Saturday, March 28th - One week to go before holidays; a few hours before Julie gets here!

An exciting week in  Oman: His Majesty, Sultan Qaboos, came back from Germany, after being gone for 8 months. As soon as he touched down, there were celebration everywhere. The assembly at school the next morning was very special. It had music and traditional dance; it was very neat to see. Once again, we are always amazed by the love of him by the population and by their pride of being Omanis. The rest of the week was typical.
Friday was quiet but we had lunch with friends from Kuwait last year who now live in Dubai and who are visiting in Muscat this week. We went to the Al Bustan Palace Hotel (Ritz Carlton); it was very good and so nice to see them.
Saturday was Earth Day, so we participated; we turned off the lights and 8pm ... and went to bed! We have to get up early to pick Julie up at the airport around 4am, then go to work. We can't wait for her to get here; it will be so nice to spend time with her. We are going to drive to Dubai on Thursday after work, stay there until the Monday then fly to Jordan to go visit Petra and the Dead Sea. It should be a lot of fun; we are really looking forward to it.

Grade 10s and 11s at special morning assembly

National Pride displayed for the return of the Sultan

Stairwell at Al Bustan Palace Hotel

live entertainment in the lobby of the hotel

Saturday, March 21st - Our colds are finally done!

 What a relief. Both our colds are finally gone, and we are feeling pretty much back to normal. We got hit by a solid bug! Our week was pretty typical: work, quiz night on Tuesday, but no Crowne Plaza on Thursday - the weather wasn't very nice so we decided to pass and just came home instead. Friday was also pretty much the same, except that we were at the beach when a fishing boat came in. It was quite interesting to see how they get the fish out of the water. 

The fishing boat - a normal boat with a 115 HP at the back - drags the top part of the net (the part holding the fishing net as such) all the way to the beach. They then use a small truck to keep bringing the net in, as people manually fold it back into the boat. By this time, the fish is still way out in the water. This net is pretty long, as it has to allow the fishing net to go down to the bottom of the sea when they are fishing. As they get closer, a few of the fishermen go in the water to check on the nets holding the fish. They eventually get really close and start lifting the fishing nets, one by one, by hand into the back of the pickup truck. Once the truck is full, it leaves to deliver the fish somewhere (fish market?). The fish they caught were all really small silvery fish, but there were a lot of them. There were people with plastic bags and containers just filling them up as there were a lot of fish that were not in the nets. It was quite interesting to see. We also understand a little more why we sometimes see the boats "stuck" in the water. The nets are probably dragging at the bottom of the ocean and the boat doesn't have enough power to pull its load. In that case, the trucks do a lot more pulling!

A green parrot

the fishing boat

Hauling in the net

There is fish in there

Who said you can't have a free meal?

Getting the fish in the truck

And there it goes

The next net to be dumped in the truck

Waiting for the truck to come back

Sunday, March 15th - We must be tired!

Jacqui has been dealing with her cold/flu for about 3 weeks while I`ve been dealing with mine for about 2½ weeks. We get days when we seem to feel better, but it doesn't seem to last. I took a day off this week. We are both getting better, but very slowly. We must be tired. Motivation is not very high, and we don't want to do much. We had an invitation for an outing on Friday night (it was in our building, two floors up), and we didn't really feel like going. We ended up going anyway, and we're glad we did. We met some nice people and talked to a few of our colleagues as well; it was a nice evening. We just feel that we have to force ourselves to go out and do things. Our spring break is in three weeks (first week of April) and we can't wait; I really thing we both need it.

Having one of us sick all week, we didn't go out much - as in, not at all. So we had to go out for dinner on Thursday night, and Saturday as well! It was nice. After school, on Sunday, we went all the way out to Shangrila Resort (a 50 minutes drive from school) to book diving sessions for Julie, who is coming up at the end of March and early April. The place is very nice so we decided to stay for dinner at their poolside bar/restaurant. It was very nice (also avoided cooking for one more night!!)

Some trees lost their leaves, but flowers are coming out!

A roundabout, on the corniche

Close-up of the center of the round about 

Waiting for lunch, at Darcy's in Madinah Sultan Qaboos (MSQ)

Sunday, March 8th - Spring is coming??

It has been a tough week healthwise. Jacqui had a cold about two weeks ago, and it never really went away. She did get better for a while as I started my own cold. A "his and hers" situation as my cold was different then the one she had - different symptoms. As I was finally getting better, she got my cold, so she didn't feel to hot for the weekend. Therefore, we didn't do much. It was pretty quiet.

As for the weather, well spring must be on the way. City workers dug up all the beautiful flowers that we had along streets and in roundabouts - I guess it will soon be too hot for flowers to survive. Also, a lot of the trees have leaves changing colors - turning yellow and falling down. We're not used to seeing this in spring!

We have been stuck in some kind of dust cloud for the last few days. We haven't clearly seen the sun since Friday. It feels weird and is also messy (see pictures below)

Dust in the air

Leaves changing color and falling

Our night table - 2 days after the cleaning lady was in (and she's good!)

Saturday, February 28th - End of another month!!

Another month gone by. Work was fine. Jacqui went to Funzone with her class on Tuesday. It's a place that has a skating rink, bowling alleys and video games. The kids really enjoyed it and Jacqui went down memory lane, tying a whole bunch of skates. She hadn't done that in a while and her arms were sore the next day! She said that some of the kids were pretty good at skating, while others were obviously just learning. The rest of the week was quiet, and so was our weekend; and it was fine by us. Jacqui is just getting over her cold, mine is still pretty much there, so not doing much for 2 days was OK. We spent the afternoon at the Crowne Plaza on Thursday and went out for lunch at the beach on Friday, after a nice long walk on the beach. Saturday, we went to the marina for lunch. The temperature was cool, as it only reached low 20's, so we sat in the sun to eat. We won't be doing that in a few weeks. We had dinner at home every night of the weekend as we had gone out a lot earlier in the week, when our friend from Kuwait was here visiting for a few days. It was nice to have company, even though we had to work.

Old inhabited village (approx. 200 years old)

Getting to the penthouse!

The other village close to the one we visited

They must have quite the view from up in that cave

Interior decorating

Our trail on the way back. We did come from there!

It gets easier as the wadi gets larger!

The old village, from the river bed

Walking on the falaj makes it a lot easier

Fruit trees located on the front left side of the road (the green stuff!)

More fruit trees planted on the side of the mountain

All those "steps" on the right are for agriculture

Jebel Akhdar - an amazing place!