Just a link

In short, life in Budapest over the last three weeks has been excellent and life on this blog is about to get a whole lot more exciting. For the moment, enjoy these lovely pictures of Budapest from my new favorite blog. What's pictured is the downtown of Pest and the overlooking hills of Buda across the river. The Pest side (where the pictures are taken from) is about a 15 minute walk from my house and I end up walking around in that neighborhood nearly every day for some reason or another.

http://riowang.blogspot.com/2010/12/homeward.html

in the New York Times today

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/30/world/middleeast/30syria.html?th&emc=th

Hope all is well in North America!
Tim

Poetry night

A short post before I can get back to posting pictures. I saw two great
pieces in the New York Times yesterday that I thought I would share.

The first is about the theft of bricks from St. Louis, which are then
transported as far as New Orleans! This really resonated with me as I
loved just driving through town and seeing the beautiful brick buildings.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/20/us/20brick.html?_r=2&th&emc=th

The second is about this poetry night called Beit al-Qaseed that takes
place every Monday night in Damascus. It's a small event that usually has
between 50 to 75 people in a basement bar of a fancy hotel in Damascus.
Drinks are reasonably priced, the poetry varies from okay to excellent, and
the crowd can always be counted on to be loud, talking back to the reader,
making corrections or suggestions, and expressing praise or contempt.

The one time I was unhappy about Beit al-Qaseed was when a Syrian woman was
reading, and the crowd absolutely would not quiet down to give her time to
speak. In general, even if a poet is mediocre, I favor giving them their
time to bore everyone, but the crowd just yelled over her, offering
pseudo-corrections to her Arabic.. the whole experience had a thick cloud
of sexism hanging over it, as even pretty bad male poets generally don't
get run off the stage, but a woman speaking in public remains threatening
even (especially?) to members of the cultured class.

In addition to original work, the event takes translations of foreign works
or readings of Classical Arabic poetry. A Syrian friend of mine is
nicknamed Shakespeare for his Shakespeare and Donne readings, and an
American friend is hoping to read an Andalusian (= Arab from Spain) poet
from the Middle Ages. I myself am hoping to read Eliot in the next few
weeks, but I need help with the translation from friends..

The best part about Beit al-Qaseed is that this fall our schedule was
changed so that we have every Tuesday off, which means I can go out and
sleep in and not be tired on Tuesdays anymore.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/20/world/middleeast/20poetry.html?ref=world

Until next time!

Lebanon

Just as soon as classes ended two weeks ago, me and good friend John
decided to leave for beautiful Lebanon, just 50 miles away. First thing we
got to Lebanon, we ironically stumbled into the most beautiful mosque I've
seen in the Middle East. It's actually supposed to be a baby version of
the famous Blue Mosque in Istanbul, and it's centuries old but was very
thoroughly renovated / rebuilt just a few years back. The mosque was
meaningful for me (and I bet the Lebanese) for a few reasons: first, it's
located on the infamous Green Line that divided West and East Beirut
(approx. Christian and Muslim respectively) during the civil war; secondly,
its restoration occurred under Rafiq Hariri, assassinated in 2005 by ?
(theories abound...).

Another day we wandered from the Corniche up alleys towards what we had
heard was the beautiful campus of the American University of Beirut. Along
the way, we found entertaining graffiti, some of which (the faces) we
couldn't make sense out of. Any ideas from the readership?

The campus didn't disappoint. On the first hill rising from the
Mediterranean, there is so much green space, more than one huge banyan
tree, and benches where John could sit and look out at the sea.

For the last picture, we liked the irony of "evoking a sense of
contemporary elegance" amid the destroyed building in front of it. That's
probably not rubble from the civil war, as that has mostly been cleaned up,
but it could certainly have been destroyed in 2006 in the Israel -
Hezbollah war. Or it could have been wrecked to put up something new in
its place.

Culturally, Beirut is worlds away from Damascus. Damascus is famed as one
of the best places to learn Arabic because people truly have very little
proficiency in foreign languages. The pan-Arabist mentality of the
Ba'athist government in Syria means that Arabic-only education is virtually
the only thing going. In contrast, Lebanon has for 150 years been the Arab
country that looks most towards Europe. The Lebanese elite generally
speaks more French than Arabic in their daily lives, and we found plenty of
well-to-do Lebanese confused and a little insulted that we should speak
Arabic with them, and automatically responding to us in French, which does
not work well if you don't speak French! In fact, many claimed not to be
able to understand our (very comprehensible) Arabic, a situation that
becomes all the more amusing when the working classes of Beirut were
delighted by our fairly good Arabic and talked with us at length. I
honestly think there's a bit of a cognitive block on the part of the elite
leading them to literally be unable to speak Arabic with foreigners.

One night, we went out for drinks and even ended up at a gay club. Now,
Lebanon isn't this liberal in its entirety, but like another small country
in the region it has everything from one extreme to the other, and so at
the bars and in the club we found a huge mix of foreigners and Lebanese,
including the first drag queen I've ever seen in the Middle East. The
Lebanese guys at the club were jealous of us living in Damascus, because as
they said, even the queeniest Damascenes are still manly men, unlike
Beirutis. Of course, they weren't jealous of the kind of silence and
invisibility that would come over them as gay men in Damascus...

The food highlight of the trip: having seen one night a bakery with amazing
rustic-looking French bread in the windows, we came back the next morning
and found they serve a traditional French breakfast: really good crusty
bread with jam and butter, your choice of a pastry (I had a pain au
chocolat), black coffee or cafe au lait and good fresh orange juice.
Heaven!

Cultural (mis)understandings and a joke

Two good (=funny) cultural misunderstandings:

The hummus-seller asked my roommate today if there are dinosaurs in America. My roommate replies that there are dinosaur bones pretty much all over the world. But the hummus-seller clarifies "no, I mean live ones!"

?!?!

We can only hope he saw Jurassic Park or something.

Also, about a month and a half ago, we were talking with the bread-seller and he asked us how you say "America" in "foreign". We tried vainly to explain to him that there are several thousand languages that are not Arabic, and that we don't all speak "foreign" outside of Syria, but it was hopeless. He just sort of looked at us and then asked again "right, so anyway how do you say America in foreign?"

And the joke: the CIA, KGB, and the Syrian secret police decided to have a friendly competition. They released three gazelles into the forest, and each team needed to find their gazelle. As soon as the competition started, the Americans were on their GPS, using live satellite surveillance to find movement in the area indicative of a gazelle. Not more than five minutes passed and the Americans tracked down their gazelle. Meanwhile, the KGB was out in force combing the area. With hundreds of plain-clothes agents, they knocked down trees, up-rooted plants, and found the gazelle without too much time passing. The Americans and Russians waited some six hours and still hadn't heard anything from their Syrian counterparts. Finally, they went looking for them, and found several Syrian secret police with a bunny tied up and one of the agents whipping the bunny screaming "Admit you're a gazelle! Admit you're a gazelle!" haha

A few jokes, and teaching!

Ten days since the last post. My apologies!

I've heard a few jokes in the past few days that I liked and thought I would pass along. One is simply "your handwriting is really nice"... but what is understood is that you're (jokingly) accusing the other person of writing for the secret police. Useful when someone asks you a sensitive political question or something like that...

Here is a nice regional take on a classic:

A journalist goes out on the street to interview passers-by, asking about the recent electrical outage. He asks the first passer-by, an American, "What is your opinion on the electrical outage?" to which the American replies "I'm sorry, what do you mean by outage?". Then the journalist asks an African (yeah I know it's not a country this is how the joke was told to me :p) who replies "I'm sorry, what do you mean by electricity?". Finally the journalist asks a Syrian who replies "I'm sorry, what do you mean by 'what is your opinion'?".

On the subject of teaching, one of the students in my program knows a priest at the Chaldean (a Catholic sect mainly in Iraq) parish in the old city of Damascus. Within two weeks of landing in Damascus, this student started an English program on his own from the ground up, dividing the students into three small classes, and initially teaching each class one hour a week (a lot of work!). Another student in the program (also with a Teaching Arabic degree) took over the lower level class, and increased its hours to two meetings of one hour a week, and hopes to do three. Then, this week, I took over the intermediate class from the founder of the program, and have agreed to do two hours a week as well.

Unfortunately, I hadn't met the students at all before I went in to teach, and in fact I was only told that I would be teaching the day of. The lesson I prepared was a bit over their heads, so this coming week I'm going to take a step back and review a little bit. We're doing a very hard topic in English, which is when to use the simple past (I went) versus the present perfect (I have gone). I had planned to teach "Where have all the flowers gone" last Thursday but we didn't have time. Hopefully this week!

The students are great, I have to say. I watched the lower-level class before I taught my own class, and I was a little dismayed by discipline problems in that class, which is I suppose natural considering that the kids are between 14 and 18 years old. Luckily my class ranges from 16 to 20 something, and so the students are more focused. I think with a more appropriate lesson plan it's going to be a great experience!

A little bit about food

(My apologies for the formatting mess. The way I avoid the blogspot ban to
post pictures doesn't allow me to be any fancier with the formatting.)

Summer in the Middle East is a wonderful time for food, and especially for
fruits and vegetables. Among the (many) pictures I have of foodstuffs from
the past month, I thought I would send a few along today.

Foodies and environmental nutters in America are very much interested in
the issue of the diversity of crops grown. Where we once had hundreds of
varieties of apples in America, today you can think of 5 varieties that
account for the vast majority of production, increasing vulnerability to
diseases and pests that, say, red delicious is particularly susceptible
too. And so I always enjoy seeing new varieties of familiar fruits and
vegetables, like the 3ajjour, which is a very slightly sweet cucumber that
looks like a tiny watermelon!

Of course, summer-time staples include apricot, though its season is just
now ending. If you want to know what is coming, you need only look at the
trees. Ripening pomegranates give an idea of what is to come soon!

My favorite fruit on the planet is probably figs, which just came into
season this week. I'm slightly allergic, but watch that stop me from
eating half a kilo at a time!

Heat wave!

So I'm slowly getting into the habit of posting here more regularly. It's a work in progress.

I laughed today when I saw this article:

http://www.alternet.org/story/147495/air-conditioning_is_terrible_for_the_earth_--_here%27s_how_to_live_without_it?page=1

It's about how AC uses a lot of electricity in wealthy countries, but especially the US. I laughed because my roommate and I had already taken their advice and, out of a mix of bullheaded stoicism and stinginess, endured the daytime heat here until a few days ago.

Now, let's clear up once and for all the idea that the whole Middle East is intolerably hot for six months a year. Of course, there are parts that are like that, but they are well to the south and inland from here. Damascus can see the occasional frost in the winter, and sees summer-time highs in the 90's. Of course, this is a dry heat, meaning that daytime high of 95 lasts for about 2 hours, so at 9 pm it might be all the way down to 75. Some summer nights it's downright chilly!

So thus my roommate and I were just sweating out the hot afternoons each day, waiting for the evening to come, when two days ago it became intolerable. Temperatures had gotten higher, there was no breeze during the day or at night, and so the brick oven (almost literal) of this city had gotten unbearable. We used the AC for two days and then I went back and checked what the weather had been. It turns out that both days it had been above 110! I would like to take this opportunity to assure my readership that I do not feel the slightest pangs of guilt about it. Happy July in the Northern Hemisphere! Hope it's not 111 where y'all are!

The SHUSHI Armenian Dance Ensemble

This past Thursday night, I headed with a few friends to see the SHUSHI Armenian Dance Ensemble, from none other than New Jersey.

The program was a long but enjoyable three hours, with large numbers (involving some 50 dancers), small numbers, as well as singing. The hardest number for me to swallow was their finale, in which they danced in military uniforms while waving no less than FOUR Armenian flags on the stage (plus a Syrian one for the locals). For anyone with a little historical perspective, the mix of militarism and nationalism is intimidating and in this case under-considered.

The dancers were nearly all Armenian American kids, ranging from grade school to high school. I saw in their participation a very American pattern of assimilation, especially appropriate for the second and third generation, when ethnic identity is still prevalent. For many people in America, arts from the home country become one of the only ways to construct an ethnic identity, and take on an importance that exceeds their importance in the home country, where one's Armenian identity is taken for granted in a way that it can not be in America. In America, we wonder, if you don't DO anything Armenian, can you still BE Armenian?

I was also touched by the comments of a friend who had done Peace Corps in Azerbaijan (neighboring Armenia). She was forbidden to cross the border at the time due to the cold war between the two countries, but she remarked on how much the people's faces (as the audience was majority Armenian-Arabs), the music, and the dance all reminded of her Azerbaijan. In any case, people blindly hate the other side even if they share so much at the end of the day.

My barber and more music

Sorry for the sparse posting! I now have reliable internet at home, so I should be able to do better.

I had the best conversation with a Syrian earlier this week with the barber. Right from the start, he's talking to me about the American Civil War, whether it really was about slavery, whether the North - South split in America has gotten better or worse with time, and on and on and on! A really wide range of basic factual knowledge and smart conclusions built upon it! He's a man after my own heart, a self-taught history buff, and we talked a great deal about what is going to happen in the Middle East in the next 5, 10, 20 years, be it in Lebanon, Palestine, or here. Btw, he's not expecting a Palestinian state anytime soon.

One of the best things about classes so far is that we get to hear a LOT of music. From my wide-ranging youtube listening in the past, I've been pleasantly surprised that I have previously heard much of what we listen to in class. Links to what we've been listening to:

http://www.arabicmusictranslation.com/2008/07/julia-boutros-arabic-arabi.html

Ronza singing the very eager "A trip! We're taking a trip!":
www.youtube.com/watch?v=PE2va0DN95c

Lastly, a link to a song by Lena Shamamian, who I'm going to see (for $2) tonight:

http://www.arabicmusictranslation.com/2009/10/lena-chamamyan-before-dinner-qabl-el.html

Classical music and a dinner party

We just finished our first week of classes. The weekly schedule breaks down like this: we have four hours of class Sunday Wednesday and two hours on Thursday. Among them, we have 9 hours a week of 3ammiyya (spoken) and 7 hours of fuS7a (written), along with two hours of lit, in which we're reading a contemporary Syrian novel. Most Thursday afternoons, instead of class we will have conversation time or short trips to interesting sites around the city.

This past Thursday, however, we had the pleasure to get our AIDS and TB tests done. This meant a lot of bureaucracy, riding from one office to another, waiting around, and finally a small blood draw, which for me led to the predictable 15 minutes of fainting afterwards. All is well that ends well, though.

Thursday night, hoping to catch great cello music, me and friends head down to the Opera House only to buy tickets for what turned out to be a play :/ Luckily the tickets were only about $2 so we said screw it and went next door to the Higher Institute for Music for a classical guitar recital which was a blast.

Last night I decided that it would be fun to have a dinner party. This involved doing all the shopping for spices and everything in Arabic which was pretty exciting. Among the successes were managing to explain what cloves look like and then getting some cloves handed to me! Among the failures (maybe not a language-related one?) is that no one has ever heard of something like coconut milk here, but I'm sure it's out there somewhere, giving the sizable population of Malaysian (plus other) immigrants here.

No internet at home yet, which means no pictures for you all yet. Hope everyone is well in North America!

First post!

For me, the Middle East basically started in Chicago. The Royal Jordanian flight was probably 1/2 Arabs speaking Arabic, another 1/4 Arab-Americans speaking English, and another 1/4 non Arabs. In Middle Eastern fashion we were first told we needed to get new boarding passes around 30 minutes before the flight was to take off. Of course, no one at the desk seemed too concerned about the time passing.

The 13 hour flight ended in a seven hour layover in Amman. After being denied to go to the gate because of how early I was and being worried that I would have to spend seven hours in the glorified livestock pens of immigration, I was able to get a transit visa to leave the airport and was put up in an airport hotel by Royal Jordanian. This included a chance to shower, and a free dinner. Thanks, RJ!

I arrived in Damascus early Sunday morning. After having been told by RJ in both Chicago and Amman that they weren't sure if my checked bags were on their way or not (?!), they came in good time in Damascus. A quick passage through immigration and customs, meeting up with other students, and a drive through the city to get everyone where they were going put me to bed by about 4 am!

It turns out that the 15 day visa is pretty standard (I had initially been a bit scared about it), and I already got a $30 piece of paper from the American Embassy which should get me my long-term residency permit...

What's on the horizon? Well, two different friends (who don't know each other!) have told me to meet a foreign oboist friend of theirs, I may have a way to teach English for pay, I bumped into a friend from Middlebury on the street who is working with the Iraqi Student Project and loves it, and CASA orientation is tomorrow.

I hope everyone is doing great in America and everywhere else, best wishes!

No pictures this time, my apologies.