I’m back in Oman for a couple of days, staying at the Grand Hyatt in Muscat. I arrived last night from a frozen, grey Scotland to a warm, balmy 25 degrees here in the Gulf. I sometimes feel like I come to places like this for a brief ’shot’ of sunshine to help me get through the long Scottish winter.
It may be a naive outsider’s view but Oman always seems to be a calm and tranquil place compared to some parts of the Gulf. As is the case everywhere I go in this region, the people I meet are all friendly and polite, and exceedingly helpful in any way that they can. But the Omanis add to that by smiling a lot - that makes life so much more pleasant all round, even when I’m here to work!
I have taken quite a few photographs on my travels during 2007, none of them likely to win photographic competitions, but all of them reminders of a year like no other for me, a year in which I crossed the globe a few times (and literally on one trip). I have compiled some of my photos into a slide show and have loaded the result onto YouTube. Great memories for me and some nice music to accompany my nomadic year.
Thank you to cargocycling for this image of serene Muscat - contrast this with Dubai.
My trip to the Gulf this week offered an interesting contrast in styles - between brash Dubai and reserved Muscat.
Dubai, it seems, is working to be the biggest and the best in the Gulf, in everything it does (typified by the richest horse race in the world, the Dubai World Cup, which I watched on TV when I got home last night) - it is competitive, thrusting, fast-moving and filling up with high-rise buildings of all shapes and sizes. Muscat, the capital city of Oman, on the other hand, from what I saw of it, could be described as serene in contrast. Muscat has wide roads, low, mostly white, buildings set well back from the street, few of them more than 2 storeys tall, and is altogether gentler and more diffident in its outlook to the world.
I like the big exciting cities of the world, but I prefer the calm detachment of cities such as Muscat. In any case, that outward serenity can disguise a level of ambition for itself and its people that other cities, such as Dubai, are only too happy to show off!
