tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25520235224684479282024-03-12T21:39:05.724-07:00I would go living in lightsA travel blog about Palestine, Turkey, Alaska, and all the places in between.Explanationshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15524932064864587071noreply@blogger.comBlogger30125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2552023522468447928.post-47283126046367128872014-02-18T17:33:00.001-08:002014-02-18T21:14:21.367-08:00Survivor's Guide to CELTA<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Confession: I check my blog stats all the time. <i>All the time</i>. I suspect that many (most?) bloggers do this. There's a sense of great satisfaction when one of the numbers clicks up. Someone read a thing I wrote! A stranger in Somalia! A stranger in Belgium! I am an Internet Ambassador!<br />
<br />
Okay, maybe not quite. Here is the number one Google search which has led people to my blog: turkish men. Here is the number two: turkish man. And number four: türkish men. Five: turkish guys. Not much farther down the list, we have "dating in istanbul". Good lord, people, it's like all you think about is sex!<br />
<br />
I'm glad we had this little talk.<br />
<br />
You know what nobody ever asks me about? The CELTA. It's kind of frustrating, really. I feel like everyone probably has something like that, something which you <i>know</i> is miserably and utterly uninteresting to most everybody, but which you simultaneously want to talk about so badly that their sobs of boredom seem almost worth it. My "Ask Me About The CELTA" buttons I had specially made sit moldering in my closet.<br />
<br />
This is what we have the Internet for. People who want to talk about boring things like cars and baseball can find dozens, possibly even hundreds of people across the world who are <i>also</i> interested in these things. Nobody in my real life (apart from my parents, credit where credit is due) has ever asked me for a slideshow of my travel photos, but on the Internet I can write about my trip to Europe with my boyfriend and there are people out there- people I <i>don't even know</i>- who will read it <i>on purpose</i>. This, as I said, is the beauty of the Internet. Here, too, I can talk about the CELTA at great length and nobody will suddenly remember that they have a dog grooming appointment.<br />
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Would you like some quick facts? Don't mind if I do!<br />
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<b>CELTA:</b><br />
<b><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>-Cambridge-accredited course offering certification as a teacher of English as a second language</b><br />
<b><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>-Taken by around 10-12,000 people each year</b><br />
<b><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>-Offered more or less year-round in over 50 countries at more than 250 centers</b><br />
<b><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>-Costs a few thousand USD, plus airfare, expenses, and accommodation</b><br />
<b><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>-Can be done full-time over four or five weeks, part-time over a longer time period, or online</b><br />
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Back in March 2011, in the weeks between my first inkling of "hmm, you know what, working at Wendy's is kind of terrible, perhaps I should do something different" and actually boarding a plane from Raleigh to Prague, I did a lot of frantic Googling. It turns out that there are an enormous number of very professional websites out there which will tell you Basic Things about CELTA. There are surprisingly few- that I could find, anyway- attempting to convey what taking the course is really like as an Average Human. When I searched something normal like "oh god oh god does anybody pass the celta" for instance, I would turn up unhelpful things like its Wikipedia article or the webpage of a testing center, and the banner advertisements in my email would start to hint that maybe retail was for me after all.<br />
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<b>oh god oh god does anybody pass the celta</b><br />
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Yes! Very nearly everybody! I found a page today with a detailed breakdown of scores by country <a href="http://gradestatistics.cambridgeenglish.org/2011/celta.html" target="_blank">here</a>. It varies by a surprising amount, really. Some countries (Bangladesh, Slovenia, Japan) seem to hand out the coveted Pass A's like Halloween candy, while most everywhere else awards the highest grade to only around 1-7% of trainees. Armenian and Venezuelan centers seem unaware that a regular Pass exists. Ethiopia fails everyone outright (???). On average, though, the Fail and Withdraw categories put together only total up to about 5% of students. You have a 95% chance of passing.<br />
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As I understand it, training centers will generally not accept your candidacy unless they feel that you have a strong chance of doing well in the course; that's the purpose of the pre-acceptance phone or Skype interview, to weed out the unmotivated and grammatically unstable.<br />
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<b>most effective bribes for celta interviewers</b><br />
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The phone interview is really, and I can't stress this enough, really not a huge deal. You send in your initial application with a little quiz on grammar and how you might teach certain concepts, and this is one thing that will come up. You don't need to get a perfect score. You just need to think about it, do your best, and be prepared to explain your answers. They will make sure that you understand the volume of work the course entails, and check that you are not planning to hold down a job at the same time, which would be a monumentally horrible idea if you opt for full-time.<br />
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I did the phone interview twice. The first time I enrolled in CELTA, I backed out at the last second to work at a hostel instead. The second time I went through with it. Both interviews were easy, laid-back, thoroughly unterrifying. Never fear.<br />
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<b>celta + stress related fatalities per year</b><br />
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Full-time CELTA is an enormous amount of work. You will be at the training center for roughly eight hours a day, five days a week (100% attendance is mandatory excepting legitimate emergencies). From day one onward, you will have several hours of homework to complete each night- mostly lesson planning and essays- and will more likely than not find yourself showing up at "school" an hour or two early in the morning to finish printing and classroom prep. You will probably drink a lot. By week two, you will lift your head from the puddle of drool on your desk and survey your fellow trainees with a bleary eye. Susie will be crying. Bill is clutching his head- another stress headache, probably. Jonah is rhythmically hammering his forehead into his worksheet on participles. Everybody yawns in unison.<br />
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I don't think anybody has actually died on a CELTA course. You may take comfort in this fact I just made up.<br />
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Woody Allen said that 80% of success is showing up. This has never been more true than in CELTA. It is not at all difficult to pass... <i>provided you do the work</i>. Of which there is a lot.<br />
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by Nazreth, very possibly taken during a CELTA lecture</div>
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<b>do you listen to theory lectures all day or what</b><br />
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I am one of those people who like to get the worst stuff out of the way immediately. I eat the eggs (disgusting) before the sausages (delicious). You will never hear me say "no, give me the good news first". CELTA is designed for people like me, apparently, because here is what you do first thing in the morning:<br />
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<i>teaching practice</i><br />
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I was the only one in my unusually small class of eight who had previous classroom experience (in Korea and Palestine). Turns out, though, it's kind of a different ballgame when you know that you're actually the one getting graded. The whole thing becomes somewhat more stressful than teaching a bunch of Korean kindergartners the ABC had been.<br />
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Each trainee gets at least six hours of observed teaching practice. Our full CELTA group was split into two subgroups of four for morning TP (as they call it, being very big on acronyms). Each group was assigned a different teacher trainer and a different class level, pre-intermediate or upper intermediate, both to be switched after week two. From day two onward, everyone taught a sample lesson on alternating days, during which time the other trainees and the teacher trainer would take notes (what worked well, what was terrible, how was the energy in the classroom?). Snoozing gently on your desk was cruelly forbidden.<br />
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Afterwards, the students would shuffle out and we would discuss the day's lessons. I seem to recall that the criticisms we leveled at one another were very tame and hesitant during that first week. A fellow trainee of mine seemed deeply apologetic while explaining that perhaps I had spoken a bit too loudly, which in retrospect probably meant that my primitive bellows were reverberating mercilessly from the walls of the classroom. "Your lesson was good... supremely excellent really... a marvel..." we would tell one another, and then quickly and quietly tack on a minor bit of criticism at the end ("butmaybejustmaybe andIcouldtotallybewrong, Ithinkthepartaboutparticiples waspossiblyalittleconfusing").<br />
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This politeness took a nosedive, along with our collective energy levels, after about week two. Don't get me wrong, we weren't, like, <i>jerks</i> or anything. But I think it's really something that CELTA does well; it fosters an environment where everybody understands the value of constructive suggestions. Nobody was offended (I think) when we would openly say things like "the part about the vocabulary made no sense to me. I don't think it worked at all. And your overhead slides were..." (laughter here, our ongoing battle against outdated technology being just one of the many factors working constantly to unite us). And the trainee whose vocabulary lesson had sucked would be <i>happy</i> about this. Pleased to receive useful suggestions.<br />
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<b>what is the point of celta?!</b><br />
<br />
To open up a world of glorious possibilities, of course! When I first heard about teaching English as a Foreign Language, I believe I was twelve and poring over a second-hand copy of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Work-Abroad-Complete-Finding-Overseas/dp/1886732094" target="_blank">Work Abroad </a>(overall a fairly disappointing book as I remember, but I won't be too harsh on it here; I was, after all, twelve). "You can DO that?" I thought. "People will PAY me for this?"<br />
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Years later, I was still somewhat surprised to discover the sheer number of expats or would-be expats who had the same happy realization. But maybe I shouldn't have been. Teaching English is pretty much the single easiest way for its native speakers to live sustainably overseas. It seems to be getting easier every day as English becomes increasingly crucial across the world and language schools spring up like weeds anywhere the demand is great enough.<br />
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So do you really need CELTA certification? There's a lot of debate around this question. The short answer is no, not <i>really</i>. There are certain countries in which your chances of employment don't seem significantly impacted by certification (South Korea among them, which is possibly the number one destination for ESL teachers globally). Others will depend on the particular school you're applying to, some of which may accept you with a different qualification, even one from the often-scorned online certification courses, or no qualification at all. If you have a degree in teaching, you will be able to parlay that into a good job in many places.<br />
<br />
The long answer, though, is yeah, kinda. If you're serious about teaching English, getting reputable certification (meaning, essentially, either CELTA or Trinity TESOL) is a <i>very, very, very</i> good idea and will open a whole lot of doors. Now that the weeks of pounding headaches are a distant memory for me, I can heartily recommend it.<br />
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Extra-special shoutout to <a href="http://www.akcent.cz/en/p/1/homepage.html" target="_blank">AKCENT IH Prague</a>, who mailed me my certificate from nearly three whole years ago with nothing more than a "huh, we were starting to wonder if you still wanted it."<br />
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Happy teaching :)<br />
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Explanationshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15524932064864587071noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2552023522468447928.post-87796752884849050432013-10-25T14:38:00.000-07:002014-02-18T21:14:45.188-08:00Alaska Pride<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Winter is creeping into Anchorage. Snow has been perched up on the Chugach range to the east for weeks, ebbing and spreading as the weather toys with us down here in the city- fifty degrees one day, twenty-five the next. Each day, the sun lingers a little less in the sky and we're left in what feels like unfairly premature darkness, even in October. Opening up my blog again for the first time in months, I can't help but notice the irony of the title I chose back in Turkey. Living in lights? Not so much. I never imagined then that I would soon enough be back in the United States, this time sharing a latitude line with Helsinki.<br />
<br />
I've moved around a lot in my life, but there's one thing that always seems to stay the same. <i>People really like complaining about where they live. </i><br />
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I used to offer, unhelpfully, "if you hate it here so much, why not move?" Well, Young Sierra, first of all, not everybody shares the desire to pack up their lives and replant hundreds or thousands of miles away every six months. But more importantly, I finally realized they aren't whining in earnest. Inside the moaning is a certain bizarre but apparently universal pride found in the oddities, discomforts, inconveniences, and annoyances of home.<br />
<br />
Something as simple as the weather quickly becomes a strange kind of race for last place. "Where I'm from, the humidity is so intense your clothes are soaked through five minutes after you leave the house," the Floridian will half-brag, half-complain. "You can't <i>imagine</i> how bad mud season gets up here," the Vermonter will say, seeing a one-up opportunity. At this point, the Alaskan senses weakness. "I am from Alaska," he announces. "The sun barely rises in the winter, and never sets in the summer. Winter, which lasts eight or nine months, is bitterly cold and terribly depressing. Lower 48ers who find themselves in our frozen northland after its onset can do nothing but huddle together for warmth and pray for a swift death."<br />
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I may possibly be exaggerating a slight fraction, but really now.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjia41xMHHRaXoNNpA4igm-q00aeeD13KtN9vxNQKEx4icOzBxacjl6BE7sfaGyUGc4oe2slyC7_lj-Qp7j60kHkA712y3-Hp25efa657po_bWWOiXzA47Nyum7722u6mckJ7qDAQ_YYSHE/s1600/anchorage.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjia41xMHHRaXoNNpA4igm-q00aeeD13KtN9vxNQKEx4icOzBxacjl6BE7sfaGyUGc4oe2slyC7_lj-Qp7j60kHkA712y3-Hp25efa657po_bWWOiXzA47Nyum7722u6mckJ7qDAQ_YYSHE/s640/anchorage.jpg" height="264" width="640" /></a></div>
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<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/100898408@N02/" target="_blank">Midtown Anchorage</a> by Mark Kimerer</div>
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Anchorage is a strange place, that's for sure. I'm not sure what I pictured on the long drive west from Boston and then north from Arizona, but it wasn't quite this.<br />
<br />
"Everything here looks like it's from the seventies," I remember saying to my boyfriend as we climbed out of the overloaded Suburban to stretch our legs in the Taco King parking lot. The faded colors, the nail salons with misspelled names, those hokey fan-driven balloon people bowing and straightening in front of tax attorneys' offices and sushi restaurants. The... um, oh no, I'm compelled to use the phrase "antique charm"... of Anchorage gives it a small-town America feeling, which, combined with the city's vast sprawl, makes it easy to forget that fully 40% of Alaska's population lives here.<br />
<br />
There's a sense of disconnect, I think. The <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=19&ved=0CHYQFjAIOAo&url=http%3A%2F%2Flabor.state.ak.us%2Ftrends%2Fjul04.pdf&ei=HtJqUoX1FqWqigLLjoHQBg&usg=AFQjCNHrON1xVbo6lNE6ZRDVdfuPy9p2mw&sig2=eoeSkrJLRv7-LqX46U--zQ&bvm=bv.55123115,d.cGE" target="_blank">38%</a> of the population who was born and raised here, along with a surprising number of immigrants, seem to view themselves as Alaskans first and Americans a distant second. "In the States" doesn't mean "in this country we all live in," but rather "down there in the lower 48". Very little west of Anchorage is accessible by road, meaning that the majority of this mindbogglingly enormous state is effectively marooned in the snow for the better part of the year. Not much of a surprise, then, that Alaskans hold <a href="http://www.alaskastock.com/Alaska_Bush_Plane_Photos.asp" target="_blank">six times more pilots' licenses per capita</a> than any other state.<br />
<br />
Not a surprise either that people up here in this middle-of-nowhere, Last Frontier, former Gold Rush state seem generally pretty psyched about the things which set them apart. Anchorage's dubious honor of being the <a href="http://www.travelandleisure.com/articles/americas-worst-dressed-people" target="_blank">least fashionable city in America</a> and the completely unshocking fact that Alaska is the coldest state year-round are relayed in a tone of voice normally used by proud parents whose son got straight As.<br />
<br />
Here's what I think: Alaska is weird. And expensive. And remote. And <i>freezing</i>. And people up here pretty much like things like that. </div>
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Explanationshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15524932064864587071noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2552023522468447928.post-73297137155481119032013-04-20T03:32:00.002-07:002013-04-20T03:50:35.448-07:00Bulgaria: We wish to retract previous disparaging comments<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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It's a beautiful day in Bulgaria. <br />
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I feel compelled to mention that. I've been back in this country for a week now with my boyfriend, Adam. Spring arrived before we did and the air is fresh-smelling and cool. Red and white bracelets adorn the branches of flowering trees- the leftovers of <a href="http://renouncereverb.com/2012/03/01/the-first-day-of-march/">Martenitsa</a>, a uniquely Bulgarian March tradition in which these tokens are given out for good fortune. Out here in the west, the mountains remind me of the ones at home. <br />
<br />
This was not my initial impression of Bulgaria during my visa runs to Plovdiv a couple of years ago, as my friend Jessica reminded me recently ("Dulllllllgaria"). I still maintain that Dullgaria is a Very Good Portmanteau, but it felt far more accurate on a cold winter morning shivering at a grey bus stop in the city. So I'm sorry, Bulgaria. That was uncharitable and it won't happen again. <br />
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<center><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhG-BBNxGp4NIrzqmXByl5jHeeBYyhD-1y-g8LoM9mGZ_bY66TKZ8Qqz4cRAlZERF3tyqrmD2Wfv08bY2wk325HGTcq3fr91ZuEkMHP2TvkiJvDoK6y1sKstZ1uc8cpb4xfiVu0nXbcEl7B/s1600/IMG_20130420_132917.JPG" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhG-BBNxGp4NIrzqmXByl5jHeeBYyhD-1y-g8LoM9mGZ_bY66TKZ8Qqz4cRAlZERF3tyqrmD2Wfv08bY2wk325HGTcq3fr91ZuEkMHP2TvkiJvDoK6y1sKstZ1uc8cpb4xfiVu0nXbcEl7B/s320/IMG_20130420_132917.JPG" /></a><br /></center>
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<center><b>Bulgaria tastes all right</b><br />
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I'm reminded, actually, of a guy I met on the interminable bus trip down from Prague to Istanbul in 2011. He was an older gentleman, very friendly, but also one of those greatly feared public transport chatterboxes who can somehow sense weakness in their seat partners and dive in for the kill. We made small talk, if I recall, for eight hours straight. When our bus eased to a stop in front of the Bulgarian border, he announced, "people come to Bulgaria only three times. The third time, they stay." Given that we haven't yet come across a single other foreigner here, I'm inclined to doubt that, but it's a nice sentiment. <br />
<br />
Not everybody seems quite as full of optimism on that point as Bus Man, anyway. A man from Botevgrad- who studies near London and spoke the best English we've heard this side of Romania- laughed and said, "everybody here wants to go to the United States. You are from the United States and come here. Hahahah!" (Then he pointed out some prostitutes on the side of the road). And there was the customs official as we entered the country. Attempting to get a thorough list of Bulgaria's surely extensive tourist attractions, we were presented with the names of three nearby caves. Any other sites? Yes, here is a fourth cave, slightly more distant. Okay, other stuff? Cave. <br />
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Don't get me wrong, I like caves. You could even say I like caves *a whole lot*. But I can't help picturing Bulgaria's tourism department as a single old woman snoozing under a flag and, probably, a poster saying BULGARIA: WE HAVE CAVES. <br />
<br />
According to <a href="http://www.indexmundi.com/facts/indicators/ST.INT.ARVL/rankings">this</a>, Bulgaria is doing a resounding "sort of okay, I guess" on the international charts; the annual tourism arrivals stats place it forty-first out of the 188 countries for which data has been gathered. Most foreign visitors here are from the neighboring countries (Greece, Turkey, and Romania) but over eight percent are Americans. <br />
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Even Wikipedia manages to give the reader an "eh, Bulgaria, take it or leave it" impression. I will admit that I did not giggle audibly when I discovered that one of its <a href="http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orehovo">links</a> to a "picturesque Bulgarian village" leads instead to a rather nice *Slovenian* village, but I did think it was comical enough to share. <br />
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I hope it doesn't sound as if Bulgaria-Sierra tensions are rising again, because this is not the case. I hope the tourism department keeps snoring away because hey, more deserted forests and mountains for me.
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Explanationshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15524932064864587071noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2552023522468447928.post-36010040713367635562011-10-10T10:02:00.000-07:002011-10-10T10:18:41.671-07:00Patriotism<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiaJXHrQ3kY4pvEtMlhyphenhyphenbJdDBEdWw-L9mTdrKyC5CaWpFySfeLxs8gFWqjJ2QO6RCL0gv8fbjPRVhcPgATB7WFGAcpvRYtBvh9LCilUeBQlLAHLeG8oDkfhgkKe3BhEIMrjIfla0Dm6O8D/s1600/eastturkey2.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 259px; height: 194px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiaJXHrQ3kY4pvEtMlhyphenhyphenbJdDBEdWw-L9mTdrKyC5CaWpFySfeLxs8gFWqjJ2QO6RCL0gv8fbjPRVhcPgATB7WFGAcpvRYtBvh9LCilUeBQlLAHLeG8oDkfhgkKe3BhEIMrjIfla0Dm6O8D/s320/eastturkey2.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5661912041821874482" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNdrbmYS8WO8vGLorz8I54k3kyGIZmmJR6FvxvlQ7wovL5RqBsctHu1EZyjQYrYny7m-5D3t4Vf1PHTR9AgN-yMXAEu90DFFeSOMYfDvWBhnc3WYwArYlRS_AoBMeddfJHsE0-s5Dl-OlK/s1600/eastturkey1.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 223px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNdrbmYS8WO8vGLorz8I54k3kyGIZmmJR6FvxvlQ7wovL5RqBsctHu1EZyjQYrYny7m-5D3t4Vf1PHTR9AgN-yMXAEu90DFFeSOMYfDvWBhnc3WYwArYlRS_AoBMeddfJHsE0-s5Dl-OlK/s320/eastturkey1.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5661911965656156466" /></a><br /><br /><center><b>Two Google Images results for "eastern turkey"</b></center><br /><br />After some undefined number of months living in another country, the major contrasts between Old Home and New Home fade into the background. I guess I've grown accustomed to rhythms of Turkish life. I get a strange sensation of uncertainty sometimes, indecision- firetrucks screeching up the street and missing their turn, playing board games at the office during the second power outage in as many days, men in suits attempting to heave a stranger's car onto the sidewalk so a bus can maneuver around a tight corner. Would these things happen in the States? I can't remember. <br /><br />I used to read a lot of travel forums even before posting on Thorn Tree and BootsnAll became a major aspect of my job (I'm not bragging... or am I? Maybe a little bit). These days, unsurprisingly, I'm clocking up a lot of hours on the expat subdivisions, where I can whine with other Americans and Canadians about how hard it is to open a bank account in another country, muse about how the nosedive of the Western world is looking from these parts, share the articles our friends and family send us about the allegedly direct correlation between beard length and likelihood of concealed weaponry, that sort of thing. <br /><br />One recurring thread in expat forums is- as you might well suspect- a discussion about the things we miss most from home. Nearly all the Americans who posted their responses included Mexican food. Like, nearing 100%. That strikes me as funny. The thing we miss the most about our home country is another country's cuisine? I thought we were more patriotic than that! "Cattle rustling" was conspicuously absent from the lists. Nobody put "sitting around with a case of PBR and brainstorming new racial slurs," or "singing the national anthem," or hell, even "baseball." <i>Mexican food.</i><br /> <br />I came across an <a href="http://www.zamanusa.com/us-tr/newsDetail_getNewsById.action?newsId=28515">article</a> by Charlotte McPherson in which she observed that Westerners "tend to become more patriotic and nationalistic when away from their homeland." My instinct is to disagree, at least when it comes to us Americans. For every United States citizen singing the praises of our Great Democracy abroad, there are three discreetly sewing Canadian flags to their backpacks. Of course, most people aren't so easily pigeonholed, and as a whole, an expat's relationship with their native country is far less likely to revolve <i>solely</i> around boring the locals with endless tales of the superior majesty of the motherland or <i>solely</i> around raging about the worst aspects of home. I miss my family and roadtrips and bluegrass and sledding in Vermont, and I enjoyed a few moments of snobbish delight upon finding out that Americans are apparently viewed as the <a href="http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/world-votes-americans-coolest-nationality-global-poll-129369803.html">"coolest" nationality</a> on earth. On the other hand, I also frequently find myself overcome by the impulse to preemptively assure people that I don't think executing innocent people is a terrific idea and that neither my family nor the family of anybody I know actually owns a Hummer. Living in a different country means that for better or for worse, I've come to take both praise and criticism of America much more personally than I used to. I'm quicker to point out the great things about the US and sadder about the hateful, shocking, dysfunctional ones. So maybe I <i>am</i> more patriotic. <br /><br />With nationalism on my mind, it occurred to me to wonder whether Americans or Turks are prouder of their country. The reputation of the States overseas is as a land of rabid superpatriots- and in fact, a poll by MSNBC found that we're the world's most <a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13577802/ns/us_news-life/t/america-tops-national-pride-survey-finds/#.To2Okd5yKfI">enthusiastic flag-wavers</a>. <br /><br />But is it so simple? I've never seen an American rush to George Washington's defense with any particular passion (have you?); in Turkey, insulting Atatürk is actually a crime- a law which is rigorously enforced. According to 2011 polls, only 17% of us in the US have a favorable view of our federal agencies, compared with 61% and climbing who support the government over here. The Turkish language has undergone, in the last century, a radical overhaul to purge the common vocabulary of thousands of words with Arabic or Persian roots in favor of Turkic equivalents, many of which had to be made up on the spot- an overhaul which met with resounding success and acceptance. Despite polls and reputations, it seems that Turkey is in many ways more patriotic than America. <br /><br />I looked up "aspects of culture" with the assumption that culture is a central concept to this idea of nationality- we rally around our flags and our symbols because they represent an unspoken commonality that we all share. I'll admit that I didn't look very far. Wikianswers, possibly the least authoritative source on the entire Internet, provided me with the following list:<br /><br />1. Food<br />2. Clothing<br />3. Recreation<br />4. Government<br />5. Education<br />6. Language<br />7. Religion<br />8. Transportation<br />9. Economy<br />10. Environment<br />11. Culture<br />12. Arts<br /><br />(Apparently culture is an aspect of culture, but there are also eleven others! Who knew?)<br /><br />Some of them aren't very handy when discussing patriotism. Transportation, for example. Even sitting in the Greyhound terminal in Murderton, Detroit, waiting for my eight-hours-delayed bus and nervously mm-hmming my way through a chat about prison tattoos with a highly pungent and frightening gentleman, it never occurred to me to think, <i>"bad public transport. THAT'S what's wrong with America."</i> Similarly, despite the comfortable seats and smiling stewards aboard the trains and planes here, I've never seen anybody smugly waving Turkish flags outside Atatürk airport. Their <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Tim_McLean">beheading rates</a> are infinity percent below North America's and even their food is not the nauseating sludge we Americans have come to expect on our travels ("Make sure you don't miss their hazelnut snack," Cornell Prodan raves in his <a href="http://www.airlinequality.com/Forum/turkish-5.htm">review of Turkish Airlines</a>. I'm not sure why I find this so funny). <br /><br />But I digress.<br /><br />Some of the others, I think, are better barometers of national pride. Some things we have in common because they're institutional and/or unavoidable. An American can't really choose not to have Obama for a president or live in a bad economy or come from the country that gave the world Hollywood. Others are more... um, opt-in, I guess, and more nebulous. Faith. Traditions (which should be on the list but isn't). Even language, to an extent. It occurs to me that maybe American nationalism is born of our strange contrast. Countries like Turkey are more historically, religiously, ethnically, linguistically homogenous than ours (we'll leave the Kurds out of this, and I doubt many of them would identify as strongly patriotic anyway), and that's THEIR source of solidarity. Maybe ours stems from different values entirely- our perception of ourselves as independent, free, self-starters, a bit rebellious in our determination to make it together despite our varied roots and backgrounds. If Turkey is a noble family with centuries of pure blood, we're a rags-to-riches businessman who bootstrapped his way up from nothing. <br /><br />What do you think?Explanationshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15524932064864587071noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2552023522468447928.post-79847572259791874092011-10-02T04:15:00.000-07:002011-10-02T05:59:06.444-07:00Tarlabaşı: ghetto livingReporters speak of Tarlabaşı like it's the dark heart of some fairytale forest- you can stroll down "glitzy," "vibrant" İstiklal, but don't stray too far from the path. Mere minutes away, it's <i>all too easy</i> to find yourself in a sunless slum where the trees whisper to each other and the birds are all reporting to their ogre overlord and you're more likely than not to find yourself getting shoved in a witch's oven or initiated into a gang.<br /><br />"Istanbul's Tarlabasi district, is famous for all the wrong reasons - drugs, prostitution, crime. Photos of mysterious figures in the shadows, pimps, transvestites smoking cigarettes, and men slinking up to hotel rooms..."<br />-<a href="http://davidhagerman.typepad.com/weblog/2010/07/tarlabasi-the-untold-story.html">David Hagerman</a><br /><br />"It's located right next to the commercial and cultural heart of Istanbul and, yet, most Turks consider Tarlabasi a no-go zone."<br />-<a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11965693">NPR's Ivan Watson</a><br /><br />"Tarlabasi is burdened with a reputation as a haven for drug dealers and prostitutes, and few would wander its lanes at night."<br />-<a href="http://www.zesterdaily.com/shopping/566-istanbul-market">Robin Eckhardt</a><br /><br />Ahhh, home sweet home. Always nice to read a glowing review of the neighborhood you live in, don't you think? Sure, the panorama outside the iron bars on my window might not be majestic, exactly (hissing cats picking through a sort of post-apocalyptic windswept dump), but nobody throws loud parties here and it's been <i>at least</i> two weeks since anybody traded gunshots on Kurdela Sokak, two streets over. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSlq4HExN5No4plR5-z5MIvAnvqeL1Y8Ksth1_XVnJ8Xwh08UZNnSBC3-28F4X54XiqxAUWu1qGhUOtV760QQaXxEIZSheenBM4244irgxUptmT9Ysq_MW4ZuN_qacHk98sUQJPdVGio96/s1600/tarl3.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSlq4HExN5No4plR5-z5MIvAnvqeL1Y8Ksth1_XVnJ8Xwh08UZNnSBC3-28F4X54XiqxAUWu1qGhUOtV760QQaXxEIZSheenBM4244irgxUptmT9Ysq_MW4ZuN_qacHk98sUQJPdVGio96/s320/tarl3.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5658874958330994114" /></a><br /><br />Drug deals, I will admit, are not uncommon, unless I'm reading way too much into the huddles of shifty-looking youths which spring up after dusk. Nor are transvestites and prostitutes (my Halloween wig shopping is going to be cake this year). Seedy hotels? Check. Out of all the journalistic allegations above, the only one I can really take issue with, actually, is this:<br /><br /><i>most Turks consider Tarlabasi a no-go zone</i><br /><br />Do they? I mean, I guess it wouldn't spring to many minds as a top-notch destination for moonlit strolls carrying a month's salary in cash. But on the other hand, even the Turks who consider going to bed with wet hair a highly risky activity and hurl themselves in my path when I attempt to jaywalk across empty streets- as if I were diving out into a spray of bullets- don't seem particularly horrified when I walk home to my apartment alone.<br /><br />I like Tarlabaşı for the same reason my parents took home the most hideous kitten they could find from the Humane Society. <i>Because</i> it's ugly, and because that gives it a kind of eccentric charm. It's got the faded glory effect, with little now left to remind us of its past as an affluent district populated by Greeks and Armenians. Forced to leave en masse in the first half of the 20th century, their abandoned houses were slowly filled with Kurds, Roma, and illegal immigrants (as well as a recent upswing in European Erasmus students enticed by the low prices)- the ragtag misfits of Turkish society, in other words, whose Little League team will surely someday win a heartwarming victory over a richer and better-equipped team from a wealthy suburb (now accepting suggestions for the title of the Disney movie... I'm thinking Starlabaşı). <br /><br />I'm constantly trying to get people to come to the Sunday market (the <i>pazar</i>, a word which means both "Sunday" and "market" in Turkish). It's one of the oldest in İstanbul and also one of the most frenzied (read: fun), a fact due in large part to the very economy and demographics which apparently make it such a terrifying place to visit on any other day of the week. You can get black market loot from Georgia, fresh vegetables for the equivalent of 26 cents a kilo, toy guns, any sort of underwear your heart desires, massive watermelons, spices... it's like Christmas day (if instead of visiting your aunts and uncles, you visited a bunch of large men shouting in Kurdish). <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhm2V83mil_x2gg9Go8ALVVUoO3tlZyaXypNv5-NVuEt4d9BG0tuzp-SsV3X3p_P1ylXuJPEE9u8N4hEoaTtibqFMTXHiN8jfJnkSE1Rc9ojXN_Se_7XszfouLmbonDuFK2NjJDm9_vHbfd/s1600/tarlaba%25C5%259F%25C4%25B1.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhm2V83mil_x2gg9Go8ALVVUoO3tlZyaXypNv5-NVuEt4d9BG0tuzp-SsV3X3p_P1ylXuJPEE9u8N4hEoaTtibqFMTXHiN8jfJnkSE1Rc9ojXN_Se_7XszfouLmbonDuFK2NjJDm9_vHbfd/s320/tarlaba%25C5%259F%25C4%25B1.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5658874036314870962" /></a><br /><center><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/30617891@N07/2915030715/sizes/z/in/photostream/">By Karpuz11</a></center><br /><br />Tarlabaşı, really, is not that frightening. The man at the corner store, intent on slicing up his cheese, will try to give you some. The toast lady will hand you a free bag of popcorn, just because. Women will lower buckets on ropes and holler at you to fetch them some bread. The tiny boy on his dad's parked motorcycle will whisper "vroom" noises and make you laugh (until he starts shouting rude words down the street after you, anyway). <br /><br />Unfortunately, maybe the toast lady forgot to smile at some government official one day, because Tarlabaşı's future is looking grim. İstanbul's Urban Transformation project, targeting around 31 neighborhoods citywide, looks certain to drive out most of the area's current residents- pimps and barbers, drug dealers and pilav sellers alike. Tarlabaşı may be... well, scruffy. But I think this is sad.<br /><br /><a href="http://arsiv.ntvmsnbc.com/modules/interactive/foto-roportaj/tarlabasi/">Tarlabaşı Photo Report From MSNBC</a>Explanationshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15524932064864587071noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2552023522468447928.post-13999461795184178712011-09-27T08:25:00.000-07:002011-10-01T03:23:25.056-07:00SuperstitionI stayed home from work sick yesterday. I'll spare you the macabre details, but I'm assigning direct blame to food poisoning, and indirect blame to the little beast pictured below. Convinced by Deniz (aka Peter)'s <i>adorable purring</i> and <i>very soft fur</i>, I've been leaving my window open overnight so he can curl up with me on his own schedule and go root through trash (or whatever he does out there) the rest of the time. Unfortunately the night air in İstanbul is getting increasingly icy as October approaches, and I think it's doing bad things to my immune system. If I'm not sniffling, I'm snuffling; if I'm not snuffling, I'm sneezing or coughing or whining about a headache. A sort of walking illness.<br /><br /><center><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinOEit4CVdHtHK6W8XFqt-xHXGvDCbj2SW7mHZzhR9KcE50sFUSIXSsIFbykaQ4zk1VTs0uV6xMosc_aGcxtIblmAvdDYo7ArFWY-9hLRyjceRx7YCaTc-HJLDpXeXc4Fz62LyTDg00GCx/s1600/peter.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinOEit4CVdHtHK6W8XFqt-xHXGvDCbj2SW7mHZzhR9KcE50sFUSIXSsIFbykaQ4zk1VTs0uV6xMosc_aGcxtIblmAvdDYo7ArFWY-9hLRyjceRx7YCaTc-HJLDpXeXc4Fz62LyTDg00GCx/s320/peter.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5657063077782958898" /></a></center><br /><center><b>THE CULPRIT</b></center><br /><br />On arriving at work this morning, a coworker told me that I wasn't the only one. Except for him, everyone else in the office had been out yesterday too. "It was like a haunted house in here," he said. <i>"İn cin top oynuyordu."</i><br /><br />That turned out to be one of those awesome Turkish expressions with no English equivalent, the kind which give me endless glee and inspire blog posts. Used for lonely, empty places, it can be translated roughly as "djinn and things were playing ball." ("<i>İn</i>" means lair or den according to my dictionary, but in this sense it seems to be used as a sort of placeholder, as in the common fairy-tale question "<i>in misin, cin misin?</i>"- "are you human or are you a djinni?").<br /><br />As an aside, etymology nerds might be intrigued to learn that our two words for the supernatural Middle Eastern beings come from different stems entirely. According to Wikipedia, "djinn" (singular "djinni") comes from the Arabic root ǧ-n-n meaning 'to hide' or 'be hidden'; meanwhile, "genie" derives from the Latin <i>genius</i> meaning "tutelary spirit", which entered English via French around 1750 when the first French translation of One Thousand And One Nights used it in place of the similar-sounding Arabic word.<br /><br />Anyway. In the Western mind, the word "genie" conjures up Robin Williams' voice booming out one-liners from a dusty lantern in the Cave of Wonders, or maybe Barbara Eden comically ruining Major Nelson's day.<br /><br /><center><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieG9tz2yOpE8ER6wkbOhsY5H2IiehwKLQHASGH9qhbpYhKFkrK_J5PzpNpF-MFUk01nA0XB7bjjmZn0M4nkNtpgTtB6h8C_Cq1J_y9kMlCpNgbHlrD4aDWw6FUOrjPYjX1K3oXalIwV6Lf/s1600/genie.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieG9tz2yOpE8ER6wkbOhsY5H2IiehwKLQHASGH9qhbpYhKFkrK_J5PzpNpF-MFUk01nA0XB7bjjmZn0M4nkNtpgTtB6h8C_Cq1J_y9kMlCpNgbHlrD4aDWw6FUOrjPYjX1K3oXalIwV6Lf/s320/genie.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5657063333257611170" /></a></center><br /><center><b>"First, that fez-and-vest combo is much too third-century. These<br />patches. What are we trying to say? Beggar? No. Let's work with me<br />here."</b></center><br /><br />But in Turkey, and across the Muslim world, djinn are much less... well, goofy. While mentions of them aren't particularly common in religious texts, certain examples do exist; the Qur'an, for instance, states that djinn were created by Allah from a smokeless fire, as men were made from clay and angels from light. They are believed to have free will, just as humans do, and can choose their own religion and the manner of their interference with our lives from the parallel world they are thought to inhabit. Wikipedia also has this to say about the genies: "Jinn have the power to travel large distances at extreme speeds and are thought to live in remote areas, mountains, seas, trees, and the air, in their own communities. Like humans, jinn will also be judged on the Day of Judgment and will be sent to Paradise or Hell according to their deeds."<br /><br />Interesting, no? Unearthly yet fallible and accountable. As far as I'm aware, most of our own supernatural sagas have no element of conscience or liability on the part of the demons or ghosts... which makes them, to me at least, less fascinating. Maybe that's why folk tales from this part of the world, like those in One Thousand And One Nights, take on a different tone than the campfire stories back home. It's all cunning and trickery, much less of the Paranormal Activity-type senseless draggings-out-of-bed we see so much of these days in America.<br /><br />Just as prevalent as djinn in Turkish superstition is the <i>nazar</i>, or evil eye (my source, an Actual Turkish Person, estimated that 95% of his countrymen believe in both). According to Hangama Ahmadzai <a href="http://users.tns.net/~mroashan/Folklore/EvilEye.htm">here</a>, praise or envy from even well-meaning individuals is thought to expose people to bad luck. Often blue eyes are considered by Mediterranean cultures to carry a particularly heavy dose of ill fortune, maybe because they're rarely seen- and when they are, it's usually on tourists, who are inclined to further prove their untrustworthiness by fawning over local infants, who are among the most susceptible to the <i>nazar</i>. Fortunately, having brown eyes and no particular fondness for babies, I am still universally popular. In case you should run across some blue-eyed fiend in your travels, though, you might consider purchasing a <i>nazar boncuğu</i>- roughly, "evil eye bead." You can see these everywhere in Turkey, from necklaces to paintings to airline logos.<br /><br /><center><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9FniSpD6HL0Y_bEDgCg5gPsHYIPSz5sNV-fYDDqOfyVr_rHBMN2C7sU5l7wHFboELcu0RY0oKX4iXmyTZCwXdjiIUr7y8DdTMmv13ohbTrOdyqmRfFxC9oKRJkcJSbuWsfKKpiOeOa-wo/s1600/nazarboncugu.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 238px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9FniSpD6HL0Y_bEDgCg5gPsHYIPSz5sNV-fYDDqOfyVr_rHBMN2C7sU5l7wHFboELcu0RY0oKX4iXmyTZCwXdjiIUr7y8DdTMmv13ohbTrOdyqmRfFxC9oKRJkcJSbuWsfKKpiOeOa-wo/s320/nazarboncugu.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5657063625541156562" /></a></center><br /><br />In other respects, though, I haven't noticed that the people here are much more superstitious than we are back home. I did find an extensive list of purported Turkish beliefs <a href="http://www.turkishculture.org/lifestyles/turkish-culture-portal/superstitions-512.htm?type=1">here</a>, but aside from one or two (such as throwing water after a departing traveler to ensure their return) I've never seen or heard of anybody actually subscribing to them. Much like the United States is not a nation of people inching down sidewalks on their tiptoes to avoid the cracks and fleeing in horror from black cats, your average Turk does not seem especially terrorized by the following prospects:<br /><br />-A boy who drinks coffee do not have moustaches, he becomes beardless.<br />-Hair in comb after combing is not thrown to street; if it is thrown, it may entangle in a leg of chicken, so you may have headache continuously.<br />-Cackle of hen implies to bring a bad-luck.<br />-If girls eat something between two meals, their luck to find a husband becomes impossible. (The tragic dangers of snacking!)<br />-It is forbidden to jump over a child, otherwise the child remains short.<br /><br />Still, I'm hoping this one is true for Jessica's sake; she was lucky enough to be pooped on by a Turkish bird during her very first week in İstanbul. <i>When excrement of a bird falls on the head, it means that the person is lucky and will earn money.</i> Glorious riches await!Explanationshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15524932064864587071noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2552023522468447928.post-81134757049173969322011-09-19T09:04:00.000-07:002011-09-19T11:13:40.209-07:00Dialects and conquestsAs you can tell, I've become very <strike>lazy</strike> busy and important recently, and let this blog fall by the wayside. Maybe we can start off my first entry in months with a little puzzle?<br /><br /><b>The janissaries sat in their yurts eating shish kebabs, then they washed down some baklava with yogurt.</b><br /><br />You know I'm up to something because I just shoehorned a bunch of seemingly random words into an awkward sentence. Any idea what's special about these words? <br /><br />The <i>yeniçeri</i>s sat in their <i>yurt</i>s eating <i>şiş kebabı</i>s, then they washed down some <i>baklava</i> with <i>yoğurt</i>. <br /><br />How about now?<br /><br />Yeah, they're all Turkish loanwords. It's a pretty short list, really (I desperately wanted to include "chock a block" on the recommendation of Wikipedia, which claims it's from "<span style="font-style:italic;">çok kalabalık</span>" meaning "very crowded". Every other source I can find, unfortunately, insists its origin is actually nautical).<br /><br />The number of Turkish words which have made their way into English is fairly small. If you look at it the other way around (English to Turkish), <a href="http://www.turkishclass.com/sfa/turkce/forumTitle_2955">the list</a> is much more extensive. As a student, I find this simultaneously helpful and annoying. I like to think of Turkish as a sort of <span style="font-style:italic;">awesome, top secret code</span>- I dont spend hours slaving over coursebooks just to be able to discuss what would happen when şarapnel hits a bungalov or the fiyasko of the rising karbon<br />dioksit levels. The influence of English on other languages, in its role as a kind of global compromise, gets a lot of attention. Plenty of people think it's horrible that the "purity" of Turkish, French, Russian, and so on, is being corrupted by English. Many more don't care one way or the other. I'm not sure I've ever heard anyone make a case that it's strictly a good thing; the closest anyone tends to come is pointing out that language evolution is both natural and inevitable, and to take steps to block the entrance of English vocabulary in various lingua francas would be to artificially hamper their legitimate course of development. As for me, I come down on the side of the purists, with a grudging nod to the evolutionists.<br /><br /><a href="http://warlight.tripod.com/KONIG.html">Click here for an interesting essay on the role of English in Turkey!</a><br /><br />Still, I think language interaction is pretty fascinating. I never realized, for instance, how much Spanish crops up in my daily conversation until Turks fluent in English started raising eyebrows at what I considered perfectly understandable and commonplace expressions- gracias, adiós, vamanos, amigo... things that most Americans, even the xenophobes in our midst, would probably take in stride without a second thought.<br /><br />Let's back up six or seven years. I was a junior in high school studying abroad in southern Sweden, and learning a language which seemed to be under assault from every angle. Most Swedes, particularly of the younger generation, speak excellent English; that, combined with the two languages' similar backgrounds and structures, has led to a huge number of Americanisms (and okay, fine, Britishisms) establishing themselves in the common Swedish lexicon. Yet generally speaking, Swedes seemed less concerned about the influx of English than about about a related, but much more politically-charged phenomenon: Rinkeby svenska, so-called after a district of the city of Malmö home to a massive population of eastern European, African, and Arab immigrants. Rinkeby svenska, which you can read more about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rinkeby_Swedish">here</a>, is in short an emerging dialect incorporating elements of the native languages of immigrants from all over the world, while mainly staying true to the grammatical components of Swedish. Turkish and Arabic seem to be the biggest players here, with words like "guzz" (girl, from Turkish <span style="font-style:italic;">kız</span>) and "yalla" (let's go, from Arabic). Books have even been written in this new pidgin- for example, Ett Öga Rött by Jonas Hassen Khemiri.<br /><br />And it's not only in Sweden. I read an <a href="http://www.turkishclass.com/forumTitle_51304">article</a> this morning- which prompted this entry- about the same deal surfacing in Germany. Turks are the second largest population group up there after the Germans themselves; some estimates go up to four million, making one in every twenty of the country's inhabitants Turkish. With immigration already a hot-button issue in western Europe, I'm surprised we don't hear more about this kind of stuff. Not being German or Swedish myself, I may lack perspective, but I for one think Rinkeby svenska and Kiezdeutsch are really intriguing and frankly pretty cool. I read somewhere that the rise of literacy vastly slowed down linguistic evolution (and popularized the idea that there's one "correct" English and if you don't follow it to the letter then you're objectively wrong... which is an argument for another day). Yet here we have the chance to watch other forces at work, shaping a new dialect right before our eyes. Awesome. Of course it's awfully political as well, considering how closely language is tied to cultural identity. Some people will always be upset about the implications of an "impure" Swedish/German/what-have-you. But on the other hand, it's not like blond-haired Sven Olsson, professor of literature, is going around shouting "<span style="font-style:italic;">yalla yalla</span>" at his colleagues. And really, isn't the immigrant experience a culture in and of itself? Why shouldn't it have its own particular vernacular?<br /><br />I'll leave you with one final thing...<br /><br />The successes of Turkish aside, it hasn't been treated quite so well in certain other countries. The conservative Islamist Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan recently received a hero's welcome on his visit to Egypt- excited crowds held up signs and banners to greet him, among them one which seemed to have been translated through English and set a lot of Turks to chuckling.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">İyi Cetvel Merhaba Erdoğan</span><br /><br />"Good ruler, hello Erdoğan". Unfortunately, <span style="font-style:italic;">cetvel</span> is the wrong kind of ruler, the kind that you measure things with. Erdoğan: effective leader or top-of-the-line office supply? You decide.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpHOFAl82yrn_kLq3ulWYfzQY8G8A5FyM2BZ2ExcxO0mIpojUd9RVnKYqFiHbpdIWAePrpsEhhpIQGgPId1xKRIPKuqH64_6CFrd_m_I0ofAQN9EunEYwsIv51wJKxlmfsrbIA_kxFjDuk/s1600/erdogancetvel.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 208px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpHOFAl82yrn_kLq3ulWYfzQY8G8A5FyM2BZ2ExcxO0mIpojUd9RVnKYqFiHbpdIWAePrpsEhhpIQGgPId1xKRIPKuqH64_6CFrd_m_I0ofAQN9EunEYwsIv51wJKxlmfsrbIA_kxFjDuk/s320/erdogancetvel.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5654109030221895106" /></a>Explanationshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15524932064864587071noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2552023522468447928.post-78726630625842464012011-08-10T10:37:00.000-07:002011-08-10T11:46:58.831-07:00Don't bother with TarkanFor the longest time, Turkish music, for me, was a source of bafflement. The landscapes here are amazing, the food is the best I've ever had, the language is a maze of poetic possibilities, the population generally so attractive that it feels like they must be cheating somehow. A few months in Turkey had all but convinced me that I'd found my way to some sort of bizarre paradise where I could live, semi-legally and potentially forever, sipping Efes in the sunshine. <span style="font-style:italic;">So why was their music so awful? </span>
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<br />I spent hours, literally hours, trawling Google for answers. I typed things like <span style="font-style:italic;">good turkish music</span> and <span style="font-style:italic;">turkish rock best</span>. Forums, blog posts, YouTube, all led me to the same warbly Arabesque folk singers and nasal men horking out tiresome love lyrics.
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<br />I celebrated my sixth month in Turkey last Friday with a visa run. Six months hardly makes me an authority on the Turks and their Turkish Mysteries, never mind their music industry, but I can happily announce that half a year did manage to kick my appreciation for the latter up a few notches.
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<br />(I don't mean to be too negative here, but I still find the worst of Turkish music much more aurally offensive than the worst of American music. Which is saying kind of a lot. I think Nietzche had it right: "we hear strange music badly"; a lot of what American radio stations play is garbage, but it's <span style="font-style:italic;">familiar</span> garbage, not as jarring to my Yankee ears as its Turkish equivalent.
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<br />For the record, and this seems like as good a place as any to mention it, the title of this post refers to a particular hatred of mine, Tarkan. Listen to him if you must, but don't say I didn't warn you).
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<br />Anyway, I'm happy to announce that not all is doom and gloom over here. Have a listen to the fruit of my (ongoing) investigations.
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<br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Luxus - Zin Magazin</span>
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<br />A seven-person Istanbul-based group playing upbeat gypsy music. I've seen them somewhere between three and a million times.
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<br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Duman - Aman Aman</span>
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<br />Alternative rock.
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<br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Ceza - Önce Kendine Bak</span>
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<br />Like a lot of Turkish rappers, he writes lyrics about Turkish immigration to Germany... which is a story for a whole different blog post.
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<br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Bomba Etkisi</span>
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<br />Another group from Istanbul, great live- reggae and swing. Here they're playing on Istiklal Street, as the majority of local acts do from time to time.
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<br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Yaşar Kurt - Ruhum</span>
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<br />Probably my favorite Turkish song, soft and sad.
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<br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Sakin - Denek Hayatım</span>
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<br />A great song about the 2004 train derailing near Eskişehir which killed over 100 people. Give it until 2:15; it picks up.
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<br />Happy listening.Explanationshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15524932064864587071noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2552023522468447928.post-53372925986017959582011-08-03T05:49:00.000-07:002011-08-03T05:53:26.495-07:0023; still childishSaturday was my first day as a 23-year old. I spent most of it sprawled out in bed, feeling like I'd been run over by a truck (note for parents: I was up late reading to the elderly and vaccinating orphans). When I finally emerged into the living room, clutching at my head and keeping to the shadows, my flatmates were already sitting there, slightly more bright-eyed than I was, having <s>drunk less</s> vaccinated fewer orphans. <br /><br />We have nicknames now, apparently, which is convenient for my anonymity-preserving, blog-writing purposes. Why we have them is a bit of a mystery to me, but I now live with Big Daddy, Shotgun, and Walking Dead (Turkish, Turkish, and Irish, respectively). Someone passing by the door and hearing us addressing one another might assume it's some kind of gang lair or drug den when in fact it is a sunny, wholesome flat full of joy and the banter of earnest, pure voices.<br /><br />Not being in top form, we spent most of the day slumped on the couches, talking, moving as little as possible. Walking Dead, an English teacher, was correcting his students' exams, a process punctuated by frequent laughter as he graded some of the less competent answers ("after dinner, you should do the <span style="font-style:italic;">orchards</span>," he would read gleefully. "Hah!"). Marking papers, I think, is a great ray of light in the life of an English teacher, and must go a long way toward making up for the delight we foreign clowns provide the Turks with our humorous attempts at communication. Walking Dead reckons there are too many Çs and Şs; for my part, I have an uneasy relationship with the Turkish verb.<br /><br />I've gotten better about speaking Turkish, though. Not <span style="font-style:italic;">at</span> speaking Turkish, unless you count a vastly improved range of local obscenities (courtesy of Big Daddy and Shotgun, who feel strongly that this aspect of my education should not go neglected), but... well, I've finally managed to guilt myself into saying things. Trying. My conversation is still peppered with a great many <span style="font-style:italic;">bilmiyorum</span>s and <span style="font-style:italic;">anlamadım</span>s ("I don't know" and "I don't understand"), but my average sentence length has doubled and I can say many impolite things. Off to a good start, I guess?<br /><br />The hapless victims of my first serious attempts at speaking generally fall into one of two camps. A not insignificant number react like the breakfast sandwich lady on İstiklal, shawled, pattern-skirted, who smiled widely at me and said "<span style="font-style:italic;">İranlı mısın? Alman mısın? Türkçen çooook iyi</span>!" ("Are you Iranian? German? Your Turkish is so good!"). She was exaggerating, of course, but I am not one to turn down a compliment. Others are like Shotgun, who will probably read this and take exception to my portrayal of the exchange, but who's milking the cow here, me or him? Anyway, I'd stuttered out a few sentences when he poked me in the ribs and said "<span style="font-style:italic;">çocuk gibi</span>! Hahahah!" ("like a child"). This was less than reassuring.<br /><br />As a point of potential interest to my fellow language learners, he's since restored some portion of my dignity by clarifying that he didn't mean to say that I'm roughly as eloquent as an infant, but rather that my voice gets higher when I speak Turkish. It's true. In fact, since I started paying attention, I've realized that nearly <span style="font-style:italic;">everyone's</span> pitch gets higher once they leave their native language. Why is this? Something to do with the effort to pronounce foreign words correctly is my theory, kind of like how accents are tougher to detect when someone's whispering. Any ideas?Explanationshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15524932064864587071noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2552023522468447928.post-38146400485645741782011-07-27T00:40:00.000-07:002011-07-27T00:51:38.367-07:00EarthquakeThere was an earthquake on Monday. I wouldn't have known, personally. I was sitting in the living room with my new quasi-flatmates (okay, I don't live there, but I might as well) and partaking in a zealous debate about whose turn it was to go to the store. Two of us <span style="font-style:italic;">yabancı</span> (foreigners) and two Turks, all digging deep into our creative resources to invent a reason not to make the sweaty trip down.<br /><br />"I can't go because I don't know which kind of gin you want."<br /><br />"Don't be lazy. You're the closest one to the door."<br /><br />"I saw that lady across the street lowering money in a bucket on a rope and shouting to the store guy. Maybe we should do that. Do you have a bucket?"<br /><br />"I don't think that would work."<br /><br />"Yeah, someone has to go. But not me. I think I went last time."<br /><br />"What? You've literally never gone. Ever."<br /><br />"Oh, right."<br /><br />"Well, I'm a foreigner. Maybe they'll overcharge me."<br /><br />"Nah. But I definitely shouldn't go because... wait, was that an earthquake?"<br /><br />"No," I said. But I was wrong. I walked into the office the next morning to a flurry of conversation about it- a 5.2 quake centered in the Sea of Marmara, no casualties or destruction as far as I could learn. 5.2 is pretty small, after all. But maybe I didn't look far enough; Googling "Istanbul earthquake" turned out to be a distracting affair, with search results ranging from "Turkey's biggest city braces for massive natural disaster" to "scare-tactic advertisements sell quake-proof flats" to "oh god oh god, we're all going to die." (Maybe not so much the last one). İstanbul, you see, sits almost right on top of the North Anatolian fault line, and it's suffered a big shake-up every century or so for fifteen hundred years, most recently in 1999. Earthquake experts, after fiddling with their Earthquake Dials and pushing some Big Buttons or whatever, have concluded that the next one, a big one (imaginatively named "The Big One") is due by 2030, and it's going to be a monster. 7.6 is a number these seismologists seem fond of bandying about- the same size as the 2001 Gujarat earthquake in India which left 600,000 people homeless.<br /><br />Let me take this opportunity to introduce a Turkish idiom which is in no way relevant: <span style="font-style:italic;">çayı görmeden paçaları sıvamak</span>, to roll up your pant legs without seeing the brook. It refers, as you might guess, to precautions taken before they're necessary, which is the exact opposite of what most of Istanbul is apparently doing, earthquake-wise. <br /><br />Oh sure, there's been pressure from the government to improve building standards, and the rich folk of the city are increasingly choosing to live in the northern suburbs, which are meant to be among the least affected areas. But as Okan Tuysuz, a professor of Earth Sciences, told the Guardian in 2006, "about 65% of buildings in Istanbul don't meet the rules and the city is growing too fast for anyone to be able to keep up. Things have improved, but not quickly enough to cope with the problem."<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Roll up your pants guys. The brook is right there. </span><br /><br />This gloomy entry brought to you by Wednesday Morning.Explanationshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15524932064864587071noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2552023522468447928.post-87798975955364312592011-07-22T02:32:00.000-07:002011-07-22T02:51:38.811-07:00The ant prayerAs much as I love Harry Potter, the books did leave me with one nagging concern. <span style="font-style:italic;">Why doesn't anybody use the Internet?</span> Have I vastly overestimated the state of modern technology in England? Is this why my British friends haven't been answering my emails? More likely, I guess, is that a world full of computer-savvy Muggles would throw a monkeywrench into the whole business of magical communication- you can't have Dudley Skyping with his Smeltings friends while Harry stares out the window, sighing heavily and trying to recall how many days it's been since he sent his owl out with a letter for Ron. But really, who sends proper mail these days? I can't remember the last time I bought stamps. <br /><br />The point is that much like modern teenagers (<span style="font-style:italic;">in the real world</span>), wizarding families are woefully unfamiliar with the workings of the postal system. As demonstrated by Mrs Weasley's attempt to send a letter through the Muggle mail in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, my current Turkish reading:<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Zarfın her santimi pulla kaplıydı, Mrs Weasley'nin Dursley'lerin adresini karınca duası gibi bir yazıyla sıkıştırdığı, ön taraftaki 1,5 santimetrekare hariç. </span><br /><br />Every centimeter of the envelope was covered in stamps, except for 1.5 square centimeters on the front where Mrs Weasley had squeezed in the Dursley's address in writing like the ant prayer.<br /><br />...wait, what? <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">like the ant prayer</span><br /><br />The dictionary told me that this, <span style="font-style:italic;">karınca duası gibi</span>, means "small or cramped handwriting." Well, okay. Figuring there had to be more to the story, I put my Detective/Language Nerd Hat on and went in search of my colleagues. <br /><br />"Ahhh, the ant prayer," I was told, after managing to ambush Ahmet in the kitchen. "It's a prayer in Islam for luck with money."<br /><br />"Like, prosperity?" <br /><br />"Yes. Like prosperity. The real name is <span style="font-style:italic;">bereket duası</span>, the abundance prayer. I think we Turks are the only ones who call it the ant prayer, because ants work very hard and cooperate to have enough to eat, you see?" <br /><br />I didn't, really. "Okay, abundance prayer, but what does that have to do with tiny handwriting? Is it because ants are small or something?" <br /><br />Ahmet laughed at me (this happens a lot). "No no no! People hang up this prayer on signs in their shops or offices for good luck with business. I think we have one here, in this building. They put it in very little letters so it will fit. That's why when you write something very close together, it is like the ant prayer."<br /><br /><img src="https://e1ykgg.bay.livefilestore.com/y1mOfkfK6tKHNnJQf2WPVK8PDz9O_BrWM9Tyzjr3CK5hHKDv_2wySNZPwxM7XEzLNZ4W8RRXSrFNGnVLHXmp07rWYvJxLrqXInt189NS1VbD7tRsfGa3n4ekwslVBx5HQBECNcM2wFq_80/kar%C4%B1nca%20duas%C4%B1.jpg"><br /><br />Ohhh. I love idioms, and I'm going to make up excuses to use this one as much as possible. When in Rome, do as the Romans do.<br /><br />...or as the Turks would say, <br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Ya bu deveyi güdersin, ya bu diyardan gidersin</span>. (Either steer this camel or get out of the country).Explanationshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15524932064864587071noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2552023522468447928.post-64577703071660540962011-07-19T07:59:00.000-07:002011-07-20T05:38:06.472-07:00Istanbul culture; my dating prospectsNinety degrees today. I know it's boring to comment on this abysmal heat in every entry, but if I have to suffer, by god so will you. Ninety Fahrenheit, of course, a mere 32 Celsius, which sounds much less impressive and is one of the things I prefer about our senseless American thermometers- everything is much more dramatic that way. Someone should invent a temperature scale which sets the boiling point of water at thirty billion degrees or thereabouts so I can whine with appropriate flair. "Ten billion degrees today, oof!"<br /><br />Onward.<br /><br />As I've mentioned before, people are very fond of pointing out that Turkey- and Istanbul in particular, as the only major city on earth which straddles continents- is a cultural mix of Europe and Asia (or the Middle East, if you prefer). It's all but mandatory, apparently, to touch on this in your opener if you're writing a guidebook or a travel article about this place, and even Lonely Planet lists "crossing between Europe and Asia" as one of the top ten must-dos in Turkey. I'm personally of the opinion that the spot would be better occupied by something else. The transition is unspectacular if you go via the bridge, just a sign welcoming you to the other side and a staggering taxi fare to pay on arrival. Incidentally, GPS devices seem to agree; someone told me this morning that upon reaching the bridge's midpoint, they'll instruct you to "turn right". <br /><br />(As an aside, I think it's interesting that nobody's thought to cash in on this with a little booth at the ferry terminal offering I CROSSED THE BOSPHORUS TO ASIA passport stamps for a lira or two. I smell big business.)<br /><br />In any case, yes, Istanbul is a city of opposites. Women in burkas and women with halter tops and full sleeve tattoos; centuries-old mosques next to H&M stores; Starbucks built across from the entrances to the winding alleys of covered bazaars. But for the most part, the city seems to take no particular notice of the juxtapositions which fascinate us foreigners. Istanbul has spent so long at the center of come-and-go empires, both west and east, that it's difficult to even frame a photograph illustrating the contrast. It's all a blend. Not the two separate identities of Asia and Europe "meeting" so much as centuries of disparate influences creating a third independent identity. <br /><br />That's a big part of why I like living here. Theres's enough Western influence to make life straightforward for an American- I don't spend my days muddling through a swamp of cultural misunderstandings the way I often found myself doing in Palestine- and enough of the East to keep me fascinated. Also enough of the East, apparently, that I'll never have a working relationship with a Turkish man, as my coworker kindly informed me.<br /><br />We were sitting in his apartment a few days ago and he was struggling to find a way to politely tell me that I had to vacate his living room. I wasn't upset- I'd already been sleeping there for two weeks, which is probably longer than I'd let anybody monopolize my own couch. His reason surprised me, though.<br /><br />"I got back together with my girlfriend."<br /><br />"Ahh," I said, remembering that he'd mentioned the original reason for the breakup had been her jealousy over one of his female friends. "And she wouldn't like it that I'm staying here."<br /><br />"Not exactly," he answered. "She would <span style="font-style:italic;">literally kill me</span>."<br /><br />We talked for a while about jealousy and its role in relationships. When I said that I wouldn't be okay with a boyfriend telling me I can't hang out with other guys, he seemed a bit taken aback.<br /><br />"Turkish girls like that. They like the man to be... a man. They want him to keep her away from others." <br /><br />"Well, the day a boyfriend of mine starts telling me who I can and can't spend time with is the day we break up." <br /><br />He frowned at me. "Then you can never marry a Turkish man."<br /><br />Well, there go my hopes for Turkish citizenship, I guess. But he's probably right. Turkey is a very liberal country in some ways, and a very conservative one in others. Dating seems to fall, uncomfortably, somewhere in the middle. Arranged marriages are almost entirely a thing of the past in Istanbul and young couples walk around freely, hand-in-hand. But gender roles are very much alive and well- the man is the protector (and to a large extent, the provider) while women cook and clean and fluff their boyfriend's pillows and do everything possible to take care of them in a domestic sort of way. When I then told my coworker that there would be no pillow-fluffing from me, or at least limited pillow-fluffing on a voluntary basis, you could almost see him mentally adjusting my relationship potential into negative numbers.<br /><br />Which is sad, really, because Turkish men look like this:<br /><br /><img src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1087/1436161506_f0319d0c79.jpg"></img><br /><br />From <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ceriess/">The Jaundiced Eye</a><br /><br />Oh well.Explanationshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15524932064864587071noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2552023522468447928.post-70311714803112918332011-07-17T13:00:00.000-07:002011-07-17T13:30:28.251-07:00On language learningNine pm in Beyoğlu. I'm out on the third-floor balcony of the spare office room I'm inhabiting until I can afford an apartment, looking out over the goings-on on Asmalımescit below. It's calm down there- the little delinquents who spent the afternoon plotting on the stoop with cigarettes dangling from their mouths seem to have moved on. The corner-shop man is pacing and stroking his moustache; couples are eating <span style="font-style:italic;">çiğ köfte</span> at outdoor tables, wearing Sunday-evening clothes (less revealing than Friday night, more revealing than Wednesday morning); the doorman at the Grand Hotel Pera looks bored underneath the American flag hanging, inexplicably, upside-down. <br /><br />("But wait!" you cry. "Out on the balcony? Didn't your laptop mutiny months ago?" Well, yeah. I'm writing this by hand, to be typed up later, due to the ominous whirring noises which started emanating from the office computer. The lifespans of electronics are halved in my hands, and if I'm going to break it, I'd prefer if it's in the presence of witnesses who can testify that I was only doing Normal Computer Things to it and not, like, kicking it).<br /><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/alpha_auer/5935187936/"><img src="http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6126/5935187936_9e0e237530.jpg" width="500" height="177" alt="Asmalımescit"></a><br />A bar street off Asmalımescit, courtesy of <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/alpha_auer/">Elif Ayiter</a><br /><br />Moving on. Unrelated wittering taken care of, I now feel free to get to my real point. Which is a two-parter:<br /><br />a) My parents like to say that I'm really good at languages, and <br />b) They're wrong.<br /><br />I'm actually only marginally better at languages than I am at calculus, which is to say, not particularly good at all. Oh, I have a decent head for remembering new vocabulary, and foreign grammar constructions usually make a certain amount of sense to me. My real failing is this: I don't actually speak them. That is, I'll speak if I have to- in stores, or with somebody who doesn't know any English. But I'm criminally awful at making myself say anything in Turkish out of the desire for practice rather than out of necessity. Most people handle this really well- they're either playfully encouraging or totally unconcerned. Every now and then, though, someone will get it in their head that I <span style="font-style:italic;">must</span> speak Turkish, and begin a campaign consisting of "come on, just say something. How about now? Just a few sentences. Come on. Don't be shy. Come on!" They're right, of course, but that approach brings out my stubborn side (and prompted me to look up the phrase "I am not a trained monkey"- it's "<span style="font-style:italic;">eğitilmiş maymun değilim</span>" in case you ever need it. I'll probably never use it, actually, because every time I do in my head they just go "ooo how cute, Bonzo's learned some new words!")<br /><br />Okay, I'm back to being an adult now. I guess my point is that I can see why so many people never learn a second language (looking at you, Anglophones). It's a long, difficult, and often embarrassing undertaking. But still. I hear so many Americans- and Brits and Australians and Kiwis, so as not to leave anyone out- proclaiming how awful they are at languages. Look at the Swiss! They all know, like, seven! Look at the Togolese! Look at the French! (Okay, maybe not the French). With a twinge of nationalistic dignity, I always want to say, well of <span style="font-style:italic;">course</span> we're monolingual. We start our underfunded, short, non-compulsory language classes in middle school at best. Imagine if you started learning how to add in the seventh grade and your Chinese penpal was already going on about imaginary numbers. Of <span style="font-style:italic;">course</span> you wouldn't get the sense that you're especially bright when it comes to math.<br /><br />I think everyone should learn a foreign language. Read Rumi in the original Persian, watch Amélie in French, chat up that tanned Brazilian, talk art history with the museum staff in Italy, crush the ignorant American stereotype one "<span style="font-style:italic;">tengo un gato en mis pantalones</span>" at a time. <br /><br />Step one: Stop saying you're hopeless at languages. You probably aren't.<br /><br />(Step two, and this is mostly for my own benefit:<span style="font-style:italic;"> Then, actually speak the language</span>)Explanationshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15524932064864587071noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2552023522468447928.post-70793984332153246042011-07-17T06:04:00.000-07:002011-07-17T06:58:18.602-07:00Istanbul (Not Constantinople)After eight months of hibernation, pressure from adoring fans has become too much to handle and I've been forced to reopen my blog. Alert readers may notice that there have been some changes around here- really only two, actually, which I'll quickly explain by way of reintroduction and then forget about.<br /><br />1: The picture at the top there. Nice, isn't it? I lifted it from someone's Flickr, a guy called <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/caner/">Caner</a> apparently, who (unlike me) both has a camera and knows something about photography. His caption says it's taken from Edirnekapı. I've never been there, but GoogleMaps places it just across the Golden Horn in Sultanahmet and I guess now I sort of have to go to justify having this as my header. <br /><br />2: The title. Once again thieved, but this time from a much more reputable source- Orhan Pamuk, Turkey's best-selling author and first Nobel winner. I have a tendency to underline things in books, and I liked this line in Benim Adım Kırmızı: <br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Işıklar içinde yaşayıp giderdim, iki karanlık zamanın arasında.</span><br /><br />Which means: I would go living in lights, between two dark times. It's on the first page of the first chapter, so I didn't yet have a chance to get tangled up in the plot and the Turkish and all of that; unlike some of the other lines I've marked, I'm actually quite sure of the context of this one. It's a dead guy talking- he just got murdered and dumped in a well, now he's reflecting on life. <br /><br />[Have one more O.P. quote for good measure. I'm circling and starring things like mad in this book, and I sincerely hope it's all as poetic to native Turkish speakers as it is to me. <br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Ama aşk, o ara, İstanbul'a ilk girdiğimde, şehirdeki hatıralarım kadar uzak ve unutulmuş bir şeydi.</span><br /><br />But love, in that time, on my first entrance to Istanbul, was as distant and forgotten a thing as my memories in the city.]<br /><br />Oh, one more thing, I guess: <br /><br />2.5: The title of this entry is, as every schoolboy knows, the name of a somewhat annoying song by They Might Be Giants, and is found in every single Turkey-related blog on the entire Internet. (I thought I should get my reference out of the way early). Surprisingly- or not?- the residents of Istanbul <span style="font-style:italic;">love</span> this song, and on any given night you will hear it playing at full volume at least once, whether you're in a bar or walking down the street or just <span style="font-style:italic;">sitting in the office trying to get some work done for the love of god.</span> Luxus does a good version of it, though. Also, it's stuck in my head now.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Anyway</span>. Istanbul is a very big city, and I have a tendency to refer to parts of it offhand as though someone who doesn't live here has any reason to know where Üsküdar is any more than I have a reason to know where Dorchester is in Boston. Still, the unique geography of the city- that is, the fact that the central part is on both sides of the Bosphorus, one side European and the other Asian, and that the European part is further divided by the Golden Horn- means that it takes a lot of explaining to get across where anything actually is. Being a fan of concision and laziness, I'm going to supply you with a map for future reference.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVAjbg7rIqTZ5NFq7fbh-B9F03_pXlaovuzpRebVuzTOWslaXaJZ2cE3bUJ9y3FCxAVCwqxGvFfj6jipdlrLYQDHdXwicavY1wuIies8j8-zwbz_cHuPOrCQRfCULmULO_2Udpu2v-gLIc/s1600/istdist.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 249px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVAjbg7rIqTZ5NFq7fbh-B9F03_pXlaovuzpRebVuzTOWslaXaJZ2cE3bUJ9y3FCxAVCwqxGvFfj6jipdlrLYQDHdXwicavY1wuIies8j8-zwbz_cHuPOrCQRfCULmULO_2Udpu2v-gLIc/s320/istdist.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5630315560676388546" /></a><br /><br />Roughly speaking, the pink is Beyoğlu (where I work) and the red is Sultanahmet (where most of the historical monuments and things are), both on the European side, and the part colored in purple is the Golden Horn, a little armlet of the Bosphorus which separates them. On the other side are Üsküdar and Kadıköy, in green, Asian side, where a lot of people live to take advantage of the cheaper cost of living and the awesome ferry ride to work in Europe every morning. <br /><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/atillavibes/865608760/"><img src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1208/865608760_f2b750b8dc.jpg" width="500" height="334" alt="My city"></a><br /><br />That's a pretty typical view from the ferry at sunset, so you can hardly blame them. (Sadly no photo credit to me there either; that one's by Atilla1000). <br /><br />Although this post is still content-free for the most part, it's the best I can do on a lazy Sunday afternoon with the temperature hovering around 95 degrees. Stories, facts, history, and all kinds of wonderful things (hopefully) to follow!Explanationshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15524932064864587071noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2552023522468447928.post-76723138793318938542010-11-07T12:10:00.000-08:002010-11-07T12:15:34.634-08:00ImaginationIt's evening in Nablus. A massive banner displaying a picture of Yasser Arafat has been hung up overnight, dominating the view from our kitchen windows; Jeremy told me this morning that the Arabic text running across its border means, according to his best translation, "the youth of today will be the martyrs of the future." Nick and I sit at the table while youthful voices filter up from the cafes on the street below and the tea-kettle begins to boil on the stove. Complaint time has arrived. <br /><br />"My kids suck at essays," I begin. <br /><br />"Mine too. Ugh, they just won't write anything interesting."<br /> <br />"It's like they can't grasp the concept of hypotheticals!" <br /><br />Harsh? Yeah, I guess. But I have never in my life come across a group of teenagers- or anyone, for that matter- so utterly lacking in imagination. My girls are sweet and hard-working and motivated and smart and just fantastically lovely in pretty much every sense, but trying to get them to wrap their minds around anything outside the realm of concrete fact is like building a nuclear superconductor from scratch.<br /><br />Picture this. Thursday afternoon. I've written an essay prompt on the board: <span style="font-style:italic;">If you could travel through time, what time would you go to and what would you do there?</span> Unprompted but armed with a month and a half of experience of the kinds of totally boring and unrelated things my students usually come up with when faced with this type of question, I've already explained it four times from every possible angle. <br /><br />"All right," I say finally. "Got it? Go." <br /><br />One or two girls rest the tips of their pens on their notebooks but write nothing, intending, I can only assume, to create a false impression of industry. The rest stare at the blank pages in front of them. Pencils are gnawed. Brows are furrowed. <br /><br />Eventually, Rahaf raises her hand. "Miss?"<br /><br />"Yes?"<br /><br />"Is... can we... do a story? Can I make up something?"<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Oh my God.</span> How is that not implicit in the prompt? "Yes!" I half-shout. It's like I've just watched the apple falling on Isaac Newton's head. "If you don't make something up, you are <span style="font-style:italic;">doing it wrong</span>."<br /><br />Suddenly, everyone is writing. The resulting essays are the best I've ever received, ranging from the sweet ("I want to back in time 1994 to see how did my parents know each other and moved, and I want to see their wedding") to the brownnosing ("I would go to America to see Sierra when she was baby. Because I think she be beautiful and interesting.") to the really pretty cool ("I want to see person his name is Rambauldi, I want to know how he is know about the future and what will happen?!"). The miracle has happened. A bush has been set alight; the waters have been parted; <span style="font-style:italic;">my students have actually put words down on paper concerning something which did not occur and will not realistically ever occur</span>. <br /><br />I left class on Thursday hoping that the floodgates of creative thought had been opened. But apparently this is more a journey-of-a-thousand-steps type deal. Today, I put a paragraph on the blackboard, brimming with mistakes, for the class to correct. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">I has the very good weekend! First, I was going to the America for see my parents, they was being so happy they is giving me a pet monkey names Roger. I taking Roger back to Nablus with I, and I was enter him in the Best Monkey contest. Roger was win ferst prize, and them gived us a whole years supply of monkey food.</span><br /><br />"Miss Sierra?"<br /><br />"Yes?"<br /><br />"Where is Roger?"<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">...really?</span><br /><br />According to my fellow intrepid TFPers, this problem is far from exclusive to my class. Our students are smart. Really smart, in some cases. Why on earth do they greet any assignment calling for the tiniest degree of imagination with utter incomprehension? Sean reckons Palestinian students are just never taught to think creatively. But man, what do kids <span style="font-style:italic;">do</span> if they aren't making weird stuff up? I think about 95% of my childhood was spent in my head, pretending that stick forts were impenetrable castles and carpets were rivers of magma (oh man, I'm totally playing The Floor Is Lava with my class, even if it takes them until December to grasp the concept). <br /><br />Imagination: innate or learned? You tell me.Explanationshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15524932064864587071noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2552023522468447928.post-82791991936867674242010-10-29T06:13:00.000-07:002010-10-29T06:21:10.098-07:00Fame and Fortune<div><div><br /></div><div>Winter? Kinda. The temperature has fallen into the fifties and sixties this past week. I make my morning coffee clumsily, wrapped in an unwieldy blanket cocoon, and long sleeves finally seem like a reasonable thing to wear outdoors. You might think that the onset of fall would kick up our girls' enthusiasm for sports a notch or two now that playing soccer no longer feels like sprinting around in the Sahara at high noon, but you'd be wrong. We're still averaging two pretend sprained ankles and three or four totally irrelevant excuses per day. "I cannot play basketball," they'll say. "My tooths, they hurt." The toothache excuse is a chart-topper, for some unexplainable reason; I don't know why they all feel that this will be the key to getting them out of sports. We're doing ballgames, not a hot-dog eating contest. </div><div><br /></div><div>We have to carry the balls through the market most days on our way to school. Oh man. Western women get stared at a lot here no matter what, but try being a Western woman with a soccer ball. Butchers shout out "Barcelona!", young boys on the street try to snatch the prize from your hands, and fruit vendors pause their pitches to call "football, football!" </div><div><br /></div><div>Sometimes celebrity can get wearing, though, and we often leave our sport equipment at the boy's school when we can, just as Madonna will put on dark shades when she goes to the supermarket. Think this does the trick? Think again. One old man, pushing past us yesterday with a brimming bag of apples and taking stock of our possessions, yelled out "what happened to the footbaaaaalll?" I was taken aback for a minute- <i>who is this dude and how does he know what we usually carry</i>? Ten minutes later, a boy I've never seen before in my life shouted "Sierrraaa!" from a third-floor balcony. I still can't read Arabic, but I don't think it would surprise me to find out that the Nablus newspapers were running headlines like "ELLEN DEVELOPS FLU-LIKE SYMPTOMS" or "AJANEB FLAT LOOKS LIKE TORNADO HIT, SOURCES SAY". (By "sources" I mean Abu Saadi, who popped up for a looksee the other day and has since been encouraging us in the strongest terms to invest in a maid).</div></div><div><br /></div><div>Some pictures, all taken by Mr. Nick:</div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiItQDn1PeVhIDBcSTfowlDwc65TH6fVRly_6m3BF0eWhJDVnqu9cMfoqASBipcxl59XYdUYgqIjNa8BWGf0YqR_9j-FavdXzv3BQ1X5SGVUykSPG4ldcnz4-MvAX1GbLfbs6Yq6frVwFe_/s1600/73617_636744868254_223305160_8484408_594071_n.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 214px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiItQDn1PeVhIDBcSTfowlDwc65TH6fVRly_6m3BF0eWhJDVnqu9cMfoqASBipcxl59XYdUYgqIjNa8BWGf0YqR_9j-FavdXzv3BQ1X5SGVUykSPG4ldcnz4-MvAX1GbLfbs6Yq6frVwFe_/s320/73617_636744868254_223305160_8484408_594071_n.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5533456285858760946" /></a>The view from the roof of our apartment.<br /><div><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg60knjDRsHkpRSF7gpSkLFD-qlzjHvdL9zOHMS2KAijRPawKGrjuOLA6AD02l0MslBEXy9pCZx8lGdwBzKGCkmVLH_rQNVWzCRGvh2piB5k2MSMVsePvXhyphenhyphendBsX6uebHys7GbtoojoPYvY/s1600/74538_636744828334_223305160_8484405_1872126_n.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 214px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg60knjDRsHkpRSF7gpSkLFD-qlzjHvdL9zOHMS2KAijRPawKGrjuOLA6AD02l0MslBEXy9pCZx8lGdwBzKGCkmVLH_rQNVWzCRGvh2piB5k2MSMVsePvXhyphenhyphendBsX6uebHys7GbtoojoPYvY/s320/74538_636744828334_223305160_8484405_1872126_n.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5533456286210857538" /></a>Guy.</div><div><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJ-zGsON5mPfTjv7_kUn6Zo0WSWZNnnKVbJLymRPItCwbDt2HjkUjiyDtYNi4GNd1IXpCR13_PPxBxmmNQHWTt2Dv3ml_Pg6XhtYw9gt3PJ9BUExLj57u_knBNNayr4_YGRq1ffNOUQo_b/s1600/71514_636742682634_223305160_8484296_1976296_n.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 214px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJ-zGsON5mPfTjv7_kUn6Zo0WSWZNnnKVbJLymRPItCwbDt2HjkUjiyDtYNi4GNd1IXpCR13_PPxBxmmNQHWTt2Dv3ml_Pg6XhtYw9gt3PJ9BUExLj57u_knBNNayr4_YGRq1ffNOUQo_b/s320/71514_636742682634_223305160_8484296_1976296_n.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5533456282589615426" /></a>In Jerusalem.</div><div><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDJ5oWrjT18f3Pk9YONC9i5vU8edDgroD9D1Gr7nFlqDA_2SozpoIASybk8GA_TA-Vc7cGCOzitxJ5BE7sUP4_pZtBbA22vCWc2-ESaIMO1LlEC6O-KTGYnAxjvyZns4nBCi5HlJC3vbbG/s1600/66383_636742782434_223305160_8484301_330246_n.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 214px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDJ5oWrjT18f3Pk9YONC9i5vU8edDgroD9D1Gr7nFlqDA_2SozpoIASybk8GA_TA-Vc7cGCOzitxJ5BE7sUP4_pZtBbA22vCWc2-ESaIMO1LlEC6O-KTGYnAxjvyZns4nBCi5HlJC3vbbG/s320/66383_636742782434_223305160_8484301_330246_n.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5533456280624307026" /></a>IDF soldiers.</div><div><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZMzijh8rBGIwI2szqBCRSdIrYBYEMdYMRPnbnQIiiaNQbICuhPJmR_3eNf6rhJnGgKl3KuXa7Oey1S-Ll9kpiCzbJz9t-4R5LR4LxfpjvQYKLKSpBHnzagPB1sMtYURZjZZvmHaCh37kF/s1600/33447_633608408744_223305160_8390030_7116837_n.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 238px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZMzijh8rBGIwI2szqBCRSdIrYBYEMdYMRPnbnQIiiaNQbICuhPJmR_3eNf6rhJnGgKl3KuXa7Oey1S-Ll9kpiCzbJz9t-4R5LR4LxfpjvQYKLKSpBHnzagPB1sMtYURZjZZvmHaCh37kF/s320/33447_633608408744_223305160_8390030_7116837_n.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5533456275352373650" /></a>The briefly-danced-upon van I mentioned ages ago.</div>Explanationshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15524932064864587071noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2552023522468447928.post-5236086547381702442010-10-20T09:35:00.000-07:002010-10-20T09:41:27.282-07:00Heat; Haram<div>What do a right angle and Nablus today (<i>October</i>, mind you) have in common? Ninety degrees. Hahahaha! I made that up myself. Side-splitting <i>and</i> topical.</div><div><br /></div><div>Ninety, for those of you who unfamiliar with Fahrenheit, is a lot of degrees. So many, actually, that we had to send our students home early today after we discovered that there was no running water at the girls' school. Forty-five minutes of dabke dancing may not have constituted the most punishing sport class ever, but today it was sufficient to leave us all thirsty and sweating under the Palestinian sun. The laziness which I assume is endemic in all gym classes worldwide was doubly evident today. Some girls sat on the sidelines, only clambering to their feet heavily and reluctantly when one of the teachers told them they faced a choice between dancing and the dreaded push-ups; others, running laps as a warm-up, traced a neat spiral into the center of the basketball court, each lap shorter than the previous one.</div><div><br /></div><div>Nobody has ever accused me of being a good dancer, but even I find dabke pretty easy. Malaa and Jivan, two of Ellen's girls from Balata Camp, brought in their dance instructors to lead the class after a fun but disorganized lesson yesterday in which they taught us a few basic steps themselves. At the girls' urging, Sara demonstrated a traditional Lebanese dance, much like belly-dancing. </div><div><br /></div><div>"It used to be a harem dance," she told us later.</div><div><br /></div><div>"And now it's a HARAM dance," Ellen said. (Rimshot)</div><div><br /></div><div>Haram, forbidden, is a word you hear often in Palestine. In one of my first lessons, in an apparently misguided attempt to psych the class up for a song competition we'll be holding in a few weeks, I bellowed "WHO LIKES SINGING?!" </div><div><br /></div><div>"NO!" they hollered back. That kinda threw me off guard. I mean, I'm both a major language nerd and an abysmal singer (my singing is illegal in thirty-five countries), and even I would probably prefer that to past participles. </div><div><br /></div><div>"How about you?" I asked one of the bolder students. "Are you sure? Singing is fun, right?" </div><div><br /></div><div>She shook her head. "Singing is haram!"</div><div><br /></div><div>I'm pretty sure this is not strictly true. </div><div><br /></div><div>Even so, after deciding to veto their song choice (some sickly-sweet croony thing from Eurovision), I'm having a hard time finding something legitimately non-haram to replace it with. I really like the mental image of fourteen teenage girls in headscarves singing Big Rock Candy Mountains, for instance, but some of the references (you know, "where little streams of alcohol come a-trickling down the rocks") might be borderline. As a general guideline, I'm trying to think of what the average American parent is fine with their kids seeing on TV. The slightest mention of sex, crisis level five. Blood and gore: A-okay. </div><div><br /></div><div>Am I rambling? It's too hot to write. I can almost feel my thoughts frying like ethereal little eggs inside my head. Send help.</div>Explanationshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15524932064864587071noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2552023522468447928.post-41633573994262946952010-10-19T00:38:00.001-07:002010-10-20T09:43:03.037-07:00Sky Nablus<div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: left;">Friday evening and there are nine of us crammed shoulder-to-shoulder in the TFP car, a lurching green affair which seems held together more by magic than physics. Ellen and I perch on spare tires in the rear while Mohammad and Saddam narrate the drive in song, drumming with abandon from the backseat. Mohammad seems to know everybody in Nablus; he pauses now and then to shout out the window or wave at passersby. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">We're headed for Sky Nablus, a half-park half-cafe stretch of light on the side of Mount Ebal, visible from anywhere in the city. The reverse is also true; standing at the railing by one of the shisha stands, with minty smoke on the air, Nablus unfolds in front of you. It's not a big city- 130,000 people live here- but it seems larger from above, all silence and light. To the west, someone told me the first time I visited, you can see Tel Aviv.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Sky Nablus is busy tonight. The benches are crowded with women in white scarves and men stroll down the drive, carrying trays of tea and coal. We double-park and disentangle ourselves to climb out and meet the rest of our group. We're maybe fifteen in total- half of us ajaneb, half Palestinians. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">It's another hot night, which seems even hotter in the wake of a merciful three-day cold snap. The girls are sweating in our long-sleeved, high-necked tops, even more envious of men's light t-shirts when we leave the road and climb the stairs to a dirt path for a secluded clearing for dancing and singing. Jon's brought his banjo, Ciaran his guitar, Saddam the drum; for two hours Johnny Cash songs compete with Arabic chanting, above it all raucous laughter and its source, the messy Arablish which is our best shot at understanding and being understood.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Always welcoming, the guys from Upstairs were transformed over the weekend into our closest- well, pretty much only- Palestinian friends. "If you need anything, tell me. This is my city. I will get it for you. I have connections here," Moath tells us at least twice a day. That he knows people is obvious- Moath, nearly as much as Mohammad, can hardly take a step down the street without being hailed by a friend or waved at by a shopkeeper. And willing to help us? Last time made his frequent announcement, I was already sipping from a free cup of sahleb which he'd brought to me from Upstairs; the time before, he was taking Nick and me on a tour of Rafidia after insisting we accept gifts from the antique store. I've stopped worrying that we won't make any Palestinian friends and started worrying that the ones we have will bankrupt themselves to make us feel at home. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">----</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Sorry for the brief and belated update. I'll try to keep em coming at a better pace, but for now let me make it up with some pictures- none, as per usual, taken by me. The first three, from Oktoberfest, belong to Ciaran, and the last three are Sara's, taken in the old market in Nablus.</div></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxiZ7SLk7yk3WidBbfTPzzUzY7ZMAfeAPqi67nouBJxgE2bkESxS27IswZyNwNyBMYwmYOsR4rm5bGD4QPldE1UF2dNluCIgrofu4h2U58wSKH_rML3eQnTspsHvz7ic_iFoUtwawtn03e/s320/67767_1673776330785_1428732122_31736936_5735957_n.jpg" style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 230px; height: 320px;" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5529659423033487186" /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgj-SOdiPWUiX5p_pew4fZEIeGvJJ1dVZu9nPc539xYqDK2OJYUBTz-JmeYzXKHNANfRktSN-siaAuCOsHeG5TKwz4pNjtHuLEoG87HcrJ0mqBarv9uzhlEs94E7shbXRto95POm6brWQGg/s320/66273_1673777250808_1428732122_31736940_2011024_n.jpg" style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 238px;" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5529659412885342114" /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvF74KuojkasojEW8EPw6_D1zyDMeWA3HBxwRTMSKGdAz2D7eWPjjaKbSmhLrtR4I6xnmWPGQuizkZiKGNlfZae799lb8gLpbgj5CJpPszmleJf5IhJq32fq-kJFSVtowfuOcfJgwtbHRl/s320/44957_1673777890824_1428732122_31736944_7670375_n.jpg" style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 214px;" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5529659415536101698" /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6W2MKoy3f1RedawTaRRdMj0VRHvRkrZmml93yRjZchgqqZwBQELjLKz9_oTxrZIgCy_kgxttLkohlTctvmvrE6toKrqYOlP-rk1T5lL5iZSMZpQWj5g1IZMTvZm_HbtAa7vorIhPo0aE9/s320/the+old+souq+055.JPG" style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 179px;" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5529659785004605778" /><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3HjXo616WoXaz8wTx3lAPP1xUlNuXG_ZvkIFi3tjF6Nqz6i2fBt9NB6IupW4jbwyXRBBf7g5Wl3lhpdLlMmn3hNys-WJQRchOJzvWsyZJSOztxwPehOZUjFrdvG6yd9Ufk0tmnXpBeGAl/s1600/the+old+souq+029.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 179px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3HjXo616WoXaz8wTx3lAPP1xUlNuXG_ZvkIFi3tjF6Nqz6i2fBt9NB6IupW4jbwyXRBBf7g5Wl3lhpdLlMmn3hNys-WJQRchOJzvWsyZJSOztxwPehOZUjFrdvG6yd9Ufk0tmnXpBeGAl/s320/the+old+souq+029.JPG" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5529659401495002066" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTxoig_6_ecXrTwNdgmratFvwVEn38Xgrk0R0zcAnDQbmYl5HB7lkIZekIyIQBD-LtIQhnaIlQ5a7fHXyhDShJAvEvfYvL2UW2zfiIu2OXWMkYnMVZ8vsJPfLdam7CirjWtbcqZ6bZ4P0V/s1600/More+nablus+034.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 179px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTxoig_6_ecXrTwNdgmratFvwVEn38Xgrk0R0zcAnDQbmYl5HB7lkIZekIyIQBD-LtIQhnaIlQ5a7fHXyhDShJAvEvfYvL2UW2zfiIu2OXWMkYnMVZ8vsJPfLdam7CirjWtbcqZ6bZ4P0V/s320/More+nablus+034.JPG" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5529659397069994354" /></a>Explanationshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15524932064864587071noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2552023522468447928.post-88116693325099349232010-10-11T14:25:00.000-07:002010-10-11T14:27:24.673-07:00Generosity, Happiness<div>And now a word about Middle Eastern hospitality.</div><div><br /></div><div>It's... well, overwhelming. Any visitor to an Arab home can rest assured that they will, through ambush or insistence, leave much fatter and happier than they arrived, and will probably have to waddle home and spend a week sleeping off their foodbaby. Stepping out your door is a dangerous business in Palestine, but not for Bilbo's reasons- and not, Mom, because you're going to get shot- but rather because you have to remember to budget an extra forty-five minutes for unplanned but suddenly essential housecalls. I should have prepared myself for this; staying with a family for a few days in El-Minya, Egypt, I often found myself near tears at the dinner table, a single bite of bread all that stood between me and <i>literal explosion</i>. </div><div><br /></div><div>Abu Saadi, our landlord, lives on the ground floor of our building. If this fact seems insignificant to you, I guess you need to go back and read the last paragraph again. Abu Saadi and his wife, I think, are tied with around 390 million other Arabs for the title of Most Hospitable Person On Earth. The first time I met him, Sara and I had gone down to inquire about our electricity issues. Opening his door to our knocking, Abu Saadi swept us into his apartment and marched us to the living room, exclaiming "welcome! Welcome! Come in! Sit down! Why have you not come to visit me before? This is very bad. You must come down more often. Sit, sit!" </div><div><br /></div><div>Electricity seemed the farthest thing from Abu Saadi's mind. How can one discuss electricity without food and drink, after all? Impossible. Hearing our arrival, Imm Saadi bustled in to meet us. </div><div><br /></div><div>"Will you have tea?"</div><div><br /></div><div>"No, thank you," Sara and I replied, having barely finished a cup upstairs. </div><div><br /></div><div>"Coffee?"</div><div><br /></div><div>"Thank you, we're fine."</div><div><br /></div><div>"Really, you must have tea."</div><div><br /></div><div>"That's very kind of you, but..."</div><div><br /></div><div>"I will make some tea."</div><div><br /></div><div>Clearly we were destined to have tea. The cherry cake which accompanied it was a bit of a curveball, but we took it in stride.</div><div><br /></div><div>Abu Saadi, in spite of his recent operation which left a vivid purple scar along the length of his leg, often manages to make the trip up three flights of stairs to our apartment to good-naturedly criticize our cooking and offer his advice on everything from poorly-insulated windows to the best place in the market to buy fresh fish. Anybody living within strolling distance from Abu Saadi will never go hungry. When he's not pressing cup after delicious cup of coffee on us, he's poking his head out of his door when he hears a key in the outer lock and handing us gigantic containers of ful (bean paste with olive oil). </div><div><br /></div><div>---</div><div><br /></div><div>How often do you come home at the end of a normal day- a Tuesday, for all intents and purposes, since the weekend here is Friday and Saturday- and find yourself unable to focus on anything except how unbelievably good your life is? Maybe it has something to do with Palestine itself. I don't mean to wax philosophical, but I... well, I guess maybe it's easier to appreciate the beauty in the abstract- family, friends- and the little things when all the goodness in life IS found in the small and the intangible. </div><div><br /></div><div>Snapshots of Nablus: </div><div><br /></div><div>Elbows flying and headscarves fluttering, our girls running along the court during sports; my students shouting "her fault! Her fault!" amid giggles as we act out a play under the one square of shade in the school courtyard; shoes pounding, again, at dusk, during a pick-up post-lesson game of basketball; sugary sahlep and reminders of a bittersweet language love affair when I again- finally- search for words like "kış" and "edemebilirim"; tongue-twisters and laughter in downstairs Upstairs; folk songs on the banjo on the balcony, starlight above. </div><div><br /></div><div>You can choose your own platitude to go here. Something about beauty in simplicity? I dunno. I'm happy, and they all seem true right now.</div>Explanationshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15524932064864587071noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2552023522468447928.post-22878141921330868432010-10-10T02:34:00.000-07:002010-10-10T02:52:15.652-07:00Upstairs<div>By now, we're all used to being stared at like we're some rare species of giraffe on the lam from the Qalqiliya Zoo- probably because we're all devastatingly attractive, but I guess being the only white faces in Nablus could play some minor role as well. For the first time yesterday, we found ourselves on the other end of the goggling. Emerging from the corner store were <i>two Westerners oh my god</i>.</div><div><br /></div><div>Richard and Daniel were German journalists passing through Nablus to interview Munib al-Masri, the West Bank's richest man, UT educated and the owner of a stand-out Renaissance-style mansion on one of Nablus's many hills. (More about him <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/king-of-the-west-bank-854336.html">here</a>; he's pretty interesting). After a few brief moments establishing just what exactly we're all doing in Nablus, of all places, the conversation took a familiar turn.</div><div><br /></div><div>"So what is there to <i>do</i> in Nablus?" Daniel asked. "Like where do you go at night?"</div><div><br /></div><div>"Uhh... Upstairs? Or Piano Bar, I guess, if that's closed," someone offered, gesturing up the street to its English sign. "There's no piano and it's not a bar, but it's not bad."</div><div><br /></div><div>Daniel and Richard seemed vaguely nonplussed. "What about downtown? Where can you get a drink?"</div><div><br /></div><div>We looked at each other. "Ramallah?" A moment of silence. We are fish out of water here, or what's worse, Westerners out of beer.</div><div><br /></div><div>----</div><div><br /></div><div>Upstairs and Piano Bar have quickly become the unofficial TFP hangouts in Nablus. Piano Bar is secondary, really, and in practice we only end up there if the much more interesting- and interested- staff at Upstairs decide we aren't coming and close up around eight. We- Sara, Ellen, Ciaran, Nick, Jeremy, and me, sometimes with the additions of Helen and Jon when they can escape their much heavier workloads- find our way to Upstairs most nights, and almost inevitably walk into a room empty of patrons except for an old man or two smoking silently near the door. </div><div><br /></div><div>I have a theory, formed initially in Senegal, that the hat trick of the worst parts of American culture are often the first to be scooped up overseas- pop music, McDonalds, and Yankees hats. The last two, in general, are mercifully absent in Palestine, but Upstairs has its share of the first, and we often walk in to Mariah Carey playing over the speakers until someone voices a preference for Arabic music and the staff, who clearly agree, turn up the volume to conversation-prohibiting levels and dance their way back to the counter.</div><div><br /></div><div>One of the waiters, Mohammad, a tall 24-year old, invited us to a birthday party at the cafe. We didn't know whose birthday it was, or who would be there, or if we should bring anything, but we presumed there would be cake and that was good enough for us. We showed up at eleven-fifteen to a totally vacant place with place-settings for twenty. "Be here at eleven, absolutely no later than eleven-thirty," we'd been warned (via Sara, our utterly indispensible translator). "We won't start without you." No danger of that when everyone else is running on Arabic time, apparently- despite being a quarter hour late, we beat the birthday girl to her party by a good twenty minutes.</div><div><br /></div><div>There was in fact, as you will be excited to hear, cake. There was also shisha and guava juice and coffee and sahleb, which is an almost indecently delicious hot drink made from orchid flour and milk (which does not, Nick, taste like soap, thank you), along with plates full of cookies on every table. The total bill came to zero shekels; we were waved off, coins in hand, by the manager as we tried to pay. Stomachs full of cake and pockets (relatively) full of money, we waved goodbye to Mohammed, who will,insha'Allah, marry the birthday girl come summer, and (I swear to God) Saddam Hussein, a nineteen-year old who spent the last two years in an Israeli prison for throwing rocks at the IDF. </div><div><br /></div><div>Another beautiful day in Palestine.</div><div><br /></div><div>P.S: Have a video. Courtesy of Ellen.</div><div><br /></div><div><object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/4p1CJwTNC9M?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/4p1CJwTNC9M?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object></div>Explanationshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15524932064864587071noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2552023522468447928.post-60226541867298998652010-10-07T01:03:00.000-07:002010-10-07T01:17:26.599-07:00First class<div style="text-align: left;">"Today," Sean says, and pauses for emphasis, "will be a complete shitshow." (Sorry for the swearing in what's meant to be a family-friendly blog... but although I don't pretend to be an expert of capturing anyone's essence in print, I really wouldn't even be making a fair attempt if I censored Sean's speech).</div><div><i><br /></i></div><div>Sean, in many ways, was not wrong. Today was the first day of class for us intrepid TFPers, and things were already falling apart in a major way. We met at the office around 11:15 to go over last minute details and prepare ourselves for the latest organizational issue. "So the Ministry assured us that we have the school," Jon told us, referring to the fancy facility next door to the boy's building where Sara, Ellen, and I were meant to take our classes. "They told us that everything's all squared away and we should be good to go today. But... Palestine. Cross your fingers."</div><div><br /></div><div>Five minutes later, his cell phone rings. It's Kowthar, and the school has no idea who we are, and an eqally nonexistent intention of letting us use their rooms. Plan B, we're told, is bringing the girls into the boys' building until they can finagle a new location. "The parents are NOT going to be happy about this." Nope, probably not at all. </div><div><br /></div><div>We arrived at school half an hour early to tape our rosters on the doors. Soon, kids started making their way in in threes and fours, and what ensued was... well, not chaos really, but it soon became abundantly clear that nobody had the faintest idea where they were meant to be. Twenty minutes and roughly eight hundred questions later, I found myself facing a class which included only two of the eight students on my list, but an additional eleven who hadn't, for whatever reason, been willing or able to register in advance.</div><div><br /></div><div>I'd learned in Korea that laying down the law from the get-go makes everything infinitely easier in the long run, so the first order of business was DISCIPLINARY ACTION. </div><div><br /></div><div>"Okay, punishments. What do you think is a fair punishment if you're out of line?" I ask them.</div><div><br /></div><div>"Push-ups!" Ala' yells out. She's a tall girl with a black hijab, one of the oldest in my class at sixteen. Her English is noticeably better than her friends' and lightyears ahead of the younger students'. She's friendly and sweet and confident. She also won't shut up, and as I write her suggestion on the blackboard, I suspect that she will be doing a lot of push-ups in the coming months.</div><div><br /></div><div>"Jumping jacks!" someone else shouts, with strange enthusiasm. "Laps!" </div><div><br /></div><div>"Sit-ups!"</div><div><br /></div><div>Clearly, my class is going to be a well-oiled fighting machine by the time we play Sara and Ellen's girls for honor and glory in the soccer championship at the end of term.</div><div><br /></div><div>"Right, good," I say. "And what kinds of things will I make you do push-ups for?"</div><div><br /></div><div>They run down the list: talking over me, being rude, not doing their work, speaking in Arabic, complaining. I think that, left to my own devices, I would have omitted the last one, but I guess they're used to a tight ship. Well, I like this even better, really. Sierra the Pitiless, future generations will call me.</div><div><br /></div><div>Their English skills are all over the place. Ala' and her friends know everything. They shout out answers and shush the other girls when they speak in Arabic, often getting so excited that they need to get out of their chairs to make a point. We are having fun, but we're disorganized and loud. The fan is going at top speed and Israeli jets roar overhead several times during the lesson; combined with chattering and the scraping of chairs, we may as well be standing in a helicopter. I shush them over and over again. "QUIET!" I bellow. They subside, except for Nada. </div><div><br /></div><div>"Nada!" I point to the blackboard where I've written "push-ups" in big letters. "Do you really want to keep talking?"</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div>"But Sierra! You're so nice and good and smart." She grins at me, but stops chatting to the girl next to her. Masterfully done, Nada. I am manipulated. No push-ups this time. </div><div><br /></div><div>With sport cut from the schedule on account of the location fiasco, class lasts only an hour an a half. It seems like ten minutes. I'm pretty certain they didn't learn a thing- I think they all could have done the present perfect exercise I had ready for them in their sleep- but we all, and I'm definitely no exception, walk out the door at four-thirty with more confidence than we'd had at the start. "See you tomorrow!" I call after them, already dreading some of these girls being switched out of my class to Ellen's lower level.</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div>------</div><div><br /></div><div>In much more depressing news, I found this map with the BBC story about settlers torching a mosque in Beit Fajjar, near Bethlehem.</div><div><br /></div><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnZMBYUwvu51u4TNY60fd9H7x99bUl5TvJgjPDT6zJj9T0w30ntn5tw5rpgx3OEFNW31-DjZfCrmnRFeLzoSIfuFh3uqpetF595nwToogl1J3H5HMy4vkRQB5n3eXbcCvwuHIzw3CqngNN/s320/westbank.gif" style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 186px; height: 320px;" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5525212528750812082" /><div><br /></div>Explanationshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15524932064864587071noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2552023522468447928.post-34270238620245701862010-10-04T04:10:00.000-07:002010-10-04T04:49:59.506-07:00And now one for the illiterate<div>Here it is, the post we've all been waiting for. Don't worry, I'm not gonna fill it up with "words" and "sentences" and all that hippie nonsense, except to point out that a combination of laziness and a certain lightfingered adolescent in Jerusalem means that none of these pictures are actually mine. You can credit (mainly) Kitty Hinkenkemper for the ones in Kabak, Ilker "Crusher" Bayraktar for the Istanbul shots, and the lovely Sara Refai for the rest. </div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>KABAK, SOUTHERN TURKEY</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRGADGiH4l7U_dsn_eAPAJ-Qfe4oSEXroZ7AnHNOdUjC2cgi0bn8y2meyDiFjjxTTYtOoJsEjd0LCmx3wvi-wjeGo2m80OJyYxz0a8Qr9VPsXGgHkmIHWtDsA7fOnosaJ9eTTbpjWaDsku/s320/onurdogsbeach.jpg" style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 213px;" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5524149005929615170" /></b></div><div><b><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVfA84tx0QVpGPK15rNPpqBwkrzVPNUIHBV1UyIgB6AH84bDKocbt4OYdAtPnsjYYlXXiepoePM2mMeV-MAMqUNwgEosi78VwX9J4BPnz9i0K7wV-knDPf87VIvp7n5-flhyEFN5y7lBOi/s320/omer.jpg" style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 213px;" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5524147683503525714" /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8_4Ay5A1xznfJorFtuw0Z6V41XbMlRo1GCuOJQdwKk0Blg0MGCB2h6LzUwjY8JHnX0aY_Z2U7xSLuPS-ZeXrqBpwMoZOHwCUHYyoEYhTPSXtQkQXxTqD3b0R16lZF528l9NI1rMUgerBF/s320/lazoonur.jpg" style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 213px;" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5524147675053163762" /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuTSi0Y8RjzUmofa1Hn-tnMNmH8l95FaFXiQs9z5-f_pWEbmubV1O6OOPJyM_a5crly9Z9md9vN5-i6gbLsPsiSMVEhLUFrwen34VOfCZdBrozroLJoGV4eZS9slikA_C7JKe_95IuMGxr/s320/camp.jpg" style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 213px; height: 320px;" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5524147661766234882" /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUJqlW0Fpt_m1ZeR-oi9Dr7RjuoM-JqsYsgFl2L0iHmHKgMZABwRnul8t2fzTHOVJBRJDMgJ6ZEe0K3tGGzbAa-WlbTLcliNIXXzhV31RCaYnTUExNhjjyZF7tG_YqthU-jHh5hCBvleJy/s320/ecedeclanreyhan.jpg" style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 213px;" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5524147664140950418" /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlzU3HIDtiEWMIALPo6UesXtLv7-EUqJYIkg9RAMyRSajQ9cEGLRny_953jBEE-k4QI36MexhIVQuCoWNrGdP3PpT3vBWZ9N7IdHz8XOboBVdLvKhg3l8cseVVOOMbNDKiXLO_CF3NuETX/s320/view1.jpg" style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 240px; height: 320px;" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5524149010279871634" /></b></div><div><b><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCtpOlmjKZYtrqJE-CsUGMr4tRNJCcvVJC7c-rnAFKJUoRm5PFOpHcoLobcA6PlRNseQtz6U9HhveBC0PH5P6mQ4auSljT3Hu9rSqBnhO7UL7eZ9UQonRRdN70Q4FW6iaHsiFGOUFcCGku/s320/ecefatosnur.jpg" style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 213px;" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5524147669255241954" /></b></div><div><b>ISTANBUL, TURKEY</b></div><div><b><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhM6lgnKdEYjeNwvEcHvFC1LahLEopujGhPawaQ2b8zimJ93Jp6slrT42sNz3jTjI-aB-Aqkl8UGgBvsr2_giQ3vaQsoDyQgSWLUIZ0WIjG5Awu8qxLQG3lpA2015vSDkKqZfJoKWKqrCRI/s320/62786_430442621238_681546238_5183861_7631599_n.jpg" style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 240px; height: 320px;" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5524148998802984754" /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWzoM7mgd4Pk3oPBiAmNLT7ldb2xKJ9_zwFx0Qa_lBD8jFIzzVjfcrPbJfYZI7X-b04tBb-yEYw7cC6kNuRsqzXma4Sou1aa1V1mbm-bfBizv3xSZmC6GeDohA6x4ZcjDGo0_ztOn8m7d6/s320/61824_430442901238_681546238_5183872_2665086_n.jpg" style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 213px;" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5524148998183939106" /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJ6XrudHbmKVuVfH3f5hqNxv0Ssnq1nwF3hQB0FRuDO-bA9pyBO256sFYlaULSAks_Dqa5dZ3xKMsglfnG5c_ILu9b2Xowt7L8500yI6V9G9bNWwJRg6LB1XjVh8XfnZjimWX2iC-4vryq/s320/61674_430444121238_681546238_5183915_1727824_n.jpg" style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 320px;" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5524148649233847314" /><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg61ZLweEznKBh4nDxAU8hyJc7kyGcZg0c9O0SKrUFk-RzWwGXdfJHLUaD3sfr6-38Tx3CwDYvqbDLTPQVK_w3r5oQY7BWOr6u-yLK5ZaVFuxZK_tK7lOlGobLl2e5tBarPzIBWAZc5Ome7/s320/63865_430443531238_681546238_5183891_6126861_n.jpg" style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 214px;" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5524149001942187938" /></b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>TAYBEH & NABLUS, PALESTINE</b></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFJnCrVB_hqcZXC4U6v9R31q0CqMLsGZuwhMcoTbv8TGm8f1u-uMk4W6-DwLYBWxqCoM7ulDS2NFer5wHNndQYnj_8fQFtcEEkWaBheI_i4OgxZDpb1zNfpL7Hx1olmjyWYq2nFly3GDif/s1600/sky+nablus+010.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 179px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFJnCrVB_hqcZXC4U6v9R31q0CqMLsGZuwhMcoTbv8TGm8f1u-uMk4W6-DwLYBWxqCoM7ulDS2NFer5wHNndQYnj_8fQFtcEEkWaBheI_i4OgxZDpb1zNfpL7Hx1olmjyWYq2nFly3GDif/s320/sky+nablus+010.JPG" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5524152759347765122" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgglgaUgxqMsveAWXS5if9_bapIVp5m_ltQj7Iv0Ptu6ymYJNn5aC78FA1R85gFMw4iokLhwE-WTJSqHr7DTHLWEL0fzcgYCuBuWUl0IpIxuL_OqP4RWrQjJzh25LW6R8CSLMGo67nBGYY6/s1600/sky+nablus+001.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgglgaUgxqMsveAWXS5if9_bapIVp5m_ltQj7Iv0Ptu6ymYJNn5aC78FA1R85gFMw4iokLhwE-WTJSqHr7DTHLWEL0fzcgYCuBuWUl0IpIxuL_OqP4RWrQjJzh25LW6R8CSLMGo67nBGYY6/s320/sky+nablus+001.JPG" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5524152756585901954" /></a><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi36LFqbRiCZrRAw7aOvmzQUr_TSsuxCq4vR6j0CgvZ1Cfa8PHjENDJ9YbL3s4YkXNJHZhiyKWpT2mUN1i_iFJtRe897A9EnVp1bjuTcX46mruQKxhoTp8QoxuKMDGG9va74Yy3B7hlCrxQ/s1600/Oktoberfest+064.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 179px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi36LFqbRiCZrRAw7aOvmzQUr_TSsuxCq4vR6j0CgvZ1Cfa8PHjENDJ9YbL3s4YkXNJHZhiyKWpT2mUN1i_iFJtRe897A9EnVp1bjuTcX46mruQKxhoTp8QoxuKMDGG9va74Yy3B7hlCrxQ/s320/Oktoberfest+064.JPG" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5524152746591561458" /></a><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi11uiEIAyZcLXe48OXQyAJG7VxgCq7E7lJcmNhYF9qBGqzWaWVt1AggK0zLVbxccglupqGHdCG0BPoAs1bjqzMoYSgZq45slZmWDycl_liDP80Da3T015AlJ3Mtr4Ids0H4pGZkLWsZD7I/s1600/Oktoberfest+015.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 179px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi11uiEIAyZcLXe48OXQyAJG7VxgCq7E7lJcmNhYF9qBGqzWaWVt1AggK0zLVbxccglupqGHdCG0BPoAs1bjqzMoYSgZq45slZmWDycl_liDP80Da3T015AlJ3Mtr4Ids0H4pGZkLWsZD7I/s320/Oktoberfest+015.JPG" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5524152742515054722" /></a><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div>Explanationshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15524932064864587071noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2552023522468447928.post-35231359513774215262010-10-03T09:20:00.000-07:002010-10-03T09:28:39.219-07:00True or False? Nablus is boring.<div>On Friday, we gathered in the the living room of our flat for the first semi-formal Teach For Palestine meeting. We're eight now- Sean and Jon, the directors, and Ciaran, Helen, Sara, Nick, Daniel and me- and waiting on three more. There's a certain informality to TFP which, given the nature of the situation, doesn't surprise me as much as it otherwise might. We all have different reasons for being here, but the fact remains that we <u>are</u> here, in a conflict zone (however stable it may be at the moment), in a city the TFP website, not entirely generously, calls "extremely boring", for an insignificant 200 dollars a month. The focus of the meeting, in fact, had a lot less to do with our actual responsibilities than with the key element of discretion. </div><div><br /></div><div>There <u>will</u> be complaints about each and every one of us, Sean said. It's pretty much unavoidable. An Australian teacher last year wore tight pants into town and prompted an avalanche of outraged parents knocking on the office door the next morning; a group went to the Wailing Wall and posted pictures on Facebook of themselves wearing the yarmulkes which are required to approach it- the backlash was even worse. </div><div><br /></div><div>The problem is intensified by the fact that we're literally just about the only foreigners in Nablus. Everyone knows, or will shortly know, who we are individually. Celebrity doesn't come free, though, and the price we apparently pay is having our names tossed around in the city's eternal gossip mill. </div><div><br /></div><div>"Pretend you're fifteen again and everyone in Nablus is your mother," Sean counselled us at the tail end of a discussion about alcohol. Alcohol, by the way, though available throughout most of the West Bank (and certainly Israel), is all but nonexistent in Nablus since Hamas started targeting the few establishments which sold it a few years ago. "If you're bringing back beer from Ramallah, don't carry it in a clear bag. And watch the clinking." In theory, most of these things seem obvious. Of <i>course</i> we shouldn't wear revealing clothes. Of <i>course</i> we shouldn't put into the public sphere any evidence that we're fond of drinking. But so much of it is second nature that I can easily believe Sean's prediction that we'll all accidentally run afoul of some social norm in the next few months. </div><div><br /></div><div>Q: What's the issue with giving the cashier at the store down the road a big smile as I walk out?</div><div>A: He's a man! Scandalous.</div><div><br /></div><div>Consensus among the volunteers, though, is that Nablus is really not as soul-numbingly boring as we were led to believe. Granted, its appeal doesn't lie in partying or checking out the (hypothetical) tourist attractions, but there's something to be said for being essentially the only foreigners in an Arab city, or sipping mint tea in the evening heat. Having been somewhere on the scale from "likely foreigner" (Turkey) to "WAEGOOK WAEGOOK AT 3 O CLOCK RED ALERT" (Korea) for over eight months now, I'm fairly used to little kids staring, wide-eyed, and old women rubbernecking in the streets. The citizens of Nablus, however, are pretty much professional starers, and have graduated to level two: yelling. There are four English sentences we all hear a good fifty times per day: </div><div><br /></div><div>How are you?!</div><div>What's your name?!</div><div>Fuck you! (from kids, and usually followed by a fit of giggling)</div><div>Welcome to Nablus! (from everyone... Sean still gets this daily despite having lived here for four years)</div><div><br /></div><div>"But what if you get sick of eating shawarmas and looking at Hamas martyr posters, Sierra? WHAT THEN!?" you ask. It's a fair question, really. Monotony seems a long way off still, but Nablus wouldn't realistically rank on anybody's top ten most colorful cities list (literally: the only two colors here are the pale blue of the sky and the light brown of, well, everything else). But Palestine isn't all headscarves and heat. </div><div><br /></div><div>Yesterday, Nick, Ciaran, Sara, Helen and I went to Taybeh for:</div><div><br /></div><div>DRUMROLL</div><div><br /></div><div>Palestinian Oktoberfest. I'm not kidding. </div><div><br /></div><div>Granted, we weren't exactly clinking glasses with the PLA; a good 85% of the attendees were foreigners. Looking over the sea of bare shoulders, Helen and I realized just how quickly our barometers of what is socially acceptable have been recalibrated by life in Nablus.</div><div><br /></div><div>"Look at that woman. Short-shorts! How dare she."</div><div><br /></div><div>"And a tank top. Outrageous."</div><div><br /></div><div>In spite of the offense to our newly-delicate sensibilities, we soldiered on to the beer tent for our first (of many) sip of the allegedly famous local brew, which claimed to be the "Best in the Middle East". It was pretty good I guess- no Long Trail, but then again utter excellence might be an unreasonable standard (hats off, Vermont). </div><div><br /></div><div>After pushing our way to the main event, we commandeered a row of chairs and managed to peer-pressure Nick into volunteering for the mystery competition on stage. Six volunteers from the crowd had to hold a massive beer mug (full, of course) out at arm's length for as long as they could. Nick made a good showing but didn't win; eventually, a huge Palestinian guy triumphed over a cocky, long-haired dude who had somehow managed to get away with blatantly cheating almost the entire time. I would have dearly loved to boo him off the stage, and was irrationally gleeful when his total disregard for the rules finally crossed the line to where he wasn't even really bothering to pretend his arm was straight anymore and he was disqualified. Cheaters never prosper, jerk.</div><div><br /></div><div>We saw three musical performances: Dam, a rap group, a Taybeh-based traditional dance ensemble, and CultureShoc, Palestine's first rock-rap band. Over the course of the three, I went from "hey, this is pretty cool" to "<i>whoa</i>, this is <i>awesome</i>" to "SHHH DON'T TALK TO ME, IT IS IMPERATIVE THAT I TAKE THIS IN FULLY." I borrowed a pen from Sara and covered both sides of two envelopes which had been irritatingly floating around in my bag for three weeks- I <i>knew</i> they'd come in handy. I feel like I could, and probably will, dedicate an entire entry to the reflection the music provoked, so for now I'll just leave you with a YouTube video of a song by CultureShoc.</div><div><br /></div><div><object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/J_aSOnua-rw?fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/J_aSOnua-rw?fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object></div><div><br /></div><div>Have you noticed, by the way, how all my blog entries end awkwardly and abruptly? Well uh, this one is no diffe</div>Explanationshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15524932064864587071noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2552023522468447928.post-7035482512014669752010-09-30T13:24:00.000-07:002010-10-01T07:00:51.269-07:00Nablus!<div>Sunday, September 26, 2010 9:47 pm</div><div><br /></div><div>Today, having nowhere in particular to go, I sat down to rewatch A Map For Saturday, a documentary about a guy from New York City who quit his job to travel around the world for a year. The film's title refers to the eternal Saturday of life on the road- no responsibilities today, none tomorrow, and none, really, for the foreseeable future. It hasn't been exactly like that for me; I've had a job of some description for about five and a half of the seven months since I hopped a plane out of Texas. Still, I'm far from immune to the travelers' casual ignorance of day and date. </div><div><br /></div><div>Today, apparently, was Sunday. I somehow didn't put this together until hours <i>after</i> church bells tolled across the city and the familiar call to prayer answered back, louder, nearer. My life is anchored by events, not calendars, these days. </div><div><br /></div><div>Tomorrow, I go to the West Bank. I have another five or six days before I'm strictly required to be there, but one of my future coworkers, a Lebanese-British girl named Sara, is in town. I'm hoping to meet up with her to go as far as the border before we split up and head our separate ways- me to Nablus directly, her to Ramallah for a few days. I have no idea what to expect at the King Hussein Bridge, my entrance point to Palestine and one of the three crossings from Jordan (as a sidenote, I'm embarrassed how long it took me to put this simple equation together: all three are bridges, because the countries are divided by the Jordan River... thus, the West Bank [of said river]. Duhhh). </div><div><br /></div><div>My rough plan goes like this: Shared taxi to the bridge. Delays while they search my bags. Delays while they ask me questions. Delays while they peer at me suspiciously and wonder out loud what possible long-term business an American could have in Nablus. Passport stamp. Bus or shared taxi to Jerusalem, or Ramallah if I can manage to find one. Onward to Nablus, a mere 39 miles from Jerusalem- I found this out today, and had to double-check; it looks much farther on a map. Then again, Jaber drove to Aqaba and back today in five hours- essentially the entire length of Jordan. Maps can be deceiving. </div><div><br /></div><div>I don't have any idea, apart from "time-consuming", what the border crossing will be like. The most common online tip for expediting the process is to omit any mention of Palestine, but since I'll be entering the PA directly, without traveling through Israel first, I might look a bit sketchy and/or idiotic if I walk up to the guards and say "Shalom! West Bank? Oh no sir, I would never!" Should I be concocting some grand story, or will the truth do the trick? How careful should I be in hiding/disguising/tossing anything which speaks of an interest in Arab culture (I'm looking at you, Basic Standard Arabic book)? Realistically, I don't foresee any major issues. The same totally unthreatening young-female-and-solo aura which is the source of so many minor hassles in day-to-day life here should, I hope, get me into Palestine with a minimum of interrogation. </div><div><br /></div><div>Yesterday?:</div><div><br /></div><div>My blog title can finally live up to its name: I'm in Palestine.</div><div><br /></div><div>I won't bore you with the more mundane details of the trip over (lift to the bus station by Jaber, service taxi to the bridge, various passport windows to stamp me out of Jordan, bus to the Israeli side punctuated by more passport checks, long lines where we all surrendered our bags, metal detectors, further passport checks, bus to Jericho, service taxi to Nablus). But in between the metal detectors and passport control booth number seven, something exciting happened: I was detained! </div><div><br /></div><div>Security seemed thoroughly unimpressed that I had a packed a book on Arabic and another on Turkish. I was initially surprised that they cared at all about the Turkish one- it hadn't crossed my mind that that could be an issue- but it occurred to me later that in the wake of the Mavi Marmara incident, Turkish may well be number two on the Israeli list of suspicious languages. </div><div><br /></div><div>Two stern border guards pulled me aside into a private room and questioned me for an hour or so; every time the first one seemed about done, the second one (who was scarier both because he was older and because he was a lot more difficult to understand... the !INTERROGATION ROOM! isn't an ideal place to be going "what? what? huh? sorry? what?") would start in with his own line of questioning. My initial plan had been to just tell pretty much the truth if I got any sort of in-depth interview, but the fact that a simple book on learning Arabic had landed me in the hotseat changed my mind, and my story, in a hurry. The best thing I could come up with on short notice was to say that I'm highly religious and wanted to see the Christian holy sites in Israel. This story, in retrospect, was desperate idiocy; I'm sure it made me look more suspicious, not less, when I couldn't come up with any specifics whatsoever. </div><div><br /></div><div>"Bethlehem? What are you going to see in Bethlehem?"</div><div><br /></div><div>"Uh... you know... like, Christian... stuff..." </div><div><br /></div><div><i>meaningful glance between the grim-faced guards</i></div><div><br /></div><div>The older and meaner guy told me at one point that I "seemed nervous." Dude, of course I'm nervous. At least they had the courtesy to leave their M-16s outside. </div><div><br /></div><div>----</div><div><br /></div><div>Eight am now, and I'm sitting on the balcony of the apartment I share with five other teachers, sipping a cup of strong, sweet Arabic coffee. Yeah, there's a balcony which looks over the whole city- there are also jets in the bathtub, and what oddly enough seems like the greatest luxury of all- <i>toilet paper</i>. Apparently all this swank isn't quite enough to protect us from what I hope will be an infrequent enemy through the next three months: power outages. I have haystack hair. I have it bad. </div><div><br /></div><div>Palestine looks exactly like what I imagined, but didn't really believe I'd find. I've traveled what amounts to a third the length of the West Bank three times now- Jericho to Nablus coming in, then Nablus to Jerusalem return when Nick and I went to meet Ciaran. Reminders of the conflict are understated: a sign for Martyr Street, political graffiti, a man who slowly shakes his head when our shared taxi rolls up to an Israeli checkpoint. But there are no tanks in the streets, I have yet to hear gunfire, and the people filing off the buses clutching their green Palestinian Authority Access Only identity cards only seem a little tired, a little wary.</div><div><br /></div><div>It's not hard to remember that I'm standing on some of the holiest ground in the world. The hills around Nablus- and all the way to Ramallah, the capital of the West Bank- are rolling, brown, and barren, but there's something indefineably anachronistic about them. I find it easy to imagine first-century goatherds wandering up the slopes with their animals, or even bushes bursting into flames. It's not just the countryside; the old city of Jerusalem, for instance, is small enough and sufficiently dense with "most sacred this" and "most sacred that" that five minutes of totally aimless wandering through the covered suqs inside the Damascus Gate brought Nick and me to the front door of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. </div><div><br /></div><div>You can hardly take a step in the confines of the old city without coming face to face with some ancient relic of an Abrahamic religion: King David's tomb, the Church of the Dormition, the Mount of Olives, a gigantic golden menorah accompanied by a sign stating a desire to see the Temple rebuilt "speedily and within our lifetimes" (it made no mention of the fact that the Temple's restoration would entail the replacement of the Dome of the Rock, the mosque built over the stone from which Muhammad is said to have ascended to Heaven and the third holiest Muslim site in the world). The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, as I said, was our first introduction to historical Jerusalem. Although it is supposedly built over the spot where Jesus was crucified and contains his tomb, we noticed right away that they're not big on signage. This holds true throughout Jerusalem. Most of what we learned was gleaned through eavesdropping on the tours passing all around us, which ranged from the annoying (hordes of Russian tourists pushing each other for better views) to the frankly fascinating (a procession of Spanish pilgrims making their way along the Via Dolorosa, bearing a massive cross and singing hymns in layered harmony).</div><div><br /></div><div>Jerusalem isn't only about sanctity and history, though. It's no Tel Aviv- which is consistently ranked in the top ten party cities worldwide- but let's just say we certainly did dance on top of a van to Hebrew hiphop. Also... please please please don't take this remotely politically, but if good looks are anything to go by, I can see where the Israelis get this "God's chosen people" business. </div><div><br /></div><div>I'm exhausted (and for the record, it's no longer eight am, not even close). Bedtime for me, and a promise of more blogging tomorrow!</div>Explanationshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15524932064864587071noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2552023522468447928.post-51517990455733469322010-09-25T08:25:00.000-07:002010-10-01T07:00:28.336-07:00Ayna?The more remote and untraveled a place I visit, the more I find myself defined- by others and increasingly by myself- by a sense of location. Jordan, in absolute terms, is neither, particularly since Petra's recent designation as one of the New Seven Wonders of the World, but neither is it exactly Paris or a beach in Goa. Jordan seems to draw an older, more sedate crowd. You can spot the occasional twenty-something European hefting his backpack from a taxi, sure, but nobody has ever accused this country of being <span style="font-style: italic;">wild </span>and <span style="font-style: italic;">crazy</span>. Jordan is safe, in other words, from students drunkenly belting out their national anthems in the streets.<br /><br />Where was I going with this? Oh yeah. My point was that, as a 22-year old American girl traveling alone, I'm about as far from Jordan's typical tourist demographic as it's possible to get and as a result, almost everybody I meet seems immensely curious about why I'm here and the circumstances that led up to it. I'm still trying to come up with an appropriately succinct answer. My working model, for now, is to say that I was teaching English in Korea, then ended up in Turkey, where I found a job in Palestine... and Jordan is just my current waypoint.<br /><br />When I say this to Americans, they say "PALESTINE?!" Jamal had a different answer.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Gasp</span>. "KOREA?!"<br /><br />"Uh..." I said, somewhat taken aback. "You know, <span style="font-style: italic;">South</span> Korea."<br /><br />"Even worse! Were you not scared?"<br /><br />"...no? We're talking about the same Korea, right? Seoul? Busan?"<br /><br />Jamal was horrified. He explained that in Korea, they eat people, and told me a long story about Egyptian construction workers who had been disappearing one by one over a period of some months, until the truth came out that the Korean supervisors had been stealing them away for dinner and sealing up their bones in the cement walls. "Nobody cared, of course, because they were Arab. But Korea is danger. You know what they eat in Korea? From the sky, everything except airplane. From the sea, everything except ships. From the land, everything except car. You see, no exception for humans."<br /><br />Is this made more or less amusing by the fact that someone, somewhere, is probably claiming the same thing about Middle Easterners? I can't decide. Ahhh, cross-cultural understanding. And so the world turns.<br /><br />From there, the conversation devolved, somehow, into an equally politically incorrect discussion of racial slurs. "I know what white people call black people. I know that white people say 'camel' for Arabs [note: we do?], but what do black people call white people to be mean? I know there is a word, but I don't remember." Again, this from Jamal.<br /><br />"Cracker, I guess?" I offered.<br /><br />"Cracker, yes!" Jamal noted this down on a scrap of paper, for future reference. So, on a scale from one to ten, how bad of a start is this to my English-teaching career in the Middle East?<br /><br />-----<br /><br />Enough of that. I went to the bazaar yesterday, which was conveniently located in the bus lot directly in front of my hotel. Apparently it runs all day each Friday, full of clothes and shoes and vegetables. I went at midday- good timing, as it turned out, because the crowds were all at the mosque for morning prayers and that meant less pushing and jostling for me as I searched for location-appropriate work clothes for Palestine.<br /><br />As a native English speaker, I got the same joy from browsing through the shirt racks as a Chinese person must feel if they loiter outside a tattoo parlor and giggle silently to themselves while reading things like "fish yum curtain" off the arms of customers. I tried to picture a young Muslim girl, decorously scarved, wearing a sweater with a Jagermeister logo, or maybe a middle-aged housewife purchasing the "MySpace is for slags" shirt to wear under her dress. HA! Where do they get these things, anyway? (A genuine question; a few had Salvation Army or Value Village tags still on them... so, what, do they go to North America and buy in bulk? That can hardly be a sound business plan when they're selling everything for the equivalent of a dollar and a half).<br /><br />It was good to spend the day outside, in any case. Every time I mention to Jabar that I'm going to get something to eat or whatever, he puts up his hands and says, "oh no no no! I will tell the boy to get! You stay here!"<br /><br />"The boy" is a blanket term for any of his four sons- the two older ones, around 17 and 19, who help out at reception, or in the evenings after school,the 9 year old or the 11 year old, both unbelievably adorable and unless something goes very wrong, on their way to becoming devestating charmers in ten years or so. They've given me a new name: Car ("sayyara" in Arabic), and every time I see little Muhammad, he starts shouting "vrroooom!" abd kicking his legs in some frantic, bizarre approximation of working the pedals. God help us all when this boy is old enough to drive.Explanationshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15524932064864587071noreply@blogger.com0