Muttrah Top 10 Purchases

(6) Mandoos Chests

Mandoos chests are wooden chests historically used as domestic closets for storing clothes and precious items such as money and jewelry. Nowadays, the Mandoos is used for decoration at Omani homes and is ceremoniously used to deliver the wedding dowery when someone gets married and transporting the belongings of a bride to her new home. Mandoos chests come in small and large sizes, are usually made up of fully wooden bodies, and have geometric shapes drawn onto them using copper needles and sheets.

(7) Halwa

In Arabic, the term Halwa literally means sweets, but in Oman the term Halwa means a specific Omani delicacy made up of starch, egg, nuts, ghee, saffron, rosewater, cardamom, and sugar. These ingredients are blended together in a specially designed huge pots heated over wood fire and then left to cool down into a rich jello-like pudding. There are kinds of halwa that use slightly modified recipes which are usually identified by the color of the halwa. It can be bought in a variety of sizes, but they are never expected to be consumed by a single person. An individual would have a scoop or two of an overflowing table size spoon at a time, and it would shared with other people and consumed over a number of days.

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