Day 2 and 3

So the last two days have been pretty jam-packed - all yesterday, until around 2, we had orientation, and then one of the academic directors, Soltan, took us on a bus tour of Muscat. The city is beautiful, and incredibly spread out. Soltan drew us a map of the city to try to describe the layout, with the sea on one side and the mountains on the other: the first picture shows his diagram. The architecture is awesome too; it's also amazing how much construction is going on throughout the city! It really shows how quickly the city is modernizing and changing. I was also surprised by all the mountains. The water is beautiful too. Oh and we saw the Sultan Qaboos's TWO yachts, which are hugeeee. We thought they were cruise ships haha. We later found out there is a movement to nominate the Sultan for the Nobel Peace Prize - you can follow him on twitter @ http://twitter.com/#!/nobpeacpzqaboos :)

After our tour, we came back to the hotel to cool off and relax before heading out again to one of the hypermarkets in town, Lulu's.

Now this was a cultural experience. Weekends here are Thursday and Friday instead of Saturday and Sunday like back home, so we should have expected the rush, since we were going at 6pm Friday night, when no one had work. But no one really knew what to expect, and the parking lot really didn't seem very full. Few of us even thought to cover. Honestly, it was one of the more uncomfortable moments in my life - not only were there little to no other white people in sight, there were certainly no other blonde young females walking around uncovered other than me and the other two blondes on the trip. We entered as a group - mistake number two. None of us knew where to go or where to start - this place was gigantic, two floors, literally aisles as far as the eyes could see. It was like a double-decker Costco, but Costco is never so crowded that you can barely move your cart along. To make a long story short, after two hours of negotiating a cart through masses of people who not only speak a foreign language but stare at you because you are so obviously out of place, we finally made it out into outside into the heat and humidity. Even at 8, the air is thick with moisture. But even though some of the other girls had an issue with one specific creepy Omani man (who asked a few girls if they wanted to marry him and then proceeded to show up at our hotel this morning), the experience wasn't a negative one - it was more a learning experience. As I spent more time in the store, I became more comfortable with the setting and realized that even if they stared, the random men weren't planning on harassing me at all - we were just some interesting and extremely unusual occurrence, and therefore solicited much more attention than usual. Its not unusual for Americans to stare at people who don't fit the stereotype of the local population so why should Arabs be held to any higher of a standard? In the future, I do plan to cover and dress as modestly as possible, in addition to speaking as much Arabic as possible, but not because I feel threatened, but because I want to respect the norms of the society that I am planning on living in for the next two months.

Today we saw another amazing aspect of the common culture here - we started bright and early at the Grand Mosque of Sultan Qaboos. From our tour yesterday, it was apparent how important mosques and the flowing architecture is. The Mosque was incredibly beautiful, from both the inside and the outside. The attention to detail, the engraving, the mosaics and just the general way that something so intricate and complex can be created to appear so simple and calming. The whole complex seemed so clean and organized. All of the girls had to be completely covered, neck to wrist to ankle as well as all of our hair, particularly to enter the main prayer room. Soltan told us that the Mosque has the second largest chandelier and the second largest rug, both of which were stunning but not overwhelming.

Finally, we returned to the World Learning Center to meet our teachers and have our first class. My class is only five people, all of us girls. It's pretty sweet :) Our teacher, Rahma, is super nice, switching fluidly from MSA to OCA and dropping in the occasional English when we reallyyyy had no idea what she was saying. Two sessions on OCA, with a short interlude for lunch (which were these tortilla things with french fries, meet and salad - slightly reminiscent of a good ole California burrito) and we were ready to go out and speak Omani. Except not really, as we found out when most of us were trying to use our new knowledge with our new Peer Facilitators. These too, are small groups of three students with one Omani young adult. My PF, Rasha, is such a sweet heart; she's 22 and is studying translation from Arabic to English at the University here in Muscat. We talked about food, dancing, music, sports, cooking... everything we could possibly think of in regards to the few words we know in Arabic at this point. By the time we got on the bus, all of us were exhausted and pretty worn out from about 4 hours of constant Arabic - switching between MSA and OCA. I know it will get easier as we go along, and thank god everyone is fine speaking a little English from time to time!

Another side note, if I wanted to get back into running, this is the place it will happen. Women generally don't really work out much here, especially not in public. So no running or exercising outside. And with all our work and full days, finding a bigger gym is probably just not going to happen. So I think my last resort for keeping sane will by the mini gym on the 5th floor of the hotel - it contains 2 treadmills, a weight machine, some free weights and 2 bosu balls. That's it. So I guess I'll be starting to run everyday from now on? Great....

Bedtime, got a full day of class tomorrow - Soltan is teaching our MSA class in the morning, and in addition to the two OCA classes before and after lunch, we have a lecture on Omani culture. I think were also venturing to Lulu's again, hopefully with more comfortable results! Goodnight all! Ma3-salaama

xoxo