Home in the Snow (late release extended edit)

Hey everybody, it seems that my closing statements on the blog got lost in the depths of cyberspace, entirely due to user error.  I do have the text for it, which follows, and I have to say that I am very sorry that this didn’t get up sooner.  If I was planning to keep blogging I would have noticed much sooner that the final post was unsuccessful.  I am kicking around ideas for getting another wordpress blog, just a place where I can post drawings, paintings, and digital imaging stuff, so maybe that will happen before school runs my life again. For the time being, I am applying for a monthly column at The News Tribune, a Tacoma paper, which would last for a year.  Perfect, seeing as I am set on graduating by this time next year.  Again, really sorry about the lack of closure on the blog, and I hope 2008 is going well for everyone.  Here’s the post thatI really thought I put up back when I wrote it.

Hey all,
I made it home safe. Since arriving home, I don’t know that I have ever felt so fulfilled and happy. I have been home two days now, and hadn’t got to writing until now mainly because I have been entirely occupied by the piano that my parents obtained while I was abroad.
Thanks to everybody for writing back about Dubai: I am sure that I will have conversations with a lot of you over the holidays and back at school. I think the level of response says a lot about all the people that have followed along on my trip, as the content wasn’t light, and I sensed very little hesitation to engage with it. So, thanks. On arriving in New York, I had been awake for over 24 hours, and had to stay awake for 3-4 more to catch my flight, so I seized the opportunity to record my first impressions of the U.S. While I will not confuse you by posting my original ramblings, I think some of the content, translated into understandable English and full sentences, is worth recording.

Seeing people in western clothes, especially to see women in short-sleeved shirts with their hair (and neck and ears) exposed was the most obvious difference to me coming home. The idea of fashion is much more minimal in Oman than it is here because everyone is wearing the same thing a lot of the time.  Coming back, everybody’s different clothing initially struck me as sort of like advertising oneself. It seemed unnatural and shallow, and that is not how I usually feel. And in Oman, people do wear different types of clothes, it is just more subtle differentiation than in the U.S., so I guess it overwhelmed me for a second.
Besides just fashion in general, exposed skin made a pretty big impression on me on first returning. Everyone generally wears long sleeves a lot more in Oman than here, though I have to say I wasn’t expecting it because it is winter. Also, while I was sitting in the airport, I had the very strange feeling of everyone looking familiar. I think it was mostly white people, but I felt like I recognized a lot of people in the airport, and thought that many other people had a lot of features similar to people that I knew from somewhere. So that was really weird.
This blog will be waning in the coming weeks if not stopping entirely (which I think is likely to be the case pretty soon), so thanks for following along, and I hope to see you soon.
Charlie

On the Way Home

Hey everybody,
I am back in the room for a short stint after a walk, lunch and some exploration in Dubai, and the fact that I am here again reminds me that the first time I toured Dubai, I never really told all of you about it.  The impressions that we get of places are reflective of ourselves; maybe Dubai is greater than I give it credit for, but for me, I guess I saw what I expected to see.
I saw unbelievably wealthy tourists burning through their money, and unbelievably poor south Asian laborers building the towers in which so much wealth is housed.  I saw many, many people, crammed on top of one another, and I felt sorry for most of them.  The mother pimping out her daughter at the hotel bar made me feel sorry for all people involved in the transaction.  There was an American bragging loudly about his exploits with a prostitute the night before, leaning against his rented corvette; he made me feel bad that at his age he could still be looking to hedonism and pride for the comfort that he has obviously not found with his peers.  The sea of south Asian migrant laborers with which we walked in a hot, stifling underwater tunnel made me feel lucky, knowing that that whether they were walking to or coming from work at 9 PM, I didn’t envy their situation.  There were small things everywhere that made me question what was actually supporting this Emirate economically, and wondering whether this is what happens when you put a lot of wealth in a pot to stew combined with anonymity for all involved.
Are laws and reputation the only things keeping people civil with one another, or did Dubai somehow develop into a place that is known for such things and attracts the wealthy, shallow, and escapist?  Anonymity combined with unaccountability does seem to lead people toward the worst outcomes I can imagine, but it was still disconcerting to see the brutal, unchecked inhumanity of the place.  Just knowing the wealth that some had living so close to so many with so little made me hurt to think of the entitlement those in the towers must feel to overlook those that built them.  I think about it and decide that I really have to get to school to figure out how they can hopefully get on a more equal plane.  Meanwhile, I tap away these idealistic rants on my beautiful computer, on free internet in my free hotel room provided by the airline that messed up my flight.  I sit conveniently removed from it all, feeling like I can’t change the situation or do anything of significance in my position, when the reality is that I probably just don’t have the creativity or the drive to really work on helping any of these people.
I find myself aiming for objective distance and the humility of acknowledging that you can’t really change anything, and then remind myself that that is not humility, that is just the dismissing of my responsibility to my fellow humans here in Dubai.  It is funny how saying that I can’t do anything and I am humble looks remarkably similar to saying I deserve everything I have and being proud: they both result in me doing nothing for anyone here.
I guess this is one of the questions that fascinates me most: what responsibilities does money bring with it?  I may be in debt after college, but working at a coffee shop would make me a lot more money than the laborers here will ever get to work for, even if their work ethic is much better than mine.  I think I am mostly just lucky.  Do I have some ethical responsibility to share?
Okay, I’ll be stateside in about a day.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this one.
Charlie

The Winding Down of Days

Hello readers,

I have lots of stories, but not much time to tell them, but my friend Chase uploaded some pictures to the facebook files, so I felt I should share them with all of you. I have 2 days left to work on my paper and it is looking pretty good. I am not stressed about it right now, today I have mostly just been editing, but I am sure that in about an hour I’ll get into another poorly written section of it and start stressing again.

I head home in a week, and besides dreading packing, customs and my 7 hour layover in New York, I am pretty content. I am thinking really wordily lately; I can’t help but process everything in an internal monologue. I have been working on this paper for a week straight, though, so I guess that is what I get. Excel won our epic battle and now we are not speaking. I mean, we weren’t speaking anyway, because it is a computer program, but I kind of gave up on using it for much. I might have a table summarizing some of my data, but I figure that it is not that important in a qualitative study where I only did 19 interviews. I don’t know if I ever really described my project to all of you: I have been studying people’s perceptions of the campaign process for Oman’s elected consultative council Majlis al-Shura. This year, a Royal Decree from the sultan liberalized controls on what media candidates could use in their campaigns, so I talked to people about the proliferation of, mostly, campaign posters and newspaper ads. I am, needless to say, pretty sick of writing about it, though, so I’ll say no more on the subject and give you these pictures.

Note the awesome old village in the background-with rain happening a couple times a year, things like this stick around for a long time after they are abandoned.

Charlie

A Land of Plastic Trees

Sorry if I have been out of touch; I am kind of stressed but still pretty unproductive with regards to my huge project.  I am putting in time, but I don’t feel like I have much to show for it.  I have different parts of my paper in different documents and I honestly have lost track of what is where.  Sometimes I feel like I have written about something before, and I am not sure where it went.  I have always struggled with organization of my papers, and though I tried to keep this one organized, I guess things got chaotic fast.  I feel like it will be a terrible paper, but regardless of how terribly it turns out, I will be flying home in a couple weeks.  As long as I don’t fail the paper, I will graduate in a year, and I won’t fail the paper.

I don’t know that there is much news from around here.  My brother is sitting next to me playing Mario Party on gameboy and asking me to watch everything he does.  I get most of my work done during the hours from 4:30 in the morning to 8 or whenever other people wake up. Because from there things generally get too loud for me to feel like I get much done.  My project is due in 9 days I think, and the day after that, presentations of projects start.

If my paper, no, my life was a western movie, and the protagonists just arrived in town (which is dusty and nearly empty), and went into a bar and asked the bartender why the town was so desolate, then the name anxiously murmured by the bartender would be Microsoft Excel.  Of course the difference would be that the audience may miss that important plot point while distracted by the bartender’s immaculately maintained and enormous handlebar moustache, while if my paper were a film, the villain would not hold the town in fear by lurking in the shadows.  Excel would be in the streets, its soldiers well-disciplined in their rows and columns, possessing so much training and potential that is all frustratingly out of reach for somebody as devoid of facial hair as I am.  I would muse on U.N. intervention in the situation and whether democratization of the region by an outside force is completely out of the question (it is).  So I would realize that I have to take them on, on my own.  In this imaginary movie I am at the scene where our protagonist (me), puts on his cowboy hat and says that this is something he just has to do.  Some woman he met when he arrived in town two days previous starts crying, a complete vote of no confidence, and the bartender has turned his back and tells me I am a fool.  The protagonist ignores them and goes through the swingy bar door into the blinding light to meet his fate.  Somehow he also took over as sheriff in those two days, because the sheriff got shot and he was the only one around that wasn’t running or shooting at him.  Because he is in a Western, I guess he is supposed to be a pretty straightforward hardcore guy.  But it ends up he is about to get rocked, because the villain has tanks and automatic rifles, and he is dying for an impractical Hollywood image where regardless of odds, good is supposed to win.
Alright, if you guys can just think of me as being that awesome instead of being somebody that fills their days with procrastination with patches of work, utterly unfulfilled and wanting to go home, that would be awesome.  I still daydream a lot, though, and I guess there are many worse ways to burn through a day.

Do you guys think that all the trees that are completely out of place in this climate, yet watered artificially and maintained at great cost, are more or less valued than trees in a forest?  They definitely don’t belong, but they are still beautiful and are the product of investments of many scarce resources (water & labor) compared to the trees at home.  I keep on thinking of them as plastic, but they are real.  I guess the petroleum wealth pays for them, so they are like trees made of petroleum: they might as well be plastic trees.

keep living,
Charlie

On Classes, Coffee, and Cats

Hey everybody,
I have signed up for classes back at UPS. I have choir, statistics, theories of political economics, Harlem renaissance (for an interdisciplinary ‘connections’ core), and lyric poetry (my ‘fine arts’ requirement, as studio art classes don’t count). Then, after that, it looks like between my thesis and the rest of the higher-level and interdisciplinary classes I need, my last semester in Fall 2008 might kill me, provided that I survive this spring. I might drop choir, depending on how much progress I am making on personal music projects this winter.

Yesterday I spent the entire morning without getting any interviews. This involves wandering around the campus of Sultan Qaboos University approaching people and talking to them, showing them a sheet of paper with a bunch of intimidating questions in English, and hoping that they will help you. It is not surprising that I didn’t get any interviews all morning, as during my first 20 or so hours of trying to do this, I only got one interview, but now I like to think that I am better at it, so I actually expect to get some. Anyway, part of the reason for this letdown was that my game got thrown off by a kid in a group I was hanging out with that had Adolf Hitler as the background on his cellphone. This really paralyzed me.  I didn’t feel like I was in any position to ask about it, because when I asked him about his phone, he hid the picture from me and kind of held his head down.  I didn’t want to initiate an argument where the only way for us to communicate would be in English, which would obviously benefit me.  Because I didn’t want to be the self-righteous American that I would come off as, I restrained myself and didn’t push the issue.

Yesterday afternoon, I was studying Arabic outside in a small courtyard because most students had left campus for the weekend, and it was half an hour until my ride would show up. A guy I had never seen before approached me with a red ceramic mug and asked me if I would like some coffee. I tried to tell him that I don’t drink coffee, that the caffeine will keep me awake, that I am actually pretty OCD about my teeth and fear that they will yellow and fall out, but all to no avail. He had seen me and went out of his way to make me coffee. To be fair I only resisted a couple seconds, because I knew it wouldn’t help, and I started dinking this coffee presented to me by a stranger. I would never do this in the states, but I didn’t think twice about it here. My level of skepticism of strangers has dropped through the floor. After maybe a minute of small talk, he told me he had to go do some work and said he would be in his office and he pointed to a building. I watched where he went so that I would be able to give him his mug back, feeling that it was a creepy thing to be doing, but also thinking the creepiness was practical and necessary. I continued drinking the coffee as my Arabic work got increasingly more difficult to read in the waning light. I decided to give up and want about finding a place to dispose of the rest of the coffee. As it never rains here, I wanted to find a place with a sprinkler that would dilute the coffee, but I also didn’t want to pour the coffee on a plant. I left all my things on the cement bench I had been studying on (again, I can’t imagine anyone here taking anything) because I didn’t want the guy that gave me coffee to come back out and think that I had stolen his cup. So as I walked I tried to concoct a story for what I was doing if he saw me, found a spot next to a tree ringed by a hose (as they all are), then got back to my things and packed them up. I realized how different I was thinking about things than I think about them in the U.S. when I didn’t knock on his door, which didn’t have a window, and I just entered. I did this because knocking would be awkward and formal when our relationship was obviously not. Nobody really has private space, and when I didn’t knock, I felt like that was what I had been expected to do.

About half of the people I meet want to exchange phone numbers and say they want to stay in touch and be friends: everyone always asks if they can help in any way, too, and I usually dismiss it because I wouldn’t feel comfortable calling on somebody I met randomly in public. Because this is the social expectation here, of course when my host-mother said she that she was swamped with work, I said that I would be happy to help her. She thanked me and said that it would be great if I could help her with all the work she is doing lately—I could look up journals for her paper. Well, ideally I won’t actually be doing that, because I am supposed to be working on my own paper lately.

Speaking of my own paper, after a couple days of doing interviews much of the day and coming home to realize that I don’t have enough discipline & energy left over to focus through all the noise, last night I went to bed before 9 pm and this morning I woke up well before my alarm, around 4:20. “Awesome,” I thought to myself, “now I can take advantage of the quiet throughout the house!” So I crept downstairs, feeling altogether too much like a thief, and got to study for nearly 4 hours, of course with a break for breakfast. I was awake for the morning call to prayer, which was so beautiful: I usually can’t hear calls to prayer very clearly, and I am usually not awake for the sunrise one anyway. This time, though, I could hear at least three mosques in the area, all overlapping each other and filling me with wonder. I was happy to be alone because I could just sit on the ground with my eyes closed and listen. It would be a very selective few that I would feel comfortable doing that with, and none of them are here.

There are lots of stray dogs and cats around the streets here, sometimes I smile when I see that there are packs of dogs, because they are beautiful animals, and I am glad that they are being social. Other times, I hear cats fighting or they scare me when I am passing a dumpster and they are surprised by me and make noise.

Ok, actually yeah, now my host-mother wants me to help her look for articles on her paper. She is going out for an hour and wants me to have articles for her by the time she gets back.
Part Three: Dubai is forthcoming, I really haven’t started it yet. It’s a wild place.

I hope thanksgiving went incredibly.
Charlie

a couple of pictures

Hey guys,

Time is short right now, because of all the unsuccessful attempts I research I waste my time with all day, and all the diversions I waste my time with because I am unhappy all evening. I wanted to give all of you a couple pictures that are already up for the facebookers, just you know what I look like.

People still live in these tiny, remote villages, where I think settlement originally occurred because they were so close to springs and dependable water resources. It seems odd to me that people would remain settled in them despite the heavily subsidized water courtesy of the government and (I’m guessing) huge costs of everything here due to transportation costs.

Here’s Matt, Neshwa, and myself on a ferris wheel in Abu Dhabi. Everything at this place was open the whole time that we were nearby, and by the end of the day, we couldn’t pass up the ferris wheel. I think the fact that it was open all the time speaks to the cheapness of expatriate staff (mostly from Pakistan, India, and Southeast Asia). I think the place was completely empty all day and night until they closed at two. There’s no way they can be turning a profit unless they pay these people next to nothing.

Part Two: Abu Dhabi

In Doha, the really cool things we saw were the Education City and the Al-Jazeera station. These were both built by the Emir’s money. In Abu Dhabi, the two most significant things we saw were the Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research (ECSSR) and the Abu Dhabi women’s technical college. These were built with the Sheik of Abu Dhabi’s money. Qatar is home to the biggest liquid natural gas reserves in the Gulf, while it seemed to me the Abu Dhabi was developing about as fast, while maybe waiting for
The ECSSR was home to the best library that I have seen on this whole trip. It is a library that focused on political and international studies and geography. It has computers where you can search the catalog of resources they have, and while not everyone can check out books, the public is free to use the library. Here I should mention that it does not take much to be the best library in the region, and I think the only libraries in Oman accessible to the public may be one in the grand mosque and one hosted by Petroleum Development Oman (PDO), and neither of them is exactly awesome. This makes sense, as there is minimal demand for books here.
There is not really much book culture to speak of in Oman; though my brothers study their textbooks sometimes, entertainment is all from the TV and movies. As I understand it, books historically have never been popular here. I think this might be from this idea that there is no reason to do anything on your own. Nobody goes into public alone, few people have much personal space, and the concept of self-reliance that is so popular in the U.S. is replaced with a focus on community and reputation. I feel now that it is worth mentioning the odd response I have had to this inaccessibility of books. It’s not conscious, or at least I haven’t acknowledged it fully up until now, as I come back to the keyboard from reading an issue of Discover magazine. The magazine is the last of four that I brought with me from the States. I have not been reading them as a normal person reads magazines, just as I have not been reading the short book that I brought with me in the way that most people read books. I have been rationing them: I just started the fourth, and in about a week I will have only a fourth of the program left. The book only comes into my mind when I feel most homesick and is titled Travels with Charley. It is by John Steinbeck and was given to me by my brother. In it, the author recounts his roadtrip through the U.S. searching for an American identity. It lets me quit taking such an entirely pessimistic view of the world when I am feeling lowest, because in it, Steinbeck takes a really romantic view of Americans, a view that I would have trouble finding on my own. I would be set to finish this book very, very slowly a couple weeks before I leave, but my friend really wanted to borrow it, so I didn’t finish it.

Sorry for the tangent.

Back to the ECSSR. They are a thinktank, and had me entertaining ideas of working at a similar place during the whole time we visited. They have meeting space there where they can host lectures and forums, and have a section of the building committed to monitoring and summarizing news, and making sure that important people are called if something urgent happens. One of their main endeavors is publishing articles and books. All in all, it is an impressive building that has received some important guests and done some interesting stuff. I would much rather work for a thinktank elsewhere, maybe one where I could have a little more self-direction, but I will be honest and say that I have no idea what I want to do for a loving. I can tell you with some certainty that after doing anything for three months straight with 40-hour workweeks, I will be ready to get out and explore something else.

On first arriving to Abu Dhabi women’s technical college, I thought that this particular school’s commitment to women’s education was unique. It is not the only women’s technical college in the region, and it is not necessarily feminist: in fact there is one in each of the Emirates, and it is really just segregation, because there is also a men’s technical college in each of the Emirates. It was excellently funded and easily outclassed the technical college we saw in Nizwa, Oman. In Abu Dhabi, their curriculum was not outdated and their graphic design students were learning to use Photoshop CS. They have many other similarly advanced programs and several computer labs. They were doing a lot more critical thinking than what I expected going into a technical school-I guess that I was thinking more along the lines of trade school. The women students that I have met in this entire region always impress me more than their male counterparts, and I have heard the same thing from teachers at a couple of schools. I did not meet the men of the parallel technical school, but I was impressed by the students that I met at this college.

During a question and answer session we had with the students at the school, one of the students asked a disturbing question of a religion studies major in our group. She asked, “When you studied religion in the U.S., did they teach you the difference between Islam & terrorism?”
My jaw hit the floor. I am sorry that somewhere she picked up that idea of my country. The American answered as well as one could, I guess, and I was glad that the student had raised that question in conversation if that was her concern. Then I felt great that I was here trying to change people’s perceptions of where I am from.

If either of the guys in Ratatat is reading (which is likely), let me thank you for releasing your second mixtape for free on your website, I think it’s great.

There is one more thing I think I should remind people of, which is appropriate situations to yell “Remix!”
When there is a total change of plans and your whole next couple of hours will be different than how you thought, you can yell “Remix!” and be well received. This is the application that I most useful day-to-day. Possibly due to the unpredictable nature of our adventures here, I have been yelling this a lot, and my peers have found new applications for the yelling of “Remix!” I think it is pretty awesome. Also, yelling “Remix!” is very appropriate when a song comes on that is a remix of another song (obviously). While we are on this topic, I am happy to inform all of you that I have been dubbed C-Monster by my very awesome fellow SIT student Chase Cooper, and he usually yells it when we meet and then I pretend I am a sea-monster.

Looks like it is about bed-time. My brother just got into bed in the room we share. I assumed that he would be up for a while because it’s the weekend and he opened a can of mountain dew and had half a snickers bar like half an hour ago. This is the brother that asked me what I was doing when I was flossing my teeth a few days back. Modernization comes in weird ways, I guess. Like how the concept of ‘diet’ has reached Oman: one of my brothers skips dinner every night because he wants get in shape for soccer, but instead of eating dinner he has a couple donuts, a bag of chips and a bottle of juice. The rice and chicken might serve him better. The concept of what constitutes a healthy diet just hasn’t reached here completely, and this is why many Omanis end up with adult onset diabetes. Yet my brother is trying, and doing really well at restraint: he abstains from pop, just as I do, he just doesn’t quite have all the knowledge that would help him live healthily. Mom, I congratulate you on cooking more healthily than my dietician mom in Oman. This also comes from the focus on community and less value of independent action, I think. The kids and the husband all complain when the food is healthy at the cost of being delicious in the ways that they are used to and they always want KFC. The mom gets tired and makes compromises, though she always puts a salad on the table, which I eat half of. When she is not around to prepare dinner we usually get something fried delivered to the house.

Sorry that this post has been so scatterbrained. Happy late birthday to my dad, and thanks for all the postings from everybody. Marcie’s link on Al-Jazeera is pertinent and appreciated: if you are curious about the topic I recommend it.

The paper is decent but slow.

From Muscat,
Charlie

Bonus letter extension! (I hate writing p.s.:  a friend just sent me a link to an online application.  It is called Free Rice.  The premise is that you pass little multiple-choice  vocabulary tests and for every correct answer wins 10 grains of rice for somebody.  Somehow the rice distribution is handled by the U.N.  Also your words get harder as you get more words right.  I am sorry if you have better things to do and get addicted to this, but I had to tell you.

Part One: Qatar

Hey Everybody,
For most of the day after class today, I was convinced my head was broken.  This might be, in part, because I am totally stressing, hopefully unnecessarily, about my project that is done at the end of the semester.  Regardless of the fact that I have over 3 weeks to work on it, I remain terrified at the prospect of feeling that I have wasted this time when it is time for my presentation.  It seems that I should be able to get everything done, as I don’t have many other responsibilities for this amount of time, but the fact remains that I have never written a focused, unified paragraph, much less a 30+ page paper.  I guess the main problem for me is that there is not much of a quiet space in this house, and I can’t find my earplugs.  I was reading this evening, and when my brother started praying, everyone else got quieter, and I realized that the only reason I felt like my head was broken all day was the cacophony that I was trying to make it work in.

Anyway, I got back from Dubai yesterday, and I think a test about it destroyed me today.  Anyway, I thought because of the stress, and because I am big into disciplining and organizing my writing (at least in theory) lately, the coverage of my latest journey will be split into 3 parts: these will be devoted to Qatar, Abu Dhabi, and Dubai, respectively.

Part One: Doha, Qatar
Have you heard of Qatar?  If you were here or I had an easy way of sharing, I would draw you a picture.  Anyway, the Emir of Qatar is banking on you saying “Yes, I have!” in a way that nobody would have twenty years ago, and then when I ask you “Why’s that, friend?” you (in this imaginary scenario) would respond “Because that is where the well respected yet controversial news station Al-Jazeera is based, of course!”  This would likely end in our sharing a laugh at the ridiculousness of my skepticism about your knowing where an awesome place like Qatar is.

At least that is what the Emir is banking on, and that is why he is funding a news station that has been losing money for most, if not all years of its existence.  Al-Jazeera is Qatar’s big claim to fame, and though it is not all that Qatar has to offer, our tour of the station was one of the more fascinating experiences in the country.  Like anyone would be, I was fascinated by the bright lights, the attractive colors, and the mysterious black painted technical stuff hanging from ceilings everywhere in the building.  It was also exciting to be escorted around the building by someone that let us take pictures, yet warned us all every couple minutes of the terrible fate that would befall anyone using a flash.  I guess the threat of danger makes everything a little more exciting.  We also saw the biggest plasma-wall in the world I think, which was totally unnecessary and mostly just doing what a lot of money placed in self-conscious autocrats’ hands does: catching a little glory just because nobody else spends money in such impractical ways.  Another example of this is the title of largest carpet, I think held by the largest mosque in Abu Dhabi.  Oman’s Grand Mosque comes in at around 7th in the world, as I am guessing most Omanis in Muscat would be able to tell you.  Anyway, the station was interesting, especially the halls that commemorated the three reporters ever lost by the station.  One died shortly after two U.S. rocket-propelled grenades struck the station’s Baghdad office in 2003, I forget what happened to another, and the third, a cameraman, is being held in U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.  Being told about these things and being an American didn’t feel as uncomfortable as I would expect to.  There was no accusation, no placing of blame, just statement of fact by our tour guide.  Nobody apologized for the deaths, we all just kind of silently looked at the exhibition of the reporters final field notes, his vest, a quote from him, and a wall dedicated to those that died.  That room ended our tour.  I should say that I am a fan of NPR and BBC, as well as Al-Jazeera, and that many Arabs feel a level of pride about the station being more or less theirs.  We got to ask questions of one of their more popular reporters, a very composed journalist with dual citizenship in the U.S. and Iraq, and I was impressed.  I even think I might watch his show some online.  I almost wish that U.S. cable providers would carry the station so more people could see it in the States: none of them carry it because they think they would lead to a boycott of their station.  It is either that, in which case I am disappointed in the U.S. markets (yet sort of proud that they would be so politically motivated), or just that that is an easy excuse for these companies not to carry media against which they are biased.  Well, Inside Iraq streams over at the station’s website, or if you have satellite television you can check it out.  I have never seen it.

So the TV station dominated the full day we spent in Qatar, but that evening we went to Qatar’s Education City, wherein the Emir’s wife gives enormous sums of money to really reputable schools in the U.S. to get them to establish campuses in Qatar, where their professors will teach and they will give degrees identical to those given to students on their original campuses.  It was really impressive, and I cannot believe the amount of money a few people have around here.  I also can’t believe the noble ways they spend it sometimes.  I will say that this is the only place I have seen recycling bins here, and there was an environmentalist group of students that hit the campus with a ton of posters about how important water, paper, and energy conservation is.  I just wanted to hug them (which is, just like recycling, something I haven’t done since getting here).  Wikipedia will hook up all the dry details on the city.

Snap! This is getting long.  Let me just say that we wandered for miles in Doha, all around the capitol, after dark in places that I would never feel safe in a U.S. city: seriously, there aren’t major problems with violent crime in any of these modernizing Middle Eastern cities.  I understand all the ridiculously wealthy American tourists around here.  On the other hand, I don’t really see those people wandering through the Qatari ghetto/industrial areas, either; I think we have different concepts of fun.

I’m sending my best energies to all the soldiers, police people, and protesters that have been caught up in the recent action at the port of Olympia, especially all the soldiers contaminated by depleted uranium ammo that might’ve been manufactured right next to the Twin Cities, where I’m from.

Don’t let the haters get you down, I’ll be back up in this internet business in a couple days.
Charlie

longwinded and undignified (sorry)

Hey world!

I am back from Nizwa and typing this up in Muscat with my three home-stay brothers aged 10, 13 and 15. I really enjoyed my stay in Nizwa, and I think our group on the whole had a pretty great time. Of course there were exceptions: mostly for some of the women of our group with creepy host-dads or uncles. I’ll talk about the city and our accommodations, then some of our daytrips, then the people we stayed with.

Nizwa is not rural in the sense of the word that I was thinking (like Frederic or possibly Deerfield, Wisconsin), but was more of a college town. There were lots on lots of little shops like any city scene in Oman: I think Omanis are much more supportive of small business on the whole than Americans are. There were also a few incredible castles restored for tourism and three or four colleges. All of the guys stayed at houses of male college students. We were lucky to have six students plus the three of us Americans in a two-bedroom house, because the other three American gents had 14(?) hosts in a 5(?) bedroom house. Anyway, the accommodations were interesting, meaning when we got there, my friend Steve said their kitchen made his frat house kitchen look like you could perform surgery in it, and the bathroom was somewhat less than ideal. The bed was more than I would have expected and I slept great, and our hosts could not have been finer (more on them later).

On this trip, we went to some of the most beautiful places I may have ever been. I may venture to say that my discomfort with being a tourist might have made my wandering through one quiet village even better. I was apprehensive about the whole situation because I didn’t want to be too invasive, but I continued on because I was on the path in the village designated for tourists, so I wouldn’t accidentally see any women with their hair exposed or anything. The village was built into the side of a valley, with water coming from a natural spring, then directed all through the village to the different farm plots through a network of canals. The canyon would have been beautiful on its own, layers of red rock with carefully farmed date palms filling the bottom of it, but the near-complete absence of people at that time of day and the immaculately maintained canals made the village incredible and absolutely awesome.

The most interesting daytrips we had were to the colleges in the area. We spent two days at the College of Applied Sciences where our host brothers all went to school, and one day at Nizwa Technical College. We also sat in for an hour at an all-boys elementary school where my friend Saleh taught a class of fifth-graders English. The women at the colleges whose families were not local to Nizwa lived on-campus in dorm-like housing, but with supervisors for groups of ten or so women. At one of the schools, the women could only leave the campus once a week, and only if they paid a man to drive them on a circuit of places to shop. They could also leave if they had a medical emergency or if they got a signed note from their supervisor to give to the security officer. It didn’t sound like that happened very often. The women and men may share professors and classrooms, but not hallways in between classes or cafeterias, and the girls sit in a back corner of the class where they will not divert the men’s attention from learning. All the restraint falls on the women as men are expected to have none. It was also really different to me to see women doing welding and working high-speed machine tools while wearing loose fitting headscarves down almost to their elbows. We asked our guide, and he said that decency did not permit them to remove their hijab, but there were never accidents because they are careful.

The six guys we stayed with were great. They took really great care of us, welcomed us into their social groups, and invited us to everything they did and everywhere they went. They were really patient at teaching us Arabic, but had excellent English skills as well. We corrected their English papers, and they answered all our questions. On the first night we got there, we were out for fresh juice and we had a great discussion about politics. Among the words they taught us were two different words in Arabic for “fart,” and plenty of comparably tasteful words were among those we taught them. If you are curious, in Arabic, the verb for farting is dependant on the sound it makes, and one of these words is fisswa, I think, while the other is a rolled ‘r’ and a ‘b’. I know this might not be up to many of your standards of decency, and I am sorry, but it is uncomfortable moments like this one that really make up a study abroad experience, as odd as that sounds. We bonded a lot, and I have gotten a couple text messages from them, one saying that this was the best week of his life and the other saying that we will always maintain our relationship. Plus now at least fifty Nizwa college kids have my email address, so I think that makes for some really interesting for months to come.

I am sorry I am so longwinded and tasteless, post or write with questions or advice and I’ll work on it. On the day after tomorrow we leave for Qatar to Abu Dhabi to Dubai for a week, then have a month to research and write our Independent Study Projects (ISP’s)

Peace.

Oo, plus I have a short story. Let me preface it with the fact that among the folk at Widjiwagan, my summer camp home-away-from-home, I am terrible at throwing. We often throw rocks and all of my voyageur group and most of staff can beat me consistently at distance, aiming, or speed: really, any type of throwing game you can think up after a hundred or so days camping. In Nizwa, I was champion at throwing. We had our group of six I think that night, and as the sun set, we threw rocks, and then Faisal set up a found can on a big rock nearby. Through miraculous luck, I hit the can both times we played. Sorry that was so self indulgent, but it made me happy, and I hope it makes you outdoors-folk out there smile.

Weekend Debrief

Well everybody, it looks like I am heading into a difficult stretch where I am not going to get to post or be in any sort of contact for a while.  This week I won’t get to write much because it is our last week of classes and everything is due on Wednesday.  On Thursday I leave for the program’s rural homestay.  It will last for around ten days, and will practically, if not entirely, take me out of contact.  I will try to talk about the trip I just returned from, though, because if I don’t write now I’ll forget it.
This post is, for the most part, all about the weekend we just spent in the desert and in eastern Oman.  We saw sea turtles, slept under the stars in the desert (which was freezing), talked with a Bedouin family living a traditional nomadic lifestyle, jumped off cliffs in a cave, and went dune-bashing.  Some of us rode a camel, too.  That is the short story, but I thought I would include a way-too-long and mostly complete story for those of you that are retired, bored, or hanging on my every word.  Otherwise, you can skip to the end.

We left for the desert on Wednesday morning.  The bus came to pick me up at 7:30 and we were on the road.  We headed east as we were to camp in the desert near Sur, the easternmost city in Arabia.  We rode around in what were called 4x4s, jeeps with 4-wheel drive.  The drivers drive people around to tourist destinations all year round and would be our transportation until they drove us home on Friday.  On Wednesday, though, we went dune-bashing, which is just driving around on the dunes, mostly on tracks that looked like they had been driven on once or twice before.  The cars had pretty loose suspensions and we bottomed out once or twice, but for the most part, the ride was really smooth.  I guess the soft sands had something to do with that.  I think we were causing environmental damage, but I don’t know much about desert ecosystems and didn’t want to ruin the afternoon, so I stayed quiet, except to express excitement as we drove down 45° slopes on an avalanche of red-orange sand.

In the late afternoon we were let free in the very established camp where we would be spending the night.  Five of us set off to the highest dunes in the area with nothing but a bottle of water amongst us and didn’t stop until we got to the top, where we hung out for an hour and a half until the sun was down and we wanted to be able to see the wire fence we had to jump to get back to camp.  We jumped it, then laid looking up at the stars until dinner, which was excellent.

On Friday, we drove to one of the many small towns in the area after stopping at some Bedouins’ home and talking with them for an hour or so over dates and coffee.  Apparently this is a regular tourist event, and I felt the same way that I did through much of the weekend, intrusive and out of place, but trying to make up for it by getting genuine insight and knowledge out of the experience.  We were no different to the Bedouin from the French women we would see at the wadi that afternoon wearing bikinis and having a “genuine” experience in Oman, regardless of lack of understanding and complete disregard for cultural norms.  We were maybe a little too probing and maybe overstepped our bounds a bit, but got back in the cars and left eventually, and they had something to talk about for the rest of the day and a bit more money for later.  My interpretation of their lifestyle is that they are not living in the towns because the government lets them live without paying taxes within commuting distance, and they don’t have the money to live in town.  They have no education and few resources to elevate their standard of living above what they would traditionally have in a migratory lifestyle, so they keep their living arrangements somewhat romantic and get some money from tourists.  The men do raise a small herd (4 camels and some goats) of livestock, but work in the town as laborers, and actually move onto the farms there for date harvest season.

We stopped on the outskirts of town and looked at the irrigation systems for the farms.  They are irrigating with water that is becoming more saline every year because the groundwater resources are exhausted.  For drinking, they pipe in water from miles away.  In Sur, they are building a desalination plant, where the government will use lots of energy to make drinkable water out of seawater, then hugely subsidize it so that people use as much water as people use anywhere in the world.  An interesting note on water use is that everyone must keep their cars clean all the time, which means every couple days they need to wash their cars.  To maintain cleanliness in the desert is very difficult and consumptive of water resources.  Islam stresses cleanliness, so it is especially important here, where 5 times a day everyone washes their hands, feet, and face.

Next, we went to a wadi, where fresh water flows out of springs in the mountains.  Before the water is used for drinking and irrigation, everyone goes swimming in it.  The wadi was a real tourist hotspot, and the water was great, the rocks were beautiful, and it was fun, despite the teenage boys that gaped and laughed at the women in our group, despite the fact that they were all in pants and black T-shirts.

We ate at a restaurant, tried to go to a dhow-making yard that had burned down a week before, and slept in a hotel after going to see sea turtles.  We saw one as it was laying eggs.  The ranger was pretty loud and excited and the swarm of tourists clustered around the back of the turtle.  In the light of their dual flashlights, one of them held back its flipper so we could see the eggs drop into the hole half a meter deep.  Once it finished laying eggs, tourists clustered all around it, and many petted it.  I think it was terrified.

Friday, we headed for home.  We drove along the coastal highway that is under construction to help make Sur more accessible.  This is because the government is trying to spread development projects around the country more than they are currently, and liquid natural gas is taking off in Sur, as well as a large Oman-India fertilizer plant.  We went to another, much less popular wadi on the way back, we had to hike about 40 minutes to get to water worth swimming in.  Then we swam up it farther until we reached the caves it came out of.  For a distance it was barely big enough for one to fit their head through above water, then it opened up into a naturally lit, orange walled cavern where some local kids showed us good cliffs to jump off of.  One of them was crazy and jumped off a 40+ foot cliff to land within arms-length of rocks above the water.  Good thing it dropped off fast.  We stopped at a huge sinkhole on the way home and got back in time for a little studying.

Family, I miss you and the ridiculousness.  Thanks for the posts and I was thinking I want to maybe make custom cookie cutters for Christmas this year?  Like ninjas and stuff.  We already have dinosaurs, but I am psyched for baking and decorating of cookies.  Suzanne, I would love to hear the full story of your visiting friend from Rwanda, because I don’t have any friends from Rwanda.  Over winter break I’m sure I’ll see a lot of your family regardless.  Mike, Eid is over, and I am back to pursuing sweets instead of running from them.  Thanks for everyone for their correspondence, sorry for the crazy-long post.  Jose Gonzales and Sufjan Stevens make up my desert soundtrack, if anyone is curious.
Ok, now I have to actually study for the essay-test that is going to destroy me tomorrow.
Charlie