View Oman, Day 1 in a larger map
Happy American Thanksgiving -- though, I'm spent and going to bed early tonight. I think I should have ordered that cappuccino at dinner. Preparations yesterday were sort of haphazard: I stuffed my backpack with the essentials and went straight to bed ASAP (but not soon enough), got up today at 3am to catch a 4am taxi, and flew -- see map -- from Doha to Bahrain to Muscat.
I caught up on sleep where possible. From Doha to Bahrain, it's usually less than half an hour in the air, but the flight was held at the gate and delayed for another hour. I fell asleep right after strapping into my seat on the plane, so this news was lost on me, and I woke up sometime later to see Jakob snapping pictures of a city skyline below us. Seeing the time, I asked "Oh hey, are we there now?" to which he answered "Nah that's our apartment down there...we just took off." So I started out the day quite disoriented.
We got to Bahrain with minutes to spare and rendezvoused at the gate with Adam, who'd arrived the night before. It may have just been the shortest length of time I've spent in any single country connecting to another flight.
Anyway, everything worked out and we're here: marhaba bikum fii Oman! Basics first. The exchange rate is 1 Omani Rial (RO) = 2.6 USD. Or, since I'm getting used to Qatari Riyal (QR) now, it's easier for me to think that 1 RO = 10 QR. Then you just shift the decimal point over on the prices -- like the metric system, for money. It feels like things get pricey here if we're not careful. We're staying at the Golden Oasis Hotel, one of the cheaper options in town, for 70 USD total tonight. A ride from the airport to the hotel was 8 RO. The equivalent in Doha, I think, would be half as much.
Leading Oman is Sultan Qaboos: his portrait adorns almost every major bridge, hangs inside every public building and is rendered on every paper bill denomination of the Omani Rial. As the history goes (I was on Wikipedia a lot before this trip), he came to power in 1970 and is largely responsible for the country's gradual but -- by all first impressions -- effective modernization in the decades since. We're still new to the country, but at the very least, the infrastructure is impressive. The view along the airport-to-hotel drive is pretty: there's been a lot of effort that's been put into greening 
the roadsides and the median, but surrounding the highway, further out, are low, rocky, desert mountains. It's definitely not the flatness we've been used to. Oman and Qatar are both in the same Gulf region, but you wouldn't know it from their landscapes.We almost didn't find a rental car because of the rush of reservations for the Eid holiday, but the hotel staff pulled through for us late in the day. With Adam driving the new Nissan Tiida, we drove off to the local corniche and wandered around the Mutrah area and the souqs. The roads are illuminated tonight by a kaleidoscope of colored lights, ostensibly in anticipation of Eid, but I couldn't stop thinking we were on some Gulf MarioKart version of Rainbow Road. But they looked cool -- very festive. Festive but funny.
Last picture -- rows of the Omani khanjar (ceremonial dagger):
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