Daily Diary: Sumail Stretch, doing the touristy thing

So my weekend, before the food poisoning incident, was actually a wonderful one, besides the fact that yet again my visit to my husband's village was delayed.

Arab families have way too many politics.

But we stopped by friends' in Nizwa, and had qhahwa and dates (yummy with tahini dip and sesame seeds), and then, well, MOP had promised to take the girls of OPNO to Izki, since it is one of the oldest places of Islam in Oman, but MOP missed the half a dozen turn offs to Izki (not a fan of the place apparently) so the girls went and saw a small village in Sumail where a little local Omani girl in village dress played peekaboo with one OPNO and other climbed up a hill to see a fort that was NOT THE fort, but turned out to be BETTER than the fort in Sumail.

Sumail seems an awesome place to see crumbling village houses, and a genuine felaj system that was solely used up until the last ten years [recounts MOP, our not-overtly-interested-in- anything-crumbling guide].

Also there was this famous Omani house in Sumail whose name escpaes me, restored for tourists, but it was closed. Only open in the morning. So the OPNO girls saw that from the outside, and one of them pried the door open half way enough that she could fit in the through the crack, but the others were far too fat (HEALTHY!) to make it.

So the group ended up praying Al Asr prayer in a ruined Masjid adjacent to the house (which was slipping off the hillside) to the amusement of one local family who came over to say salaam and informed the group they may have been the first persons to have prayed in that Mosque/Masjid in the last 150-300 years. Kind of cool.

In the evening they saw the Barka souq (traditional vegetables and fish, better in the morning), and headed off into Muscat for a firework show. They ate cotton candy, and popcorn, from a very happy coffee chop with more customers then it could handle, and on the drive back stopped at the camel breeding center to ask about the price for an Omani camel.

OPNO petted some camels and fed them palm leaves, and were told the camels were not for sale, so I guess that leaves another road trip to Sinaw in the near future.