The next day Kate, Neil and I packed up to head to The University of Al-Buraimi, which had only been established and opened in 2010. I felt sick after breakfast because the orange juice was off, but I was also nervous about the drive. I immediately put the kibosh on music in the car because I didn't want to travel for
four hours listening to that whiny crap. Nobody protested. I chatted with Neil beside me in the back seat. He revealed he had been a born again Christian for ten years, but also considered himself a Buddhist. He’s read a lot of Carl Jung. Another rabbit.
The drive took us through flat barren land with bleached shrubs and rugged mountains that looked like chocolate ice cream cones. It was like Jordan and the area north of Aqaba - the rocky terrain, the desert, the various shades of sand and gravel.
When we got to Buraimi, I still had my headache and its intensity increased when I discovered that the air conditioner in my room was not only smelly, but loud. A late night caller said “We’ll pick you up at 7:30 and you will teach tomorrow.” Will the students have books? Do the students knows any English at all? In my years of teaching I've learned to hope for the best but prepare for the worst.
I went downstairs the next morning and waited in the car until 7:45 and Neil hadn’t arrived for the drive to the university, so I called and said “Come in a minute or we’re leaving without you.” The day was chaotic with teachers trying to find their class and students trying to find their homerooms. With no books, I had to wing it my first two-hour class. Just as I had thought, no books, no supplies and no organization. Neil, his face redder than a pimpled strawberry, ran around like a rooster with his balls cut off. The yelling, the door slamming. It was too much.
Paul showed up at my room after school one day and we talked downstairs with Kate. He seriously wants us to stay and for me to be a coordinator because the American chick with the Muslim costume who works at the school went and complained to the Dean about Paul and now Paul says for sure she’ll be fired. But after being in the school for a few days, I'm not interested in staying, particularly with the horrible accommodations.
After school I want to relax in my room, recover from the activity chaos, but my room stank of sewage and mould. My complaints and whining got me a new one and it didn't make my nostrils recoil, but when I tried to sleep the loud buzzing and clatter from the air conditioning units on the roof kept me awake.
New teachers arrived, Steven, from Canada, Alicia, from South Africa and Vance. Vance is from N.Z. and is just looking for enough cash to get back to Bali and surf. He told us of getting beat up at the border of Peru, the same place where I was kidnapped and escaped. Steve, a real comic, is collecting stories and writing a book.
Jackie phoned Kate and said they're headed down to Ibra and, as it's in the middle of nowhere, she’s going to buy a scooter. She'll take my stuff with her. Kate and I went out to the bar to celebrate nothing in particular and she was on her sixth beer by the time I started my third because that girl can toss it down her throat faster than a loan-shark in Ireland. We talked about everything, her mother, her younger sister, her addicted brother, my sisters, my mother, my two weekends in jail in America. We were drunk when we paid the 30R tab, but before we could leave and get in our taxi the bar manager crept over to us and whispered "You come? Follow me. Come. We have other place for drink."
We followed him up a narrow dark staircase that opened into to a brightly lit area the size of a small gymnasium where Omani men in coloured thobes and kumas sat drinking beer at square metal tables. In the center of the room a runway had been erected, like something you'd see at Fashion Week in New York City. The manager ushered us to a table and pulled out two white plastic chairs and summoned over a middle-aged woman wearing a full-dress abaya and hiijab who quickly ordered two beers for us, snapping her fingers at a lackey, with a beer and apple sheesha for herself. She smiled through heavy red lipstick as she sat down and joined us. What is a traditional Muslim woman doing in this place? Particularly as she drank beer and smoked sheesha and cigarettes. She took Kate by the hand and led her to the washroom where she tried to put lip liner on Kate. I roared, she looked like a clown when she came back.
Momentarily, a PA system crackled to life blasting Arabic music at a decibel a deaf person could hear and to my astonishment, a woman wearing a brassiere and tiny skirt came out from behind a screen on the runway and walked seductively down the platform. Her dark hair hung like a curtain over one side of her face, which she kept turned towards the wall. One after another young women in short skirts and bras or night-shifts and shorts came out and did the same slow, seductive walk. A girl with hair below her butt wore a jean skirt and a large pot belly hung over her waistband. They were all shapes and sizes, the main similarity being their youth. One girl looked about 14 years old, making me wonder how old they all were. What's going on? Who are these people? They walked the runway, then disappeared behind the screen. With the show over, the Omanis stood up and milled about, but before I could go over and satisfy my curiosity about the girls, I heard Arabic music coming from a tape deck and a crowd of men gathered in one corner. When I elbowed my way through, an exotic, beautiful woman whose looks could have shamed Sophia Loren when she was 15, was belly-dancing in a floor length silk dress that clung to her hourglass figure. "Where are you from?" I asked. "Morocco." And with that she disappeared, too. The night was a dream, a peek into another side of hidden Omani life, particularly the life of men. Alcohol is unlawful for Muslims, yet in all the bars I was in, Omani men were there drinking, but more so in the city. And they're the worst drunk drivers in the world.
Back to the uni and working for the man, Dr. Ali. I’ve got a crush on him he's so sexy. These Arab men are so damn sexy. He has asked me stay on at Al-Buraimi because he was impressed by how I organized the placement tests for Eddie and got his messy day under control. However, at a conference with the teachers, Neil piped up and said that he would stay. What a shot in the foot to Ali because he thought Kate and I would stay. We don't want to. It's hot, muggy and dusty in Buraimi, there's nothing to do and our accommodation is the shits.
So Dr. Ali gets Neal for the university and when I asked “Neal, do you really want to stay?" he said yes. I told him I’d send him some websites for teaching ideas and went to pack my bag.
