Eid holiday - Saturday

Eid holiday was a bliss. Taking rest and not experiencing any stress from work. Great.

Although I got sick at the end of Eid it was a great time to meet (new) people, see some things of the country and like I said, take rest from work.Friday, the first day of Eid was for me a day to go to church and spend some time reading. I was reading 1984 by George Orwell. I never knew that book was so good. And Church is always good too. Weekly I go there to take communion and spend time in prayer and worship with my fellow brothers and sisters: all honor and glory to Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

Anyway, Saturday I left in the morning to go to Abdullah, my coworker who lives in Shinaz, about 3 hours to the West of Musqat.

Arriving at his house I was welcomed in the guest room, the only room I would be seeing that day

. This is typical for Omani hospitality; receiving guests in the guest room. No tour du maison or meeting any of women. We sad down to have water and fruit and afterwards some qa'awa and hahloawah. That is coffee and sweets. The Omani coffee is coffee with cardemom and served in tiny cups. The sweet is a very very sweet almost jellylike substance served traditionally at

eid (although you can get it al throughout t

he year).

Having sat there for a while and having met Abdollahs older brother Khamis we went to collect the result of a daylong cooking process. We went to collect the goat that was killed the day before at eid. What they do to prepare it for dinner is cutting it in pieces, wrapping it in some sort reed protective and draining it in water. After this is is put in a hole in the ground (about 1.5 meter/ 5 feet) and cooked/smoked over hot

charcoal. Result is a delicious tender piece of goat meat with a strong smokey flavour. This was our lunch. It was really good.

(photo's: the wicker basket with in the pot the heads of the goats. On the plate the prepared meat. yummy)

Having had lunch with the family (and again... of course only the men were there, because it is improper to meet the women in the family in their house) Abdullah and I went for a d

rive to Shinaz. There we found that the weekly bullfights were about to start. Normally these are on friday, but because of Eid they were postponed a day.

Since the famous bullfights were on my list of things that I would like to see in Oman I was feeling happy to be able to witness this

cultural event, charactaristic to the west of Oman. The bullfights are pretty gentle in Oman. Nothing bloody or really agressive. More of a challenge and short struggle to see who is the strongest of the two fighting bulls. As we arrived at the 'arena', an open field of about 40x40 meters, we saw about 30 bulls roped to poles encircling the battlefield. Some of them making load roaring sounds, probably showing somesort of displeased attitude, and other bulls were scraping the ground with there hooves (or what ever sort of foot it is that bulls have) causing dust flying around. The bulls were not really big though. The back was probably about 1.5 meters high. Yet they were able to show enough strength and toughness to intimidate me and all the rest of the people watching. But I guess that is the idea of the thing.

And then the fighting started. First, two bulls were distached from the poles and led to the centre of the arena. There they were placed at about 2 feet from eachother facing eachothers' ferocious (well, not really) looking horns. Then the fight began. There were a couple of scenarios. In scenario one, the first bull was scared of the other and ran away. Not really a big show, although at one occassion, one bull almost ran into the crowd of spectators. But of course we were not there, nor was it the point of the bull fight, to see the crowd being torn to pieces by a bull that was almost wetting his pants. Then in the second scenario the bulls didn't really care about eachother and were just looking at one another with the greatest amount of indifference. Too bad, no show. But, of course, the third scenario was what we were hoping for. A great display of power in a struggle to dominating the other bull.

Mainly what happened was the bulls beating their head against the each other and trying to

subjugate the opponnent by pushing its head to the ground. Most of the time these fights only took about 30 seconds upto two minutes. At the end, the ropes that were still attached to the necks of these 'behemoths', were grabbed some Omanis that had the job of controlling the beasts after the fights and the bullls were brought back to their place outside the ring. Most of the time

I had no idea how to determine which bull had won in the end. Sometimes the game just ceased and the bulls were seperated. But anyhow I really enjoyed this old Omani tradition. Reflecting on it the fact that these battles were pretty docile might be related to the friendliness of the Omani people... who knows.

After the game we went back to the house. I wanted to go home, because I had a long way to go and had to get up early in the morning, but of course I had to stay for dinner. I could not just leave like that. Dinner it should be and dinner it was going to be. So I stayed for another meal and then headed back to Muscat to take rest before my next adventure in Sur began....

(to be continued)