Bargain Books

These guys were prepared! Shopping trolley in a book exhibitions.

Visited the exhibition on the last day and apparently it's the first time they organized it in Oman. No wonder they have those trolleys, majority of the books were heavily discounted. The titles may not be the latest one but there are all good quality book.

We approximately saved 50% from the original price of the books.

Selamat Hari Raya Aidil Adha

Oman celebrated Eid Al Adha on 9th Dec. Holiday started from 8th until 12th Dec.

Laundry

Somebody must have been doing some heavy laundry last Friday, the beach was all foamy....




The past few weeks, it's all red tide and bad smell by the beach. Apparently the foam is coming from some sort of micro organism from the sea.

Survey, Numbers and Future

This article from Brudirect highlight some interesting numbers:

• 75 per cent of oil and gas sector employees are locals.
• 4,379 staff out of which 3,203 are Brunei Citizens or PR.
  

A much more interesting article is about the SPE Salary survey:

• In both North/Central Asia and Southeast Asia, the average base pay reported by non citizens is about four times greater than that of citizens.
• Annual base pay for citizen is US$44k while non citizen is US$180k.

The standard explanation for the difference is because this non citizen has to pay for his commitment in his home country. This may be valid many years ago but now, I doubt it.

The SPE survey also mentioned "Yet in the US, Australia/New Zealand, Canada, and North Sea/North Atlantic, the differences between noncitizen and citizen pay are far smaller. and in the US and North Sea regions, the base pay for noncitizens is lower".

The gap between citizen/non citizen has been there for many years, probably since oil first discovered but what can we do to reduce the gap? The industry are paying the non citizen almost similar amount in all the regions.

It will be a shame if our future generation still has to face this situation and had to relocate to earn fair wages.

Time will tell, God willing changes will come.