Sunday, February 1, 2015

Finally, a post! And some updates...

I know, I know, I have been woefully remiss in updating this blog lately. It's a combination of being really busy, crankiness/expat frustrations (and not wanting to use this blog as a forum for whining) and trying to write posts that don't stray into local politics or things that could piss off the people who so nicely sign my checks every month. So I'll just ram the past few months into this one post and then I'll try to promise to be better in the future.
 
1.     I Moved!
 
As you may recall, I had some serious maintenance issues with my former house. It turns out that living in a house with toxic black mold, unending plumbing issues and where your kitchen cabinets are lying on the floor can make you cranky. It also turns out that living in the middle of absolutely nowhere, 20+ minutes away from any conveniences, can make you feel even more isolated and homesick than you already do as a single expat in a foreign country.
 
I'll admit, I was willing to live with too many issues for too long because it seemed like living with the House from Hell was easier/less stressful than dealing with moving, so it's partially my fault for waiting until I was totally miserable. My final straw(s) was when my shower stopped working for like the 6th time and when my house completely flooded when we got 30 minutes of light rain. That was back in October and thus began a nearly two month endeavor to get HR to move me. (I actually wrote a blog article back in December on that whole seemingly unending clusterfuck, but then decided I sounded too whiny and angry. But if you ever ask me about it in person, be prepared for me to launch into an angry tirade since I still have some anger issues about the whole topic).
 
To make a loooooooong story short, on Christmas Eve I moved into my fabulous new apartment (which also happens to be the apartment I was originally supposed to move into, except HR accidentally gave it away to someone else), which happens to be in the heart of the expat area and is a 3 minute walk from an area with my favorite restaurant, a bar, liquor store, 2 coffee shops and a Western grocery store. Let me tell you what a huge sigh of relief this has been for me - I'm much happier here, much more willing to consider staying beyond my contract term of 15 months and much more social now that I can walk to meet up with friends.
 
[Side note: After moving out of the House from Hell I heard a lot of other stories from people who had also moved out of the same development. Turns out one of my neighbors had three huge, poisonous viper snakes in their laundry room and other people have reported poisonous vipers coming up through toilets. Turns out that as part of their botched plumbing construction, they've managed to let poisonous snakes into the pipes. Can you only imagine how I would have reacted if I'd had a poisonous snake come up through my toilet?!?!]
 
2. Christmas
 
Christmas in the Middle East is pretty strange. It's a normal work day, all the restaurants and shops are open, there's no Christmas trees or decorations and it feels like any normal summer day. I had offered to work on Christmas so my coworker could spend it with her family and it was so strange to be at work and to go out for lunch at a normal restaurant. Also, you know how in the US you're not supposed to say "Merry Christmas" anymore but instead have to say "Happy Holidays" to be politically correct and inclusive of all the non-Christians? Well, here there are no other recognized holidays in December other than Christmas and every Omani assumes that all white people are Christian. So pretty much every time an Omani saw me on Christmas, they exuberantly shouted "Merry Christmas!!!" and seemed pretty happy with themselves for remembering the white-people holiday. I found it charming and funny.
 
[Side note: I could give two shits about the whole "Merry Christmas"/"Happy Holidays" political correctness debate in the US, so please don't think that previous paragraph was meant to indicate an opinion on the political correctness of either statement.]
 
3. New Year's Eve
 
I traded working Christmas for getting off for NYE. My sole requirements for NYE were that I wanted to be somewhere cold and I wanted to not be in Oman. So I met up with a few friends from my Romania trip in Edinburgh, Scotland for the annual NYE street festival called Hogmanay. Two comments: I am too old for drunken street festivals and my body is too broken to handle a cold, wet Scottish winter. Everything ached for like a week even after I returned to the desert.
 
4. Naughty Nala
 
I got suckered into taking home a stray kitten that we'd been feeding outside of our favorite restaurant for a while. She's sweet and adorable and I think Zim is happy for the company, but she's in the naughty kitten stage where she races around the house and then knocks everything off every surface. She also has an obsession with smashing fruit all over the house (so far I've had an avocado, tomato and apple smeared everywhere)...hence the title Naughty Nala.
 
Zim and his mini-me, Naughty Nala. Yeah, I know, one day I should get a pet that isn't black.
5. Winter Wonderland
 
All summer people kept telling me how awesome Oman is in the winter when it's not hot and gorgeous. I heard tales of rooftop bars and restaurants, nightlife only available in the summer and desert excursions that wouldn't kill you from heatstroke. I can finally say that while I would hardly call 75-85 degree weather winter, it is definitely a nice change from the scorching summer. And this is definitely a more interesting place to live from December-March.
 
 
Ok, I think that's it's for the major "catch up" and I'll try to get out some more substantive posts on my recent adventures soon!

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