Saturday, October 25, 2008
Reply to OIUS's Comments on My Previous Post
OIUS-I appreciate your comments 99.9% of the time, but please don't be an unthinking populist. Your country has placed significant interests in tourism and you cannot ignore that. As I said, the GCC summit is very important, but so is the reputation of the country and its businesses. The read this gets in the West is "we can dishonor guarantees at the whim of the government." This is a serious impediment not only to tourism, but also to international investment. If your country is to benefit from foreign tourism and investment as it aims to, people's attitude cannot be "yeah, f- you guys." The attitude of "they'll keep coming" is what will lead to the downfall of the tourist and investment development model of the Gulf in general. They'll keep coming until they realize that guarantees are not guarantees. This is not the hospitality of Hatim al-Taiee. When did he say, yeah, f-u, I changed my mind? I understand that situations change, but this needs to be explained and sincere sympathy must be shown for PR's sake at least.
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4 comments:
Leo,
I didn't intend to say "F you guys". But I understand your overall sentiment.
I'm not so sure. Sudden decisions on a scale like this are actually quite rare, and if they continue to be this rare, I still think tourism won't be affected.
People tend to have short-term memory.
Other than that, I didn't mean to come off so insensitive; it was a little bit tongue-in-cheek. Obviously I do realise how absurdly inconvenient this is. Since I'm from there, I've experienced my share of sudden inconvenient decisions.
-Omani in US
OIUS-
This is the beauty of dialogue. I really hope I get to meet you sometime. I understand some of where you're coming from , because I've been there and you've been here and you understand some of where I'm coming from because of the same. This is where dialogue lies. Not only do Americans need to understand the rest of the world, but really, the rest of the world needs to understand America too. God knows, I've talked to a ton of people who think they know America because they've seen all of our movies, but their perceptions are SO FAR OFF. Of course, most Americans' perceptions of other countries are completely uninformed too, but the reality is that a Hollywood understanding of the U.S. from outsiders is as useless as a Hollywood understandinng of the Middle East by Americans who haven't been there. The bottom line is that I want more OIUS's and I want US's IO...
Haha, yes it would be interesting to meet you too one day. When I have free time I'd like to craft a little more nuanced post explaining how I actually feel about this tourism-in-Oman business.
Related to learning about America through movies: watching shows like Friends, The Simpsons, and Seinfeld in high school really taught me a lot about American culture. I wasn't aware of this at the time (and didn't get some of the jokes), but very much did realise this when I came to college here and was surrounded by Americans.
-Omani in US
Who knows where to download XRumer 5.0 Palladium?
Help, please. All recommend this program to effectively advertise on the Internet, this is the best program!
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