Day 44, Sunday - Muscat

Okay, so here it is, me today:

I’ve got to say, I found wearing the abaya rather comfortable. You can wear pretty much whatever you want beneath and the girls told me to wear something comfortable, I still wore business clothes though.

Seeing as it is Halloween today I did wear my orange and white sweater with black pants. While they told me in Kuwait that they would be doing some things like dressing up for Halloween, nobody really seemed to pay attention to it here. They know about it because of American television, but they don’t really celebrate it.

Back to abayas, there are actually lots of different styles. Some have a little collar, like mine, others have a wide neck. Some have tight cuffs; mine has something called a “French sleeve” which is wide and angled. They also have lots of different patterns, and stitching. Mine has small rhinestones, purple on the dress and pink on the headscarf. You can also wear whatever color headscarf you want, although I think black is traditionally worn in business settings.

In case you were wondering, no I won’t be wearing an abaya on a regular basis, but I did want to wear one so that I could tell people what it is like from personal experience. I told the girls that I was worried that my wearing one might be considered disrespectful, but they assured me it was fine. They seemed to really want me to and here we all are together at the office:

Can you tell which one is me? ;)

In the evening, I went to dinner with a gentleman named Shabib and his wife. Shabib came to Seattle in 2005 with a group of students from Sultan Qaboos Univeristy, like the group Marwa came with, but the men came a year before the women. Shabib stayed in contact with my father, so when he heard I was in Oman, he and his wife invited me to dinner.

Before dinner, however, they took me to one of the city’s parks. It was a beautiful park and they tell me that part of the reason it was built was to encourage people to be outside, when the weather permits. Due to the weather, much of the year it is simply too hot to be outside, and as a result not as many resources have gone into developing places for people to be outside to just walk around or sit, until recently.

For dinner, they took me to Chili’s, which I have never been to before. It was really good, maybe I’ll have to go sometime in Seattle. They brought along some of their engagement and wedding pictures for me to look at (I told you we talk about weddings a lot). The clothes that the women wear are beautiful with amazing embroidery and detail and was interesting the see the different outfits for the different days: her engagement dress was traditional Omani style and was red with gold details while her wedding dress was similar to the one I saw at the Kuwaiti wedding.