Back from the Desert

I have showered and scrubbed and extracted in more ways than I ever thought humanly possible, and still I am fairly certain that I have sand-lots and lots and lots of sand-everywhere.

Some stories are below but if words are too much to deal with...I also have pictures!

We started our final excursion on Monday morning with a series of visits to a series of springs that were all very beautiful and all fairly similar. At the final one, we had lunch and were attacked by lots and lots of bees. But before that, we ran into a camera crew from Amazing Salalah, or something along those lines, who wanted to interview us. It was in English, which made the prospect less exciting, but knowing that I've left my audience dying for more ever since my debut as Cheering White Woman in an Omantel commercial last year, I decided to give the people what they wanted.

What the host wanted was to talk to us about the various tourist attractions in Salalah. I had been sleeping on the bus in between visits to the various springs and really wasn't clear on what to tell him. But luckily, he told me a little about the areas where we were (apparently we were near a big old tree that attracted brightly colored birds. I saw a tree. It looked kind of old? I guess. No birds) so I told him on camera exactly what he had told me before we filmed. And he seemed pretty happy with that.

We spent the night at the esteemed thamreet hotel, where we had also stayed during the east trip. It was..um. Well. Thamreet is a strip of small restaurants, a gas station, a grocery store, and a few other commercial buildings in the middle of nowhere. And the hotel is pretty much what you would expect of an establishment in such a dazzling location.

The next day was a lot more driving. I was in a car with two other students and one of the PFs. My new arabic vocab for this trip includes: parrot, pirate, 'middle of nowhere', and urine.

Needless to say, it was an interesting ride.

We got to the desert with only a few land rover-sunk-into-dune issues and even though there were a few times I swore that one of us was going to get run over (we were all out playing on the dunes and some of the drivers decided they needed to show off) we did not. That was good.

Things in the desert were pretty...sandy. Oddly enough, it rained. We got out the big plastic mats and sat as we waited for dinner (which included camel! I mean...why not) then spent the evening playing 'common knowledge' trivia (well...common to the area. I had never heard of half the writers and singers that were mentioned over the course of the game) and singing (one of my friends brought his guitar along. For fun). Apparently, none of us knows all the words to Semi-Charmed Life. But that does not stop us from singing it.

The tents were HOT at night so we ended up sleeping outside. It was weird waking up to see an endless expanse of gray sky above us. But kind of cool.

Even though I tried to go to bed around midnight or 1, one of the PFs decided that he needed to start a storytelling circle. And the drivers decided they needed to start a dance party. Their dance party got shut down pretty quickly (they HAD to wait until we were going to sleep? really?) but the storytelling continued. As I listened to theirs, I made up my own:

Once there was a group of men in the desert and they were constantly talking. Then a group of women came and killed them all. The End.

It sounds a whole lot better in Arabic.