I just got to the crew yesterday after my two days of getting paid to sit in Muscat : ) Cause the dirt runway in Nimr is still wet, I ended up taking an 8 hour bus ride instead of the usual 1 hour flight.
I saw date farms. Rows and rows of big palm trees with what looks like giant bunches of yellow-brown grapes. There were this strange brightly colored fruits in a few of them, which I later realized were children. They had shimmied up to pick some dates. Their feet were up next to their hands. All I saw was a curved back dressed in a colorful shirt. Tucked in between the big palm leaves it looked just a fruit.
I discovered a new favorite food. Every 300m of road, throughout Oman, there are little coffee shops with the name "Golden ___ Coffee Shop". You may fill in the blank with a word such as sheep, spoon, castle, goat, camel, etc. They remind me of street vendors in Philly. They sell chicken sandwiches that are to die for. Curried roasted chicken, cucumber, fresh cabbage, sourcream, and hot sauce, all wrapped in a fresh chewy pita. They are small, I'd get 3 for lunch. The shops also always have a variety of smoothies. I get mango. They take the mangos right off the shelf and blend em up with ice and yogurt. Fresh as can be. Such a meal costs around 500 baisa (a buck twenty-five in US money).
At an omani truck stop. I peed in a bathroom that wins the title for "Most Disgusting Bathroom I've Ever Seen". The floor was covered in 1/2cm of brown liquid. The toilet was pit style, just a metal encassed hole in the ground. The wet floor made me fear that some people had missed. I squatted. Then I went to wash my hands. I turned the grimy handle, a cold trickle came out. As I rinsed my hands I realized the water was pouring directly through the drain to the floor.
Now I'm back at crew. I'm currently overwhelmed with work details that I forgot, but I'm sure it will come back in a few days. Its been raining so much over the past couple months that there are toads all over camp. I had a real nice first day of welcomes from everyone. I'm happy its my third shift and I'm not new anymore.
4 comments:
Were there a lot of other people on the bus with you? Or was this a special shuttle that they arranged? I am just interested in what kind of characters would have wanted to travel where you were headed. As an aside, I was thinking of opening up one of these coffee shops and naming it "Golden Festiva Coffee Shop." Do you think it would fly? There will be a gold Festiva out front with a purple door.
Yeah, the bus was very full, so full some people got left behind in Muscat and Nizwa. It was full of mostly Omani men and a few indian men, and of course myself. Indian men and Omani men are similar looking except in dress. Omani men have the white robe (called "dishdash") and the Omani hat, and indian men almost always have khakis, a short sleeved button down shirt, and a mustach.
And...just to make the coffee shop fit in a little better here...I think you should run the coffee shop from inside the festiva, and have a bunch of white plastic tables and chairs sitting around outside of it. Most of these places are run out of a closet. Golden sheep is actually a pretty fancy one.
and to clarify, the omani men and indian men were all just people working on various oil and oil related crews. there were no women, and no corporatey looking types, they all probably managed to get plane tickets, or delay their trips
Post a Comment