Mosques, Forts, Amusement and Corn

The mosques of Muscat are best photographed at night. Fun fact, the Grand Mosque, above, lets non-Muslims in, which is a rarety.

Outside of Muscat, we saw different styles of Mosque. This one, called Jamea Al Islam, inspired George Lucas, I believe.

Low-key town mosque.

Shorter Mountain Mosque.

Speaking of small towns, most of them have forts!

Some were in better conditions than others.

We mostly couldn't go inside, but I bet the best parties happen down here.

They seemed to be restoring this one. Tricky.

I like fort ruins, but one thing I love is an abandoned amusement park!We found this one by accident, and struggled to know if it was abandoned 2 or 30 years ago.

But we did learn that Omanis eat corn at amusement parks. Not popcorn, but seasoned corn.

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Axils and Breaks

Welcome to my new favourite restaurant: Loaloat Yemeni Happy. It never seemed to actually open, but the name is fantastic.Shopfronts in Oman were curiously descriptive.

I made Barry back up a bit for this double whammy of axils and breaks.

This one says "Sale of Boats, Sell Tours, Equipment and Fishing", but no boats were spotted.

We found an Irish presence in Oman, but my Irish friends tell me they prefer the 3-leaf clover.

In addition to the shopfronts, I was also a big fan of the doors.

Well, hello little guy!

Such great doors.

The houses, not so much. This place likely says: Fake rose water factory only open for tour buses.

These ones are my top choices for updating our home door.

This door was in a castle we went to see. You can see the regular-sized door at the bottom that we could not pass, not being sufficiently royal.

This last door is so nice that no roof was required. It doesn't rain much in the desert.

Final thought, how many types of dates do you know? The grocery store had 10 in bulk, and many more packaged. I tried several, and got happier but more confused.

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Omani Mountains

At first, the hills of Oman look small. But that small red dot is me, for perspective.

And, if you spend more time in the mountains, you'll see native mountain animals like these sun-faded festive reindeer.

We got a very nice sunset.

And a selfie, of course.

I love a good sinkhole in the desert, but had questions about the warning sign - what can happen to you in the sinkhole?!

I didn't see anyone get sucked away into an endless tunnel

We drove to the end of the earth, and we took a couple of cliffhanger breaks.

Here's Barry trying to look confident about driving on cliff edges.

But this is what we came to see, the remotest of cliffy wall villages. They have a pulley system to get stuff back and forth, because otherwise it's a long walk uphill!

In addition to the desert, Oman has the sea. Here is the Sultan's secondary yacht.

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Happy New Year with Goats!

Well hello there, can you see with that goaty fur in your eyes?

Everyone young and old goes to the goat market in Nizwa, Oman.

Oh, except the women, I guess.

It's beautiful, and you can check out the different styles of clothing.

So you lead your goat around a circle, and there's some shouting and auctioning. Luckily, we didn't end up with a goat, despite Barry's considerations.

You could buy many other things, like birds of all kinds (including turkeys) and delicious date halva.

It was very friendly, welcoming, clean, with no one minding the tourists.

Ok, here it looks like they're minding, but that's because I didn't show you my other 49 pictures.

We did notice a cultural difference.

It took us a bit to pinpoint what it was; see if you can spot it.

But then we figured out that, indeed, we haven't seen rifles at a lot of other auctions.

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