The Ade Tour – Day 8

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The shopping day! Today was officially dubbed the shopping day by mother, before the day had even began. After the events of yesterday the elder Ade’s had mutinied and decided that they were not getting in the car today and that they wanted to spend the day walking around Muscat. Little did we realise that Muscat is rather spread out and that you can’t really walk around it in the sense that you would walk around a city like Prague.

The first task of the day was to find somewhere to clean the car. This actually turned into quite an eventful little mission. The first service station that we pulled up to didn’t have a car wash so we headed back onto the road to find another. The car wash had a queue. And I mean a QUEUE! Apparently it is illegal to drive around in a dirty car in Oman, so all the car owners must have been at this service station trying to clean there car this morning. The queue actually got so bad that it blocked traffic coming off the main road, and also off the slip road. This was mostly because of the monster truck that was trying to turn into the service station and couldn’t because of the large queue.

When we finally got to the front of the line the little man put little covers over the wind screen wipers and actually unscrewed the jeeps aerial before we went into the car wash. And then at the other end we were attacked by a little man with a shammy, who shined the car to within an inch of its life. Even opening the doors to wipe down the inside of the car doors. And again all for the princely sum of OR 1.5 or AED 15. However all of this took time and we exited the service station approx 40 minutes after we had entered.

The second aim for the day was to find the souk at Mattrah, which is on the corniche. This sounds quite and easy thing to do but I can attest to the fact that it is actually a lot harder than it sounds, as we managed to get lost. Well not completely lost, just mostly lost. We had to stop at a Lulu Hypermarket (YAY I have finally been inside a Lulu! I can now advise that it is basically just a normal shopping centre of the Lamcy Plaza type) to get directions. Luckily the directions were to just the road to our left and keep going straight. Very straight forward.

We finally arrived at the souk at about 11am. After finding a nice little parking spot with a view of a water feature for the Jeep to look at, we wandered down the corniche towards the souk. Mum had a ball in the souk. Many presents were bought. How many actually reach their intended recipients is another question as mum seemed to like a great many of them. The perfume shop in particular earned itself probably its weekly wage today. Many perfume bottles were bought, and filled with the local fragrances, and I must admit that I also succumbed and bought myself some jasmine oil, to go into the little perfume bottle that mum bought me for xmas. I also have to admit to purchasing two cushion covers (that eeyore would hate as they are mutli colored and totally textured) as well as a plain black pashmina, and a textured black pashmina. The little stall owners kept trying to sell us pashminas, especially the 100% cashmere ones, from Khasmir. However at AED150 I wasn’t really in the mood to buy a third. Ma Ade bought herself a little rug as well, in addition to the pashmina and perfumes. So all in all the souk did quite well out of us.

Today we had lunch at a little coffee shop just beside the souk, and the highlight of that had to be the fact that the pizza that I ordered off the menu wasn’t in fact made in that particular shop. Instead they actually give the order to another shop down the road and then wait for it to be delivered. Of course all this takes time, approximately 50 mins time. Which wasn’t so great considering that I was the one person who was totally starving and that mum and dad got their meals within 10 minutes, while I was just left there to salivate and start to hallucinate. Luckily it finally arrived and I was brought to life again.

Following our feast we meandered back to the car and then headed off into old Muscat. Of course by the time that we got their all the museums had closed for siesta. A fact that upset dad and greatly cheered up mum and I. So instead we just took a little walk around the streets. And saw the most insane car crash that I have ever seen. A car literally just drove into a streetpost. There was absolutely no reason for it to drive into the post. No other cars were around, it wasn’t a sharp corner, there were no animals around. It was almost as if the car just wanted to hit the lamp post. It made a terrible bang and then an even greater bang when the post fall down and shattered into a million pieces on the ground. After a couple of moments the car doors opened up and two lady’s in abayas staggered out. By this stage many locals had run over to help and one of them bundled the lady’s into their car. We can only presume that this person was taking them off to hospital, even though they didn’t really look injured. The strange thing was that that left nobody with the car to explain what had happened to the police when they showed up.

We were a little more careful of walking around after watching that!

All in all though we have to say that Muscat is one of the most beautiful cities that I have seen. Everything is low rise and constructed in traditional architecture. There are no high rise glass towers and the landscaping is out of this world. The hills that it sits around are incredible, all scraggy and rocky with forts literally perched on every peak. And the sea is just amazing.

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Photos

The mosque
The infamous photo that gets deleted

The crazy breakwater
complete with seagulls

Oops
The car crash from out of nowhere