Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia is a country in the Middle East where everybody is constantly at least kind of mad because it's hot all the time, sand gets into all of your shit and no one is ever allowed to have any fun doing anything. It's kind of like Utah, if you've ever been there before. Saudi Arabia is an Islamic absolute monarchy, which I think basically means that if you live there, you shouldn't fuck around. Saudi Arabia is also located on top of the world's largest oil reserves, which means that despite continued criticism over human rights issues such as equality between men and women and the perennial question of whether or not cutting off the hands and feet of minor offenders is the best method of criminal rehabilitation, the king (currently Abdullah bin [more names]) still gets to have lots of weird sleepovers with powerful foreign heads of state. Saudi royalty aren't really all that different from the kid you knew in the fourth grade who was kind of a shitty person, but you hung out with him anyway because he had a Sega Dreamcast and Crazy Taxi was a really fun game.

The Burj al-Mamlaka, Saudi Arabia's tallest building, was built in 2002, in case someone ever needs to open a really huge bottle.

Oman

Oman is a country and a 1976 horror film directed by Richard Donner that isn't as scary as it used to be and a 2006 remake that I haven't seen but probably wasn't that scary to begin with. Located in the Middle East, Oman is the birthplace of the popular cliché "Stuck between Saudi Arabia and hundreds of miles of gorgeous Arabian Sea coastline." Oman also shares borders with Yemen, which I don't know anything about, and United Arab Emirates, which is the one that has the indoor ski hill. Its capital, Muscat, has a human history dating back to the Stone Age and was mentioned as early as the 000s by Pliny the Elder, who described it as "A nice enough place, but good luck finding as much as a Quizno's there." The head of state is Sultan Qaboos bin Said al Said, who lent his name to Oman's Grand Mosque in 2001 because he hates America. Most people have never heard of Oman because it doesn't have as much oil as Saudi Arabia and, as mentioned before, it lacks an indoor ski hill.

Muscat: Pretty enough, but lacking in restaurant chains that fill me with a sense of familiarity and comfort.