or attacking and burning the city to the ground? The Crimson Cowboy was the first to bail out; due to the shirt vomit incident we didn’t give him too much lip about it. The Boer was the next and last to drop out. Longboard tried to squeak out of the evening but I convinced him to come out “for one beer.” …but I think we both knew he was sealing his own fate as soon as he left his room.

Kim-Kraut, Wino, Longboard and I ventured in the Shanghai night, with no expectations, loan money to burn, thirsty gullets, and open minds. I don’t know how she knew where to go, but when we got into the taxi Kim-Kraut told the driver where to go, to a street with “a lot of bars where foreigners go.” For day one that was good enough for me.

When we paid three and a half American for a thirty minute cab ride we were in good spirits, when we realized the cab had dropped us off in an area with more neon bar signs than a Bukowski flashback we moved straight to high spirits, and ambled jaws agape to the closest boozatorium. The establishment in question was called Bar 88, it had a healthy smattering of gangly white folk and a compliment of Chinese drunks. We sat at a table pondering and calculating how quickly this funny money would disappear when three Chinese waitresses wearing rather revealing red dresses with high slits up the side of the leg offered us a beer menu. Suddenly a phrase from a Chinese history book popped into my head, in the nineteenth century Shanghai was known as “The Whore of the Orient” which for some reason made these leathery old waitresses somewhat more appealing.

We ordered some beers and were showered with bar peanuts for a solid hour or so before the urge to crawl came on. We wandered down the street a bit trying to gleam a little insight from anyone sober enough to walk in a crooked line and were given directions to a few of the more substantial bars. We moved down the street a few blocks where the sights ranged from a 20 foot statue of an Indian, (feathers not dots) a bowling alley/trance club combination, a Turkish restaurant/Hookah bar and a myriad of Irish pubs, a T.G.I. Fridays, and about a dozen crones offering massages with what I imagine would be the happiest of endings to a blind man. We clearly had stumbled onto Gringo Ground Zero in Shanghai.

Our next stop was a non-descript place called M-Factory. It had no cover charge and was quiet on the outside, but as we descended the stairs the bass started making its way to my sternum. We turned a corner and walked into a freakishly cool free club, filled wall to wall with Chinese twenty somethings. Not only that but there were bikini clad dancers all over the place, on the bar, next to the DJ, above the stage and anywhere we seemed to turn. The fact that they were horrendous dancers didn’t bother us so much…what with the bikini clad aspect to the performance.
We headed for the bar and then headed for the dance floor and had a gay olde time in the most heterosexual sense of the phrase. We were blinded by a hail of laser lights numerous times, jostled about by some ecstasy addled teens, and sweated like crazy dancing sweaty people at a club after an hour or so.

It was however, an excellent little joint to study the massive generation gap buffeting this country. The old guard, literally guards, at the club stood stone solid on the top floor watching the new generation of China raving, consuming drugs they will probably never understand and listening to music so disparate and foreign from tradition that they may never come to like, enjoying Shanghai prosperity that they had never known, and may not yet have fully come to accept. Communication between ourselves and our new countrymen was rather lacking, and even attempts to converse with the geriatric guards patrolling the upper level were met with complete failure. All in all we were being terrible ambassadors for Concordia University and The United States of America. We were here to enlighten the city going and nationwide people of the People’s Republican of China that not all Americans were obnoxious drunks, and that we didn’t just come to Asia because of some petite fetish. We decided another bar and new patrons would remedy the situation.

Unfortunately on the way to our roadmap for peace we took a detour at the shimmering highway rest stop of insanity. As we passed by a less than charming tourist trap known as Narcissus we noticed patrons brandishing multicolored sparklers inside of the bar. It should be remarked that Narcissus seems an entirely unlikely name for a bar in Shanghai, but after some drunken philosophizing I’d decided that Shanghai is an entire city utterly devoted to worshipping its own reflection, and maybe wholly unknown to most of the customers maybe the most symbolic boosery in the metro area. Anyway back to the sparklers, they were bright, colorful, and on fire, we had no choice but to enter. We walked to the bar grabbed a dozen sparklers each and went to town. We set about in swirling, spinning, jumping, falling, and whatever else our sluggish minds could force our limbs to do. Unfortunately, or fortunately for us, our attention span faded as quickly as those deadly pixie sticks because after five minutes of feverish activity, panting and laughing we moseyed to a table and order some beers.

After the fury of the fire dance ended and we sat down to take in our surroundings, they had some imported beers like Heineken, Chimay, and others. They also had a professional Brazilian Karaoke cover band. How does one accurately describe this…well imagine any American bar cover band full of 40 somethings trying to relive their college days by playing an endless volley of Lynard Skynard and Journey – now change those guys into two Brazillian women clad more in my drool than the little slips they were wearing and put a drummer behind them with more tattoos than a masochistic Hell’s Angel and you start to get the picture. However, after staring at the women for some time I realized there were sounds emanating from somewhere above their breasts and as it turns out they were trying to sing. They tried to sing in such a way that threatened to sober us up. We took a vote and came to a unanimous decision to chug our beers and culturally empathize with somebody who wasn’t tone deaf.

After paying our tab and running for cover we realized there was a Turkish restaurant next door…that was quiet. Well was being the key word there. We ambled in as true cultural ambassadors, demanding a hookah and the finest Arabic maidens. We got some hummus and another round of beers. Words danced around our heads and some of them managed to spill out in long chains of things resembling sentences, but not quite making it. “Remember when that guy…with the thing…came out and,” Wino rumbled. “He totally fucking ate it…and did you see that dude?” I encouraged. “Fucking A…this town,” Longboard continued. “What the hell are you guys talking about?” Kim-Krout would invariably attempt to be the voice of reason, or grammar, or something. “That guy!” We would admonish.

At this point I noticed a rather sullen looking gentleman eating some Turkish dish by his lonesome. Here was our chance to prove our mettle, drunks with a heart. I probably meant to say something diplomatic, to re-assure this lad we were welcoming, thoughtful people ready to tackle the ills of the world and bring all the sufferers under our umbrella of care and understanding. What came out was “Hey! Get over here and have a drink with us.” But one can’t argue with results. Came he did, and drink he did.

He was a German and his name was Renee, but true to our mission we hardly made fun of his…“You know that’s a girls name in the US right?” Fucking Wino. Anyway it turns out he was some kind of cog in the sales and marketing machinery of Porsche, and he had a damned fancy little business card.

Renee seemed more interested in Kim-Krout than having a conversation with us, but we remedied that situation by a constant barrage of questions, as I believe he’s the first person in the city we’d actually managed to talk to. We then moseyed out to the last bar we’d hit that evening. It was about 2 AM at that point. There was an epic metal fence around the street corner opposite us, and the inside of what sounded like a hugely crowded establishment was completely obscured by huge shrubs. As we turned the corner a horde of tired looking Chinese woman offering massages came charging at us like some kind of hooker cavalry. We ducked, dodged, weaved and fled in terror and pretty soon we were in the courtyard of Zepatas, Mexican restaurant by day, expat sanitarium by night.

We were completely surrounded by large white men looking down the shirts of short Chinese women. Half of the patrons wore suits, and the other half looked like us, grungy, drunk, and loud. We were happy with the turn of events…and then 80’s rock emanating from the bar area. The sirens of our youth compelled us, though we would order “on the rocks” not crashing into them. The four of us, with Renee in tow, formed a small circle inside the bar, belting out familiar tunes at the top of our lungs. I fondly remember Renee going berserk when they started playing 99 Luft Balloons (the German version of 99 Red Balloons for you Philistines). We all grabbed each others shoulders and tried to sing German with him, but like those balloons floating away we were mostly full of hot air.

We stayed on for some undisclosed amount of time before getting into a cab. Renee made a last ditch effort to take Kim-Krout home with him, and we all kind of stood around not knowing what to do. We had only known the lass for about a half a day, but eventually I nudged her more toward the get in the cab and go home crowd. I’d like to say I was motivated by compassion but seeing as the two of us were dating a week later I doubt my motives were entirely altruistic. The cab sped off into the night, through the dizzying maze of a new city on the first night. We made a spoken recap of the night as the taxi flew past the half dozen establishments we’d frequented that evening and after about 17,000 apartment complexes flashed by the windows we were back home.

We strolled into our family mart, the 24 hour convenience store outside of campus, and added a few more beers to what must have been a monumental tab for the evening. We sat outside our new apartments in the little front lawn and drank our last beers when of all things, the sun appeared. We’d made it to sunrise, for some reason that seemed like an accomplishment. Wait, we’d survived until sunrise…there we go. A half hour after the sun rose the Crimson Cowboy appeared at the doorway ready to go for a morning jog. We were all still outside, in high spirits, and high BAC’s and immediately began telling the story of the evening. By telling, I of course mean screaming gibberish. I decided to go for a little run with him and retold most of what had transpired but after three laps and maybe a tenth of the story behind us I decided maybe running around wasn’t the best thing for all that poison worming its way through my system. Soon after I got back we decided it was about time to collapse in our new beds, in our new home, in our new lives. Welcome to Shanghai.

Shards of Sand # 1

2/3/2010 - Sound waves 

Sohar Beach is a peculiar shade of brown somewhere between gold and dirt. Beaches are a matter of fact piece of the landscape here, and treated no differently from the mountains or the parks scattered around the cities. There is no great migration to the beaches by tourists or vacationing locals, just footprints running like roller coaster rails in loops and circles across the surface.

I sit in the shade of a palm tree sipping tea with an Egyptian. There is a line of palms planted near the parking lot behind me. In front of me the water is nearly empty of bodies. All of the boys on this beach are happy to have a flat piece of ground that isn’t covered with rocks. The beach is simply a place to play ball. Five or six pick-up games of soccer emerge at about five o’clock, when the sun has lost most of its strength, and end an hour later, around dusk.

There are a few women on the beach, most towing their children behind. Occasionally they take them down to the water, and the children (in swimsuits) with the women (covered head to toe in the black cloth called an Abaya) poke at the warm surf with their feet.

Black sea birds, that fly like gulls and caw like crows, gather around the minaret of a nearby Mosque. The call to prayer radiates into the waves, not as a summons, but as a warning. The land-born know the power of the unspoken faith in the sea; a power that manifests simultaneously in its fullness and emptiness. Where the desert god chose a palette brimming with colors, the sea god used few. Its beauty does not come from inexplicable flashes, but the overwhelming mass of its domain. The sea creates and consumes with hypnosis, and I would venture that the end of days will not be signaled by a rain in the sands, but by the terrible silence at the end of waves. When surrounded by prayer it is difficult for the mind to flee entirely from religion.

Further down the beach a line of white, wooden posts become a boundary that separates leisure from tradition. A hotel built of squat, whitewashed concrete buildings looms over the small space of beach chairs and thatch umbrellas. The crenellated white towers are supposed to make the hotel look Arab, but are in fact mimics of the Portuguese; who were the builders of Oman’s first forts and castles. Past the occasional flesh of a bikinied tourist the beach again transforms, or rather, returns to the long rows of fishermen’s huts with the scattered debris of nets and ropes filling the spaces between.

For centuries Omani date farmers had provided the fishermen with the ash gray fronds of their trees. This gift of shade was purchased with the bounties of the waves. There seems a deep stirring of the timeless in these actions. A repetition repeated through so many generations that it may have wormed into their DNA. The awe of the archaic is constantly broken by the intrusions of our modern world though. The rambling tracks of SUV’s and trucks, the tell-tale green of Mountain Dew bottles, and the shimmer of aluminum from crushed packs of Marlboros.

We modern creatures find a great comfort in the traditional and these intrusions from our world threaten our visions of the living past. Those born within the timeless cannot help but relish the speed of its collapse. These are the two unstoppable forces spiraling through the developing world, forces which do not collide or explode in Oman, but merge for a time and simply continue along their paths.

As I walk along the huts and boats and nets and cars I watch children play soccer in the upper sands, perhaps fifty feet west of the foam. They hang fishing net over posts of driftwood and run in a kind of suspended animation in the thick sand. Their parents appear in flashes as the white of their dishdashas reflect sunlight when they move beneath the roofs of their huts.

At dusk, a white pick-up rumbles between a line of palm trees and a pick-up soccer game. Two black figures gleam in the back. They do not seem to move their immense frames, but they are alive, as the center of the ocean is alive; in its mass, in its ability to make you shift in your seat to confirm that you are not a part of it. Their coats have no sheen and they do not reflect the glare of the setting sun. They absorb it, like two bull shaped holes cut from the fabric of night. When the truck stops a teenage Omani gets out of the cab and pulls the two bulls out of the truck and into the water. Those hulking mounds of midnight were bred not to pull plows, but for battle. In Oman the bulls do not fight men with swords and capes though, they fight each other. There is no great crashing of a dead beast, but simply two great animals slamming their bulk against one another until one is defeated. Within fifteen minutes the bulls are bathed, back in their truck, and driven back to wherever they came from.

The cloud of sand and exhaust from the bull’s truck dissipates to reveal a whole family trudging out to their boat. The overweight grandmother, or possibly first wife, nearly bursts from the fabric of her flower print Abaya. Two men and two boys push the boat over round logs on the sand, while two small boys move the logs the boat has passed over to the front of it.

Two logs away from the surf the call to prayer bursts from another nearby Mosque. Everyone stops, but only for a moment, if they pray it is silent and quick. When the boat moves into the water with the ululations of the Imam behind it I rethink my opinion of the seaside Mosque. Maybe it is not a warning but a ward. So those that slide along the waves are rocking to the rise and fall of Allah’s prayer. They do not begin their fight with the endless God of the Sea but coast into its bosom upon a sound that mimics its movements. Do not worry, the Imam sings, for you ride on my voice and the rhythm of my song is the only rhythm you will remember.

Benjamin Franklin once quipped that he preferred lighthouses to Churches. He might find irony in the fact that the seaside Mosque can serve both purposes. For returning sailors and fishermen do not return on the providence of a beam of light but the lilting fugue of a minaret’s song.

Sohar so good

I left my coffin, the Qurm Beach Hotel, at the asscrack of dawn, some of you may refer to this period as around 7 AM. A pair of young Omani dudes wearing the nation’s national dress, a white dishdasha and a pillbox cap (which is somewhere between a skull cap and a fez) came to pick me up. My bags were hoisted into the trunk of a very mediocre Honda something or other, and we were off. There was absolutely no traffic at this point in the morning, because I had arrived during Ramadan.

Almost dinner time.

Ramadan is a very interesting month in the modern Arabian Gulf. It is a month devoted entirely to fasting (no food, no water, no cigarettes, AND no sex for the entire month) between the morning prayer, usually around 4:30 AM, and the Magreb, or evening prayers which happen when somebody figures out that it’s dark again. However, many of the Muslims in the Gulf actually put on a tremendous amount of weight during the month that’s devoted to fasting. I would say it’s the equivalent of the gluttonous clusterfuck all Americans subject themselves to between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. Most of you are probably thinking, “Dem’ Muslim hypocrites don’t even care bout’ their own religion.” (I was being generous with crediting you with the proper form of “their” in your racist outburst…you racist.) But, alas, you’d be wrong, though I haven’t been able to stalk every Muslim in the Gulf to see if they were sneaking Kit-Kats around in their taints all day, I can say pretty confidently that in the Gulf most Muslims adhere pretty strictly to the fast.

So how the hell do they gain weight if they can’t eat for 16 hours a day? The answer is pretty simple, they eat a metric fuckton of everything that comes even remotely near their outstretched arms for the eight hours a day they have left. As soon as the last syllable of the evening prayer is finished, eating begins. Entire extended families will sit down to a thanksgiving dinner every day for thirty days. How much weight would you gain if the only meal you ate was thanksgiving dinner every day for a month? Would you like some cheese cake on that pie? No you’ll just wash down these cookies with a six pack of Sam Adams. It’s a huge party every night, bearing in mind that party has a different connotation without Alcohol and the cornucopia of wonderful substances available for mass consumption.

They gather, they eat, they watch TV while eating, then they drink coffee while eating, then they move to another room to talk while eating, play cards while eating, go for a drive while eating, hang out on the Corniche while eating, etc…and this continues on right until the morning prayer before dawn, at which point instead of going about their day and burning the calories they’ve consumed, they pass out for as long as they can and wake up when they don’t have to wait so long until they can eat again. Most businesses are closed for almost the entire regular workday in the Gulf during Ramadan. Some of them will do a split shift, where they’ll open up for a few hours, close down for a four to six hour siesta, and then open up again at some point in the evening and stay open until the wee hours of the morning. All in all, I find these habits comforting, because, in the end it doesn’t matter which God we all pray to, the only sure thing is that come next year we’ll be fatter than the year before.

But I didn’t know any of this yet, as it was only my second day in Oman. All I knew was that the car was moving down an empty street and two guys who didn’t speak much English kept stopping at Banks. To this day I still don’t know why these two Omani gentlemen had to stop at five different branches of the Bank of Muscat on the two and a half hour drive, but it was apparently more important than comfortably and quickly transporting me to my new home, which was another surprise.

When I accepted the job in Oman, through a flurry of e-mail communiqués with my scummy teacher recruitment company, the one thing I was sure of was that I was working at the College of Technology in a small town in northern Oman called Shinas. Shinas doesn’t have a whole lot of information spread around the interwebs, but from what I could make out it was a seaside town whose primary industry was fishing, and that those fish were almost entirely shipped directly for consumption in Dubai. After living in a city of 20-35 million people (Chinese population statistics aren’t very accurate) the idea of living in a small city of a few thousand seemed refreshing. I would be able to go to the beach, maybe go out with the fishermen every once and a while, read books, and learn Arabic, etc... But I was not going to make it to Shinas that day.

Let there be Street Lights!

The car I was in headed north from Muscat. After we had cleared the city, or district, or area, or whatever the hell “Muscat” actually was we stayed on the same highway the entire drive. The landscape didn’t seem to change much. The Batinah coast is flat. Almost impossibly flat, and the highway was straight as an arrow. I learned two things on this rather pedestrian drive; Omanis have a love bordering on fetish for street lights, and a reluctance bordering on terror of traffic lights. The “dual carriageways” otherwise known as “decent roads” everywhere else were covered in gargantuan, tightly spaced lights. This isn’t as noticeable during the day as the other primary feature of Omani road construction, traffic circles.

Traffic circles are in my mind a means of population control, and nothing more. They are ludicrously dangerous, prone to creating more traffic than alleviating it, and psychologically, since there are no stop signs or red lights simply asking for stupidity. Even in the major cities, traffic control is almost entirely left to the traffic circle. My driver didn’t pump his brakes, decelerate, or even seem to actually check for oncoming traffic before blasting through the majority of them at 70 miles an hour. This is one lesson I learned from taking taxis in Shanghai though, no matter how insane or suicidal it might seem, drivers in a foreign country know more about driving in it than you do, and if you’re not driving all you can do is relax, and possibly pray.

During this death defying race down the highway I spent most of my time looking out the window. If you took what I saw the first ten minutes outside of Muscat; some shops, a Mosque, a gas station, a coffee shop, nothing, some shops, nothing, nothing, Mosque, gas station, coffee shop you could have basically looped it and replayed it for two and a half hours and wouldn’t have missed anything. Apart from the Mosques, some more beautiful than others, the environment reminded me quite a bit of Mexico.

"The Compound"

When we finally saw something resembling a large town, or a small city, more promising landmarks began to come into focus. I saw a really big Mosque, some banks, electronics stores, car dealerships, Mcdonalds, a mall, apartment buildings and finally I asked where we were. “Sohar,” one of my guides said. “So how long until we get to Shinas?”They looked at me like this was a very stupid question, and didn’t bother to answer. I would soon realize that this was a stupid question, because we had arrived at our destination, sort of. Apart from getting lost for about 20 minutes , I was home. Thus began my first adventure living in a “compound.”

‘Compound’ is also a Latin word, though etymologically it’s closer to the Greek, which means “a place where rich, white people separate themselves from poor, brown people.” Eventually even brown people may earn a coveted spot within the walls of the compound, but they need to prove that they have a sufficient income, and also despise poor, brown people. As Americans, many of us don’t really understand this concept, we simply move to a place where there are no brown people. We call these places “suburbs” or “Ohio.” Europeans though, have a very good idea of what I’m talking about, because Europeans are the ones that spent hundreds of years trying to tame the “savage lands” of the world, and did so while hunkered down in compounds. As if to prove my point I found out that almost every whitey living in the compound was British, and almost all of them worked for Sohar Aluminium. (No that’s not a typo, the Brits say “A-loo-min-ee-um”) I don’t know why, but they claim that it’s different from Aluminum, or if they’re drinking they’ll just say, “You fuckin’ yanks don’t know anything.” It’s hard to argue with this line of logic though, since most Americans don’t know a god damn thing about anything. (I’m looking at you again Ohio and Nebraska, Kentucky, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kansas…) Anyway, I lived in a compound.

I can’t complain too much about the compound, it had a pool, a little park that nobody used, a little gym that only one fat woman used, and my apartment was spacious. I had a giant, comfortable bed. This would never even remotely come into play however. If there were an emoticon for a penis shriveling and dying I would use it here. I suppose that aspect of my trip can wait for another entry. The compound was nice, but it was built for people working in the Sohar port.

The Sohar port is one of the parts of the country that keep the modernizing trend going by shipping out everything that’s been stripped, burned, pumped, pulverized, extracted, mined, and removed from the land and sending it to a country that will use it for something other than Mosques and traffic circles. Naturally the Omanis, being essentially a collection of Beduin tribes until the 1960’s, had absolutely no way of converting their country’s natural resources into cash money by themselves. So a bunch of British, French, and German pipe monkeys are called in, given three times the salary they’d make in their home countries, and told to do whatever it takes to get the operations up and running.

This leads to the main problem with the compound. It’s in the middle of nowhere, and inhabited almost entirely by people who make five to ten times what I do. They can all afford a car. I make 30 grand a year, and was only in Oman because it was the first country to offer me employment, within a year I’d peace out to a more horrible place for much more money.

Now, for those of you who don’t know any better, you might be wondering, “Is there a point to any of this?” Or maybe, “Isn’t this supposed to be a BLOG? I haven’t seen one tit, there’s barely any pictures, and he hasn’t even called Obama a Nazi or Glen Beck the fucking anti-christ!” Maybe for those of you enlightened types who are curious about this bizarre hodgepodge or quasi-autonomous oil exporting countries we call the Gulf, “Why was Sohar so good?”

My compound was about a ten minute drive from the city of Sohar, surprisingly, one of the nation’s largest cities. It had a population somewhere between a few and a bunch, but nowhere near a lot. My compound was also about a 30-40 minute drive away from the school where I’d work. The reason that they could drop me off into this completely inaccessible hive of big fat Brits is because I had a coworker who lived upstairs. This coworker was naturally expected to drive me to and from work. This coworker who I will refer to only as coworker, was the first person I met in Sohar. Naturally I expected some fat bastard who had been chasing poonani around Asia for twenty years doing BS English teaching jobs, and then finally gave up and decided to make a little more money. What I got was a devout Muslim, who didn’t drink, prayed all the time, and…well that was enough. It would be the equivalent of showing up at your Freshman dorm room the first day of school and discovering your roommate was a Mormon.

So here I was, dumped off in the compound, with no phone, no knowledge of my surrounding area, two weeks to go until work started, zero Arabic to my credit, almost no money in the bank, and no internet. My only lifeline to the outside world slept all day, because it was Ramadan, and when you fast you just want to sleep all day so you don’t think about the fact that you live in the most Arid region in the world and can’t drink any water. It was day two, and the terrorists were winning.

Indians are also the ones riding the bikes.

My one reprieve from the monotony of the compound for the next two weeks, was my daily visit to the city of Sohar. My coworker would drop me off in the center of town and then we’d meet an hour or two later after the prayer was finished. This is where I came face to face with perhaps the most defining characteristic of the Gulf that I don’t think anyone in the western world is readily acquainted with unless they’ve visited or done their homework. Half of the population of the Arabian Gulf isn’t Arab.

As I walked around the large Suq (market) that dominated central Sohar here is a sample of the population: Indian, Indian, Filipino, Pakistani, Indian, Pakistani, Omani, Indian, Bangladeshi, Filipino. Nine out of every ten people I saw in Sohar were from the subcontinent. They worked in all the shops, did all the plumbing, electricity, construction, ran the machinery in the factories, stocked the shelves in the supermarkets, owned and ran the hotels, owned and ran the hotel bars, planted the trees, watered the plants, delivered the water, they made up the vast majority of doctors, nurses, dentists, surgeons, engineers, and architects. They did almost everything, they even built the Mosques. Indians and Pakistanis had their own school systems, their own taxis, their own restaurants. There was a massive profusion of immigration and almost zero integration. For many, the way they lived, the way they were treated and the wages they were paid don’t amount to out and out slavery, but “wage slavery” would be a very applicable term for the lives many of them led. I can’t think of any parallel in history where a country with massive natural resources and a lot of money imported so much slave labor, and the slave labor was better trained and qualified than the majority of the host country. It was an unexpected and bizarre discovery to say the least.

One night during my jaunt about the town I got tired to the rows of identical stores selling identical wares (all imported junk from India and China), and sat down on a bench, under a surprisingly large and beautiful tree. A Pakistani man sat down next to me, and while chain smoking cigarettes traded from each other’s packs we got to talking. He had a brother driving a taxi in New York City, this is something you’ll here in almost every developing nation in the world, and is one of the primary reasons New York remains such an incredible city. The way he came to Oman was also abnormal by most modern standards. He came by boat. The stories he told me of how the poorest laborers came into the Gulf was haunting. They were crammed into the holds of leaky, old transport ships, where some succumbed to cholera and dysentery, some died, and some had to take the same trip immediately back home after not clearing whatever passed for immigration laws. The laborers that arrived from Pakistan and India had a lot more in common with passengers on the Amistad than those of us lounging on the floating hotels with names like “Princess III.” While much of Oman was meticulously groomed and manicured, the highways festooned with flowers and palm trees, and the stone buildings glimmering in the sun around tidy streets, the dirty side of Oman was pretty fucking ugly. This begs the question then, what do the Arabs actually do in Oman? Well, you’ll be sorry you asked, because this very question led me to one of the most startling revelations of all.

There is one business in Oman that is always exclusively staffed by Omanis, the banks. The Omanis controlled where their oil money went, and how it got there. The Omanis were also naturally the only members of their government, although they didn’t do much since the Sultan wielded supreme executive authority. For any outsider to start a business in Oman as much as 50% of the profit had to go directly into the pocket of an Omani business partner, who was legally obligated to do nothing to help that business. There was a privileged class that simply made money for the sake of making money. The Omanis also almost never did any kind of physical labor, which was left to others, often people of other religions. The Omanis controlled the media and entertainments apparatuses of the country. Many of the television shows and movies played focused on the historical triumphs and tribulations of Arabs, a subtle indoctrination, but potent. The Omanis essentially held all the locks to all the doors, yet somehow there is still this brooding feeling that they are Muslims first, and that they are connected to the suffering of other Muslims around the world, some of whom are mistreated, or ghettoized in places like France and Germany. Muslim men are completely doted on by their parents, and marrying outside of their religion would be a sin worse than any other. They were expected to settle down with a nice Muslim girl, and then maybe three other ones. It seemed as if a small cabal of Omani Arabs controlled all the money and media of the country. The more I traveled and learned about the Gulf, the more this scenario seemed to keep playing itself out. They didn’t have big noses, but there is one very distinguishing facial feature of the Gulf Arab, the unibrow. Have you figured out where I’m going with this yet? If you haven’t I’m about to blow your mind, and I’ll even give it its own paragraph.

Arabs are the Jews of Arabia.

There, I said it. It’s on the internet and there’s no going back. How could nobody else have picked up on this yet? I may have just solved the Middle Eastern Peace Process. Those crafty Swedes should start polishing my peace prize. The Arabians and Jews had more in common the whole time than they ever thought possible. I thought this process would take a whole lot longer but I’ve settled it in a couple of weeks. I don’t know if there’s anything else to write about now, but I’ll keep trying.

Dewed on Arrival

It started as these things usually do, with a trip to JFK with the folks. They dropped me off at a new terminal this time, for ETIHAD Airways, the official airline of Abu Dhabi and the Emirates. My father says they claim to be the fastest growing airline in the world. After waiting for 15 minutes in the wrong line for the wrong airline I re-oriented myself over to the Etihad line. This touched off the beginning of what I imagine will be a long line of skin tone misunderstandings. Waiting in line with about two dozen Indian men and nobody else I was beckoned over to the first class kiosk. An Arabic looking kid came over and fetched my suitcases and in about 30 seconds I had my tickets and my bags were checked. As the kid went to move the luggage onto a cart the ticket agent hollered, “No, he’s only coach.” I had to take my own bags over to the station down the corridor for them to be hucked into another set of scanners before they made their way onto the plane. After the wonders of about two minutes of first class treatment I was tossed back onto a line with all the smelly plebes.

After that I waited in line, and then waited on line again. The mass of humanity tangled and sprawled behind me, often confused at the lengths American airports will go to compensate for the fact that they very often buy outdated and inferior scanning equipment.

 “Do not put your shoes or your bags in the plastic bins, they go directly into the machine!”

“Put your passport and ticket away, you don’t need them here!”

“Jackets, belts, change and wallets go in the bins!”

“Take your computers out of your bags and put them in the bins!”

These things could have easily been communicated by signs so they didn’t have to be screamed out by frustrated employees every thirty seconds, but so it goes. There are moments of awkward comedy watching various non-English speakers placing their bags in the bin, their belts over their arm and carrying their shoes in their hands while they tried to walk through the metal detectors.

Once I got to my terminal it was remarkably empty save for a few dozen Indians, everyone but me in fact, was Indian. Apparently Abu Dhabi was a very common connection destination for flights into Mumbai, Delhi, and Bombay. I sat next to an interesting fellow toting a stuffed bear the size of me. He turned out to be an Indian Anthropologist specializing in native medicine.

He said he had been in China, India, and Thailand and was about to go to Sri Lanka for three months after a brief visit to his wife and daughter in India. The purpose of the study he was engaged in was to analyze all these old fashioned herbal medicines so that he could present their potential uses to major pharmaceutical companies. We talked for an hour or so before boarding with breaks in between for his IPhone chats with his wife. When it rang her picture filled the screen and words scrolled across the top of the screen “My Love.” Many of the Indians I’ve met in China have been hopeless romantics.

Once on the plane it didn’t take long to understand why this airline was on the rise while most American carriers were gasping for breath. I don’t think I have ever seen such a diverse bevy of beautiful stewardesses on any airline before. There was a gorgeous Korean woman, then two stunning African women and one foxy Arabic girl to complete the quartet. If this was the first indication of the machismo of the middle east then score one for Medieval patriarchal culture. American equality, political correctness, and feminist movements have destroyed the god given right of every hot blooded American male to be surrounded with sexual icons between take-off and landing. We’re left with a bunch of aging, overweight and grumpy gay guys who secretly love it every time the flight runs out of chicken and you stare helplessly at him while wondering if the fish will kill you before the plane touches down on the tarmac. Apparently they gone so far as to take your beers as they flee out the inflatable wing slide on a bad day.

Though this flight, despite its smorgasbord of lady parts, was far from full, and I had my own little row of two seats to myself. Though the ability to stretch out and be comfortable is fantastic I’ve found that the people I meet on these transatlantic flights often help kill the time from one continent to the next. As I stared aimlessly out the window the plane began its ascent without issue and New York and JFK faded into the black distance. The lights kicked off and one of the beautiful African stewardesses came to offer a hot towel and a drink. My first instinct was to get wine or a beer because it was free, and I wanted to pass out in a few hours. My second instinct bitch-slapped my first instinct and reminded it that if I showed up to a country under Sharia Law reeking of booze the potential for a quickly accelerating downhill year was also quite possible. So, stupidly, I had a coke.  

After the initial drink phase had ended and the pre-dinner phase had begun I opened up Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game and started reading. Halfway through the book chicken arrived in front of me, after the book was finished I decided to check the map, surely after a meal and finishing a 350 page novel we must be nearing our destination. After tapping the panel in front of me, hard, and after likely inserting bees and snakes and woodpeckers carrying bee shooting snakes into the nightmares of the passenger in front of me I got a look at our flight path. We’d traveled some 3,000 kilometers, with 8,000 to go. We hadn’t even cleared the Atlantic yet.

Having just finished about 15% of the literature I’d brought with me to last a year I decided to scan the movies. The list of films that don’t even merit the effort it takes to steal them from the internet included Dragonball Z and The Fast and the Furious. I started with DBZ.

The next 15 paragraphs describing the downfall of Hollywood and decline of the American mind have been deleted to save the reader.

During the course of these cinematic tours de force my brain felt like it was being pounded by a dozen monkeys with rock hammers, quoting George Bush in a southern twang. Which is to say, I felt dumber.

The rest of the flight would pass in a state of unsleep aided by both an IPOD and re-runs of old sitcoms on the chair screen. The unsleep would grant me my first travel moment of the trip though as the plane began its slow descent from 41,000 feet. When the plane points its nose downward it will still be a long time before I see the lights of Abu Dhabi, that jewel in the dunes. Instead when I open the window slat above the right wing of the plane I see the last gasp of the day. The horizon feels impossibly large without any shapes coming up from the ground to meet it. The last colors of the day do not seem to retreat down behind the trees and mountains as they do in New York but are simply snuffed out by the black bowl of the sky suffocating a feeble flame.  The Earth, the desert, and the sand glow in bright orange which fades to yellow as the light moves up. The sky bleeds its last midnight blue from beneath the black and where the colors of the sky and sun meet a hazy green aura shimmers. It is the first truly clear sunset I remember seeing from a plane, a desert sunset; and for me, it marks my entrance to into this new phase of my life. I begin to get excited again.

And then as quickly as the spectacle began it was gone and we were on the tarmac of Abu Dhabi Airport, situated in a city that most Americans will probably forever remember as the magical faraway land to which Garfield is always threatening to send his arch-nemesis, Nermal. It is indeed a magical land, the airport is exactly what JFK would look like if it had class and an Asian fetish.

The first thing I would notice though is the utter lack of concern from the baggage people. I waited in line with my backpack behind a pair of obnoxious German tourists, who joked, JOKED with the baggage people. They gave them a hard time about taking off their belts among other things. As I slid my bag through the x-ray machine the bored looking technician was busy looking at a video on his IPhone while facing the opposite direction from the screen showing the contents of my bag. Here I am in the heart of the Muslim world, spitting distance from Saudi Arabia, and terrorism registers as a danger somewhere between the Bubonic Plague and a hangnail. I would learn quickly that the leading cause of death in most of the Arabian Peninsula is by car accident, and one would have to go many orders of magnitude down in Oman or the Emirates to reach terrorism. In fact you are about a thousand times more likely to die in a car accident with a terrorist on his way home from a gang-praying, or pin the beard on the infidel, or whatever the hell it is they do for fun than actually getting caught downwind of the plot. I imagine in the deep south drunk driving fatalities with members of the KKK outnumber lynchings by about the same ratio.

But let’s get back to our Asian fetish. The Abu Dhabi airport apparently stays open twenty four hours a day, brightly lit, and duty free to all who pass through. As I strolled carelessly through the aforementioned metal detectors I was buffeted by Filipina hawkers waving coupons to the various luxury shops around the airport. I heard Chinese, English, and a Philippines dialect a number of times before I finally heard someone speak Arabic. If you are poor, will work for peanuts, and speak English Abu Dhabi welcomes you for employment. It doesn’t hurt your chances if you’re attractive either. I imagine the only thing that keeps the leggy Eastern European women away is the climate. More importantly than merely employing cute little Asian women at all the shops is that everyone is actually friendly, willing to help, and they don’t even heave an audible sigh when you ask them for directions. Hospitality…at an airport, the world seems upside down sometimes.

The flight from Abu Dhabi to Muscat (which you should know is pronounced “musket” not like musk rat) is only about an hour. So, naturally I would be sitting next to a wonderfully interesting human being who would have been a great neighbor for the previous thirteen hour flight. The guy on the aisle side of our three-seater was a Belgian surgeon named Zach. He had lived in Muscat for the last nine years with his wife and kids. He grew up in Belgium went to medical school in France and worked there for a time, and spoke five languages with fluency or very near it. He had basically re-affirmed most of what I’d heard about the country until then, that it was incredibly safe and friendly and offered plenty of adventures to the outdoorsy types. You can camp anywhere in the country that isn’t a backyard, and even then they’ll probably let you if you ask nice. Though some in my family have made the claim that this area “is nothing but dirt and sand” there are sizable mountain ranges across the country with their associated flora and fauna. The scuba diving is top notch, and it’s within easy reach of a kind of scuba Mecca in this part of the world, Sharm El-Sheik in Egypt. If you look at it on a map, you’ll also notice that pretty much the whole thing is a beach. Bars and Clubs are largely absent from the country outside of the capital and a kind of Sharia Law partially hand-cuffed by modernity held sway in the courts.

We talked about a number of subjects until my curiosity got the better of me. He was if nothing else a swarthy fellow, not black but not white, not Asian or Indian, he had what I’d call a perplexing skin tone. So I asked a question typical to travelers, which is to say a theoretically appropriate question with thinly veiled racist overtones; “So where is your family from?” He smiled because he knew what I had really asked was something like, “So what kind of mulatto-quadroon are you anyway?” Zach’s family history, if he’s to be believed, started in Northern Africa 400 or so years ago until they made their way into India for a couple hundred years and sometime in the last 100 years made their way into Europe. I didn’t go into how he could possibly know this, because he seemed pretty confident about it. His children would be a mix of all that blood with a white Belgian woman. I have no doubt that they will be extraordinarily beautiful kids.

When our hour was up Zach and I parted ways when I went to pick up my visa. After that, there was another line, this time for immigration. One of the benefits of travelling to another country, being illiterate and ignorant of both practical and cultural realities, and being in the minority when you arrive, is that unlike living at home almost everyone you meet knows a hell of a lot more than you do. Most people have some kind of story to tell, advice to offer, etc… So waiting on line is a much an opportunity to chat as it is a nuisance or hindrance. On this particular line I met a couple of Canadians who were staying in Muscat for six months for a cover band gig at a hotel bar. After a quick introduction I got the guy’s card and the name of the bar where they were playing. So after a few minutes in my new home I had a 6 month ground zero for bar crawling in the capital.

As we parted ways and were shed from the line to our immigration stations I pulled out my passport and gave it to the Omani at the desk. He was dressed as all Omani men are dressed with their long white dishdasha (say it three times fast) and a little fez hat with some kind of pattern on it. It is not the “towel” of the Saudi’s or the “device” as my friend Matt lovingly refers to the headgear of the Palestinians.

“Where are you going in Oman?”

“I’m teaching at the College of Technology in Shinas.”

“Oh, Shinas”

He puts his head back down and thumbs through a quickly filling passport.

“So many stamps!”

“I get around a bit”

Smiling, he returns to the his own sets of stamps and finding two empty pages hits them with the tell-tale thud travelers know will yield a new nation to their unending questions.

“Shinas…it is a very small place. You should get a car and then you can drive to Dubai in less than one hour. Also the city of Sohar is less than one hour South of you and you will find many big shops and Kentucky Fried Chicken and so on. Good luck, please enjoy my country.”

What?!

Advice? Smiles? From an immigration official. Good wishes? This is unheard of, absurd, outrageous and contagious. It is far and away the most pleasant experience I’ve ever had at an immigration counter.

I went to the baggage carousel to wait for my luggage and “By Allah’s Shiny Beard!” the luggage was already there. No sooner had I grabbed my suitcases when I was greeted by a man in a Dishdasha. To make a long story short I met an Omani man in Thailand who was a muckity muck in the Muscat police department. He was apparently high up enough in the police department to stroll into the baggage area to wait for me to arrive. We walked together outside to where a young guy from my company was waiting with a placard.

This was planned by e-mail and achieved the exact result I was looking for. The liaison from the recruitment company, instead of being confronted with a happy if somewhat bewildered American, was assaulted with questions from a high ranking Muscat Police Chief taking care of his friend. My hope was that this exact confrontation would ensure a more smooth transition than the usual fob-off that ESL Teachers get from these bottom feeding recruitment companies. A few months later the jury’s still out on that though.

After a brief look through my paperwork and cheerful conversation my police wasta (friend) was off and I was ushered through the city in a used Carolla. My erstwhile guide would attempt to put things out to me that he thought an American would appreciate like Mcdonald’s, KFC, the imposing and beautiful Sultan Qaboose Mosque, and another object which merits some more specific description.

The LuLu Hypermarket is a building that might look like a Wal-Mart, if you were tripping hard on some good acid, and staring into a kaleidoscope.  Months later I still don’t know what inspired the construction of these monstrosities across the country, but suffice to say it’s a two to three story supermarket/mall with a goofy sounding name that looks like something a gay, Japanese James Bond villain might construct on his moon base in the 1960’s. It is coated with neon lights of remarkably clashing colors running in different directions, blinking, running back and forth and peppered with iridescent quasi-Arabic characters. Once you step inside a LuLu Hypermarket though…you are very likely underwhelmed by the fact that it’s simply a garish supermarket.

After my brief tour of fast food restaurants and the like the car sped down the dark spaces of the city between the hamlets of flurried activity. Muscat has a population of about 700,000 but through the limited view I got of the city it seemed to lack a truly central core, and appeared more like an interconnected web of small towns. We approached one of these areas, called Qurm, and my heart skipped a beat as I laid eyes on one of the coolest looking hotels I’ve ever seen. It sat atop a rocky hill overlooking the apparently famous Qurm Beach. I didn’t want to say anything for fear of ruining my chances at a single night of swank and plush. We approached the hotel along the promenade of the beach where the sidewalks were filled with people at almost midnight. At some point though approaching the hotel turned into going past the hotel and I returned to reality. I’m an English teacher working for a scummy recruitment company, and my port of call turned out to be pretty much the cheapest hotel in Muscat.

The Qurim Beach Hotel may have been a top of the line hotel in whatever decade it was built, but now seemed simply the low cost haunt of English teachers and sub-continental middle management (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh etc…are usually known collectively as the sub-continent). The single rooms can be adequately described as coffins, with beds barely wide enough for a pair of Olson Twins let alone one fat bastard from West Virginia. The coffins have all been partitioned from what were likely enormous rooms when the place opened.

Once I had settled into my tiny room I had a decision to make. It was well after midnight and my company was picking me up around seven in the morning to take me to whatever hole I was going to live in for the next year. I would be living two and a half hours away from the capital and didn’t know how likely or how expensive it would be to come back soon. My funds were, after all, abysmally low. I decided to grab my IPod and walk along the boardwalk, where I saw what seemed like a huge group of people when we drove past.

I changed into shorts and sandals and ventured out into the sweltering night. It was a week night, which I quickly found out fell between Saturday and Wednesday. The holy day of Islam is Friday, so Thursday and Friday were now my weekend. Trees towered outside of the hotel, probably planted whenever it was new, and as I walked the noise of the beach area came on before I saw anything. I heard the engines of cars gunning and revving and I wondered if this place was about to go all Tokyo drift on me. The truth was far more adorable. The beach was covered with signs that warned people to avoid swimming. This seemed odd considering how many people were walking along the sand.

As I contemplated the point of a beach where I couldn’t swim the rattling of rice rockets grabbed my attention again. The road in question was a dead straight run for about a mile, a seemingly perfect place for drunken teenagers to drag it out. At least, that would be the case, if there weren’t about a dozen sets of speed bumps across the straightaway. That didn’t stop these kids though, they were gunning the engines of their American cars and kicking it all the way up to second or third gear for each 30 meter stretch of road before they had to slow down for the next speed bump. It’s hard to believe I know, in Oman, in the country’s capital, the biggest city in the land, was filled with townies. I fucking hate townies.

But I tried to ignore them because I really didn’t have anything approaching a good context to judge this quasi-hysterical behavior. I punched up some rock tunes and strolled down the Corniche (corn eesh). What the hell is a Corniche, you ask? A corniche is a boardwalk, or pier, or promenade, or esplanade. I can only imagine the word was used by the British Empire a few hundred years ago and that even the Brits don’t use it anymore, but for some odd reason every city in the Gulf has at least one “corniche.” A quick googling tells me it was a French road built into the side of a cliff between Nice and Monte Carlo, but the French never controlled Oman, so its use here still bewilders me. Anyway, the corniche was absolutely filled with people, and when I say “people” I mean men. Most Slayer concerts have more women present than the average night out in Oman.

I walked down past at least two dozen low tech picnics, where young guys were listening to music, some dancing, playing guitar, cooking skewers of meat, and in general having a sober good time. I wasn’t quite ready to join any of them, and was in more of an observation mode, and before I knew it I was out of corniche, out of lights, and out of people.  I found myself in quite a pleasant spot actually, on my right side was the dead black space of the Gulf of Oman, and on my left some kind of space reserved for a marsh or swampland. There weren’t any concrete monstrosities, neon shops, obnoxious hotel signs or other signs of humanity around. I took off my head phones and listened to the sound of the sea for a few minutes, but before long another sound intruded on the serenity of the moment. Thankfully it was not the call to prayer, but it was music.

I heard a voice, and I crossed the street, walking back toward the corniche while following the sound.  I couldn’t place the voice, or see who was singing, but the sound was mesmorizing. It was a haunting, funereal dirge in Arabic. As he sang it was hard to believe that a few blocks away teenagers were showing off their mustangs and huge groups of people were partying near the beach. I have no idea what the words to the song meant, but I don’t think it was important either. It was a nice reminder that traveling often comes down to a series of perfect moments, that no matter how alien or familiar your surroundings might be, that there are things that break down every wall that you erect within yourself and find some greater truth about the human race. But of course, these moments are only that, and a minute later the singing ended and I happily strode toward the corniche melee.

In a semi-circular rock alcove cut into the sidewalk a dozen or so young Omanis sat barbecuing and hanging out. I stopped, looked over, and within a few seconds was shouted at. “Hello! Welcome! Come sit down!”

And so I did, and was immediately buffeted with a combination of food and questions. The boys were all college students in the city. One was from the tourism college, a couple studying engineering, and another trying to become a pilot. Their English down to a man was as good as my Arabic was bad. They were naturally curious about this errant gringo that had come among them, and were surprisingly positive about their feelings toward Americans.

“Obama!”

It seems that the Obama effect, despite what most newspapers were saying about opinion in the Middle East, was doing as much good as the Bush effect had done the opposite. The next pro-American assault came in the form of Metallica, Garth Brooks, and 50 Cent blasting from their cell phones. This may be the first and last time those three artists will ever find themselves on the same playlist. As the conversation continued on and one of them spotted me laboriously trying to swallow down the hunks of meat and bread and sauce arrayed before me one of them offered me a drink. “Water, Pepsi, or Dew?”

“Wait what is Dew?” And almost before the words were out of my mouth the Holy Grail appeared from the cooler, the sweet nectar of the Gods. “Omani Beer,” the engineering student told me as he tossed the can over. I could hardly believe that the first country that yielded my favorite beverage so easily was an unknown hamlet in the Arabian Gulf, but they are a Mountain Dew nation.

The conversation rolled on, one of them played guitar for a while, they constantly talked about all the women they couldn’t have. It should also be noted that none of them were wearing the national dress we associate with Muslims, all were in a t-shirt and jeans. After another three dozen cars, blasting hip-hop, and gunning their engines across the 90 foot drag strip I finally asked, “Why does everyone here drive like they have a tiny penis?” I made sure to accompany this with a gesture to get the point across.

They laughed, they agreed, and they sighed. The logical conclusion to this thought wasn’t hard to follow though. Take a huge population of adolescents and twenty somethings, take away beer and women, add a car and what do you get? Oman.

At sometime around 3:30 the guys packed up all their garbage, got back in their cars, and went home. I put on my IPod again, entirely happy with the evenings turn of events, and got ready to say goodbye to this strange new city, unsure of when I’d return. Tomorrow I’d be off to my apartment, my city, and my job, and new madness would surely await.

Since nobody asked for it...

Back by popular silence, the long winded tirades will soon commence. This blog will hopefully carry forward in the whimsical traditions of the critically acclaimed Sense and Senseibility. However, a warning to the internet generation whose attention span now approaches that of a meth-addled kitten, I am going to be a bit more bi-polar in this corner of the blogosphere. I'm writing a series of essays, tentatively titled "Shards of Sand," which will explore a more serious side of the middle east in painfully flowery poetic language. You will of course be duly warned before one of these thought provoking monstrosities appear. The ultimate goal of this will be to finish a book length anthology. "Anthology" is of course Latin for "too god damned lazy to finish that novel you're supposed to be working on."

I would like to find an Indian somewhere to do some pro-bono html work for me so that this thing doesn't look like some grandmother learned what the word "template" meant, and actually give it a decent layout, but we'll see how that goes.

Most of you, and I don't really know who "you" are, also missed out on the last couple years in China and Southeast Asia, so I will probably go back into the vault and pull out some flashback pieces on some of the more cringe-inducing moments of that culture clashing clusterfuck. Also, there will be swearing. The public demands it!

Some of you may be perceptive enough to notice that I live in Saudi Arabia, but all of the early posts are about Oman. I'd like to work through all of the Omani stuff, since I was there for a year before I came here, and also because I haven't done anything worth writing about in Saudi to date...and there really isn't a whole lot to do. I'll be in Saudi Arabia for the next 22 months unless I get fired, and I plan on taking most if not all of my vacations to other parts of the Middle East, or MEAST as nobody in particular calls it. I've got a flight to Lebanon in September and I'm leaning toward Syria in November. Egypt looks likely for the spring of next year. After that Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia might be in order. I'd like to go to Israel but apparently they don't let you back into Saudi Arabia if you've got an Israeli stamp on your passport.

For any of you who are wondering, Yes, I am going to try to get into Mecca and Medina. No, I don't know how or if it's possible. The area is off limits to non-Muslims, but it's a pretty easy conversion process, and since I don't think they've created a device that can detect trace elements of holy water yet, they shouldn't be able to figure out I was Baptized.

I will end on a more serious note, because after all I'm not 23 anymore, and I'm painfully sober every day. There are a staggering amount of misconceptions out there on both sides of this fence. The only consistent aspect of human nature that I've observed in all my travels is that young men want booze and sex, regardless of any qualifications, and women want to take advantage of drunk puss-hounds and make them look stupid by robbing them blind. Alright fine it wasn't Shakespeare, but I'd rather you, the royal "you," find out about how the Middle East and Arabic culture operate from me, than from Bill O' Reilly. Fair enough? Great.