Muscat City Tour

We had the chance to stay closer to home this day and have Adeline as our tour guide instead of Thierry, who went back to work to get some well deserved rest! In the morning we went to the old section of Muscat and the Bait al Zubair museum.

Thanks Amelie for the picture! It was Halloween, so here Adeline is dressed accordingly as she was teaching that evening and wanted to bring in a bit of Halloween fun to her classes.

The collection includes many examples of traditional Omani dress and culture, i.e. the dishdashah, hijab, khanjar and a replica dhow. There are separate sections for male and female dress, items from the home and weapons. It was nice to go to towards the end of the visit after seeing many of these objects throughout the country, though I can see the benefit of going first thing when you arrive in Oman as well.

From there we went over the road to a small art gallery, which has many locally produced works exhibited in a classical Omani house, with a small courtyard in the middle and a nice rooftop terrace. From the roof you are able to see out across much of this old section of the city, including the Mirani and Jalali forts that protect the entrance to the harbour. We also drove over to the Sultan’s palace so that Amelie could see it, though I retain my view that the front of it is terribly ugly.

The rest of the afternoon was spent relaxing at home, writing some postcards and getting things ready for our impending camping trip.

CW and Thierry hard at work preparing the onions, ginger and herbs for the fish BBQ we were having on our beach camping expedition

In the evening we all went over to Ruwi, which is the Indian section of Muscat. We poked around in a couple of shops and then went for a very nice dinner in this small and extremely inexpensive café.

In fact, I am not sure I have ever had so much food for such a little price, absolutely incredible and the food was quite good as well. We walked around a little bit more and then retired for the evening.