January 2020

January 2020 has been an interesting month here in Oman.  We kicked it off on a boat finishing off our trip.  We arrived back in Oman a bit late for the first day back to school, so that was one day off.  At the end of that week, J woke up sick to make a second day off for him.  Then came Saturday morning when we learned that Sultan Qaboos had passed away.  An official mourning period was declared for 3 days.  The official mourning period started the next day (Sunday) which meant 3 more days off school.  Then came the last of the heavy rains for the month which cancelled the first day of school after the mourning period thanks to flooded classrooms and no electricity.  5 days off for E and 6 for J in 2 weeks.  Good thing the rest of the month didn't trend the same way.

Back to the passing of Sultan Qaboos.  He was a truly beloved leader as he led Oman from being a poor, oppressed, left behind country, to one with much improved roads, hospitals, and educational systems.  He made Oman a symbol of peace as he quietly led by example inviting arguing leaders to the table to discuss solutions.  The people here live much more free lives, though it is still not the level of freedom Americans experience.  He had been sick for quite a while as he was battling cancer.  While it wasn't shared in local news (no freedom of the press), Wikipedia indicated that he came home after his early December doctor appointment because he wanted to pass away in his home country.  The only news released here came at the end of December to say that he was in stable condition.  He passed away Friday, January 10, in the evening.  The new sultan (Sultan Haitham) was named Saturday morning.  Sultan Qaboos was laid to rest later in the morning.  It was a crazy morning/weekend/week of searching for every bit of information that we could find online to keep up with what was going on.  We dealt with closed roads as diplomats and world leaders came in to pay their respects during the days of mourning.  I sent Stephen to the gas station for emergency milk the first morning because I wasn't sure if it would be respectful for me to be out in public, and the gas stations were about all that were open.  We went to the grocery store the next day after they were asked to be open.  (The grocery store is in the mall... It was super weird going to a mall with all the stores closed.)

Southeast Asia Celebrity Cruise

When we moved to Oman, we made lists of places we would like to visit.  Then we quickly realized that there was no way we would see all those countries with limited vacation time during just a few years here.  Cruises to the rescue!  Cruises are a great way to see many new places with just 1 trip.

Since we are in Oman, there are certain places we would like to go because they are nearby or at least closer than they are from the States.  We knew that we wanted to go to some countries in Southeast Asia, but there are a lot to choose from!  We did some cruise searches (using sites such as expedia.com, cruises.com, and vacationstogo.com).  We then made a spreadsheet to help us compare options.  We tracked cruise line, dates, # of nights, ports of call, price per night, and any additional notes such as deals or activities for the kids.  With this list, it was much easier to narrow down our options, discuss our favorites, and choose a long Celebrity Cruise Southeast Asia Holidays Cruise that had a very low price per day (we wanted less than $100/person/day, this one was well below that goal).

I can send you our spreadsheet if you'd like a visual.  It's nothing special, and it may take some explaining as it is so bare bones.  But it works for us because we are both Engineers and love spreadsheets.  It really did make it much easier to compare our options.

Before I get to the bullet points of our stops, I'd like to stress how much we loved this cruise.  This was our first Celebrity Cruise, and it did not disappoint.  The food was amazing.  The staff was wonderful.  The captain was hilarious.  The kid's club had many activities and kept our kids excited to go even though they have a small area.  We were scheduled to have 2 "chic" nights for dinner, but we ended up with 3 given the special holidays.  They did the holidays right with special foods, Santa coming for a visit, and New Years hats.  This was a top vacation.  Enjoy!

My family with our waiters.  It's fun getting to know them as the days pass.

December 2019

As you may or may not know, expat life is actually a lot like regular life.  I deal with oddities like no Amazon, signs and menus in another language, and some uncertainty about what I will find at the grocery store.  But, I encounter those as a part of normal things like shopping (in my case more "window shopping") online, eating out, and grocery shopping.  It can be quite mundane.  With that in mind, December started like any other (though admittedly warmer).  The kids went to school, they had some typical end of term days of assessments and reviews, and they had a Winter Fair and program.  We decorated the house for Christmas and enjoyed Christmas decorations as we would see them at hotels, restaurants, or the grocery store.  By the way, Christmas decorations in hotels is what "it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas" means here in Oman as well as many parts of Asia.

For school, J had an explorer day where he dressed up like an explorer (space explorer in our case because I already had the costume) and did fun recaps of what they had learned about Tudor Explorers this term.  E had a decades day where all the kids dressed up to represent a decade of the 1900s to wrap up their learning about the 20th century.  E went as a boy from the 30s, and he took a cool board game we made with trivia questions dealing with the 30s.

E ready for 30s day at school.