Reflections on Oman

This was my first trip to Oman and I really enjoyed it - and wished that I could have stayed for more than just a couple days. I was scheduled to visit Muscat this last summer before the Great Unpleasantness changed everything - although I'm sure I would not have been as enchantened in 135 degree weather.

I found the people to be very friendly and out-going. You actually saw Omani folks working at jobs, which is not something that you are as likely to see in the United Arab Emirates (where the work force is almost entirely legally temporary immigrants, even if they have been there for generations). It was both very exotic, but also very comfortable. The men all wear the traditional white dish dash with very cool hats while the women wear black abayas. I'll use some net-drawn pictures because I haven't been able to download my own pictures yet. There is creeping westernization, to be sure, but the Omanis are very sensitive to it, especially the ecological damage, and clearly don't want to become another Dubai. The funny thing was that the last night Johanna and Francois took me out to eat at a local nice mall as a going away treat, and the mall was alive with young folks in western garb, both men and women. I had not seen any Omanis in western dress all day long until that moment. So, Oman is definitely on the cusp, which is why they're such a natural fit for our Global Module expansion. If we can get in at Sultan Qaboos with this program I think we'll be very well-positioned.

And Sultan Qaboos University. It is only around thirty years old, and is one of the prettiest campuses I have ever seen. It is an odd place because there is absolutely no exchange, unless it is very subtle, between the male and female students - they just pass each other like ghosts. They are not segregated - and there are clubs designed to let them spend time together in regulated activities - but you certainly never saw any guys hitting on girls or vice-versa. Now, what happens at night in the mall, of course, is anybody's guess. Several women, again in their traditional black abayas, went out of their way to come up and talk to me when I was waiting outside a professor's office. They were very friendly and one of the girls actually gave me a poem to read and critique, both the poem and her English (both were quite good). I spent a goodly portion of the day at Sultan Qaboos with George Rishmawi, a great guy. George is a Palestinian Christian from Bethlehem, and actually knew some of the folks I've talked to at Bethlehem University and someone I know at the University of Jordan. He invited me back to his house for lunch and I met his wife. I had not picked up on the fact that he was Christian until I entered his house and saw several icons and a cross on the wall. His daughter lives in San Francisco and they are very interested in visiting her more often. I had commented to one of the secretaries that I had, unsuccessfully, tried to buy some of the Omani hats down at the old souq downtown - they wanted more than I wanted to pay - although, typically, I've been regretting I didn't buy about ten. I think the problem is the exchange rate - I've just had too many of them on this trip: it's about $1.30 to one Jordanian Dinar; and around 3 Emirati Dirhams to a dollars; and one Omani Rials equals three US dollars, and one US dollar equals around 200 Hungarian Forints - too much confusion and I was afraid I was being cheated worse than usual so I hesitated - of course, I also almost bought something at the market here in Budapest the other day and thought it was an acceptable bargain at $19, and then redid the math and realized it was actually $190 and quickly bowed out. Anyway, I made this one simple comment to the secretary and it became her life mission to get me some hats - and no amount of argument on my part could change her mind - and she eventually went home and returned with three hats that she had initially bought for her brothers! Again, she wouldn't take no for an answer nor accept any payment. Typical for this amazingly generous part of the world. So, definitely visit Oman - I can't wait to come back.

Stuck in Budapest with the Muscat Blues Again

Actually, I love Budapest (especially now as I'm sitting in the Club Alibi off the Szerb Utca, feeding off free wifi, and devouring a plate of garlic spinich chicken). However, on Tuesday I had my doubts. I was sitting beneath a low-lying, almost claustrophobic, caliginous sky, and found myself dreaming of the heat and blue skies of Muscat, Oman. Of course, that may have just been a case of the fact that I was freezing to death. Not only was it 30 as compared to the 95 I have left behind in Muscat (mainly because the heat had broken in Oman and everyone was happy for the cooler weather), but I didn't have a coat or a sweater, which were stuck inside my suitcase that had picked a particularly bad time to go missing.

To make a long story relatively short, I got stuck in the Air France strike the other day. I flew out of Muscat at 12:30 a.m. on Monday morning and arrived in Dubai around 1:30 a.m. Now, I wasn't scheduled to fly out until 12:30 the next afternoon and I had already thrown away $200 for a nine hour stay on my first trip through Dubai so I just hunkered down and slept on the floor of the airport. Wow, it was cold, really cold, which at least took my mind off how uncomfortable the floor was. That was the first time that I wished that I had my coat, if only to act as a blanket - instead, I used my extra pants as a pillow and my extra shirt as a blanket. My suitcase was already checked through from Muscat to Dubai to Paris to Budapest. Anyway, after a long cold night I woke up to the news that my Dubai to Paris flight had been cancelled because of the Air France strike, which led me to track down an Air France agent (who were, not surprisingly, lying low). I finally found a very nice young woman at the Air France lounge who confirmed that the Airlines had already moved me over to Emirates Air, and that I was flying out at 2:30, and passing through Frankfurt instead of Paris. Beggars can't be choosers so I didn't complain - plus, she let me hang out in the posh Air France lounge for several hours. So, I eventually boarded the Emirates flight at 2:30, although it then didn't take off until an your late, making my layover in Frankfurt a bit iffy. When I landed in Frankfurt I had to run throughout the entire airport and by the time I made it to the Malev (local Hungarian carrier) counter I was told it was too late to get on the flight - I had already been turned back by a security agent who had sent me to the Malev counter in the first place. I didn't accept that as an answer and they held the plane, thankfully, because Frankfurt is too nice of a city for that level thermo-Scudderian explosion. After some more running I made it onto the plane and on to Budapest, only to find, not to my surprise, that my luggage had not followed me. It could have been flying out of Muscat, or the layover in Dubai, or the Air France strike and redirection, or the short layover in Frankfurt because of the late Emirates flight, but my suitcase didn't make it. So, the next day I had to walk to all my meetings in just the shirt and khakis that had served as blanket and pillow the night before - and Budapest was pretty cold. I am staying at the Hotel Gellert, a spa that has seen better days, although they are fixing it up even as we speak. That said, I could look out my window and I could see Corvinus University on the other side of the Danube, so it could not have been more convenient. My luggage eventually showed up late Wednesday night, and the sweater and coat were greatly appreciated - I can now leave the hotel!

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.

Abu Dhabi and Muscat

It's Saturday night and I'm in Muscat, Oman. It's amazing how quickly this trip is moving along. One week from tonight I will have left Oman, passed back through Dubai, then Paris, then Budapest, then back through Paris, and then JFK and back to Burlington - and that's assuming that everything works as it is scheduled to work. Air France is on strike and beginning tomorrow night I have four flights on Air France - two on Monday (Dubai-Paris; Paris-Budpaest) and two on Saturday (Budapest-Paris; Paris-JFK) - so who knows how it will all play itself out.

After my day of meetings at the Dubai campus of Zayed on Wednesday I caught the shuttle to Abu Dhabi around 3:00. There I met up with Kate O'Neill who teaches at the Abu Dhabi campus of Zayed University - Kate is also from South Burlington. She very graciously volunteered to put me up while I was in town. I had never met her husband Scott, or her three sons - Hobie, Berent and Peyton. I ended up sleeping over at her brother Chris's apartment, which was about a five minute walk. They were all fantastic and I had a great time. Kate felt that I'd never get a moment's peace with her boys so she thought I should stay with Chris. Actually, the boys were great and by the time I left Berent and I were sharing tootsie pops, which has all the hallmarks of a life-long friendship. The meeting at the Abu Dhabi campus of Zayed went very well and, considering the accomplishments of Wednesday's meetings at the Dubai campus, give me a lot of hope for the future.

I made it back to Dubai on Friday night. Kate, Chris and Scott were going to Dubai, and stay in a nice hotel, to see the reformed band Queen as a birthday gift for Chris. So, we said our goodbyes to the boys and took off early afternoon. Before we left we had to feed Kate who, like me, apparently is a blood sugar accident waiting to happen (grin). We went to a nice mall and headed to the food court. Kate went to McDonald's while Chris and I headed to Dairy Queen - where I had a double cheeseburger, chili fries and a chocolate milk shake (hardly what most folks in America would associate with Middle Eastern fare, although these restaurants are very common in some parts of the Middle East - we passed by KFC, Burger King, Chili's and Krispy Kreme). When we made it to Dubai there was a mix-up with the room and Chris, in a demonstration of a great talent he has (hidden under the layers of a very nice guy) pushed the people at the front desk until they received a night's stay at a $2500 a night suite on the top floor. The suite was insanely nice - and I told them that I hoped to live long enough to live in a house as nice as the third bathroom in the suite. My flight out wasn't leaving until 10:20 so they asked me to hang around for a couple hours. As part of their largesse they were invited to a complimentary drink/starter/dessert reception starting at 6:00. We showed up, hunkered down with endless waves of food, and then the band showed up - which is how I found myself next to Brian May in the buffet line. Very odd.

I'll have a lot more to say about Kate and Scott and Chris and the boys - as well as Dubai and Abu Dhabi later. I took my leave around 7:00 and caught a taxi to the airport. My flight on Swiss Air left right on time and by a little after 11:00 I had arrived in Muscat, Oman, which was my first time in the country. After swapping dollars for Rials, which is humbling because it's around $3 to a Rial I queued up to get my visa. It was a long line, but it was very painless. Everyplace I've visited I've either not needed a passport or could just pick it up at the airport, with the exception of India where I had to send it off in advance - another of the advantages of being a US citizen.

Joanna Nel, who teaches online for us at Champlain, met me at the airport. I first met Joanna years ago when she was teaching at our campus in Dubai. I encouraged her to think about teaching online and she contacted Champlain and has been doing so ever since. Then a couple years ago I was chairing a panel at a conference in Amman and asked her to put in a proposal, so I saw her again, and met her husband Francois for the first time, this time in Jordan. So now she was nice enough to ask me to stay at their place in Muscat while I was in town. They are originally from near Cape Town in South Africa. In fact, Francois and I watched the South African national team, the Springboks, play tonight on cable - he was very pleased when I disappeared into the back to change into the Springboks t-shirt that I had picked up in Pretoria a couple months back.

I have a day's worth of meetings tomorrow at Sultan Qaboos University but today was wide open. So, Joanna played tour guide and we went downtown to old Muscat. It was a great day, but more on that later.

Dubai

OK, I've made it back to Dubai. I'm sitting in my friend Yunsun "Sun" Chung-shin's office at Zayed University in between meetings, feeding off of the university's wifi. The trip down from Amman was uneventful, other than I'm utterly spoiled. Emirates Airlines is such a great airline - so much better than that dreadful flight I had over the Atlantic on Delta. The food last night was fantastic and the seats were confortable and every seat had it's own individual screen with a library of films to watch - sort of like British Airways, except with more comfortable seats. I watched an independent film I'd never seen before called My Blueberry Nights - I'm a sucker for independent films, but this was mindly entertaining at best. It starred Norah Jones (don't know how many movies she has done - she was OK, although the high point was her cover of Neil Young's "Harvest Moon" - didn't see that coming), Jude Law, Rachael Weitz and Natalie Portman. In the row next to me there was a woman, in very traditional Arabic garb, who had three seats to herself - and she was watching three different programs. I don't know what was more surprising - that John Carpenter's Big Trouble in Little China was in the film library, or that someone had actually chosen it to watch.

I stayed at a hotel called the Jumeira Rotana last night - although I didn't get in until around 10:30 p.m. and the driver from Zayed came at around 7:30 to pick me up. It wasn't much of a stay for a sizeable amount of money. If you factor in the cost of the room, the room tax, the ride in from the airport, and the breakfast, I'm sure it was around $200 for nine hours at the hotel - and I didn't even get to take advantage of the pool or exercise facility. However, that's practically slumming it in Dubai. It was the least expensive, logically convenient hotel that Zayed could find. And this is why I'm spending the rest of this trip and my time in Muscat, Oman sleeping on the couch in professors' houses (grin). On my two previous trips Zayed picked up the tab and I was staying at places that were normally around $300 a night (although I don't know what deal the school got). I wonder what Sudhir paid for that place he used to put us up in near to our old campus in Dubai - the one with all the Russian prostitutes in the bar?

Now I'm back visiting Zayed, trying to convince them to embed more GMs in their curriculum. They are a nice size for us, about 2000 students - 1000 here in Dubai and a 1000 in Abu Dhabi, where I'll be tomorrow. Again, a fascinating place - a sleek, ultra modern campus with great technological infrastructure - and all the students, it's an all-women's school, wearing head to toe traditonal black abayas. Still, they're very interested in the connecting to the rest of the world. I talked to the students in Sun's class today and they're great kids - very enthusiastic and friendly.

Security at the University of Jordan

The concept of just leisurely strolling onto a university campus is a very American concept - or at least a very American and European concept (which is ironic since we're the ones known for school shootings). In the Middle East and some parts of Africa (Morocco and Kenya yes, South Africa no) there is always a lot of security around campuses, and they don't even like you snapping pictures of the place. There are several gates leading into UJ and I normally enter using the big gate across the street from the fast food restaurants down the road from ACOR - there's a tunnel there under the street. I've been coming onto the campus of UJ for years now, often several days in a row on each trip - and the response is almost always different. Sometimes the professor or administrator I'm visiting will meet me at the gate and we just breeze through. Other times I'm by myself and the guards just wave at me and I stroll through. Sometimes they ask to see my passport or who I am scheduled to see (in a very clumsy conversation limited by very few words in common). Yesterday I was actually sent over to the security building, which was a first, where I had to sit down and say who I was visiting - she was an assistant professor who they had never heard of and they couldn't quite figure out who to call - until I thought of the magic word, Majdoubeh. He is a dean and very well known - as soon as I said the magic words they threw their hands in the air and said Majdoubeh, as if it were a ceremonial greeting or Hamdil'allah ("thanks be to god"). I felt like Ali Baba - the cave opened and in I went (although with a written pass, which was the first time I'd ever received one). Now, the day before I had been on campus for meetings all day and ended up leaving something in a room by mistake, which I didn't remember until I had made it all the way back to ACOR, and it was night. So, I turned around and walked all the way back figuring that I'd have issues at the gate, but the guards just smiled at me and waved me in.

Moving On

It's already my last day in Amman, even though it seems like I just arrived yesterday. It was another fruitful trip and I'm slowly making progress with the University of Jordan. Huge universities like UJ have tremendous potential for my program, but they also take a lot longer to turn as compared to small schools like Champlain or Al Akhawayn - it's like trying to turn a huge pleasure cruiser on the ocean as compared to a small car on dry land. We're running GMs in several literature classes and are moving closer to potentially embedding the GMs in a new course entitled Intro to Cross-Cultural Interactions (which would be a great fit - as I always say, you shouldn't hammer the GMs into a course just to say you've done it - if it fits and benefits the course, then they should go there - we'll be running GMs in a couple of the Cross-Cultural courses as an experiment). My friends Inas, Laza, Sane and Deema were once again remarkably supportive. I received a lovely gift from Inas.

ACOR was quarky, as usual. There are several students here from West Point who are spending the semester studying Arabic across the street at UJ. Great kids. I haven't been called sir so often since I taught in India. The faculty members are artists and visiting Fulbright scholars and folks doing more serious research - and then me promoting the GMs. On an earlier trip my friends Bob, Rob, Char and Ann took to calling me the RA of ACOR, and as a veteran I guess that's a good designation. Last night I gave my usual tour of local ice cream and schwarma establishments last night (and the schwarma was wonderful, per usual, and the guy who runs the stand was very excited to see me again - and why not, much as with Homer and the hot dog salesman who followed him to the funeral, I'm putting his kids through college). I talked to Barbara, who is the director here at ACOR, and asked her if I now held the world record for most stays at ACOR (six), but she says I'm not even close, which is a testament to the place. Barbara is also heading out the door today to go to the US for a presentation at a conference on ACOR. The assistant director, Chris Tuttle, will also be taking off for the US in a week or so to defend his disseration - and then make a trip up to his home state of Vermont (we might catch lunch in Burlington when he's in town). If the name Tuttle in Vermont sounds familiar then it should, he is Fred's son. A very small world.

Today at 2:00 the driver comes to take me to the Amman airport to catch my 4:30 flight to Dubai. Then a night in a hotel in Dubai, and Wednesday I have meetings at the Dubai campus of Zayed University. At the end of the day I catch the bus to Abu Dhabi where I'll be bunking at Zayed Professor Kate O'Neill's place (Kate went to South Burlington high school - again, a very small world). On Thursday I have meetings at the Abu Dhabi campus of Zayed University, then back to Kate's place. Then on Friday I'm catching a ride back into Dubai with Kate and her husband, who are going to town for some event and are staying at a downtown hotel, so I'm bumming a ride with them, and then trying to sneak onto the hotel shuttle back to the airport for a late night flight to Muscat, Oman (where I'll be sleeping on the couch of Champlain online professor Johanna Nel). See, it is a luxurious, exciting life - staying at $30 a night establishments in Amman and sleeping on the couch of friends in Abu Dhabi and Muscat.