30 hours of travel on three different continents and we were tired. Started in Annapolis, MD at 1 pm on Wednesday and flew into Zurich. I have not been to Zurich before, but can say that the airport is very nice. Duty Free was always good. So many things to buy and still… I did not buy a thing. After waiting for 5 hours in the airport, we boarded our plane and flew into Dubai and then on to Muscat.
Customs in Muscat presented its own unique problems and hurdles for us to clear. We waited in the line that we thought we should be in for an hour only to be told to get out of line and wait to be helped. We then tried to explain what we are doing in the country and how we were told to enter the country. Any one that has never traveled under orders from the U.S. Government cannot understand completely how difficult this can actually be. Finally we were allowed into the wonderful Sultanate of Oman and we proceeded to baggage claim where we promptly found our luggage to be the only bags still on the conveyor as our plane had landed more than an hour and a half earlier. We then took submitted our bags to be x-rayed (I have never had my bags x-rayed just to leave an airport before) and were met outside by the director of SIT in Oman, Larry Brown and his wife Judy.
Larry and Judy are some of the nicest people that I have met. They welcomed us to the country and brought us to our hotel and up to our room. Somehow I ended up with a queen size bed while Raymond and James are on twin beds. Unfortunately Clayton is stuck either sharing a bed with me or on a fold out. WOOPS. After moving our stuff up to our room, we decided to walk down the street and see if we could find some food. I do not think that we expected to find anything still open as it was already 1:30 in the morning in Oman. Nonetheless we went out and found to our delight that the soukh (market street) was still relatively busy with young men just relaxing on the sidewalk and sitting around the various fast food places which serve everything from American style burgers to Shwarma and curry. We got some food and walked around for a while. By the time we returned to the hotel it was well past 3 in the morning and I got ready for bed as we were planning on waking up by 9 and going shopping for groceries and other necessities for our apartment style living arrangements.
Waking up was more difficult than I thought it would be but we all woke up and got ready. We walked down to the local grocery store that we had located the night before and spent a long time looking through each aisle at the various types of food and other stuff present. I eventually needed to point out to James and Ray that we were going to be carrying all of our groceries the couple blocks back to our hotel, so we couldn’t buy out the whole store. After we got back to the room and unpacked all of our purchases, we were picked up by Larry and Judy and brought to an enormous mall in Muscat. The mall has everything from Starbucks to Victoria’s Secret. It also has an enormous grocery where we proceeded to buy more food that we had been unable to buy in our earlier shopping adventure. I was overwhelmed by the amount of stores in the mall and food in the grocery. The grocery contained produce from all over the world (Iran, Vietnam, China, the Philippines, Malaysia, Somalia, Turkey, India, and many many more)
We then returned to our hotel where we labored to find space for all of our purchases in our mini refrigerator.
Today we also were given a tour of the World Learning Center (where we will be attending class) and the beach right near the school. Now it is almost 11 at night here and I am writing this as my first installment for my blog. We start Arabic classes tomorrow. We are all excited.
Until next time,
Sam Ross
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