Sultan Qaboos and Sweaty Doha

In my last post I forgot to tell the story of the first person outside immediate family to know I was pregnant. It’s an instructive story in that it reminds ladies in early pregnancy to eat breakfast. Having been lazing around in bed until mid-morning one weekend while Mr A went to the dentist, I went to let the cats out and found one of their eyes was all cloudy. Slightly panicking, I quickly pulled on some clothes over my pajamas, put the cat in its box and drove straight to the vet, who took Nimr out and started poking away at his eye while muttering something about a third eyelid.  It was at this point that I started to feel a little peculiar so excused myself and went to sit outside on the steps of the building – my brain was thinking ‘I need fresh air’.  What I actually got was some warm, humid air and a very dirty backside, none of which made me any less likely to faint. The receptionist said I could use the loo inside but unfortunately I couldn’t make it and was forced to sit down, as if in protest, on the corridor floor, in order to regain my composure. Clearly an experienced lady, she guessed I was pregnant and rather bizarrely became the first person to know the happy news.  She then kindly waited outside the bathroom in case I knocked myself out on the sink and gave me a banana.

The vet had by this point done all she could for the cat, so I sat in the waiting area eating Mrs Receptionist’s banana, stroking the cat, feeling a little self-conscious about baring my shoulders in a vest surrounded by abaya-clad Qatari girls (my jumper really wasn’t an option) and getting covered in cat hair.  I eventually got hold of Mr A who had to abandon the dentist’s chair with his teeth half-cleaned to pick us up. As a punishment for not being there in my hour of need, Mrs Receptionist gave him evil looks for having obviously left his wife and in utero child to deal with the cat while he played golf (or something like that). Needless to say, we all recovered. I am now a big breakfast person. The cat can see again, so he’s happy.

Last weekend we spent 48 hours last weekend in Muscat, Oman for a friend’s 30^th birthday, staying at the same beautiful posh hotel I bored everyone with last year .  It’s still beautiful.

This time we actually made it to the Grand Mosque which was built by Sultan Qaboos, the ruler of Oman, about six years ago.  It’s huge, with separate ladies’ (timber mashrabiya screens, carved stone walls, beautiful) and men’s prayer halls (huge with the largest diamond chandelier I have ever seen and a lot of colourful tiles and carpet patterns).  This marked our first visit inside a Gulfi Mosque, and total failure of documentation since our camera had run out of battery and I’d forgotten to pack the charger.  It turns out we have cameras on our phones, so we have a selection of slightly blurry, oddly-coloured photos.  I fashioned myself a really rather genuine hijab as required by the mosque officials, which didn’t help with extreme heat but did help to soak up sweat. All the Omanis we have met are incredibly friendly and relaxed people, apart from the scary man at the mosque who threw out a German tourist for being in shorts. He then marched off muttering about how “someone will have to bear responsibility for this outrage!”

Otherwise we lay in the pools at the hotel.  A lot.  We had a special GCC residents discount rate and we realised that this is probably because anyone who lived outside the Gulf wouldn’t go outside in late July unless they were bonkers.  A room upgrade with free mini bar (ah, the shame of not being able to take full advantage), free cocktails at sunset and free room service breakfast meant we just about coped, and sucked in all the memories as we realised that such jaunts are unlikely to happen once the babe makes an appearance. I collected shells on the beach and got chatting to an Omani guy who was a little more into the conversation than I was. Upon parting ways, he gave me possibly the most rubbish shell I’d seen on the whole beach.

So now we’re back in sweaty Doha, working our way through Season 4 of The Wire. Mr A’s been doing live radio interviews in Arabic – I think I find it more stressful to listen to this than he does to do them. I hear the cricket starts again today so that means he won’t be leaving the flat this weekend. Great news.  I’ll spend the days trying to squeeze my wedding ring on to my swollen fingers (pregnancy is non stop glamour).  Unlikely, but at least it’s something to distract me from worrying about Flintoff’s knee.  Or we’ll spend the weekend watching Edgbaston in the rain, which to us will be a surprisingly fun.  Believe it or not, I’m actually missing rain.