Coffee Break

Muscat hit 51 degrees yesterday. Today it is slightly cooler (a relatively chilly 44 degrees) but factor in the humidity and a couple of minutes spent outside is enough to steam up your sunglasses and leave you feeling a bit damp.

To combat this, all buildings and cars have very good air conditioning systems and the way to cope during this time of year is just to basically move from one air conditioned area to the next. I often compare this (when people back home ask how I cope in the heat) to the not too dissimilar a set-up of a cold harsh winter in Scotland where you don't step outside much and tend to move from heated home to heated car to heat office.

Today the electricity supply in my college's area was cut for two hours. Speculation is that with so many AC units on at the moment, that the city can't cope with the massive surge in power required. Needless to say, the college started to heat up like a blasphemer's feet and so the students were sent home. The teachers had to wait around for a bit however and talk drivel to each other in the form of gossip, arrange meetings to discuss the forthcoming exams and find new ways of being stupid lazy fuckwits.

To get away from them, I sat and had lunch with Binoy and Joseph (bottom row in this blip) using my penlight for illumination. Topics of discussion today included whisky, god and children. Joseph doesn't believe that a twelve year old single malt takes anywhere near that length of time to produce and speculated that if it did, the whole of Scotland would be covered in whisky barrels. Joseph does believe however that everything in the universe was created by God (written with a capital 'G' out of respect for Joseph), and that my sole purpose in life is to have children ("just one if you like") so that my family name echoes through the ages. At this point, I grabbed my camera and distracted him by taking a picture of his mug.

The conversation finished with Thomas arriving for a chat about his new N95 mobile phone whilst Joseph gently nodded off to sleep in the dark.