Yesterday one of my hubby's collegue who is a local Omani, invited us to his place for lunch. The good part was that his family home is far from the city in a small village which is a 2 hr drive from the city. So in a way it became a day outing for us and not just a lunch trip. The temperature has soared up now, we are touching 50 degrees and it is not comfortable to go out during day time in this temperature, but when you move out from the city, the temperature gets a little better. In some parts of Oman in the interior region it does rain regularly, and the place we visited also they do get some amount of rainfall, compared to Muscat city where it rains may be just 1 day in a year.
It was a nice long drive and the roads here are very good to enjoy these long drives, compared to India.
As we started getting closer to his place, the road started getting rough. These people really do not bother much on these things and they are happy with their set back life. And I personally also feel this is real freedom, where you have very minimal intervention from the outside.
On reaching there my first reaction was that in future I want to live in a place like this forever once me and my hubby are done with all this job things.
Their home looks fancy from outside, but when you go inside it is completely different. They have very minimum furniture in their homes. Normally they have very big rooms, since their families are big, and most of the seating is on the ground.
Omanis are very hospitable people, if you visit their home they will fill you up till your tummy will burst out :-)
Omani Coffee, Dates and Halwa (Sweet) is a traditional welcome. They will normally offer fruits along with these as a welcome gesture.
The good part about these small villages are that they are self sustained, and they live on a barter system way. They grow their own veggies and then they exchange it among each other. All of them have their own farms.
I normally avoid their traditional Halwa as it's too sweet and very sugary, but here he told me they had made it from unrefined sugar. They grow sugarcane and then they have their local mill in the village where they make the sugar and it's very healthy. It was very tasty also and for once I had a lot of sweet.
The drinking water was also from the well. He knows I prefer all natural things so he had made it a point to have everything as organic as possible. That was very sweet of him.
After the welcome, then we went around his garden area, and there were variety of plants. We could not visit the farm, since he had some issues there, so he wanted to avoid it and we respected his decision.
The plants he had in his backyard were lemon, oranges, papaya, tomatoes, dates.
These are the tomatoes plants. They are still raw.
The Lemon trees
The date trees
The Papaya tree
The village is surrounded by hills and it's a pleasant view.
They also have some poultry of their own
After spending a good amount of time in the place then there was time for lunch. I was already stuffed up with the fruits but then when they put the food in front of us, it was looking so delicious and the aroma was filling up my nostrils and senses. The menu was again very local dishes. The Pulao Rice, cooked with Saffron, the chicken from their own farm and the goat meat also from their farm fed goats, cooked in their home grounded spices. Everything was delicious and extremely filling. I went into a food coma after all of this :-)
It was a wonderful day spent, I surely cannot take this very often, I mean the food part, but once in a way it surely is a treat and fun. One thing was good, though there was lots that went into my system, but all of it was organic and healthy, and there was no junk. We had a wonderful time.
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