A weekend in the mountains of Oman

Making the steep climb by car up to Jebel Akhdar I arrived in the late afternoon to join the celebrations for a friend’s wedding . The formal betrothal had taken place last year and today would be the start of married life. Of course, it was a busy affair, as all Omani weddings are, with probably most households in the village joining in . Since this was a ‘town persons’ wedding we set off, in a queue of cars , to take the bride to the grooms home .

The car with Bride and Groom arrives

 

The next day I managed to have an early morning walk through the mountains before having a very enjoyable lunch at a simple reception to congratulate the groom

A Date Palm in the Mountains of Oman

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Dates from Oman

I managed to get back and see the Hadrian exhibition at the British Museum. The reading room in which it is held is of course an appropriate venue as Hadrian’s Pantheon inspired its dome. I was intrigued as to how the curators had utilized the Reading Room for a major exhibition (as I hadn’t seen China’s Terracotta Army) . The entrance to the exhibition is at 90degrees  to the original room and a narrow corridor skirts the circumference until a staircase takes visitors up to a newly installed floor – complete with ventilation fans in the floor.

Hadrian and compatriots

  

Timed tickets should have been a warning – the space was probably full to its designed capacity and it was a struggle to move at my pace and see the exhibits. For me the outstanding impact was the representation of Hadrian throughout his rule – each artist created a sculpture of a man whom the “vir in via” must have been able to recognize has they walked past him.

 

It was wonderful that among the marble the curators included a written plea for support, from a foreign civilian living in northern England, to the regions governor. Perhaps the same man had touched a large amphora, found near Hadrian’s Wall, which was displayed along with an image of a shard mountain of 26million amphora.

Later, walking along Bond Street, I was surprised to see a familiar shop name. ‘Bateel’ a shop selling Dates and Date products has a branch in Muscat; amazingly they had set up close to where a company I was general manager with 25 years ago had a shop. My surprise was not really in seeing Bateel but with a rental of probably GBP300,000+ per year the extraordinary volume of dates they must sell to cover costs – probably Arab Embassies are ideal clients.

Bateel Date Shop – Bond Street