Snippets (Part 5)

I'm driving home from the university in the mid-afternoon, feeling a bit pressured for time in that a colleague will pick me up from my apartment in 30 minutes so that we can then head to Dubai for a 3-day conference on English language teaching.  I hit the initial roundabout on Mazoun and turn on my right blinker.  As I make the right turn, I see that there is a small motorbike about 10 meters in front of me, using the emergency lane as it's personal transport lane.  On the bike are two Omani male youths in their late teens or early twenties.  Both are wearing fashionable knee-length plaid shorts and t-shirts covered up by cheap zip-up hoodies from Max or some other discount store that one never wishes to enter into on a Thursday afternoon lest elbows are sharpened to a fine point.

What I find striking about these young men on the bike is that even though it is difficult to balance two adult bodies on a machine built for one, they make the ride look effortless, even with what look like tall yellow plastic drink containers in their left hands.  As I begin to pass them in the acceleration period coming out of the roundabout, I realize that they are not slurping from dink containers. Rather, they are eating corn...on the cob...while pushing 50km per hour on a 100km/hr stretch of busy road...wearing fake Ray Ban sunglasses.  If you've got to eat corn on the cob, though, you might as well eat it in style.