"Your blog is malnourished." -R

So, what's been going on since my last post? I'd like to answer this with a tag cloud. "visa. flight. wedding. find apartment. move. job search. manifest new life where I am very crafty creative industrious and bloggy." Well the last one might not really work as a tag, but you get the idea.

So we moved to New York! We love it. And now, after two years in London and one month in New York, I'd like to give some initial thoughts:

This country is litigation mad! I guess I knew this but I never experienced it before. I mean official bureaucracy, yes. I have had my share of that- (see my previous post). But you need a credit check to get an apartment here. You need to sign non-disclosure forms and tax forms and authorize background checks on your "character" when you go to a job interview! It's madness.

Free stuff everywhere! New York is like a living garage sale. There's free stuff on the street, curb alerts on Craigslist, all kinds of impromptu street sales, stoop sales, and community swaps. Now mind you when we held a sidewalk sale on our street in Hoxton and advertised up and down Kingsland Road, to get rid of some stuff before we left London, we were met with everything from a lack of enthusiasm to total fear. English people don't really seem to get the concept of self-organized sales; they're more comfortable with a car boot or a jumble in a designated area. I do find it something of a paradox that the land of free market capital is also the land where commerce can easily get back in the hands of the people. But they probably just look at it as trying to make a buck. I'm the one who walks down the street past a lady selling some old baby clothes on the front stoop of her brownstone, eyes shining, and murmuring about anarcho-syndicalism.

People talk to each other here! Strangers! The other day I was in Williamsburg, which is pretty much like Shoreditch only a bit scruffier, waiting for my friend to meet me for brunch. Meeting for brunch at the weekend, with a Mimosa (Buck's fizz) or Bloody Mary, seems to be very New York. It's not much different from meeting for brekkie in London, except there's no beans or tomatoes or decent tea, and you're allowed to get a bit tipsy. So as I was standing on the corner in front of a diner, I saw a lady with a dog pass a man. He asked her if that was a beagle. She said... I'm gonna go to quotes here:

LADY: "Yep. He's a beagle. Pet a beagle and you'll have good luck all day!"
MAN: "I won't get bit, will I?"
LADY: "No, no. He won't bite."

Then they get into a conversation, which goes on for about 10 minutes. This lady tells the whole story of how she found this dog. The vet says he's about 8. She thinks he's a retired hunting dog. Sometimes he just sits on the sofa a looks at her and she wonders if he's happy. The man suggests she takes him to a park or wood, and gives him something to smell. Then she should hide the item and he can hunt it.

MAN: "You see, there's a big difference between what makes us happy and what makes them happy."

Turns out this guy is like a dog whisperer. I love how people in New York just start talking to anyone randomly, and this story also leads me to another observation:

People in New York are CRAZY about their pets. First of all EVERYONE has a pet. Everyone has a cat or two and a dog. When we were apartment hunting, we started out looking at sub-lets, but it was soon clear that that wouldn't work out because everyone had a pet, and I'm allergic. The people across from us have two cats who eye us through the kitchen window whenever we get something out of the refrigerator. The neighborhood is full of pet salons, doggy day cares, and professional dog walkers. Yes, that's a job here. People give their pets birthday presents and christmas presents. People send their pets to pet resorts. It's like a child substitute for people who are too busy or selfish to have children. I don't mean to sound judgemental. It's just weird that so many people treat some animals like their own children and don't afford the same sense of kindness to the animals on their plates. But hey, I guess it's better than living in a country where ALL the animals are treated cruelly. Here it's just most of them.

Food! The food here is so freakin good. I mean there is good food in London, and in our neighborhood we were especially spoiled with great Turkish food and Vietnamese. But that was it. Decent pizza and more recently Mexican can be had in London, but you have to seek it out. Here, it's everywhere. There are so many good places everywhere. There are thousands of pizza places all over this city where you can get a slice for $2.50 and it's unbelievably good. Tacos. Deli sandwiches. Eggplant parmigiana. Any time I eat something here I pretty much reaffirm that we made the right decision.

One thing I miss about London, among many, is the free museums. Museum entry costs a fortune here! There's a real class divide; high culture is a luxury. Luckily you can get free tickets to fringe theater and off-broadway shows on Craigslist. The other area where New York clearly falls short is parks. There are two big parks we can access here, Central and Prospect. But neither really live up to London parks from what I've seen. So what's the conclusion of my research so far? Strangely, or maybe not strangely, I am dazzled by New York, but I don't feel it's my city yet. I'm presently still loyal to London, but a few more slices of pizza and a free blender off the street might turn me into to a true New Yorker.

the p0rn post

Instead of a picture to begin this post, I will start with some headlines/web addresses which appear when one googles 'p0rn.' The first site which appears, from the first click shows pictures of women with come on their faces, a special "f*cked up facials" section (this is the porn jargon for coming on a woman's face or in her eyes), women with pained expressions while being f*cked, and a left hand menu which goes from amateur through fisting, BDSM (which shows women with clamps on their breasts, electrodes on their vaginas, tied up so that their breasts are swollen, bound and gagged, tied up on crosses and other apparatus, and one with clothespins on her vagina), through to the teens section which advertises "girls next door abused." dirtylittlewhore.com is the fourth address, bitchdump.com is number 10.

If this sounds extreme, it is no longer considered so. This is normal mainstream heterosexual p0rn. This is what teenage boys (and girls) or younger find the first time they decide to google the word 'p0rn.' This is what is colonizing our culture and our sexuality, men's and women's. This is what I'm so pissed off about.

What I'm even more pissed off about is that not many people seem to care. In fact, not only don't people seem to care, people seem to like it. Guys like it and, increasingly, girls like it too. To speak out against it is to be misunderstood as repressed, old fashioned, anti-sex, or anti-free speech. To feel that it is disgusting and damaging, not only for the individuals who act in it, but for everyone who consumes it, for everyone who is influenced by it, in relationships and in daily life- is to feel oneself in the minority.

Does it have to be this way? According to one man I recently spoke to about it "If it wasn't about domination and submission it would be boring." So does that go for real sex too? Does real sex have to be about aggression and submission? Have you never had loving spiritual sex? Poor you.

Another person said to me "There's always been porn." Yes there has, and there's nothing inherently wrong with depictions of sex to facilitate arousal. But the images we make make us. The images we produce show us who we are. And we are currently woman-punishers, woman-haters, woman-degraders. Whole generations are learning about sex from porn, internalizing these damaging roles, and losing their sexualities to the porn industry. And it is, we must remember, an industry. With a net worth of $14billion, according to Forbes magazine.

A lot of people do object. But most people I know seem to fall into one of two categories. Either they know about it and don't see a problem, or they don't know about it, and thus don't see the problem. Unfortunately it is mainly men who fall in the first category and women who fall in the second.

I defy anyone to tell me that p0rn in its current practice is not applied misogyny. Just take one look at the first site which comes up when you google 'p0rn' : http://www.yobt.com/main.html
and tell me what you see. There is no love here, no pretense at equality, no respect. It is all about the utter dehumanization and degradation of women. It is the backlash against the feminist movement of the 70's. It is the message to women - hey you want your sexual liberation? Here you go, you slut. You like sex? I'll make you wish you never asked for it.

There is no equivalent for men in our society for the language of hate and degredation used against women- whore, slut, bitch, skank, ho. There are no equivalents for men for the ways women are depicted- dehumanized animals who enjoy being forced and who enjoy pain.

So some agree with me. Yeah it’s wrong, they admit, but what are you gonna do? I don’t know. I think the first thing I’m gonna do is bring it to peoples’ attention that we have a f*cking problem here, and we need to start taking responsibility for it. And then we need to take our culture back from the people who are selling this shit. We need to tell them that we’re not buying.

Lost youths

I'm feeling depressed with the world lately. I'm working myself up day by day into one of those funks which are hard to shake off, because they are so easily fed with so many examples which demonstrate that the world is in many ways a terrible place. It wouldn't be so bad if the world were inherently terrible; I could accept that more easily. It's that the world is beautiful, and that I love life, and it feels like all of its potential goodness is being squandered- not only squandered but distorted into unrecognizable forms. There are so many wrongs that need to be righted and it's hard to hope that they ever will be. At times like this I question why I even want to have children. Life is hard, we don't know what it's for, we don't know what to do with it. The world is a fucked up place full of mostly fucked-up lives. Do I want to inflict existence on my progeny just because I don't know what else to do? I am afraid to imagine sometimes what kinds of lives my children and grandchildren will have, what kind of world they will live in. The signs are bad.

In recent weeks, I've seen a few things which have upset me. One, I saw a perhaps thirteen year old boy eat a chocolate bar first thing in the morning at the bus stop and then deliberately drop the wrapper on the ground. Meaning, this kid lacks even the most basic concepts of ecology, pride in one's home town, and cleaning up after oneself, not to mention of a healthy breakfast. Basically, I interpret the whole thing, the eating and the littering, as this kid screaming out "I feel like a garbage can, people treat me like garbage, I treat them like garbage. I therefore see no point in trying to avoid wading through a sea of garbage." Though, of course, as a Brit, he was probably using the word rubbish as opposed to garbage. My thoughts filled me with despair, as did the feeling that nothing I could say could get through his wall of ignorance. Not even if I quoted to him from "The World Without Us," a depressing and compelling book which details how the sea has literally become a sea of garbage, millions of tiny pieces of plastic to be precise.

A couple weeks ago, I was sitting on the upper deck of the bus. Across the aisle, two teenage girls were talking and laughing, one of them playing music on her phone. At times it seemed so loud, I wasn't even sure if it was coming from her phone, or from something more powerful. I had my headphones on, and I could still hear the music plain as day. I took a headphone out of one ear, and said to the girl "Is that your music?" with a little smile. She looked at me, immediately quizzical and confrontational. "What?" "Is that your music?" I said. "But you got your earphones on, isn't it?" she asked. "Yeah," I said. "But I can still hear it." "How can you hear it if you got your earphones on?" she asked, pushing up her face. "Because it's really loud," I said. "Do you think you could turn it down a bit?" "It's not even loud!" she said aggressively. Then looked at her friend and laughed. "I asked you politely," I said. "You could respond politely." She didn't answer.

The last and most disturbing event was also on the bus. Three twelve or thirteen year old boys piled onto the back of the bus on the upper deck. They were laughing and joking and shouting, as kids do, but literally everything they were saying was an obscenity. High pitched voices, horseplay, and "you cunt! oh, you cunt!" "stop it you twat!" "Oy, your mom's a bitch!" "Fuck you! Your mom's a dog. She takes it doggy-style." Not yet full grown-men, already fully trained woman haters.

The thing that is the saddest is these kids, the litterer and the swearers, the rude girl, are not entirely to blame. They are, in a sense, victims. They are sponges who soak up the culture we immerse them in. A culture that values above all style, surface, sexiness, and possessions. A culture which places little value on being smart or spiritual or basically caring about other people. These youths are mirrors we look into and recoil from because we don't recognize what we see. There is sickness and corruption here, in our culture, in our world, and we ought to take responsibility for that. We ought to stop wondering what wrong with these kids and start wondering what's wrong with all of us.

self-inflicted

Gosh it's been a while since I blogged. As my time in Turkey draws to a close, (six days to go), I've been plagued by this nagging feeling that I should write a post that will elegantly encapsulate my experiences here on the Eastern reaches of the Black Sea coast. But I can't. The thing is, so many little things have happened, which I want to remember and launch into the blogospehere for all eternity. The said theoretical eternity may bring up complex metaphysical questions, but suffice it too say that I should have written about them as they came along, instead of leaving them all to the last minute. Isn't that always the way with me.

Tonight I had dinner with some new friends. They are an old couple who teach in the same department at the university- urban planning - and throughout dinner their smiles and carefully measured words, and appealingly open-ended questions- "What is America like?" - made me want to volunteer to be their adopted granddaughter. The Professor invited me to dinner to say thank you for editing some papers for him. I must admit I expected it to be a boring duty-driven evening, but it turned out to be very pleasant. A little glimpse of them, a little promise of an unlikely friendship, and then the kind of slightly awkward goodbye that comes from the unspoken fact that we will not see each other again, nor keep in touch, nor even make empty gestures about keeping in touch. The Professor's wife held my hand warmly, and fretted about it being cold. (The Turks have a deep-seated fear of catching cold - drafts and chills of all forms are carefully avoided - to the point that people will not open windows more than a crack on a suffocatingly hot bus). I told her I was fine, and she told me to go straight in and warm up. Such a lovely caring nature is typical of the Turks; I will miss being treated so well when I get back to England- where affection appears to be shown through insults. Right?

Last weekend I went to Sinop with a colleague, her daughter, her mother, her aunt, and a bunch of pensioners on a packed and rowdy bus. It was, as I expected, both interesting and trying. (At several points I was made to dance in the aisle of the moving bus, and at one point a microphone was proffered with the instruction to sing "a foreign song.") These Black Sea Turks are so enthusiastic and fun-loving it's amazing - they get up to all kinds of embarrassing and crazy antics, and without alcohol! I don't really relish group tours but I didn't want to miss the chance to see more of the Black Sea. Sinop is one of the longest continually inhabited cities on the coast, about half-way between Istanbul and Trabzon. And there were a lot of strange sights to behold. We toured the famous Sinop prison, which was not that interesting to me and rather scary. But what made it worthwhile was the surrounding fortifications, walls built by the Seljuk Turks incorporating Greek ruins. You could literally see classical pillars sliced up like carrots and laid into the walls. No one seemed that interested in this part, but I was haunted by the sense of so much history built on top of and cannibalizing itself through the ages. You get that feeling a lot in Turkey.

In Trabzon, in fact, I am eerily conscious of the weight of its history, which remains for the most part invisible. This is an ancient settlement, and yet almost everything, apart from a handful of mosques and a caravansary, looks to have been built in the past fifty years. Trabzon is truthfully not very attractive. Fighting for ground between the mountains and the Black Sea, the architecture is almost all of the 1960's-style block variety. But I am haunted by the idea that it was a different place 100 years ago, different not only in the appearance of its buildings, but with different people and a different culture. Until the aftermath of WWI and the formation of the Turkish Republic, this whole region was a Pontic Greek stronghold - descendants of Byzantine Greeks who never left- and now, due to deeply contested historic events, read "relocations" and "population exchanges", almost all of them are gone. The thing that makes the history of this region so haunting is that no one talks about it. The people around here don't seem to want to reflect on the past. Many old buildings were destroyed to make way for six and seven-story apartment blocks, which seem out-of-place in a city of about 200,000. The main area of town has some half-dead Ottoman wooden houses whose days appear to be numbered, and, out of sight, hidden, there remain some crumbling ruins of Byzantine churches, Greek villas, and Orthodox monasteries, which almost none of the locals know or care about, which aren't mentioned in any tour guides, and which I, annoyingly, haven't been that successful in finding. I've read that one of the monasteries in the hills above the city is currently in use as a barn, but if you ask the farmer nicely, he might remove the hay and let you see the frescoes.

In any case, I have that predictable feeling that I haven't made the best use of my time here, that there's more to see that I've missed. So I'll be spending Saturday visiting mosques that used to be churches that may have been temples before that, and gulping down the last glasses for who knows how long, of fragrant black tea grown not fifty miles away.

acting with no expectations

Living in Turkey is proving to be an extended lesson in Taoist wisdom. Tao, which to me is a slightly warmer version of Zen, advises above all acceptance, flexibility, and a union with the way things are, rather than trying to force them into what we would like them to be.

This is not my natural way of being but I’ve been practicing for a few years. Before I became a Taoist, however, I am and have always been a person of lists. I like to start a job and complete it, and cross it off. It makes me feel industrious and efficient. But Turkey makes a mockery of my routine. The process of crossing an item off the list has become akin to waiting for an unbearably slow internet connection to stream media content. You watch the bar. You press play. You press pause. You watch the bar. You read "buffering" over and over. You press play and get some incoherent garble. You press pause. You wait.

See, getting something done here doesn't begin with the direct statement of intent of whatever you would like to achieve. It starts with formulas of greeting and welcome, and generally moves on to a glass of tea. The overall atmosphere is not “Let’s get things done” but “Let’s talk about this for a long while, come to no fixed conclusion, and maybe we can talk again some other time.”

I have been trying to book flights for a weekend trip to Istanbul all week. I go to the company's web site and it won't accept my credit card. I know my card is ok, I've used it before with the same company for an online purchase, but for some reason, it just won't work. I mentioned this to a colleague, who advised me that sometimes it doesn’t work, and I should just keep trying. So I did, but to no avail.

I decided to call the airline, which says it's open 24/7, on the English section of its website. I called and was welcomed by a recording, and prompted "For English, press 9." I pressed 9, got a 15 second dose of muzak, was told (in Turkish) to wait, and then looped back to the beginning. I was welcomed, told "for English, press 9," treated to another snippet of a different dead-tune, told to wait, and back to the start again. I tried a variety of responses, ie. pushing different buttons, not pushing any buttons, to escape this mini-samsara, but to no avail.

The next day at work I asked my colleague to call for me. She got through to a real person, explained the situation, and made a reservation for me. The next step, I was told, was to go to a local agent for the airline in order to pay for and collect my ticket. Using your credit or debit card outside of a large company’s internet payment facility requires the physical manifestation of you and the card. Alternatively, under duress, (which I have applied in previous similar situations) they might ask you to fax a copy of your card (which is always illegible), or email a scanned copy of your credit card (great idea!).

So, it happens that last evening I went to see a performance by a Georgian theatre group. The play, which was a quite abstract treatment of “conflict,” and which didn’t seem to impress the audience much, probably due to some very ambiguous scenes of women with headscarves covering their entire heads and faces, ended at about 9.30pm. I mentioned to my friend that I needed to go to a travel agent sometime. Oh, she said, there’s one nearby, let’s go! At 9.30 on a Friday night? you ask. But, yes, the office was open for business. There are no set office hours around here. Shops open and close when they feel like it. If you’re wondering if a certain shop is open, go and check. At last, I thought, the cultural differences are working in my favour!

But it was not to be. After a lot of discussion and explanation, the agent managed to book a reservation for me. I presented my card, but the airline still for some reason would not accept payment. I offered to pay in cash. The agent tried to use the company credit card to book the ticket online, but his card didn’t work either. We all had a good chat about how there must be a problem, we can’t understand it, what bad luck, God knows why this is happening. And I was invited to come back to the office tomorrow to try again. I went home and called my bank, who confirmed that there’s no problem with my card or account, and no record of me trying to use my card.

Incidentally, while I was on hold with my bank, I was waiting for over five minutes, reading an article on the internet, and somehow ended up in a deadzone. After a lot of really great recorded advice about extra services I’m definitely going to try, there was now only silence. Had I been disconnected? I wondered. I tentatively pressed a button. “Recording stopped!” I was told. “To log into your voicemail, press 82.” I don’t know where I was, but I didn’t feel I belonged there. I felt that, like the characters in Being John Malkovich, I had somehow entered some secret zone in the back alleys of corporate infrastructure. So I hung up.

Anyway, I guess I’ll go back to the travel agent later, maybe have a glass of tea, and if the flight to Istanbul comes to me, I will accept it. If not, I will release it. My heart is open as the sky.

excuses excuses

A lot of things have happened. I haven't updated in a while, and you may have been thinking that I proven to be one more person who starts a blog, and then abandons it when the novelty wears off, contributing to the vast net-fill of junked sites. Well, no! I've just been a little busy that's all.

1. My boyfriend came to visit and we trawled about town and took some day trips to nearby lakes, mountains, and a monastery carved into a mountain. We became minor celebrities wherever we went. See I can pass for a Turk (Turks come from various ethnic stocks due to the historical diversity of the region and the empires; some look Eastern European, some look Asiatic, some look Middle-Eastern), but he cannot. Everywhere we went children stared- actually everyone stared. After the initial shock passed, we were treated to a barrage of questions, smiles and general astonishment at our existence. I have to say I felt a little bit like there wasn't room in this town for the both of us. Now he's gone I'm the most interesting foreigner again. Yeah.

2. I went to see a Macedonian modern dance performance. It's part of a "theatre" festival hosting groups from various bordering countries. No details of the different performances are offered in the program; you just turn up and hope for the best. Seems like I got lucky. These Macedonians weren't actors but proper dancers. The production featured well-chosen costumes, fresh micro-beat and clicky music, and the artful use of a camera to project an aerial view of the dancers behind them. It was refreshing to have some non-Turkish input. Diversity is what I miss most about London. It's nice here but it's something of a mono-cultural deal.

3. I went to my friend's house and she cooked enough food for five people. We had borek (feta cheese pastries), a yogurt with carrot and garlic dip, green beans with olive oil and rice, orange cake, semolina pudding, apple-filled cookies, and glass after glass of tea. The Turks are some of the most hospitable people I've met. If you have a way in, ie. you know one person, all of their friends are instantly your friends, and they kiss you on the cheek (if you are of the same sex) and treat you like an old pal the first time they meet you. There are no separate words for colleague, classmate, flatmate- all the people you associate with who are not in a position of authority or dependence to you, are called friends. And friends get looked after. I have never seen anyone eat or drink anything, even gum, without offering it to the people around them. Even a candy bar will be broken into pieces and shared among five people if need be. The important thing is that everyone is included. My students are all so nice to each other- there is little of the cliquiness of American high school and college culture here. There aren't loads of competing "types;" there is just one perceived type: Turkish.

4. I accidently erased all the music off my I-Pod this evening. And I've realized first-hand what the A in apple really stands for. If you don't have an I-Pod the following is probably a ticket to the depths of dullness, but I just gotta complain about this or I won't be able to go to sleep for the knot of regret in my stomach, which has lately replaced the numbness of denial. See, I opened up I-Tunes and it presented me with an option to automatically update my I-Pod with my I-Tunes library. Without thinking too much about it, it sounded like a good idea, so I said ok. Then, without further warning, it erased everything that was on my I-Pod that wasn't in my library- like 90% of my music. Design flaw you might think. But I'm pretty sure it's a deliberate design trap. People like me, who have (had) perfected their I-Pod, filled it up with all their favorite music, spent countless hours creating playlists and labeling and ordering all the tracks, make Apple no further profit. But poor suckers like me who so easily and without a warning message lose all their music have to start over again. I guess Apple is hoping I will replace my lost music at the I-Tunes music store. Well they can fuck off. And another thing. I have done a little research and found that the newest version of I-Tunes doesn't allow for the automatic update option to be switched off. This ensures two things - that you can't use third-party software like I-pod Rip to get music off your I-Pod and onto a computer where you can share it, and that you risk wiping your I-pod every time you plug it into a computer that doesn't have all the music on it that you have on your I-pod. Well, luckily out of sheer laziness I never updated to version 7, and I never will. So in making one error, I became aware of a second more grave error in time to avoid it. I guess the moral of the story is don't fool around with stuff if you don't actually know what you're doing. But I always operate like that, and even though it leads me to do careless things sometimes, it still feels like a good approach for some reason. I like fooling around with stuff.

5. My computer knows it's in Turkey. Ok, it's probably more accurate to say that some web sites, like google and blogger, know when I open them from Turkey. But I get pleasure from personifying my computer. It makes me feel almost as it there's more than one American in this town. Actually my computer seems more British. Probably because I bought her at PC World. Right. Well I better go to bed. But I just want to add that although blogger knows that I am in Turkey, it doesn't know that I don't speak Turkish very well, so it's just a big pain in the ass when I want to update my blog and everything is in Turkish. Get it right blogger. I'm on my guard with all you blood-sucking, money-grubbing, music-eating companies from now on.

There. That ought to placate the yahbiquette-starved masses for a while.

black sea enlightenment

I have learned a lot from my students in the past week or so, and, being the generous soul that I am, I'm sharing some of these wise trinkets with you. Did you know...

I, yes me, am America.

"We know the so-called Armenian genocide never happened." So, no need to talk about that anymore.

In Turkish, as in English, the word for "bill" is also a name.

Please be aware that certain TV programs, especially chat shows and soap operas, can corrupt your morals!

And, to close on a positive note: "Love and peace are the enemy of war, and if we all love each other there will be no more war."

And this is the way darkness and light, humor and despair, play upon the dreamy waters of the Black Sea.

tea for twelve

I recently attended a dinner party at the home of one of my colleagues. It was different from any dinner party I've ever been to before, and not only because everyone was speaking Turkish and I only had the most general sense of what was going on. For most of the evening, I focused intently on the words and gestures and reactions from people, and kept a running commentary in my mind, along the lines of someone's ill. what a shame, is it someone i know? probably not. is it serious? i have no idea.... something about a film. iran. ok... and? why does she keep saying banana? maybe it's not banana.

The evening began for me as all the guests set off in a cavalcade, children pressing their faces to back windows and waving, adults in the front smiling and waving back, to our hostess' house on the other side of town.

We arrived and left our shoes outside the door. You can always see when your neighbors have guests in Turkey, because there's a pile of shoes by the front door. Or sometimes only a single pair of men's dress shoes with a pointy, slight curled toe, which for some reason I always imagine becoming animate and tapping up to me, heel-toe, heel-toe. Creepy.

Anyway, we were welcomed in, kissed, given slippers, and seated in the living room. I realized that I was the only one wearing jeans, then excused myself to myself, thinking hammily, hey I'm American. Most of the women had made an effort; some had makeup, some had straightened their hair, except for one of the wives, who covers her hair and was dressed simply. The mothers were called at one point to round up their children, and serve them, and settle them in the kitchen, while the table was laid for the adults in the dining room. I stayed in the living room with the men. Being neither a mother, nor a man, I felt vaguely uncategorizable.

Dinner was served once the children were secured. It consisted of various platters: cheese pastries, walnut bread, fruit cake, lentil-cakes, zucchini with yogurt, sweet carrot balls, and glasses of hot tea. Everyone ate slowly and chattered away, while the hostess barely ate but urged more food on all of us and refilled our tea-glasses ceaselessly. After we'd finished, we stayed at the table drinking more cups of tea, talking (or listening), and eating baklava. Later the hostess brought out a remarkable paste she uses as a cleaning product, explaining its benefits to the women of the table, and passing it around for everyone to smell. Yes, it's true.

Some got up to smoke off the balcony. Conversation never faltered for a moment. People joked and laughed, and I smiled, having not a clue what was so funny. Occasionally someone offered to translate a little snippet of the conversation for me. After we had had a chance to digest a bit, a huge bowl of fruit appeared, and everyone set to peeling and cutting apples, oranges, and kiwis on little plates with little knives. The children had finished their meal and were causing a general ruckus by this time. After the fruit, the hostess offered us each a few drops of refreshing lemon cologne for our hands. I was exhausted from so much food and focused listening. Around midnight, the head of the department announced, well friends, it's late, let's go. So we all got up and filed out.

I got a ride home with the head of department and his family, who are all painfully quiet and unfailingly polite, and somehow always leave me without a thing to say. It's his wife who covers her head; they're a conservative family. The children are very quiet and well-behaved. So we drove in silence, and as the car rolled up and down the hills around the city, the radio incongruously tuned to a house station- "Saturday night disco!"- I felt that truly refreshing sensation of finding yourself an incongruous object in your surroundings, of finding the terrain of your own life unfamiliar and inexplicable. I love it when that happens.