Eid day 2: Sama'il

The first day of Eid I was alone, but the second day I went out to Sama'il with some friends who have relatives there.  It was fixing to rain, which I haven't seen in nearly a year.  Probably since the last time I was in Sama'il.  It doesn't rain much in Muscat.

It's not all as bleak as these pictures, since it rains a lot.  It's just that the green irrigated areas are off in the distance in another direction and these shots are of a dry river bed, which doesn't get the chance to grow much.

We had a nice time visiting, I explained why I wasn't praying traveller's prayers.  Ibadhis pray them when 18 km from home, but Shafi'is have to be 80 km from home.  People here think I should just adopt the Ibadhi ruling or become Ibadhi to take advantage of the ruling, but I like the Imam ash-Shafi'i too much and so I stay. (I just don't want to switch madhhabs and suddenly have no idea what any of the rules are).  We ate too much halwa and drank a lot of qahwa.  Being over-caffeinated and high on sugar is an Eid tradition.

I'm told that Oman's oldest masjid is in Sama'il, but I've never seen it.  My friend's family don't seem to know which one I mean, but they say that there's an old masjid near their daughter's house, so maybe that's the one.

Iftar in Sama'il

I went out to Sama'il with the family of a friend for iftar.  It had rained that afternoon and there was standing water all over the roads, so not all of the family members were able to make it to their grandmother's house for iftar.  Sometimes there were wadis in the way.

I wasn't able to take any pictures, we were in a hurry to get there before maghrib was called, so I'll borrow someone else's.  This is the largest thread I've seen of pictures of rain and clouds (source).

Sama'il fort, which I saw from a distance:

source

Sama'il is in Dakhiliyya province, about 40 km from Muscat, and Wikipedia tells me it has a population of about forty thousand.

source

I do at least one embarrassing thing every time I eat at someone else's house.  This time, I bit off half a fresh bone-in herring and chewed.  And chewed.  And chewed.  And then my friend's mom leaned over and showed me how to split the fish open and pull out the spine fringed with little bones before eating it.  It was really obvious I'd never seen a herring before that wasn't pickled or canned.