On the Saturday before Eid, Dot and I arrive at Samira’s apartment in our ramshackle rental car.  We will be driving from Muscat to Ibra, a small town in the Sharqiyah region, to celebrate the end of Ramadan with Samira’s family.  As usual, our half-baked travel “itinerary” is 90% Improv and 10% Plan.  Normally, I like to travel with a plan or at least the skeleton of one, but since moving to Oman, I’ve learned that there’s no such things as a premeditated adventure.  Adventure is the thing that hits you over the head when you reach for The Lonely Planet guide to look up the town you just passed, but it’s not in the index because you literally drove off the map.  Getting into the car, I knew there is no way for me to micromanage any part of this trip — and that feeling is as scary as it is exhilarating.

The mountains around Ibra, in Sharqiyah region.

When we arrive at Samira’s house on the Saturday before Eid, her mother greets us exuberantly and informs Dot and I that she will be our Omani mother from that point on.  Very quickly, we take to calling her “Ummi” (my mother), and by the end of the trip, we really mean it.

That evening, everyone is huddled around the television waiting to find out if the Eid starts tomorrow, or the following day.  The start of the holiday is dictated by lunar cycles, and Oman’s religious leaders have to spot the first sliver of the new moon before declaring the start of Eid.  The news anchor is fielding calls from regional leaders across Oman.  Apparently, every wilayat has to report a naked-eye sighting of the new moon before the leaders can declare the end of Ramadan, which my Muslim companions have all grown weary of by this point.  Unfortunately, it’s a cloudy night — and the elusive new moon is hidden from view.  Ramadan will continue for another day.

Samira’s family is as disappointed about the delay as Dot and I.  Unlike our last trip, we didn’t pack an emergency stash of water and pumpkin seeds.  Even if eating were an option, we decide to fast out of respect for Samira and her family.  The day goes by quickly, since we sleep through most of it.  Accustomed to a constant and copious supply of water, I’m more than parched by the time we break the fast.  Together, Dot and I consume a tray of Omani bread and several liters of water.  We feel sleepy and sated, but the night is far from over.

Pretty soon, “Ummi” is mixing up a bowl of henna, made from scratch.  Samira tells us that you

Henna paste, made from ground leaves, is used to decorate hands and feet during Eid. Dot and I display our henna-ized soles, here.

can’t “feel the Eid” without henna, although she isn’t a big fan of the strong-smelling body art herself.  Ummi loves to cover her daughters’ feet with henna, but they’ve grown less enthusiastic about the process in recent years.  Samira warns us that it’s difficult to go to sleep with the wet henna caked on the soles of our feet, and the color might stay for weeks.  But Ummi practically corners us, and we realize that there’s no graceful way to decline the henna.  Samira’s younger sisters gleefully spread newspapers on the bed and tap the perimeters of our feet, to ensure a clear line at the edge of the henna smear.

Dot and I lie side by side on the bed and listen as Ummi slathers the green sludge on our feet and tells us about the Oman her daughters never saw: an Oman without roads, hospitals or schools.  Like most older Omanis I have encountered, she lavishes praise on Sultan Qaboos and his massive development projects.

The daughter of a family friend wears traditional Omani dress on the second day of Eid.

I wake up the next morning in a pile of crusty henna remnants and scrape the remaining matter off of my feet in the shower.  Everyone will wear Omani national dress today, including Dot and I.  Samira’s family makes new outfits every year for this occasion.  The jewel-toned tunics and pants are stitched entirely by hand, as are the intricately embroidered bands around the ankles and wrists.  The pants billow comfortably above the knees, but are close-fitting above the bottom hem.  The fabric hugs my ankles so tightly, that it takes me a few minutes to shimmy the band over my American-sized foot.

Only after I’m fully clothed in ceremonial regalia do I realize that I forgot to use the bathroom before dressing.  Now, the two liters of water I just chugged are catching up to me, and I can’t bring myself to ask whether or not it’s permissible to pee in Omani national dress.  We’re leaving the house in a few minutes for an undisclosed destination, were we will be spending an unspecified amount of time.  It’s time to make a judgment call.  I slide on the communal flipflops that Samira’s family keeps in the bathroom for hygiene purposes and gingerly position myself over the squat toilet.  I barely know how to use this utility when I’m wearing Western clothing, and I’m terrified of defiling the beautiful garment.

Afterwards, I congratulate myself for leaving the ceremonial dress unblemished and stumble out of the bathroom and back into the girls’ room.  That’s when I realize that I’m still wearing the communal flip flops that are strictly for bathroom-use only.  I freeze and look down at my feet.  There’s no way to pretend that these are ordinary shoes.  Everyone knows what they are, and where I just came from.  Samira’s youngest sister bursts out laughing and can’t stop.  My cheeks turn red with shame.  Fortunately, we’re in too much of a hurry to let the gaffe slow us down, and Samira ushers her sisters out of the room.

We pay a brief visit to a relative’s home and cruise around Ibra for a couple of hours, as Samira points out various sites.  We return home to receive a string of visitors.  Each time, we sit around a tray of popcorn, dates and pastries and exchange niceties with the guests.  Someone is always offering me food, and it’s unthinkably rude to turn it down.  By evening time, we’ve had half a dozen rounds of refreshments and my cultural sensitivity is starting to fray around the edges.  Any moment, I’m going to fall into a sugar-induced coma.  Fortunately, Samira senses my fatigue and offers to take Dot and I to the outermost dunes of Wahiba Sands, a vast swath of desert that covers much of the Sharqiyah region.  It’s just a short drive from Ibra, and we jump at the opportunity.

Women don’t usually travel without a male escort in this area, so Samira needs to get her mother’s permission before we leave for the desert.  Naturally, Ummi tells us that this plan is deeply flawed.  She explains that the bedou and other young men are “majnoon” (crazy) and will make “mushakil” (problems) if they see us.  “Why are they dangerous?” I ask.  Much to my surprise, Ummi has devised an elaborate theory to explain the moral degeneracy of certain young Omani males.  Some mothers stop breast feeding the boys when they reach the age of two, at which point they switch to formula milk.  The artificial formula leads to cognitive abnormalities, Ummi explains without batting an eyelash.  This is why the “shabab” (young men) are so incredibly majnoon. She insists on accompanying us, because the bedou won’t approach an older woman like herself.  We gladly oblige, and Ummi climbs into the car wearing full Omani dress.  I can’t imagine a more fearsome travel companion, and it’s easy to see how Samira became the strong woman that she is.

An hour later, we reach Munturab, a town built on the barely habitable outskirts of the sprawling Wahiba Sands.  Appropriately, the Arabic name Muntarab means “Dusty Place.”  It certainly lives up to its name.  Driving through a plot of parched date palms owned by a family friend, we stop

Dot runs up a dune on the outskirts of the Wahiba Sands desert.

the car when the road ends, just a few yards from a sweeping, honey-colored dune.  Feeling a little stir-crazy after a day of obligatory social visits, Dot, Samira and I sprinted up the first dune to get a view of the vast desert beyond.  “Ummi” — still wearing the vibrant Omani dress — stays behind, arms-crossed while her ever-vigilant eyes track our progress up the embankment.  Of course, when we reach the top — all we can see is another slightly higher dune.  When I turn around, I can’t see our car or the small goat pens at the edge of the desert.  All day, my hair has been feeling matted and sweaty under my clumsily wound scarf.  With the fabric against my scalp, our non-air-conditioned car feels like a pressure cooker, and I’ve been waiting all day to remove the shila.   Behind the dunes, we’re invisible to the gaggle of Muntarab residents who are slowly coalescing in the gravel lot where our car is parked.  I gladly unwind the scarf and let the perspiration evaporate in the dry, twilight air.  This is the first time my hair has been exposed outdoors since we donned our unfashionably plain abayas in Muscat, and my head feels almost obscene without the requisite shila.

The sun is setting and “Ummi” reins us in.  We climb back into the car and backtrack through windy streets and onto the main road that leads to Ibra.  When we return to Samira’s house, we drink heavy zatar tea, which seems to be the default activity around here.  Samira’s tea is suspiciously rich, and when she lets us watch her make it, I learn that the secret ingredient is baby formula.  In between sips of the creamy brew, I glance at the television, which has been on since we arrived in Ibra.  Samira’s energetic cousins straddle the sofas like horses.  One of them brandishes a toy automatic rifle and throws a pillow at me.  No one is really watching the television, but it is perpetually tuned into Omani talk shows, cartoons, or American sitcoms.  Every so often, a public health bulletin appears, urging Omanis to avoid large gatherings and wash their hands at every opportunity.

Oman launched a massive public health campaign to discourage physical contact and large gatherings over the Eid holiday. Here's an add from the local newspaper:

Anxiety over the recent surge in swine flu cases has put a palpable chill on this year’s festivities.  Social visits are less frequent than in previous years, and guests greet their hosts with air kisses, always maintaining a safe distance.

Outside in the unlighted yard, Ummi is baking Omani bread on an outdoor stove.  She squashes the wet dough onto a fiery hot slab, leaving a think film that quickly hardens into a circular wafer.  Peeling the paper-thin bread off of the griddle, Ummi lays it in a bin on top of dozens of identical sheets.  She repeats process for over an hour, until the bin is stacked to the brim with the delicate bread.  Dot and I can’t quite stomach the assortment of roasted meats paraded before us, so we eat as much of the Omani bread as we can.  Quickly, we discover that our hosts can’t give us more food if our hands are still full, so I cling to the bread for as long as possible.

Ummi bakes a batch of Omani bread on the outdoor stove.

In between social visits — by relatives, neighbors, and friends — Samira, Dot and I retreat to the girls’ room, where we try on an assortment of traditional Omani dresses, and some of the less traditional frocks favored by Samira.  At this point, we’ve already relinquished control over our bodies — now adorned with several square feet of henna — so we passively sit back and watch Samira select two dresses from a closet bulging with abayas and glittering evening wear.  Dot is a good five inches taller than the average Omani, so Samira gives her the longest dress in the closet — a sleek, black and white-printed sheath with a matching khaki blazer.  I admire the sophistication of the design and hope for a similar outfit.  But apparently, Samira wanted me to channel my inner sorceress:

Playing dress-up in Samira's room.

Between the dress and the steady consumption of sucrose-slathered pastries, I’m feeling pretty animated by the third night of Eid.  I had run out of clean pants and desperately wanted something to change into after spending the day in my Technicolor mumu. Grabbing the wazir (men’s wrap skirt) that I use as a bedspread, I tie it on over some soccer shorts.  Immediately, Samira’s younger sisters collapse into convulsions of hysterical laughter.  I’m accustomed to ridicule by now, and decide to embrace it.  Figuring that I’ve already maxed out on cultural faux-pas’s, I start mimicking the dance traditionally performed by Omani men, who wield their walking sticks to the rhythm of a drum beat.  Kawthar’s younger sister, Reema, is rolling on the floor now, and it feels good to make someone laugh.  This is the first time I’ve seen any of the girls let loose since we arrived on Saturday.  I start imitating a sartan (crab), then a nim’r (tiger), a booma (owl), and so forth, until I’ve exhausted my surprisingly well-stocked arsenal of Arabic animal vocabulary.  Suddenly, Reema runs out of the room, and for a second I’m worried that my gender-bending performance has gone too far.  When she returns a minute later, Reema announces that she just threw up from laughing so hard.  Apparently, my dance moves induce vomiting.

Everyone is up and dancing now, including Samira’s middle sister — who hasn’t cracked a smile all week.  They are performing a traditional Dhofari dance, which Dot and I try to imitate, awkwardly.  We fall asleep exhausted and wake up the next day to Ummi’s shrill inquiry: “It’s dawn!  Have you prayed yet?”  Samira and her sisters answer with a groggy affirmative.  A couple of hours later, we all wake up to drink zatar tea and pack our bags for the drive home.  Ummi — always eager to make sure that we are eating five times more food than we can metabolically process — hands us a huge plastic bag full of popcorn, dates, and roasted meat.  Thanking her profusely, we stow the food in the trunk, where it will simmer for the duration of the two-hour drive to Muscat.  When we arrive at our apartment, the trunk and everything in it still smells like Eid.

After purchasing my very first abaya (on sale, and a few inches too short), I am packing my bags for a week-long excursion to Ibra — the second largest city in the Sharqiyah region, and home to Samira’s family.  Samira has graciously invited Dot and me to visit her hometown for Eid al-Fitr, a three-day megaholiday marking the end of Ramadan.  Sharqiyah is several shades more conservative than Muscat, where the Starbucks cups are plentiful, as are the Western tourists strutting around in strapless something-or-others.  In an effort to blend in, I bought what is possibly the cheapest and least embellished abaya in all of Muscat.  It gives me the illusion of preparedness for a trip that will undoubtedly defy every single one of my ill-informed expectations.  There’s no way to know what awaits me in Sharqiyah, but I will do my best to describe it on the blog when I return sometime next week.  Speaking of returning, feel free to send out a search party if you don’t hear from me by next Saturday.  Until then, I’m off the grid.  As a placeholder, I’ll leave you with this photo of my new neighbor:

If there are any ornithologists out there, feel free to identify this specimen for me. In the meantime, it will be known as a Window Bird.

Omani blogger Omar Almamari is reporting that an unspecified number of “internet activists” have been detained by government security services and forced to sign pledges of loyalty swearing that they will stop disseminating defamatory statements on blogs and online forums.  In the op-ed, which was originally published on the Arab Media Community’s website, Almamari criticizes the infamous Article 61 of Oman’s Telecommunications Act, which provides justification for censorship and harassment of journalists and forum moderators like Ali al-Zwaidi, who was prosecuted this spring.  That story and others like it are too sensitive to get printed in Oman: We only find out about them through foreign media reports, which the intrepid muckraker(s) over at Muscat Confidential have compiled here.

I wanted to find an English translation of Almamari’s article to publish here, but when I tried to access the English version of the Arab Media Community’s site, I was redirected to this friendly Omantel bulletin:

Avert your eyes: Omantel knows best

I’m pretty sure that the Arab Media Community is exactly what it sounds like: a group of freelance journalists who publish news analysis and commentary to an online forum.  But according to the Omantel bulletin, I just stumbled upon a cesspool of pornographic hackers.  I do appreciate Omantel’s chivalrous efforts to shield me from obscene material, but it’s obvious that the definition of objectionable content is absurdly overbroad.  Article 61 criminalizes all web content that could be construed as “contrary to public order and morality.” This is where I would normally launch into a civil libertarian diatribe, but I can’t get blacklisted by Omantel because my grandparents read this blog — and I’ll have to explain to them why the local telecom giant thinks my blog is a virus factory and/or porn site.

For now, I’ll just say that the internet is amazingly resistant to regulation — so punishing individual bloggers can only put a temporary damper on dissent.

Earlier this week, Dot and I paid a visit to Jane, an American transplant who moved to Muscat in 1992 with her Omani husband and has lived here ever since.  She now runs a non-profit dedicated to preserving and cataloguing traditional Omani garments.  Clothing is the lens through which she views Omani society.  Jane’s living room is decorated like a suburban, Technicolor souk.  When she steps out to order a platter of fruit juices from the kitchen, I furtively whip out my camera to snap a photo of the sumptuous décor, glowing with chandeliers and spastic sequins.  My lens is still sweating from its recent exposure to the vaporous Muscat air, so the image is shrouded with a lurid, red haze.

I imagine that the Love Boat’s VIP lounge looks something like this:

Jane's house is a repository of antique and contemporary Omani garments.

We arranged this meeting to discuss volunteer opportunities at the Center, but spend the first hour of the visit discussing the changes in Omani society that Jane has observed since her arrival 17 years ago.  When she first moved here from Missouri – before the era of hypermarkets and Carrefour – she had to make her own baby food and formula.  By her fifth child, the local grocery stores were beginning to import canned baby food to supply the ballooning expatriate community.  Now she lives in a cozy residential enclave peppered with Porsches and extravagant home irrigation systems.  In a country that is approximately 80 percent desert, suspiciously green lawns are a symbol of affluence.

Oman is no longer the isolated backwater that it was when she arrived, Jane tells us.  The Center’s appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show – as part of a special “international” segment exploring global conceptions of beauty – is evidence of the country’s newfound receptivity to foreign ideas and resources.

After the Center was chosen to produce original footage for the show, Jane had to mobilize a production team in a matter of days.  When Jane found out that a professional crew would charge her OR 10,000 to produce a few minutes of unedited film, the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to appear on Oprah quickly devolved into “this little project from hell,” she says.  Finding a cameraman was the least of her concerns, however.  The footage had to make it through the labyrinthian customs office before shipping overseas, a process that could take up to a week.  But naturally, Oprah’s team had Wasta with the Omani FedEx franchise, so Jane’s footage cleared customs in record-time.

Before we leave, Jane shows us a room that doubles as her personal office and museum.  It’s plastered with vintage postcards depicting traditional Omani dress, embroidered dishdashas and milk-white

Roundabouts: the bane of my existence?

mannequins – molded by the same sculptor who designed Saddam Hussein’s infamous bronze statute in Baghdad.  On our way out, Jane gives us directions back to Qurum.  “Turn right, after the suicide lane,” she says.  This isn’t a particularly meaningful landmark, because every lane is a potential suicide lane in this country.

Flashy textiles turned out to be the theme of the day.  After our meeting with Jane, we meet up with Samira to shop for Eid-appropriate garments

Flashy dresses at Seeb Souk

at the Seeb Souk. During the Eid celebration that marks the end of Ramadan, norms of hospitality compel families to entertain lavishly.  Women – who are the gatekeepers and architects of the annual festivities – will splurge on new tablecloths, furniture, and of course, wardrobes.  I have heard about Eid dresses before, but this is my first time seeing them close up.  This season, the shops are full of voluminous trapeze dresses in rich jewel tones. The high necklines are encrusted with garish rhinestones that overcompensate for the modesty of the silhouette.  The gowns are appropriately shapeless, with panels of pleated fabric tacked onto the sleeves like spinnaker sails.  A racy rhombus of skin is exposed, where the billowing sleeve meets the shoulder strap.  According to Samira, this dress is far too provocative to wear without a long-sleeved undershirt – at last under her mother’s roof.

Samira admits that she finds the abaya restrictive, and would prefer to wear western dress.  Underneath the black gown, she is wearing tight jeans and a colorful silk blouse.  In the privacy of her own home, she will remove the abaya and scarf, provided that her brother-in-law or other male guests are not present.  Although Samira favors western dress, it would be nearly impossible to forego the abaya without alienating her family – and this is a risk that Samira is not willing to take.  The family unit is the nucleus of social life here in Oman, and at the end of the day, Samira doesn’t want to rock the boat.  But when she has her own children someday, Samira says that she won’t dictate their wardrobe decisions and social engagements, because she has seen such restrictions backfire at the university she attended.  Often, the most rebellious students were the ones from the most conservative families.  If young women are determined to make trouble, hijabs and niqabs are no obstacle.  Samira says she will teach her children to respect themselves and make responsible decisions, whatever they choose to wear.

Hadiqa al Sahwa, outside of Muscat

After a brief tour of the gold stores, we part with Samira for the evening and drive our ramshackle rental car along Seeb beach, frantically defogging the windshield every few minutes and hoping that the rhatooba (humidity) subsides before we have to brave the dreaded roundabouts of Athaiba.

I think this used to a puffer fish.

Bonus points if you can identify this snake.