Trip to the East

Our second trip was to the East. I have to preface this by saying that even though some of the natural beauty was gorgeous(!) overall, the trip was a bit of a disaster -- in that it was so windy the second night we were being attacked by our tents, one boy's tent actually fell down on him.
The second day we were actually woken up by our teacher at 6:30 with shouts to (Sieze the Day) and then we preceded to drive around all day aimlessly, stopping at one beach and another...for no reason....



But, I will try to stay positive! On to the picture narrative:

Our first stop was at Hassan Taqa (Taqa Fort). This is one of the more famous landmarks. I know that this is not going to be comprehensible to some (like me) but this 'stronghold' was actually built in 1930...it just looks the same as all the other Kasbah's built centuries ago!







I actually really enjoyed this aspect of the trip, because we got to learn a lot about how Omani's lived before modernization came to them -- before electricity or new building techniques. And our tour guide gave us the whole tour in Arabic...so we learned a lot of words like mortar and pestle (different than in Moroccan Arabic).

After this we went to see a tomb of an old prophet, who helped bring Islam to the region...and a huge graveyard around it. This was actually a really beautiful site, and we got to go explore the graves...but the oldest ones we could find were about 200 years old.

The contrast between the white tomb and the brown gravestones is quite stark, and makes for some beautiful pictures. Also, you can see the cool old-style Arabic writing (the tombs in the pictures are about 200 years old)