I’m reading The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts. Blah blah blah yeah I know it, I’ve read a few pages of The Power of Now. The present is the only thing, the future haunts us, the past chases us, but the present is all we ever experience, so we can either be in it or skip it. And I try not to skip it; I try not to totally unpack everything in the queue line for the future. But so often it does feel like a queue line. Doing this is for getting that later. Meeting this person is for getting that from them later. The job now is to get the next job. The school now is to get to the next school.

It isn’t bad! It isn’t sad! You have to do things in order, you know. I was having a discussion with my students about transitions and how to make life choices (around the time I wrote this). I’ve been struggling recently with how to make choices. Do you think about your current self? Do you think about your short-term self? Do you think about your long-term self? Do you think about (in my own personal experience) what your father wants from (or probably FOR) you? Do you think about the outcome with the greatest chance of success, or the outcome with a small chance of much bigger success? Do you not think about it at all and just do whatever seems right?

For better or worse, I’ve decided to try that last one, just once. I’ve given myself six or eight months to see if it fails. Even though I don’t know what metric to use to see if it fails. I guess I’ll just decide when it’s time. But yeah the point is that one of my students is one of those sorts of people who can lacerate all the crap from something and come out with a sentence or two of significance with less effort (seemingly) than anything I’ve ever produced. He said, in reference to his own life plan, “I guess I just plan things, and then I do them.” I may be misquoting slightly, but it’s a fair paraphrase.

“I guess I just plan things, and then I do them”! What an idea. If only I could count the hours I’ve spent on rooftops, in parked cars, in emails, on the phone, in professors’ offices, around dinner tables, in armchairs, backyards, text messages, inside my own head, all those hours just getting at WHAT SHOULD I DO.

I am making myself look like the absolute most disgustingly privileged person ever, spending hours laboring under the delusion that my life choices are somehow important and worthy of even my own hours of thoughts. That’s not really my approach and it’s not really true. But it’s kind of true, that growing up with my background, in my socioeconomic stratum, with my kinds of parents, with my culture, etc., left me with this unshakeable feeling biting at my ankles, that I have to Do Something Impressive all the time. Or, if I choose instead to Be Happy, it has to be Be Happy Now but Also Happy Forever Based On Sound Life Choices Now. My life is a staircase, starting in the basement of Infant, each academic year or maybe professional experience is a step.

Everyone’s life is a staircase, right? Why else do we take the “next step”? You don’t take steps sideways. You take steps forwards, backwards, up, down, and if you’re marching in place that’s something your parents and friends are going to be gossiping about behind your back, using exactly that metaphorical framework.

The funny thing is that for all my struggling with deciding what the right framework of life planning is, in the end I always do something decent that my parents are proud of. Or at least they tell me that, and I can relax for another year. I wouldn’t ever actually do something that wouldn’t give them something to tell their friends, would I? I don’t and wouldn’t do drugs, I don’t and wouldn’t kill folks, and knowing me, even if I did one of those CRAZY WILD THINGS that sometimes I think about (moving to the tropics to have an experience of finding or destroying the self or something), I’m sure I’d send home thoughtful letters and maybe even write a book about it, justifying and rationalizing my choice to step outside of the “ratrace.” So brave! So, so brave!

Usually about 20 minutes after getting into a thought spiral like this, I’ve reached my destination or finished my shower or fallen asleep. And then I just end up doing the thing and then it’s done. And these transitional parts, when I think I’m just plodding through the boring parts, become the parts I’m nostalgic for later: they are the parts when the next step wasn’t set or initiated or whatever, and the fan of possibilities is still spread open, and I have the luxury of wondering about all the millions of things that might happen.

Do folks from my generation get this? Do I have something wrong with me?

After the semesters faded away, it was countries. “This is how it is in this country, but soon it’ll be another one.”

I’m in another such period of change. That’s fine. I will probably be in this particular period of change for much longer than I’m even thinking I will now. It’s always like that.

I’m happy, though.

Puppies are always happy too. This is Charlie, who stayed with me until he found a home. Yay Charlie!

I am writing about this mainly because it’s immediately relevant to the last post I put here, and I don’t want too long to go between posts. A month is too long!

Anyway, you’ve now seen that I track a lot of things. That post didn’t even mention a few other things I track, such as the books I read over at Leaves of Trees (where the lack of recent posts doesn’t mean I’ve given up, but just that I haven’t finished a book lately), the hours I work (I keep an enormous spreadsheet of all my hours including what major tasks I complete each day), and a few more documents of work-related journals I keep both to use myself and to give to the next person who has this job.

There’s one conspicuous absence, though. If I tell you I’ve been a PADI-certified scuba diver since 1998, you’ll immediately recognize what’s glaringly, obviously missing.

A logbook.

I’ve tried! In my defense, I’ve tried!

I logged my check-out dives, November 1998, in Himalaya Bay near San Carlos, Sonora, Mexico. I logged that dive where my weight belt’s buckle released itself and dropped to the sea floor as quickly as I popped to the sea surface. I logged that dive where I saw the enormous sea lion. I logged that dive where I saw five octopuses, the dive where I saw the jeweled moray, the dive where my dad pretended that some gooey coral was snot. Then my dad got his logbook wet one evening and lost the logs of all his dives from the 1970s to the 90s, and instead of being enraged, as I would be if I lost my journals or spreadsheets, he figured maybe he didn’t need to be too particular. (Now, I don’t think this is my dad’s actual attitude. He likes tracking things as much, if not more, than I do. He tracks many of the same things as I do. But he’s also good at taking things in stride.) And somehow I just never really got that much into logging dives. Some of the best dives I’ve done are preserved only in prose in my journal, no logbook to speak of: the cenotes in the Yucatan peninsula, the clear water off the coast of Zanzibar, the magnificent Blue Hole in Sinai. There’s no log of the puffer fish I saw blow up at an octopus right before getting inked. No log of the choppy water and jellyfish sting near Cozumel.

What makes this funny is that the single most tracking-oriented people on the planet are divers. My personal impression that it’s especially bad among PADI divers, but of course that’s just speculation. There’s also an ambiguous hierarchy that operates as a shadow to the explicit hierarchy (see the flowchart here) of fees and schedules and courses and fees. This ambiguous hierarchy suggests that there is something fundamentally wrong with an inexperienced diver (which is what I am, with my infrequent dives and disinterest in climbing the flowchart ladder) failing to log their dives. You have to be a divemaster to skip logs. I totally agree and yet somehow I still can’t manage to keep one of those little books with me.

It causes me trouble, too! I’ve been diving on and off for about fifteen years, usually going for a few dives a year or every other year, so I’ve gone on about fifty or sixty dives. This is not very many for the real enthusiast, but way more than the new hobbyist. It means that I tend to forget how to manage all the oppressive details of diving in the eighteen months that sometimes elapse between outings; it means that I’m not really scared anymore. It means that when I wanted to dive SS Thistlegorm in Egypt with a reputable dive shop I had to buy a logbook and start logging the week’s dives with 50, since I needed to be above 50 to do the dive at the end of the week. It means that I had to write “I refused the assistance of a guide and will instead dive with my companion who is a divemaster” to release liability from the dive shop that couldn’t verify that I’ve gone on more than 25 dives yesterday.

Tracking my alcohol intake over 13+ months now, keeping a list of everywhere I sleep for nights on end — these things do not improve my life in any way and if I were to suspend either practice (or any of the others), my life would not be impacted in any way. Yet somehow I can’t bring myself to log the one aspect of my life that my peers obsessively keep track of.

I am wild!!!!

Anyway, we went with the dive shop out of Sawadi Beach Resort. I won’t link because I don’t want to be rude and let a negative review filter back to them, but overall, I wouldn’t dive with them again. I’ve only gone with one other shop here in Oman (Euro Divers), and they were awesome. In comparison, the operation I went with yesterday were overpriced, asinine, and undergood. Oh well! It was a big chunk of change to lay on the table for subpar service and a crowded boat (I won’t blame them for the low visibility, though), and they just can’t compete with the reasonable prices and overall good service provided by the other guys.

But zebra shark! An enormous zebra shark! And I was lauded for my “average” air consumption and “not as annoying” range of distance from my dive buddy (whose biggest complaint in the past is that I tend to dive like a koala baby, attached to the fins of my partner…what can I say. I am afraid of sharks, and my dad always told me to stay close to him when we went diving when I was a kid. I thought it was SOP). One of our companions on the trip had an underwater camera, so if I get permission to post any photos, I will.

Okay I realize there isn’t actually a story here, but I’m trying to post more often.

Offline

Daily Log. I kept a very brief journal for five years, from my birthday in September 2006 to my birthday in 2011. I used a template I made with Microsoft Word that divided the page into 14 boxes, so I could fit the most important information from each day for two weeks per page. This was an easy habit to keep because it only took a few minutes a day, but it limited the amount of information about each day I kept.

Journal. Starting around my birthday in 2011, I decided that my five years of preparation had sufficiently trained me to manage a more verbose journal. I retrofitted the previous five years of logs into journal format and incorporated various texts from elsewhere. For instance, I had kept a travel diary during my 45-day backpacking trip in the winter of 2007, so I put those entries into the relevant journals from those years (which I had transformed from the logs). I also went through my old blog posts and incorporated whatever information was helpful. Since September 2011, I’ve been writing at the very minimum what I’ve done each day, but often much more. I’ve found that one drawback of having a journal like this is that I typically write more about issues that are troubling me than things that are going well, so looking back on previous entries I always seem a little moodier than I really was (at least, I hope). I do make an effort when I can remember to write about what things are going well in my life so that my journal is better balanced.

Data. In addition to my journal, which is text, I keep an Excel file each year of some health-related metrics. I keep track of daily weight (and have a column for weekly average), so that while I can’t manage to lose the 400 pounds I’ve been meaning to lose for years, I can at least congratulate myself for maintaining the same weight for those same years. I also keep track of exercise I do in that same file. Occasionally I have added a third spreadsheet for calorie counting, but I don’t have any patience for that so I always end up deleting it.

Country List. I keep a list in Microsoft Word of every country I’ve been to, with the dates of my visit in parentheses. When I revisit a country, I add the new dates. I use the rules promulgated by the Travelers’ Century Club. I also keep the same list for my dad because he can’t be bothered but he is obsessed with comparing his scores against mine.

Inventories. I keep a few inventories of various belongings.

Budget. Using Excel, I keep track of the current status of all of my bank accounts. I check my bank accounts on the 1st, 15th, and 25th of each month and record the numbers there, so I have three figures for each month for each account. I keep track of my total cash (that is, the sum of both checking accounts and all savings accounts) and total credit card debt. At the bottom of each column, I have my total net worth (i.e., the difference between my total cash and total debt), and my total debt-to-credit ratio at any given time. I have found that this is the best way to see trends over time. I know that all major banking websites let you do this, but I like doing it manually and most importantly, offline.

Daily Picture. I take a picture of myself using my laptop’s webcam every day. This was a very random decision I made one day in 2010. I really have no idea why, but I took a picture of myself sitting in front of the computer at my friend Keegan’s house in Cairo, where I was renting a bedroom for the semester. Then I did it the next day, and the next. By the time I had done it for a week, I figured I may as well keep it up. Now it’s been over two years and at this point it seems like it would be a shame to quit. I do miss a few days every month, but rarely do I miss more than a day in a row. I figure I may one day be glad I took a picture of myself every day, like when I’m old and crazy.

Online

Daytum. I use Daytum to keep track of three categories: alcohol, flights, and sleeping. I’m not sure why I chose those, but I chose to follow those metrics on 1 January 2011 and I’ve enjoyed doing it. For the duration of 2011, I kept track of every alcoholic beverage I consumed, organized by type. I kept track of every flight I took (for 2011, it was a total of 40!). Lastly, I kept track of every place I slept in 2011. As someone who rode on 40 planes, you can probably imagine it was a lot. And it was: in 2011, I slept in 36 separate places. The place where I spent the most nights was in the bedroom I rented in Cairo this spring: 100 nights. On the other side of the spectrum, I spent a single night in 15 different places: a bus to the Sinai peninsula, an all-nighter in Tahrir square, a hotel in Ibri in Oman’s interior as part of a school trip, a farm in Ibri on another trip, a hotel in Roswell with my best friend Cara, a girlfriend’s house in DC, a Cairo friend’s house, a hotel in Dubai for a visa run, a desert camp in Oman, another desert camp in Oman, a beach camp in Oman, and a number of all-nighters on planes.

Google Calendar. Everything above is focused on things I’ve done. I use Google Calendar for all things in the future. This includes not only events and plans, but also things I need to remember on a certain day.

It makes me nervous to post all the crazy I do all the time on the internet, but I was inspired by a conversation I had with my best pals last night. They were all interested in the idea of keeping track of your life in a more structured way and didn’t make fun of me. So, I thought I would share what I do.

Our first day, we drove to the sinkhole at Bammah. Here is how you get there: drive over the mountains to Amerat and turn right at the globe roundabout. Turn left a few roundabouts later. Maybe there’s a sign? Debate with your navigator. Curse your directions. Keep going! Okay now you’re there. This joke will never not be funny. It is and always will be funny to comment on how poor the signage is in this country.

At the sinkhole we discovered a principle that would follow us through the entire trip: when women go swimming, an enormous crowd of Arab and Indian men will materialize as if from the ether to gawk at them. I do not know where they came from, but within minutes of our first lady submerging her modest clothing in the water of the sinkhole, there were probably about 40 creepy men staring slack-jawed and recording video on their phones. Men are gross.

We had the best Chinese-Arab-Indian-Continental food I’ve ever had at a Chinese-Arab-Indian-Continental food restaurant in Sur and then went on to the Wahiba Sands, by way of CONFUSION. I cannot recommend a GPS device for this region enough. How do I know to recommend one? Because we didn’t have one, and should have had one.

Anyway, whereas before when I went with Laura and James and stayed at Thousand Nights Camp, this time we stayed at al-Areesh Camp, run by a company called Desert Discovery. The main difference is that al-Areesh looks like the whole thing could be taken down in about 15 minutes and transported somewhere else in a few pick-ups. Thousand Nights is based on similar tent architecture, but there is a swimming pool, concrete pathways between buildings and tents, and a conference room. Al-Areesh Camp has a few real buildings, but not really. It’s also on the edge of the desert, so you don’t even need a 4×4 to go there. If you want to park right by the camp, you need to gun it to make it up a small sand dune. I did not have the guts, after hours of searching for the place in the dark, to make it up the dune, so I had one of my students do it for me. It worked out okay.

We went dune bashing the next day. Our driver, the very capable Abdallah, drove down the steepest dune in the area while standing outside the car, steering with his foot, while texting. We were terrified!

Next was Wadi Beni Khaled, a canyon that’s been built up some. It’s a pretty easy walk up and there’s a small cafe and a bridge across the cliffs. We jumped off the cliffs several times and once again attracted a giant herd of young men. I do not know where they come from.

That evening we stayed at the sister camp of al-Areesh, Naseem Camp, near Ras al-Jins. Once again, we were driving blind (i.e., in the dark, but also without GPS — though I found out that the camp had printed their GPS coordinates wrong on their web site anyway so it wouldn’t have helped). We turned right when we saw a sign, but then realized that there was no signage after that one errant signpost. We turned left when it just seemed like we should, drove down a few kms, and then doubted ourselves and turned around. After an hour of phone calls to the catatonic employee and frantic map-reading, we realized that we had probably turned around that side street in front of the camp. We decided to go back and try again. We drove down, saw an archway hung with Christmas lights and emphatically no sign, and decided the worst thing that could happen is that someone might tell us where to find our camp.

So, we drive in. On the left is a structure housing an outdoor eating area and a couple lackadaisical dudes. One of them gets up and walks to our car, filled to the brim with seven people and lots of stuff. I roll down my window.

“Is this Naseem Camp?”

“Okay.”

Not a good start.

“Are you sure this is Naseem Camp?”

“Yes? You make reservation ten people?”

“No…seven. Are you sure this is Naseem Camp?”

“Yes…”

We were pretty sure we were going to get murdered. The man started showing us various features of the camp, but none of us had gotten out of the car yet. It was like he was showing the car. It was one of the most bizarre experiences. I kept saying, “where do we park?” so that we might get out and he could show us like we were real human beings, but he wouldn’t say. So I kept creeping besides him in the car until he took us past the bathrooms, fire circle, over to the tents. I figured we could leave the car by the tents, and he didn’t seem to mind, so we got out then.

“Three tents?”

“No, we need four. We’re seven people.”

“Okay. As you like.”

“Um, what do you mean as we like? We either have three or four, no?”

“Okay.”

Then came the process of trying to figure out the turtle watching, which is the main attraction in the area and the only thing that could ever allow a camp like Naseem to justify the truly ludicrous price of TWENTY OMANI RIALS PER PERSON. This is crazy. That’s $50 in real money. Insane! Several bites deep into a word salad without any dressing, one of my students finally realized he was Bengali (she’s fluent in the language) and we finally made some sense. But not that much sense. Only some.

Once we had thrown our stuff into the tents, we had a look around. It was dark, but a full moon, so while we couldn’t see the mountains I knew were around us, we could see to the edges of the camp. The camp is about the size of a football field. Or maybe a soccer field. Somewhere in between. On the narrower side by the entrance was the eating hall and employee accommodations, with the entrance on the bottom right corner and communal bathrooms on the bottom left. Along the left long side was the no-bathroom tents which we were staying in, but spaced out so that it was a pretty decent schlep to the bathrooms. Along the far narrower side were some tents with bathrooms, and the long right side was studded with tiny huts with built walls. In the middle of the dirt lot? NOTHING. Besides maybe the invisible remains of a Satanic ritual or something, the contents of the entire camp were stretched along the sides of a enormous dirt lot, with nothing in the middle. We were truly perplexed.

Dinner was grueling, i.e., it was gruel. Well, I’m exaggerating, because I know it wasn’t that bad, and that’s because in hindsight I can compare it to breakfast, which was one of the more dismal culinary experiences of my life: canned beans, lukewarm; over-boiled boiled eggs; stale bread; stale cornflakes; bananas. The bananas were the best part.

I couldn’t resist, when our lone employee said “See you again” on our grateful way out of the place the following morning, chirping “Hope not!” cheerfully before sinking the accelerator.

However, the real reason we went to Naseem Camp was to see turtles, and that we did. I achieved the third of my three major life goals:

1. Pet a baby cheetah (completed)

2. Pet a baby armadillo (completed)

3. Pet a baby sea turtle (completed)

I even helped some of the stupid baby turtles get to the ocean. It was awesome.

I need some new life goals!

I’m thankful for my health, the resources of all sorts that my parents have provided me, the support I’ve received recently in moving across the world, and the well-being of my friends and family.

More particularly, I’m thankful for my friends in Muscat, both old (Jenny), new (Claire), and not-in-Oman-anymore (Laura). I’m thankful for my job, which is the first step of a career and a pretty good time. I’m thankful for the emotional support I receive from people on the other side of the planet. I’m thankful for John, James, and Paul. I’m thankful for Cara, Liz, and Erin. I’m thankful for so many more people and places and things than that. I’m thankful for everything I’ve been given and I’m thankful for the opportunities that allowed me to work for what I have.

I’m thankful for James, because not a day goes by in this place that he doesn’t do something to make me happy. That I met him is the biggest joy of coming to Oman so far for me.

I’m thankful that I live in a time on the planet and was born into enough privilege that I am able to support myself in a foreign country. I hope I don’t waste that privilege, and I hope the planet stays like this for a little longer. I hope things get better for the people who weren’t born with the privilege I was, and I hope I can find a meaningful way to help. I haven’t done much in my life unless you count ASPCA donations and oxymoronic involuntary volunteering in high school, but I hope I find the resolution to change that. More than anything else, I’m thankful for cheetahs.

Spier, South Africa 2007

The film was not in 3D, so it loses an immediate edge. Also it was an action film, so it’s suspect. Also it was a James Bond film, and I have a well established case of James Bond-linked narcolepsy and boredom disorder that I’ve had ever since Tomorrow Never Dies and The World Is Not Enough, two films of the very few films in which I inevitably fall asleep (a third being Dead Man, the most boring film ever made).

To add a few cards to the deck already stacked against this film, I also had tried to watch Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace in the day prior to seeing Skyfall. A half hour through Casino Royale, I had to start cribbing my viewing with a synopsis and after I had put in a good hour and a half I had to give up and muddle my way through the IMDB page. I couldn’t even make it to Quantum of Solace. Maybe it’s because I was watching in a media player only a couple inches across since I was also reading the news at the time, over on another area of my laptop screen, but I just couldn’t get into them. James had assigned them as background viewing, though, so I decided that to assuage my guilt over the missed assignment I would just wager him that if he would read my master’s thesis, I would watch both of those films, start to finish. He did not make the deal. Accordingly, I went to Skyfall with only a vague idea plot elements of the Daniel Craig Bond universe. As an educated human, though, and someone who has had the fortune of seeing the first Austin Powers movie (and had the misfortune of having seen the others, too), I get the Bond references that I’m meant to get.

ANYWAY this is unnecessary wind-up, isn’t it? So we went to the theatre and were taken to our seats by an over-worked, under-paid usher and within minutes a crowd of young hooligans (or what can nearly pass as hooligans here in the Sultanate) came. Apparently the usher had put us in the wrong seats; he blamed us. YELLING! MILLING ABOUT! So much yelling. It was like Egypt for a few minutes. In fact, a few minutes later, the film started, Bond started stalking the screen, the lights weren’t down yet, and the usher was still standing in the middle of a coven of young Arab men impotently flailing his flashlight around trying to get them to sit down. Little did we all know, he should have been trying, at the time, to get them to sit down and shut up. This is foreshadowing, for later.

The film starts in Turkey: some random mission during which Bond gets killed (not really a spoiler, it’s like the first two minutes). My first reaction, during the train-top scene where Bond is fighting with his enemy in a typical action-movie set-up, was, man, it’s weird to sit in a room full of Arabs and watch on the screen a couple British people fight each other with literally no concern for any of the Turkish bystanders they kill. Just collateral, I guess; it’s an action movie, whatever! But you just can’t, or at least, I just can’t, ignore the over-/undertones there, with that. I had this whole screed worked up in my head about how movies like this one dehumanize the “collateral Other” and that it just can’t be good for international “understanding” and all that stuff, but then it turns out that they really made it rain British blood later in the film, so the events of the film (if not the characters themselves, necessarily) are mostly just unconcerned with incidental innocent lives. So I take that little bit of criticism back, before I even wrote it down. I’ll be back for you later, Edward Said.

The real cultural experience did not come from the film itself but rather the audience. I had seen a film previously in Oman — I saw Dredd in 3D (i.e., AWESOME because all 3D films are automatically awesome), and apparently all my fellow patrons were as awed and awestruck as I am by the cool 3D effects because they shut up like me in a math class (or a 3D film. Ha!). Dredd, however, was not indicative of usual Omani theatre-going, as I learned last night, because apparently the cultural custom is to talk as loudly as possible throughout the entire film. They usually quieted during scenes of dialogue, which helped, but cod forbid there was a dramatic, quiet scene with heavy plot implications that didn’t have a rollicking, polyphonic chat-track on top of it. And don’t get me started on the under-sexed exhalations of excitement the male population of the theatre let out en masse for every nanosecond of somewhat-fleshy sexuality that managed to somehow make it past the censors’ scissors.

Fortunately, the unruly mis-seated mob left right during the dénouement. Why they would leave then I don’t know, besides the fact that I would venture a guess that they could intuit that the violence was over and all was left was boring stuff like narrative tie-ups. And I’ll have you know that I made it the whole film without shushing them! I am a model of tolerance.

In brief: Skyfall is fine as far as action movies go. Ben Whishaw (“Q”) gets two thumbs up from me for being hot, Daniel Craig plays a hilariously humorless Bond, and Javier Bardem was great. Okay! Next I get to choose the film.

Marina Bandar al-Rowdha is really far from all the other places. Here is how you get there: Start at the intersection with all the big time roads and the Shell station. You know, it’s the one by James’s house. Then keep on goin’. You’ll pass Qurum City Centre and then you keep on keeping on and when you get to the part of the highway that flies over some mountains you go right instead of left (left is the one that takes you to Matrah). By now you’re following the signs to Ruwi (sorry; I have claimed in the past not to consider Ruwi as part of my worldview but I have taken out a casual transit visa) and then go up the mountain by the enormous dancing horses. Once you pass the dancing horses you come to a roundabout with a goofy boat and you go left, then turn right to the marina. You’ll know it’s the marina because it has a buncha boats. The funny part is that I literally (Hannah, I’m being careful here but it’s true) could not give you directions more accurate or detailed than these; those who know Muscat know I am right and those who do not won’t get where they’re going anyhow.

I have been to the marina four times in my life.

1. James and I went scuba diving in mid-August. (This one.) We only went to the marina to go on the boat for the diving. We did not consume any edibles at this one because it was Ramadan so they had locked up all the booze.

2. After my birthday celebration in the desert (this one), Laura, James, and I went to the marina for lunch. We sat outside, even though it was still way hot. I had fish and chips because for some reason I got it in my head that I would have that. I also had two Strongbows, which is not Ace but oh well (over three years ago but still delicious), and they put ice in them. That’s kinda weird.

3. I met my lovely friends from university Dana and Tuve earlier this month and we went there for lunch. They were kind enough to overlook my inability to get us there without an unintended 20-minute detour in Ruwi and their child was kind enough to be charming and not terrifying (I am always afraid that children are going to be terrifying, but sometimes they are not, and their child is a lovely one). I ate fish and chips again, and I asked for my Strongbow to be served without ice.

4. My friend Robert was in town from Saudi a few days ago; I knew him when we both lived in Doha. I tried to take him to Feeney’s, the Irish pub near the Intercon (inside Qurum Beach Resort), but the kitchen was closed until 6 and it was only 3pm. Rude! So we finished our drinks and went to the marina, because it’s a pretty good place to take an out-of-town visitor, though Robert was unimpressed by the high seawall blocking the yachts off from the “open” ocean (i.e., placid swimming pool-ocean). I ordered fish and chips again, and again requested iceless Strongbow.

I’m sorry I didn’t take a picture of my food or the marina or anything at all any of the times I’ve been there. This is someone who carries around two phones equipped with cameras. And not to mention my two cameras sitting in the States, forgotten. I will retrieve them in December, do not worry, cameras. But point is, I am not so good at taking pictures of things. I can tell you that the fish and chips at the marina are solidly decent, and look exactly like fish and chips.

I’ve had the opportunity now to eat both indoors and out; the indoors of the restaurant feels like a dated country club dining hall or maybe a banquet room at a three-star hotel set up for a medical device-sellers’ conference. Deep blue carpet, chair covers, fake wood. It’s kind of awesome. The outside is less, um, vintage; the venue is dotted with white plastic tables and chairs à la mode de Walmart. There are also blue gingham tablecloths. Décor is muted, simple: ketchup bottles, salt and pepper shakers, leftover plates from the previous patron.

Like many restaurants in Muscat, the price-to-service ratio is decidedly in the favor of anyone choosing not to eat at this particular restaurant at the time. Hey, what can you do? Well, basically, what you can do is be okay with forking over like 25USD every time you want to eat in a restaurant in this country and basically 125USD if you want to drink. Slight exaggeration (not really). Omani rials are tricky, tricky enemies of mine; low price numbers lull me into thinking that a few pints of cider at 3.5OMR each really can’t be that much. And before you know it you’ve drained your paycheck. Your next month’s paycheck. Moral of the story: the teetotalers have it right, and they’re the majority in this country. You’ve been warned.

I only spent about 22 hours there. Since James and I wanted to go to the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series finals in Wadi Shab, we booked a late flight out of Muscat on Swiss Air. FYI, don’t fly Swiss if you can help it. They didn’t give us snacks on the flight out (we were asleep but still, no evidence of snack distribution remained upon waking), and also the plane, while it did effectively transport us the couple hundred miles, would probably only have impressed the Wright brothers. On our way back, we did get snacks, but the flight was delayed 45 minutes and we had to check in for the flight in a hallway far away from all the other check in counters, which is suspicious. I think Swiss might be a front for something.

Arriving in Dubai, you  immediately realize just how podunk Muscat is. It’s like Phoenix compared to Tucson, only if Phoenix were even more bizarre. We took a taxi to the hotel, which was at the Mall of the Emirates. Far as I can tell, malls are the real landmarks in Dubai.

After availing ourselves of the breakfast buffet, which featured the weirdest scrambled eggs I’ve ever eaten (and Lord knows I make some really weird dishes for myself, so this is meaningful; it was like they had chopped up hard boiled eggs and suspended them in a strange substrate), we went to Mall of the Emirates. It is a giant mall, but otherwise has no distinguishing features. The object of my acquisitional desire, the cosmetics store Sephora, was a small one, and didn’t carry what I wanted. Lame. I took a peek at Ski Dubai, the famous indoor ski hill, which in actuality is fake snow packed on a ramp in a dimly lit warehouse space. Arabs and others amble around in puffy jackets while being stared at by hot chocolate-sipping mall goers. It’s so weird.

After that, we went to Ibn Battuta Mall (tagline: Great stuff, Fantastic place). Here is a little known “secret” about Ibn Battuta Mall, as published in the Mall Directory under “Mall Secrets”: “Largest themed mall in the UAE based on the journeys of Ibn Battuta the 14th Century Arabic explorer.” Right. Well, Ibn Battuta Mall succeeds in its mission: if I had to design a mall that describes the globe-spanning travels of Ibn Battuta, stretching from Andalusia in the west to China in the east using only the vernacular of 21st century consumer culture, I guess I’d end up with something pretty similar to Ibn Battuta Mall. We entered at one end, the China end, and walked through India, Persia, Egypt, Tunisia, and Andalusia. It was exactly like the Epcot World Showcase except the stores inside the various region-themed zones don’t sell Disneyfied recreations of “local” items; instead they are world brands like Forever 21 and Nike selling the same stuff that sits on the shelves of every major mall in every major city in the world. In Tunisia Court, for instance, the Krispy Kreme is vaguely Tunisian-themed as it pumps out sugary American donuts and in the Chinese Court on the other side of the mall the Tomy Roma’s is situated inside a pagoda. As far as shopping and chain dining goes, it was pretty postmodern. We did have lunch at a fantastic place called the Lime Tree Cafe which came highly recommended by James and didn’t disappoint. You can find it in the Chinese Gardens.

Once I had sufficient exposure to retail and had purchased the one sort of facial soap I meant to acquire, I was done shopping, possibly forever. We went to the Barasti Bar (a name which I just had to google, as I came up with Barista, Banister, Barrister, and Batista but not Barasti) on the beach at the Le Meridien Mina Seyahi Beach Resort & Marina. It used to be James’s hangout, apparently, before it was so built up; the legend he tells suggests that the bar used to be a little more like a real bar instead of the simulacrum it has become. The place was filled with drunk men trying to attract mates by ogling the drunk women likewise trying to attract mates by tying, quite literally tying, with strings, tiny triangles of clothing on top of their sex organs. Not really my scene, but it was very Dubai. My commentary was that it was like the bar’s managers had taken a huge crowd of young and young-at-mind people and shown them a movie about beach parties in Dubai and then asked them to recreate the movie as well as they could. Dubai is a tribute band to Dubai; Dubai is a running commentary on Dubai itself; being in Dubai is the performance of being in Dubai.

I had a really great time! I’ll gladly visit again and I will, once again, enjoy my stay. I’m glad I live in Muscat, though.

Wahiba sands

Off the top of my head, I can think of a number of sand dunes I’ve visited. Sossusvlei in Namibia, the dunes in Death Valley, White Sands National Monument in New Mexico, the Empty Quarter in southern Oman, the White Desert in Egypt, the Shifting Sands of Tanzania, some sand dunes that I remember from my childhood but who knows where they were, and then all the beach dunes I’ve encountered. That is a lot of sand for someone who is not an enthusiast.

Last year I celebrated my birthday with two of the most important people in my life, John and Paul, with one of the most important beers of my life, Stella, in one of the most important cities of my life, Cairo. It was a night fraught with substance! Indeed. Until we stumbled into Le Bistro for steaks at midnight. Or something. This birthday celebration was decidedly less urbane, and infinitely less urban.

We stayed at Thousand Nights Camp, a “bedouin camp” in the middle of the sands, isolated from civilization.* The main form of accommodation is tents with proper beds. There are two levels of tents; one group of tents is cheaper and all share four bathrooms in the middle of the area and the other group of tents is more expensive and each has its own bathroom. They are proper bathrooms. By some stroke of luck, there was only one other party staying at the camp the night we were there, so we were in the shared bathroom side but no one else was there. I am probably spoiled now.

Our tent. Notice we brought the beds outside. By “we brought” I obviously mean “we had some folks bring” because this is Arabia and you don’t do shit for yourself. Also the particulate matter in the air is not snow but rather airborne sand. Very rude. Photo credit Laura.

When we arrived, it was already sunset and the sky was darkening, so we didn’t engage in any activities other than starting on the long process of draining a bottle of Smirnoff. Exactly how I like my camping.

The price of the tent includes dinner and breakfast. Dinner was good; I remarked that they really have nailed the art of providing food in the desert. It would be impossible for them to actually be a food destination, but it would be extremely easy to mess it up. Instead, the food was pretty good, definitely not bad, and ultimately just not too noticeable. Same with breakfast the following morning, though there was dissent among our group over the quality of the waffles.

Sand camping, before dinner.

Laura and me at dinner

James and me

There’s not a whole lot to do around the camp. Apparently you can go “sand boarding,” where you climb up a dune and then slide down on a board that channels sand directly into your face, but you’d have to have your head examined if you did that. There’s a small, algae-green pool that you can go swimming in, so that’s exactly what we did after being rudely awoken by an over-eager sun at like 6am.

On the way to breakfast and the pool, you pass by a pen of gazelles, which is pretty sweet. When we walked by, we noticed that there are also bunnies in the pen and then a staff member came by and said “want to pet the bunnies?” and I was off.

You can’t tell here but I’m sprinting

The bunnies were kind of ragtag though and the gazelles were gazellishly shy, so that was a bit of a bust.

Here’s what made up for it:

I would like to start a childfree clothing line and put this on a shirt.

view from the pool

On our way out of the sands, we passed through a small town that is best known for its shuttered tyre repair shops. We passed the single best museum I’ve ever seen, with these amazing signs:

SALE OF MASTERQEICES PRESNTS
SELA OF CARPET MOQUETTE

KITCHEN BY BLOOD MONEY TO POPLU
SELA OF PERFUMES BEAUTIFI REQUIR

And here’s some bonus shots from our trip to Jebel Akhdar last weekend:

living on the edge

dangling off the edge

Mountainous Menda

*by a 45-minute drive