Beginning of 2nd Hitch

I'm finally going to send my blog out. I'm a little embarassed to assume that people want to read about my every day life, but 8 bizillion other people have such blogs, and I am in some country named Oman. So there you have my disclaimer.

That said, I made it back to Oman yesterday for my second hitch after a nice chill 20 day vacation that included visiting PA and TX, cleaning my wonderful room, petting cats, doing taxes and reveling in all the green.

I suffered through another 24 hour trip to get here. I made the trip with only two flights. I flew Lufthansa Houston to Frankfurt and again Frankfurt to Muscat. I thought I was getting the flu in Frankfurt. I spent a miserable five hour layover on a cold tile floor near the interterminal train trying to get away from people and smoke, and trying to cool my throbbing head on the tile floor. Pitiful.

Thanks to a healthy dose of Nyquil, I slept on the next flight. I woke up in Muscat at 1am and the flu had mysteriously dissapeared. Thank god. Maybe I was cured by flying over the holy land. As Matt put it "god only cares if you're on the projection plane of the earth". Nerd.

After 4 hours of sleep I got picked up at 6am to catch the domestic flight to the crew. It's these domestic flights where the passengers might consist of 50 omani men in traditional dress... and me.

I had a very nice first day. Nothing special. Just a lot of nice greetings and friendly converstations. And then I slept for 13 hours, from about 1pm to 6:30pm and 9:00pm to 6am.

A side note: On my first flight from Houston, I got seated between two big guys. I struck a conversation up with one who was headed to Bulgaria to work on a drilling rig. He was from Mississippi, rural Mississippi. The guy on my other side overheard this and piped in. He also worked on a rig, and he was from super rural Lousiana. Real-life french-speaking cajun Louisiana with swamps and bayous and alligators and shot guns. They both had delightful accents. They ended up talking to eachother about raisin' crawdad's, buyin and sellin goats for 10 a head, huntin' copperheads, the merits of red clay, etc.. This could be the most interesting cultural experience of the entire trip.