The Chasing Iamb

How could I have missed something so obvious? Other than fervently recommending to footloose travellers that they should positively go to Oman ( and no, no, not the Dubai Shopping festival) what have I done about my love for beautiful Muscat? A decade after the last time I was there I find some really fun people writing about Muscat. And they are not expats. As any Gulf return Mallu will tell you, in my four years going to school in Muscat, I didn't have a single conversation with an Omani kid. Imagine how ignorant!

So to stumble on The Muscatis, a husband-wife blog was a complicated pleasure. Grad students, parents, foodies, book lovers, the pair give me at least a glimpse of what its like to live in a (what seemed to me) a benevolent monarchy. It seemed benevolent because one never heard anything else. You never talked politics except with your family. And the papers never said anything less than trilling about Sultan Qaboos. In my scurillous, dirty, high-school the really dirty boys took pleasure in saying the Sultan was gay. As a fag-hag in training it just made me like him a lot more.

But the bloggers careful writing about national issues reminds me how blinded and cottonwooled we were as expat kids.

From the Muscatis it was a short step away from Saudi Jeans, a slightly depressed, sweet, lefty blogger and the frequently ranty Secret Arabian Journal.

How different my life would have been if as a sixteen-year old I had access to these.

If you want to look at a bunch of Emirates blogs, posted by Emiratis and expats (from Brit to Filipino) go here.