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.