Saturday, February 21st - Jebel Akhdar (Green Mountain)

A Jebel is a Mountain, however Jebel Akhdar is not a mountain in itself but a region forming a plateau on top of the mountain. We left early morning (7:30 - that's early for a Saturday morning!!) and drove for about 1½ hours to Birkat al-Mawz (on the way to Nizwa where we had gone in the fall). Once there, we met our guide as we can only go up the mountain in a 4X4 - no cars allowed as there were too many accidents while coming down the hills; you have to use low gear because just brakes wouldn't do it. Yes, it is that steep in many places. He took us up to the top (over 2200 m) with a few stops along the way. The scenery was amazing. It was Grand Canyonesque! You stand way up on the cliff and see the wadis (the old river beds) at the bottom, and then you start walking down to old villages built in the cliffs, that were populated a few hundreds years ago, and then work your way back to the Range Rover by walking through the wadi at the bottom; it was amazing! The plateau is where most of the Omani fruits are grown (pomegranite, avocado, olive trees, fig trees - but nothing was in bloom as we were end of February). They produce enough to supply the country and export some to neighbouring countries.

We got back to Muscat by late afternoon, pretty much in a wind storm. We were lucky that the road we travelled on was bordered by mountains with very little sand on them, but as soon as you had an opening with a sandy place, it was like driving in a snow storm at home. Sand is blowing all over the place and visibility is greatly reduced, not to mention that it can accumulate on the highway just like snow does. It's not a great feeling at all, since you cannot melt it, but our journey back was fine, for the most part.

I must warn you now that the pictures below probably won't do justice to what our eyes were seeing, as it is hard to capture a 3D image in a 2D picture. But still, hopefully it will give you an idea of what we saw.
The rest of the pictures will follow next week!

"Rocky Mountain High, Colorado" -eh oops, Oman!

River down in the valley; town on the left hand side - talk about the middle of nowhere!

This water is blocked by a dam

Town on top of the cliff, pretty much on top of the plateau. On the right hand side, you can see the "layers" that are used for agriculture - all the greenery is fruit trees

Wadi way down at the bottom

A village/town down the mountain

Very old village (+250 years) basically in the cliff of the mountain

The neighbouring village. Not sure how long it took to walk there!

The village next door - the neighbours

The "village" as we get closer

Friday, February 20th - Night at the Opera House

Work week was fine, except that Jacqui had a cold all week. She did take Sunday off, and had sports day with the grade 4's on Tuesday. It was very hectic from what she said - not that much fun at all.

We didn't do much all week; we even missed quiz night on Tuesday. On Friday, our friend Sandy (my former principal from Kuwait) arrived for a visit. She has next week off so she decided to come down to Oman for part of it. We picked her up at the airport, went for lunch and then back home. At night, we went to the Opera House to see the musical "My Fair Lady". It was a very nice evening. The Opera House is such a nice venue, fairly small, but every seat is a good seat. Being fourth row from the front kinda gives you a good seat anyway ... We had a heat wave as temperatures really warmed up towards the end of the week. While our friends in Ontario were suffering at -37, we were at 38 on Friday (that's a 75 degree difference!!). It was very hot for this time of year, but between the Ontario and Oman temperatures, I'll take the hot one!

Temperature on February 20th in Muscat

Jacqui and Sandy, at the Opera House

Saturday, February 14th - Canadian stand-up Comedian in Muscat

Our week at work was fine. Jacqui and other grade 4 teachers and students went out to visit the Royal Omani Police, where they displayed how the sniffing dogs help them in various situations. Students and teachers found it pretty cool. Speaking of cool, we turned on the AC this week. Ya, it is warm already (daytime high in the low 30's for now, night time in the low 20's)

Jacqui and I went out for Valentine's dinner on Thursday night. We went to the Hyatt hotel, where they have a rooftop restaurant and a menu that includes your selection from the menu plus soup, salad bar, dessert and all you can (or want to) drink. It is pricey but still a good deal if you make an evening out of it, which we did. It was quite enjoyable. We hit the gym Friday morning than went for lunch and came back to the Crowne Plaza to spend the rest of the afternoon by the pool. At night, we ventured off to the Radisson Blu Hotel, for Oman Comedy Central. They had four stand-up comics, including one from Regina, Sask. So we had to go see that. We had gone earlier in the afternoon to find out the time and location of the event in the hotel, but the receptionist didn't have a clue what we were talking about. Sadly enough, that was probably the funniest moment of the whole thing! The show is happening in their hotel, and she doesn't where or when. One of the four guys was pretty good, but we had seen him before. The other three, including our canadian dude, were just OK. But still, it was nice to talk to him after the show, like, you know, eh!

Saturday was too quiet. Jacqui was not feeling well so we did our little shopping in the morning (liquids and groceries) and relaxed the rest of the day. She will take Sunday off to rest up and get rid of this cold that's been hanging around for a bit.

Presentation at the ROP

With Haris Khan, pakistani-canadian comedian, from Regina

I never would have thought I'd see this in a Muscat parking lot! 

Saturday, February 7th - Our visit to the Muscat Festival

Friday started as a usual Friday: walk on the beach, lunch and part of the afternoon by the pool at the Crowne Plaza. In the evening, we went to a park located in Amirat, a "suburb" of Muscat. Every year, Muscat holds its heritage and cultural festival. The events were held in two parks at opposite ends of the city, so we decided to check out the one that is closest to us. The publicity made for the festival was mentioning an Ice Village, with a slide and penguins, so we had to check that out! The "village" was basically a tunnel that you walked in until you got to a circular area of maybe 20 - 25 feet in diameter before exiting through another tunnel. But every thing they mentionned was there. They had a snow making machine - it didn't really look like snow - there was ice on the ground by the side of the path we walked on, there was a slide - a small metallic slide that we often find with swing sets bought at CT, and penguins, which were obviously not real (made of plastic, plaster and something else, I guess). But the young Omani kids seem to enjoy it quite a bit; it was cool to see.
They also had a Traditional Cultural Village, which was more interesting. They had crafts, art, music and dance, as well as traditional food. It was pretty interesting. There was also a sport demonstration. We're still not sure what the sport was; we've never seen anything like it. It was played on a sand court, like beach volleyball, but the court is probably one third of beach VB. They had two teams of 4 guys, all standing at the end of their respective sides. Then one person from one team would go to the edge of the court on the other team's side, and then the four guys would tackle him down as he tried to do... we're not sure what. It was weird. Then they start again. I'll have to find out more about this thing.

Entrance to "Ice Village"

Snow making machine

Making scarfs

The unknown sport!! The blue guy will get tackled by the red guys.

Traditional dance

Parts of the park

Another traditional dance

Traditional music group on stage - notice the "seating" arrangement of the crowd!

Thursday, February 5th - End of a nice week at work

We had a really short week at work, with Sunday and Monday being days off. We had a PD day on Tuesday, which meant we only had students at school on Wednesday and Thursday. The grade 4's, Jacqui's kids, were all pretty much there. On my side, half the grade 10's showed up, only one out of 9 kids in grade 11 showed up and most of my grade 8's were there. So needless to say, there wasn't much teaching done in those two days. It was however a very stressless week! We could use those all the time! But, not to break with habit, we ended up by the pool at the Crowne Plaza on Thursday afternoon then went out for dinner!

Monday, February 2nd - Car maintenance

Today is our last day of our early spring break. I got up really early (3:30 am) to watch the SuperBowl. Glad I did as it was a pretty good game. However, I kind of felt tired for the rest of teh day, even after going back to bed at 7:30am!
We had to get the car serviced so we booked an apointment for 10am, figuring they would have it for about one hour and then we'd be free to do whatever we wanted with the rest of our day. I guess it doesn't work this way. I was told they needed the car until 3pm. So I came back home and Jacqui and I did school work for part of the day. We picked up our car at about 2 and were very pleasantly surprised. They did the maintenance and like many other places, washed the car. But they also cleaned the inside - vaccumed the mats, washed the inside windows, used armor all on the dash and even on the tires. The car looked like brand new! Now we understand why they need it for more than one hour, and they can have it anytime!!
We went out for dinner to celebrate the end of a very nice 4 day weekend (as if we need a reason to go out!).
I don't have a picture of the car, so below are more pictures of Wadi Shab, taken Saturday.

Sunday, February 1st - Golfing in Ghala

Today is a day off school as we are in our early spring break (4 day weekend). Jacqui and I went golfing at a course located about 20 minutes from our apartment. The course is built in a valley. It was pretty nice. It was our first time ever golfing at this time of year - can't really do that at home, can we? The course wasn't too challenging but it got warm on the back nine - 32 degrees. Jacqui skipped parts of certain holes or complete holes at times as she felt the heat more than I did. Since Sunday is a work day, it was very quiet; we practically didn't see anyone in front or behind us. We played pretty much a Clint Eastwood round - some good, some bad and some ugly! It was however quite enjoyable! So far, it has been a very nice weekend!

Course seen from above - taken Friday when we were trying to figure out how to get there!

Let`er rip!

Not a good sign when you need steps to go down in the bunker!

As long as it ends this way, things are good!