Car Go Fast

(I actually wrote this last week...and then promptly forgot about it...)

Today I think I found more evidence that DMVs everywhere feel and even partially look the same.  Same chairs, same listless stares, same paint peeling walls.  BUT, getting my Omani license today went much smoother than I could have hoped.  They corralled a herd of new Embassy peopled into a waiting room then called us out one by one to take an eye test in a mostly empty yellow room with an eye chart at the end.  Perhaps it's a residual of my High School please the teacher days, but eye tests give me a bit of anxiety.  The possibility of immediate negative feedback?  Your very freedom of movement depending on the outcome of a jumble of letters? ..........  It's hard to say.

But in the end I read a few letters, only guessed at one and got it right, and picked up my shiney Omani drivers' license later that day.  

And you know what else feels the same as back home?  Getting pulled over by the police without said license because it's being processed by said police.    

Boo.  

But I wasn't taken to prison or anything and I am now a full fledged driver.  I keep looking down at the thermometer hovering somewhere between 96 and 100 and thinking I really have to get that fixed but then I remember that it is actually almost October and somewhere between 96 and 100 degrees.  Good think my AC is boss.  And yes, I know that words like "boss" age me but working in a school makes one well aware of how old they are and I feel just fine about it.  

Relax Your Stroke

A Little shipwreck on one of the beaches I frequent with the Dog

My car clock said 8:20 and the temperature read 105.  After dousing my hair with clean water, gulping down handfuls of pomegranate seeds, climbing into the car and driving for a few minutes the digital display had worked its way down to 96. 

Since moving to Oman I have wanted to start open water swimming in the warm Arabian Sea and last week was the first time I felt like it wasn’t too hot.  That’s right, it’s finally cooled off enough to ocean swim in the wee hours of the morning. 

I’ve been lap swimming for years, but plunging into the salty sea, critters abounding and searing water creeping into your nose, is a different feeling.  I spent most of my first swim trying to push out thoughts of zebra sharks and sea snakes that might slowly creep into my field of vision, thus causing panic verging on freak out.  Not that I don’t want to see them in the right context, but mid stroke I was afraid I would splash about and become tangled up with something slimy.  Oman has fantastic sea life and snorkeling, but honestly, in this particular spot my fears were pretty unrealistic.  I saw a few sardines and crabs crawling about on the rocks that dotted the cove, but it’s a pretty coral-less beach. 

Yesterday we headed for a wilder beach without protection from man made jetties.  The rocking waves are both fantastic and frustrating.  We started against the current and when you’ve been paddling for what feels like hours and look to the shoreline to discover you’ve only gone a few meters its kind of a bummer.  But after my first open water swim I came home and googled “open water swimming” because I’m nerdy like that.  One of the tips I came to again and again was relax your stroke.  The first instinct when a particularly strong current sweeps across you is to swim faster, kick harder, work your way through it and stay on course.  But I found that if I let it move me a bit farther out to sea or towards the shore instead of fighting, I can maintain momentum and save energy – putting me back on course faster and with less effort.     

I swim with a few older women and when we pause to catch our breath or stretch our arms on the sand we talk about Islam, Architecture, Politics, The new Opera house in Muscat and gardening.   I usually have little to contribute to the conversation, but I listen and ask questions of women who have lived here far longer and seen much more than I have.  I’ve swapped out my sleek black swimmers cap for a bright pink one in order to identify myself to fishing boats that zip along the coast and I wear tight pants to my calves so as not to offend the locals who troll the beach each morning.  Yesterday I saw a spikey sea urchin and a few fusiliers who had momentarily abandoned their schools.   

It takes all morning to drive out to the beach, stretch, swim, wash off, dry, kick sand away and navigate my car back across the beach and onto the paved road again.  But I’ve got things to do and meals to cook and a house to clean and library lessons to prepare for and plants that need repotting - do I really have time for this?     

Relax your stroke I think to myself.  

Doing It Yourself

I have the hands of my pioneer ancestors who pulled wagons and mended clothes and planted seeds along the path from Illinois to the Salt Lake Valley.  I looked down at my ripped cuticles and jagged nails at work today and paused to dig a paperclip under a few that gave refuge to fat crescents of dirt. I work in the yard most mornings before my job and spend weekends doing errands and exploring this place.  The more I get out in the city, the more I want to get my hands into something messy when I get home, build something, cook something, sweat until it falls into my eyes  - which doesn’t take very long here. 

A few weeks ago I began my search for various yard related hardware items; pieces of wood, wire, steel rods, nails – stuff to build my fantasy garden where I pulled out a small fig tree and a flowering aloe vera a few weeks ago.  (Don’t worry, both were replanted somewhere else in the yard.)  But when I ask people where one finds such items a puzzled look comes over their faces. 

And then it dawned on me one day as I watched the migration of foreign workers from their cites to the freeways to catch shared, crammed, busses or to simply walk until they reach their apartment:  fixing up your house, building things in the yard, repairing broken pipes and trimming trees are all things done by other people here.  I could be wrong, but I think there aren’t many “Do It Yourself” kind of stores here because, well, people don’t do it themselves. 

And for some reason, this makes me want to build my own bamboo tomato trellis and mop my own floors and weed my own garden.  To make pasta from scratch and rake the leaves myself.  We got a bit carried away in Casablanca with a housekeeper who also cooked and a doorman and drivers from time to time and it’s feeling really good to sink my hands in again.  

**Pictures coming soon!  We took the camera to the beach the other day, but it was so humid that my lens immediately fogged up and I couldn't acclimate it before our dog walk was finished.  Perhaps this week now that we have our own car!

Sweet Valley High...Again

The High School girls’ locker rooms haven’t changed a lot over the past decade or so.  Goopy lip glosses peak out from grafittied shoulder bags, a pair of jewel studded converse high tops have been tossed on a pile of jeans and the bathroom stalls are in various states of toilet papered disarray.

“Shut up.  You are totally going to make varsity”

“Yeah, but there are only 10 slots and –“

“Yeah and you are totally going to make it, you are so freaking tall”

“ohmygoshdoyouthinkso?”

I observe this conversation from in front of the bathroom sink, trying to remove my waterproof eyeliner before heading to the school weight room.  In fact, this conversation is happening in every corner of the locker room – some girls are speaking loudly and looking around to see who’s listening and others are timid, changing their clothes with their faces to the wall and whispering back and forth about who will or will not be on the varsity Volleyball team. 

And I don’t feel like I’m a grown up, I feel like I’m a new High School student with no friends and an awkward body.  And to have the near 30-year-old body reflected back at me in the 10^th grade certainly would be awkward, but then I remember that I’m not vying for prom dates or looking for someone to be my BFF.  I’m an adult professional headed to the gym to keep my weight down and my premature hip arthritis at bay.   Very adult indeed.   

I’ve had several of these back to the future…er past moments over the last few days at my new job in the International School.  I read an article a few months ago (which I can’t find for the love, but I’ll keep looking) about the adolescent brain and even though it’s a relatively short time in our life, our High School age memories feel disproportionately vivid well into adulthood. 

“The brain is buzzing with more dopamine activity than at any other time in the human life cycle, so everything an adolescent does—everything an adolescent feels—is just a little bit more intense ‘And you never get back to that intensity’” (saved the quote with no citation – bad librarian!)

You forget just HOW intense everything feels at 13 and 15 and 17 and then you see the first day faces on these kids and it comes back like your first mixed tape was given to you just yesterday.  For the record, my first mixed tape was a bizarre 3 part compilation of unheard of folk artists, terrible Christmas rap, Van Halen and heartbreaking Yo-Yo Ma performances.   I was a strange 16 year old and dated even stranger boys.  But I have a special spot in my heart for High School intensity - and perhaps strangeness as well - since during my first days of 10^th grade I met the corduroy wearing 16 year old who would later be my husband.   

So “back to school” makes me excited and full of butterflies for obvious back to school reasons, reasons that don’t really go away when you become an adult – Will the other teachers like me?  Will I do a good job?  Will I wear the right thing?  - but I also remember what it feels like to be 16 and in love and confused and exhilarated and nervous and happy and independent and perhaps just slightly out of control.  And maybe this flood of emotion wouldn’t be so readily available to me if I weren’t sitting next to Mr. NOFX t-shirt wearing, guitar playing, head shaving heartthrob right now, even if he is wearing a suit and sporting a well-quaffed beard these days.


It pays to have such well read friends!!!  Thanks Marci
http://nymag.com/news/features/high-school-2013-1/  

Where We Are Now

There is more cheddar cheese in Muscat than in Jerusalem.  In fact, there are like five different kinds of cheddar to choose from.  We’ve had nachos for dinner twice now. 

The traffic is much better than it was in Casablanca and the city less hectic, but there isn’t a French bakery around the corner. 

The street food in Amman was better, but there are gobs of Indian restaurants in Muscat and I have to spend limited amounts of supervised time in the spice isle here so I don’t pass out with cooking potential excitement.  

This is both the best kind of thinking and the worst.  The most illuminating and the most stifling.  New places make you think about the way things work and what that says about the people and geographies that have engineered these things.  You compare food, clothing, shopping, communication, street names, driving habits, recreation, public worship, family interactions, social structures, government and rumored private behavior to better understand politics, religion, geography, history, power – humanity.  What is shared, what is different and what does it mean about them, about me, about us?  I’m not saying that you always or even ever get a place right, but the exercise has value.   Making observations about grocery store selection and street signs helps me understand values and make sense of histories. 

But there is also the danger of setting yourself up for negative experiences by applying definitive, evaluative, and often misinformed assessments to anything new.   Becoming someone who travels or moves to a new place and spends the whole time complaining “It was easier/better/more fun in _______________ than it is here.”  You bluster forth in a whirlwind of romantic energy about the place you left and how perfect it was – pre-empting first impressions and spoiling your time by not trying to figure out what a new place is.  What it ACTUALLY is.  This, along with touching, is one of my growing pet peeves.   Someone said to me recently that Jordan wasn’t even really in the Middle East because it didn’t have souks and fun medinas and nice people* and other Middle Eastern stuff.   I objected then, but in the weeks since I’ve actually grown livid about it.   We, outsiders, don’t get to tell a place what it is and what it isn’t.  Coming to a new country with Orientalist expectations (or whatever people have in other parts of the world) of what a place should be and determining it “bad” or even “good” – as if our narrow personal experience unequivocally defines a place, its people and its values - is paternalistic nincompoopery and a waste of time and energy at the very least.    

It is for this reason Paul Theroux, remarkable travel writer and noted misanthrope, hates the internet and many industries that have bloomed around travel.  They rob people of primary, primal experiences and the opportunity to make their own assessments.  People arrive with photoshopped pictures of Vietnam and are inevitably let down by what they find “That doesn’t look like Ha long Bay from the calendar…  I don’t like it here”. 

As a photographer and travel blogger the irony of this gripe is not lost on me.  I experience pretty regular paralysis about how to share the things I love without making travel about shallow consumption or participating in the Conde Naste-ing of it all.  I can’t think of a way to do that entirely, and so for now I just continue.

All of this is to say that during this first month in Oman I have been watching and learning and asking questions and making comparisons and trying to figure things out.  It’s normal and it’s not bad, unless it holds you back from getting to the why and what of a new place.  So far we are loving, loving Muscat.  I’ve tried to keep my comparisons fair and revealing instead of evaluative and definite, but honestly, it’s pretty great here.  We love our house and our neighborhood and have made many new friends.  Max likes his job and has a lot to do and I’m about to start my dream job next week at the International School library.  Our dog is happy, my kitchen is huge, the people seem nice and the city is lovely.  Our car should arrive next month and I'm already itchin' to get out and explore the beaches and mountains and wadis.  In the mean time, I'm working on my donotgetsunburnedtoacrispafterfivesecondsinthesun which is very different than working on a tan.     

As a small postscript: our stuff arrived today!  By accident (or gross misfeasancee it’s hard to say) our stuff was never even sent to the location where a fire might have burned it, but shipped immediately to Muscat. We spent the last few weeks just sure that not only had our candles and other liquids melted, bubbled and exploded in the heat, but that our printer, mixer, and ceramic dishware had oozed back into their component elements as well.  None of that happened.  Sometimes I overreact.  Thank you to all who wished us and our stuff well.    

*We met MANY wonderful and nice and hospitable people in Jordan.  So much so that we were convinced we wanted to make a career in the Middle East. 

Waiting

A whole chicken in Muscat comes clean and perfectly trimmed.  The insides have been removed and the feet firmly trussed.  Lovely, accessible, recognizable, orderly, immediately usable.  Muscat has seemed much the same way since our arrival,  but today we are home after the announced Embassy closure through August 10th and that has shifted my thoughts to other homebound pursuits.

My jet lag those first few days woke me up between 4 and 5 am.  The light streaming through our bedroom window was warm and beautiful and the temperature quite pleasant compared to the noon day burn.  A few days in a row I pulled on a flimsy yellow African style dress I bought In Essaouira, my wide brimmed straw hat, and set about pulling weeds in the planters that line the yard.  With my bare hands I scraped through the dirt, pulling out gnarly growths by the roots, removing large rocks and other debris from the beds.  My fingers weaved through the spiny weeds, getting them just around the base to avoid blood.  

Last weekend I bought small tomato and eggplant seedlings to plant around the yard.  Inside I sowed seeds for rosemary, thyme, chives, oregano, savory and basil in empty egg cartons that are resting high on a shelf in the laundry, sweating and germinating in the filtered sunlight.  

What can you do but wait?  Wait for the little seeds to crack open, their insides snaking to the surface and peeking through.  Wait for the tomato plants to grow just a few more inches before planting them in the raised bed I fashioned from discarded bricks stacked up among the weeds.  Wait for the Embassy to reopen and life to continue as normal.  Wait for the narrative to change?  

But then I remember that Max's job is not just about waiting.  I'll cheekily almost avoid a tremendeous cliche by only alluding to a planting metaphor, but we are here because we really believe there is more to be done than just waiting.