Dinosaurs

While downtown Joanna and I wandered into a little museum, which combined little snippets of natural history, culture and more recent history. They also had a room dedicated to the ancient past of Oman, including a recreation of the one dinosaur that they have definitively identified as having existed in this area. There was a whole troop of school boys going through, enraptured by the dinosaur, as all boys are - however, these boys were dressed in traditional white gowns and the hats that you see all Omani men wear (and which I'm searching for, but that's for another posting). What struck me about the entire experience is the perception that we have that the Middle East is somehow backward - yet here we are in Muscat, Oman and they have no trouble with an exhibit of dinosaurs. It only seems to be in the US that we are stilling having arguments about creationism vs. evolution - and I'm thinking of my home town of Cincinnati and their creationism museum. A point that my friend Kate made about her Global Module experience really rang true - she said the thing that really marked the exchange between the kids from Champlain and the kids from Zayed was that the Zayed kids were amazed at how the CC kids were not very traditional but more conservative than they thought they would be, and the CC kids were amazed at how the ZU kids were traditional but much less conservative than they thought they would be.