We arrived in Muscat, Oman, for a holiday after an 11-hour trip from Riyadh, which I find pretty amazing since both countries are on the Arabian Peninsula and not very far away from each other.

However, it’s the start of the two-week Ramadan holiday in the kingdom, although Ramadan doesn’t actually end until Sunday. It seems that most Saudis and immigrant laborers leave Saudi Arabia for the holiday, and they all must have been at the airport today. There had to have been thousands of people trying to get on their flights, with tempers high from fasting and no real order in the queues to the ticket counter, in other words, chaos. Then the conveyer system for luggage broke down, due to overloading, I’m sure, which ground everything to a halt and delayed flights for at least an hour, which ours was. The same thing happened yesterday, I’m told, but flights were delayed for even longer. Our connecting flight to Muscat, which was coming from Riyadh to Abu Dhabi, was also delayed, but we finally got here.

But wow, I think I’m going to like this country! It’s less conservative than Saudi Arabia, but more so than Dubai, but there was actually music (Arab rock) on the radio (which doesn’t exist in Saudi), the highway signs were all in both English and Arabic, people were driving pretty sanely, like what a difference! The one thing that isn’t too good is that not only is it hot, but it’s incredibly humid. Every time I got out of our car or a plane or a building, I couldn’t see where I was going because my glasses fogged up so badly. When we got on our flight in Abu Dhabi for Muscat, the plane itself fogged up – it looked like a huge amount of steam flowing into the compartment from the A/C system. I can't even believe I'm saying this, but I'd take the hotter but totally dry climate of Riyadh any day.