Music and Mary

Well today is a very good day. My daughter Mary arrived in Muscat from Cape Town. There she is on the left. We took that picture in Portugal when we were all together for a family holiday.

She is going to be a trainee English teacher at a local private language school. This is a lovely opportunity for her to get to experience what I have for so many years!!! The guts and the glory! She will probably be so grateful to return to Cape Town where she makes a few pennies writing for the newspapers. Mostly about music and musicians. We are going to have a lot of fun while she is here I want to show her as much of what I like about Muscat as I can in spite of it being summer and there being not much happening in Muscat.

She just missed The Proclaimers on Thursday night. I went with some colleagues and we assembled with a whole lot of other pale-skinned mid-lifers and others of course in the Intercontinental Hotel garden. We stood and stomped and sang along with this highly energetic duo and their backing band. We dripped sweat as we stood and jiggled then later we dripped water that some noisy neighbour poured over us!!!

It was a very good night though - such fun to have something to do in our own culture - just a change. I only knew their one song and for a change it was possible to hear the lyrics of most of the other songs and pretty intelligent they were too! Again a change from what mostly graces the radiowaves and calls itself music!!

Next week we are going to camp on Jebel Al Akhdar http://picasaweb.google.com/lynettefaragher/JebelAlAkhdarTripInNovember2008 check out the pictures we took last year. We just did a day trip as we didn't know what we'd do for the ret of the time once we had driven around the whole place and popped in to some of the villages and bought our rose water and mint and thought about buying the juniper berries. Anyway we will find out what to do next weekend.

To go back briefly to the music theme - I have finally cracked the use of the iPod and am uploading all our CDs onto it. They are so amazing - all that music in that tiny little card case sized object and available in the car in the bedroom and the living room. To be surrounded by music and with almost no effort - I am sure none of the readers of this blog will remember the days of changing 78rpm records on wind up gramophones... to be honest I don't remember it that well but do remember stacking 33 rpm vinyls on my dad's turntable so that we didn't have to jump up at the end of each record and change... this one in the picture was a state of the art record player when I first got married!!!

Do we do more with our time now that we have all this labour saving stuff??

Almost the holiday

This blog is being written at the least pleasant time of the year in Muscat and yet it is still a nice place to be. It is very hot. Hot and humid at times and we have been almost preparing for a cyclone. There was one last year at this time - 5th June to be precise and it caused a lot of damage - so we are nervous at the thought of another one.

My husband Alan checks the weather on the internet because he is always wanting to see if there are waves to surf on the east coast and he says that what looks like sinister weather patterns are not serious and we shouldn't worry. Some people are obviously worrying because there are no ordinary candles to be found in any of the Al Fairs in Muscat! (Al Fair is the supermarket that we like because they often have South African products - like Ouma Rusks and Mrs Balls Chutney!!)

With luck we will be able to go to the east coast to our favourite spot at A Sila near Al Ashkarah before we go on vacation to Australia to our home on the Australian east coast. The picture is of Alan surfing in Australia. I can't get close enough to him in Oman to get a decent picture! The beach is too wide! The only thing about camping at this time of the year is that the flies get very persistent and sticky! I am sure that even before the dawn of Islam the people who lived in the desert covered up completely against the heat and especially the flies!!