Hello. Its been a while since I wrote anything. Life's been pretty routine here - doing the daily QC checks - writing out tapes for clients - browsing the internet - reading. I haven't made good on the promise to myself to study some geophysics. I've been pretty good about studying Arabic though.
Right now I'm getting the hang of plurals. They are too complicated! In Arabic, almost all nouns are irregular in the plural, like the English "people" vs "person". Also, you have to pluralize any adjectives that describe your plural noun. Many adjectives also have irregular plural forms. However, for a given adjective, you may use one of 3 of its plural forms depending on the type of noun it is describing. And there is a whole other set of rules for the plural when describing two things, rather than several things. And I suck at memorizing. Ahhh!
Last night we had a barbecue to celebrate our 2 millionth LTI-free man-hour. LTI stands for Lost Time Incident meaning a significant injury, or significant equipment damage that causes us to stop production. Our client uses this concept to monitor the safety of the many contractors they have working for them. To celebrate this achievement, a couple bosses came down from the Muscat office, along with a few client reps who are involved in our project. At the end of the day, the entire crew gathered together and there were some speeches in Arabic and English. The client presented our crew with a plaque and pictures were taken... and then we got to eat.
I met one of the client reps named Mohammed. He was born in Zanzibar (east Africa) in a place that used to be a colony of Oman back in the 1800's when Oman was a big sea-faring power. He moved to Muscat when he was 8, in 1970 the year Sultan Qaboos took power. Back then it took his family 15 hours to drive from Dubai to Muscat. Today it takes 2 hours.
We had a nice conversation. We started out talking about me learning Arabic. That is always a good ice breaker with Arabic speakers. Carlos joined in. He is our Venezuelan on-crew client representative, and he's also learning Arabic. Our conversation took a left turn to the topic of "opinions about IM and text messaging languages". Carlos absolutely hates when his daughters email him with misspellings and shortened words, like 'u' in place of 'you'. I disagree that this is a bad thing. With the aid of a beer I passionately argued that misspellings and slang and shortcuts are how a language develops. All that matters is you get your point across, and hell, the more creative the better. Mohammed stood the middle ground. He mentioned some speech by some German leader (not Hitler) who speculated that complications in the German language my be holding German universities back. Mohammed also admitted he was a fan of texticons :0 ;). It was a fun conversation. As I mentioned, I was sipping a beer during this whole bit. I don't think I could have taken myself so seriously otherwise...lol.
On another note, Ramadan starts in a few days. That might be interesting. No food, water or cigarettes from sunrise until sundown for any of the Muslims for an entire month. As a non-Muslim, my only obligation is not to take consumable things outside of the kitchen where they will torture the hungry people. I wonder if everyone will be horribly cranky for a month. That's what happens to me when I don't eat.
Once, when I was in college, I tried to fast before Thanksgiving. I decided I would not eat for the three days leading up to Thanksgiving. I only lasted a day and a half before I rushed home from choir practice to stuff my face with noodles and butter. Fasting is hard.
Well that is all for now... although I have a few more posts brewing. A "history of Oman" post, a "bragging about my upcoming leave" post, and a post about some of the many people from Kerala, India that come to work here. So stay tuned.
