A fascinating little video over at National Geographic.com takes a look at the city of Muscat, Oman, where writer Bernice Notenboom and photographer Martin Hartleyo head out to explore some of the ancient and extremely remote nooks of Yemen. Takes a while to load, but it's worth it, we learn about chewing Qat, a brush cultivated everywhere and that is masticated a bit like chewing tobacco...but apparently the buzz isn't that great. Still people are absolutely addicted to it. They show one guy who is, I'm not making this up, a professional qat eater. Notenboom seems to really like the stuff and gets a little rush from it. Something tells me that the marketing folks at Starbucks are making trips to Yemen as we speak. You'll be able to pick up an elegant little box of the stuff by the register, and they'll call it something fancy like Qat-izzi.

Filed under: Arts and Culture, Learning, Food and Drink, Blogs, Africa, Asia, Yemen