When I got off the plane in Muscat almost 6 months ago, probably one of the most prominent thoughts I had was "the next time I'm on a plane, I will be going home". Turns out I was way off base. This weekend is my long awaited trip to Sri Lanka, and I'm both excited and very nervous for this incredible opportunity to travel in a unique setting (as a participant in a school trip). I'm saving details about that for the next post - when I get back, I'll be writing about everything that happened and uploading lots of visuals. But for now, more about this week.

Nothing particularly exciting had happened for a while (barring our trip to the Muscat festival together last week), and so tonight was completely perfect. The five of us YES girls were invited to a "jazz" concert at the house of the American ambassador to Oman (we have  now met her several times; she's really nice), and so we went straight from AMIDEAST after class (we watched a video during Arabic today called Amreeka). It turned out the "jazz" was more of a country-rock mashup, and we wound up dancing on the lawn with each other and ambassadors from various other countries in a crazy jumble of tangled hair and swaying limbs as the Mary McBride Band played in front of us (photos coming soon). 

This is, in a way, a pretty perfect analogy for my life in Oman. Nothing is ever really how I expect it to be, but it almost always turns out well and into a meaningful experience - this one was perhaps some of the most fun I've had in a very long time. I still can't believe that this is my life - hobnobbing (this is probably one of my favorite pieces of British terminology) with ambassadors and attending VIP concerts with four other girls I love dearly, but I can honestly say that even though it can be tricky to be an exchange student, it is completely worth it for the moments like these.

As my dad is so fond of saying, "when the going gets tough, the tough get going". That's what exchange is about. It's about keeping yourself going to enjoy the beautiful little moments when everything pays off and you capture for yourself a memory to keep with you for the rest of your life. But I don't want to get sentimental, so I'll sign of with the promise of more news to come next week when I return from Sri Lanka; in the mean time, here's a song to tide you (and me) and over until then.

🎶Carry On - Fun.🎶

The sand will stay forever in my hair, my pores, the lining of my shoes. The desert is like nothing I have ever seen before. To someone from the Northeast of America, famous for snowy winters and chilly summers, it's one of the strangest feelings in the world to be standing in the middle of February with your feet firmly planted in vast amounts of hot sand. It's incredible.

I don't think anything about it was how I imagined - the sand was finer, the sky was clearer, the dunes were taller, the night was freezing cold - but it was absolutely perfect. There's something really special about sitting down in the sand, watching handfuls of it fall through your fingers as you reconcile yourself with the fact that this sand has been around forever. This sand has been around for thousands of years, and will continue to exist for thousands more - watching the Earth change and morph and capturing within itself the memories of ancient pasts.

The desert never looks the same twice. The breeze shifts the dunes around, the goats crop up the scraggly shrubbery, and every so often a group of excited girls comes along and takes a bottle or two of sand home with them to keep forever. It's magical to know that in that moment, the moment you are there are looking around, you are seeing your surroundings in a unique way, and that no one will ever see it exactly the same way ever again.

But I digress. This past weekend we went as a group to Wahiba sands to explore the desert. We visited the home of a nice Bedouin woman, rode camels up and down the dunes, did some dune-bashing, and on the trip home made some stops to swim. Our first stop was at a wadi - essentially a valley that floods with water. It's very similar to an oasis, except it's far more beautiful than anything elicited by the pop-culture references to such a landmark as a perfectly circular blob of water with a neat cluster of trees in the corner. 

Following the wadi we drove to a sinkhole - otherwise referred to as the "House of the Devil". Here we all went swimming and spent some time admiring the incredible rock formations rising from the water up to the rim. 

Overall it was an incredible trip that I can't possibly accurately describe in this post - but since a picture is worth a thousand words, I'm uploading lots of photos to my gallery in the hopes of expressing better how amazing the desert truly is.

🎶100 Years - Five for Fighting🎶