Trip to Muscat

I finally got my email adress from work today plus a guy from the bank HSBC was here as i will get a local bank account. Finally feels like I am settling in… Unfortunately I still dont have work – so finally I have time to write about our Oman trip last weekend. One step at a time…

We were 8 people on the trip. My landlord and his Italian girlfriend/wife (I’m not sure about their status) 3 of my flatmates, one girl from the flat upstairs and another French guy. The trip started fine at 6 am in the morning, we were early at the border, didnt have to line up for a long time, got our visas and the car insurances and could continue Muscat.
Close to Muscat the problems started to appear. Cause obviously Shahid, our landlord had some other plan in mind than the rest of us. He wanted to stay in a fancy Hotel and started looking for one somewhere in the outskirts of Muscat without really knowing where to go… (we weren’t asked about asked about our opinion at all) so while driving around in circles the fight between him and his gilrfriend/wife started… and didnt stop. After what seemed to be hours we finally could convince him that all of us wanted to stay somewhere cheap close to the center… Then we started looking for a beach and the whole driving around without any clue where to go started all over… I have no clue how many wrong turns we took… But we did find some beach in the end and even were lucky not to pay anything. Unfortunately the sun was already down so we soon had to head back to the hotel and the whole arguing started another time about where to have dinner… not to mention that we took the wrong road back from the beach and were lost one more time…
But in the end we had some decent dinner and we found the market/souq to walk around… which at this time already closed down.

So next day we decided to change plans and split up into smaller groups so everybody could do their own thing and was happy in the end…
I ended up wandering around the city with Audrey, the French girl from upstairs, as we both had the same idea about how we wanted to spend the little time we had. The weather was beautiful, the sun was shining so we went to discover the city. Only once we were disturbed by a yound Omani guy following us in his car trying to hit on us… but after several turns and twist we got rid of him as well…
We went back  to the market where we spent hours bargaining for the scarves made in Oman… too many colours from which to decide…. but in the end we were successfull and broke… After lunch we headed back to Dubai where we had fantastic cheap Pakistani dinner.
As we only have two bathrooms in our flat the only fight we had was who could shower the sand and dirt off first…

I loved Oman. Its not the most exciting place to be but its a beautiful place to be. The landscape is amazing and the people are so layed back, relaxed and friendly. If you live in Dubai its amazing to see locals working as Taxi drivers and in the supermarkets… actually amazing to see locals at all. All dressed up in their traditional local style. All of us girls decided unanimously that the Omani man are pretty handsome.
Definitely a place where you can relax from Dubai – the city that never sleeps… and definitely worth a visit!