Home Sweet Home (Muscat Style)

Hallo!

Gentle reminder from family in Tauranga (hey Uncle Ron!) that I needed to update the blog, so here I am and with home internet access at last!

Thanks to everyone who left comments, its been great to know the blog efforts are appreciated, but don’t think you’re off the hook now, that wasn’t a one off!! Anne, am I still on the AgriQuality email blacklist, did you put me there or the IT police? :-)

Given that I’ve just seen Mum (via webcam) in long sleeves in NZ, I shall start by bragging about the weather. We’ve had 15 consecutive days of 40+ degrees, am still not letting myself say that its too hot… apparently there’s more heat to come and the London winter is still fresh in my mind. We’ve found we need to stay indoors now between 10.00 am and 4.00 pm so are constantly looking for ways to entertain ourselves whilst confined to air-conditioning land.

Every day here is beautiful and sunny. There was a thunder and lightening storm a few weeks back, but as there were only about 12 raindrops that came with it, it doesn’t count as bad weather!! A neighbour told me that officially the temperature here never goes above 45, that’s because it’s against safety regulations for the many outside labourers to have to work outdoors when it gets that hot. But my thermometer read 48 degrees yesterday when I left it in the sun?!?

We are now legal in Oman. After submitting to an AIDS test (Mark) and being finger printed both in ink and digitally, we have been issued our residency cards. I finally also have an Omani driver’s license, thanks in no small part to Petra who accompanied me to the eye test, and proceeded to yell out the letters I was struggling with. The police officer testing me was so taken with her, he signed me off quickly to give Pet her own eye test. That kid’s ego will never recover!

I thought I’d show you around our house this post – I’ve seen other blogs that include video footage but I haven’t figured that one out yet (Evan can you point me in the right direction?) so you’re stuck with plain old still shots for now.

We are one of 18 houses in a garden court (I hate the term ‘compound’) where we share the garden and swimming pool which each house backs onto. Although 18 houses sounds a lot we still haven’t met all our neighbours and a number of houses have men living here on their own, working a 5 week on, 5 week off (when they return to their families) type roster.

You can tell our house - it has the green sun shade!

Each house has three bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, and an extra downstairs toilet. They are quite spacious (compared with the apartment in Barnet), and solid concrete so no worries about the noise!! My only complaint would have to be the white floor tiles everywhere, calming and cooling as they may be, they require constant attention, that could be the deciding factor in the great maid debate :-)

Mark pretending that he does all the cooking

Miles of white tiles

A few of the houses have the washing machine plumbed up outside, which I initially thought was strange, but then it hardly ever rains here, so no risk to the machine. I also discovered the houses aren’t waterproofed when washing my car recently and found water running straight inside through the gaps around the front door and ranch slider.

View from the street

We inherited a cat with our house. Brannan and Petra still haven’t forgiven us for abandoning Jafar in NZ, so it was a nice surprise for them to meet Sid, who really is quite indifferent to us (I think we’re her 4th owners). I personally prefer a stray cat that has adopted a pot plant (and us) out the front, he looks like a tabby mixed with some kind of lynx… not sure MAF would let us bring him home!!

Our neighbours held a barbeque not long after we arrived, which was fun, everyone brought out chairs and dinner from their homes which we shared and ate around the pool. Tallying up the neighbours we’ve met there are: 2 Danish, 2 Welsh, 2 Omani, 1 Canadian, 1 Egyptian, 1 English, 1 Jordanian, 1 Dutch and 1 Indian households here. Its fantastic for Petra as there are 3 other girls her age living here, the 4 of them have a great time together, and there’s always someone about for her to play with. Unfortunately for Bran, the only boy here his age is relocating back to Wales come the end of school in June.

Petra in her room with Danish friend Alberte

Bran and his favourite pastime - Gameboy

Living here in the garden court is carefree and effortless. The landlord employs a gardener to maintain the garden and pool. And when Mark reported several items that needed fixing in our house recently, half a dozen tradesmen in blue overalls appeared on their bicycles within 15 minutes.

Some domestic related differences we’ve encountered living in Muscat: not many streets are named, for example we live in Way 1710, which is fine except there doesn’t seem to be any logic to the numbering system so a map is essential for getting around! And as there’s no home postal delivery service everyone has their mail sent to their employer’s post box. No domestic refuse collection either means you see many skips around the streets. In fact one is parked just across the road from us, so we have an army of cats camped in the front garden (Alan please make sure Dorothy doesn’t read this!!) Mark is currently trying to get the skip relocated so we don’t hear the 5.00 am rubbish truck coming to empty it or the industrious person who rummages around in the middle of the night looking for aluminium cans :-)

A final note, we’re very excited here today, I booked the tickets for our trip back to New Zealand over the summer (winter?) and today it’s exactly a year since we flew out of Auckland. Looking back over the past year, I can’t believe how much we’ve done, I’m so pleased we took the gamble!

Life is wonderful!

Love to you all
Hayls
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