Category Archives: expat life

Day 3, and 2017 is already looking interesting

03 Tuesday Jan 2017

Posted by in dear apples, expat life, journal, new year, Uncategorized, writing

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Dear Apples,

It’s only 11:30am, and so far I have:

-Gone to the grocery store with my shirt on inside-out

-Put fabric softener in the washing machine instead of washing detergent

-Failed to do my writing work

-Thrown a plate into the trash can instead of the banana peel on top of it

-Remembered last night’s dream that involved Donald Trump doing a commercial for Kraft cheese that required him to sit in a tub of boxed macaroni and cheese.  (I was mainly confused as to why Kraft believed that this marketing idea would boost their mac n’ cheese sales.)

How’s your day going?  Happy New Year!

Antakya, Turkey: First Impressions

01 Sunday Jan 2017

Posted by in dear apples, expat life, journal, learning a language, refugees, Syria, Turkey, Uncategorized, writing

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Dear Apples,

We’ve moved! (From Lebanon to Turkey). We’re not quite settled; we’re still staying in a temporary guest house because frankly we’ve just been too busy to move into our new apartment, which is only a ten minute walk away.  We’ll use the New Year holiday to continue assembling our mountain of two-dimensional Ikea pieces into the objects the online catalogue promised they were.

I’m surprised by how much I love it here.  The thing about having perpetually low expectations for everything means that I’m almost always startled by my own happiness.  Here are some first impressions and recent happenings.

-We arrive in Hatay (Antakya’s province) at night after a long layover in Istanbul.  I have been breastfeeding Isla the entire second flight without eating enough, so I have a migraine and I’m too exhausted to notice our new surroundings through the taxi window.  C holds Isla, we arrive at the guest house, and he goes out to bring us food.  All I am aware of is the fact that we still have to put Isla’s crib together, which in the moment feels like knowing we need to run a marathon up a steep mountain range without sleeping first.  To C’s amusement, I start crying with joy when he comes home with a huge steak and puts the crib together by himself. (Me through my tears:  “I thought you meant you were bringing a raw steak that we’d have to cook!  But I can eat this right now!”)

-I wake up in the sun and look out the living room window to a view of the bustling center of the tiny city.  The red flapping of a Turkish flag, a mosque’s spire jutting up against the mountain, cars and pedestrians circling a roundabout with Ataturk’s statue in the center.  We go out for a walk and there are so many young people and the sidewalks are crammed with baby strollers vying for space.  You’d think babies would attract as little attention as the squirrels in NJ; they are so commonplace, but no, Isla receives more waves and smiles and admiring words than a celebrity would. We hear as much Arabic in passing conversation as we do Turkish.  We sit down in a restaurant, guess at the menu, and make the happy accident of ordering a breakfast that could feed about five people.

-We find a babysitter for Isla; a Syrian woman from Hasakeh who has one home in Aleppo and another in Damascus.  She doesn’t speak English and sings the Arabic songs that Isla has grown up with.  Isla loves her right away, and we walk to her house every morning where I drop her off, write for a couple hours, and pick her up.  Before I take Isla home, we have coffee or tea and watch the news together and learn the updates on Syria.

-C’s work is urgent and stressful: truckloads of food and winter supplies need to make it over the border into Syria, and war tends to throw everything off course all too often.  There is little predictability.  His office is across the street from where we are staying, and we have lunch together every day.  C and I haven’t done too much cooking for each other since we’ve been together, (I made my own meals and we ate a lot of C’s mother’s dishes before we had our own kitchen) but I have always loved real food and loved to cook.  Now once I day I make a meal for our lunch.  I haven’t found a good volunteering fit yet, so feeding him is my contribution to relief efforts for now.

-I am always homesick around Thanksgiving and Christmas, and so I call my family almost daily.  We celebrate Thanksgiving with a big group of American expats and we eat all the beloved signature dishes of the day including two large turkeys.

-Isla turns one year old.  She is happy here and sings a lot.  We laugh when she starts singing along with all the calls to prayer from the mosques.  She prefers tearing sheets of tin foil into tiny shreds over playing with her toys. She is stubborn and emotive and wonderful.  I think back to last year when her early arrival caught us off guard.  She was so incredibly tiny that we were scared for her, but she’s been a tough little girl from the get go.

-C travels to the US and Isla and I stay and prepare for Christmas by setting up a nativity scene, playing holiday music, making cookies and buying two small cypress trees.  Christmas involves cinnamon rolls, gifts, whiskey, games, and a Christmas Day lunch celebrated with a small group of (mostly Muslim) Syrians.  The evacuations from Aleppo have finished and peace talks are underway.  For now, things seem hopeful.

-I’m homesick for both New Jersey and Lebanon, but I do love it here.  Turkey is less accessible to me than Lebanon; the people seem more guarded.  It might just be my interpretation and the fact that I don’t speak Turkish, or it might be the result of all the attacks that Turkey has undergone lately.

For now it’s so right for us to be here and we’re soaking it up.  We’re in close proximity to a whole lot of suffering and terror, but we’re also amongst brave people and witnessing incredible resilience and humanity and ordinary life in the midst of it.  (I need to expand on what I mean by that in another post.) I know 2016 was a bruiser, but here we are at the end of it, and here’s to seeing what 2017 will bring.

Poetry Archives: Naomi Shihab Nye

26 Monday Dec 2016

Posted by in everyday poems, expat life, Gaza, Palestine, refugees, Syria, travel

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“Since no one else is mentioning you enough.

The Arab who extends his hand.
The Arab who will not let you pass
his tiny shop without a welcoming word.
The refugee inviting us in for a Coke.
Clean glasses on a table in a ramshackle hut.
Those who don’t drink Coke would drink it now.
We drink from the silver flask of hospitality.
We drink and you bow your head.

Please forgive everyone who has not honored your name.

You who would not kill a mouse, a bird.
Who feels sad sometimes even cracking an egg.
Who places two stones on top of one another
for a monument. Who packed the pieces,
carried them to a new corner. For whom the words
rubble and blast are constants. Who never wanted
those words. To be able to say,
this is a day and I live in it safely,
with those I love, was all. Who has been hurt
but never hurt in return. Fathers and grandmothers,
uncles, the little lost cousin who wanted only
to see a Ferris wheel in his lifetime, ride it
high into the air. And all the gaping days
they bought no tickets
for spinning them around.”

-“The Sweet Arab, The Generous Arab”

How (not) to travel for 17 hours with a 9.5 month old

18 Tuesday Oct 2016

Posted by in expat life, journal, Lebanon, travel, Uncategorized

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  1. Make sure your flight leaves at 2:00am. That way you’ll have to wake up your baby to leave for the airport at 11:00pm, ensuring that her sleep is interrupted and she is off to an exhausted start.
  2. Don’t pack Benadryl, ZzzQuil or any other sleep inducing nectar of the gods for her. They are surely dangerous for so young a child, and you wouldn’t want to jeopardize her health …or give her anything that might possibly help her to fall asleep at all during your journey.
  3. Go by yourself. Make sure you leave at the height of allergy, flu, cold and airborne virus season.  Tell yourself that you are a strong independent travel warrior, that this will be an adventure and a challenge, and that you are looking forward to this opportunity to prove yourself. Who needs help? (You. You need help.)
  4. Attach the baby’s pacifier to her clothing using a metal clip. That way, you’ll have to go through the detectors multiple times before you realize why you are both beeping, even after you’ve removed every last scrap of excess clothing and jewelry possible without actually walking through naked.
  5. Don’t wear slip on shoes. Make sure you wear shoes that have a lot of laces and require a bit of elbow grease. While you struggle to tie and untie, the baby can crawl around on the germ-ridden airport floor, chew on the shoes of the security guard, and bring down the stack of gray plastic customs containers onto her head.
  6. Order special meals on your flight. Once your baby has finally fallen asleep, the flight attendant will find you and ask in a yelling tone if you’re the one who ordered the gluten free meal, thereby waking your baby who will not sleep again for the remaining 14 hours of your trip. Also, the gluten free meal is basically made up of small separated portions of flavorless cardboard that no amount of salt and pepper can salvage.  It’s fine; you won’t be able to eat it anyway because you will be busy holding down the baby while she tries to dump rice on her head and throw the food tray onto the lap of the person next to you.
  7. Let your phone fall out of your pocket as you exit your first plane and head into your layover airport. Exit the plane and realize that your stroller is missing. Lug your baby and your carry-ons across the entire airport, and wait till you arrive at your departure gate to realize that your phone is missing. Consider leaving the baby and the bags behind the help counter and running back to retrieve your phone. Reconsider, and give up hope after much useless begging, pleading, and bribing of the customer service personnel.
  8. Sit next to an Asian professor who has to grade economic term papers for the entire 8 hours of your second flight. The baby is a sucker for a good gnaw on a stack of papers, and she is not easily dissuaded when she is running on a sleep deficit.
  9. Bring the baby into the plane bathroom with you, and place her on the baby-changing tray while you use the toilet. The tray is located above the toilet, so it’ll be fun to try to reach up and hold her in place the whole time and make sure she doesn’t careen into the sink, grab the highly questionable waste from the trash, or fall into the toilet itself. Douse both yourself and the baby in hand sanitizer, which she will want to drink, and repeat the whole process every couple hours.
  10. Breastfeed the baby to calm her and help her with the pressure at takeoff and landing. She will be distracted by everything around her, and subsequently leave you exposed and subject to disapproving glances every five minutes.
  11. Walk up and down the aisles for the last four hours of the trip while she cries. That way, you’ll allow all the passengers aboard to partake in her unhappiness.
  12. Upon arrival to the United States, make sure you have a suspicious story to tell the border control officers. Your exhaustion will help you look particularly guilty and sweaty as you talk. Yes, you are traveling by yourself from Lebanon.  Yes, you and your baby have different last names but she is your baby. No, your husband is not with you because he is in Turkey. Yes you live in Lebanon but will be moving to Turkey soon. (This sounds mild as I write it now, but in the moment you can be sure that I dug myself into a dark pit the more I spoke as I tried to explain my circumstances while under intense interrogation, and without having slept for 30+ hours.)
  13. Do it all again on the way home. Practice makes perfect, and soon you’ll be electing to travel alone with your offspring all the time!

Update: I had told C that although we both miss him very much, we simply will not be able to return until Isla is five years old, but then my gracious baby girl offered to take a separate flight on the way back to ease my journey.  What a gem.

Lebanon: Looking back on a year

25 Monday Apr 2016

Posted by in dear apples, expat life, journal, Lebanon

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It was on Valentine’s Day in 2011 when I arrived at the Beirut International Airport and began my love affair with Lebanon.  I first came to do my Masters here, but to be fair, it had started long before then.  Somewhere during my high school years, I’d developed a curiosity for this tiny little Mediterranean, Middle Eastern country, and I promised myself I’d visit someday.

I’ve always had a fascination with anything and anyone “other” than what was familiar to me.  In high school I became fixated on the Middle East.  I remember one day my friends drew up caricatures of what they imagined the future loves of our classmates would look like.  When they showed me mine, it was a man with a turban on his head.  I looked at the drawing and smiled.  Destiny.  (C does not wear a turban.)

I’m coming up on one year of returning to live in Lebanon again, and I’m oh so glad that this lovely country will now always be a part of my life.  While this year has been a beautiful one, there’s also been a good deal of adjustment. It’s felt very full and fast and somehow very slow and quiet at the same time.  It’s been a year of struggling with my Arabic, sending job applications,  receiving job rejections, and waiting for many many responses that never came.  It’s been humbling and a little scary, but most good things are.

It’s also been the first year where C and I finished up the long distance chapter of our relationship for once and for all. It’s the year of Isla, and my first experience of pregnancy and childbirth (both of which were pretty amazing experiences despite –and perhaps because of–my tendency to expect worst case scenarios in which I give birth to a 14lb baby in my 10th month of pregnancy after 32 hours of excruciating labor.  Thank you for going easy on me and arriving early, Sweet I).

In reminiscence of our many travels to visit each other in our long distance days, C and I took a romantic trip to Paris to celebrate our one year anniversary….in the Charles De Gaulle airport waiting for our layover flight back to Beirut after a trip to New Jersey.  In our defense, we did bring some celebratory treats for the plane ride: nuts, dried fruits, and a knob of aged gouda,  all washed down with wonderfully horrible airplane wine.

In the midst of a lot of change this year, I think what’s been most consistent to the daily routine is my morning walk or run.  I cling so hard to this small space that’s all my own, where I can enjoy Lebanon’s many springtimes and bright hot summer.  In the spirit of gratitude, I would like to thank some friends who have been a source of returning joy for me throughout this first year.

First off, I am grateful for my five little Syrian neighbors.  There are three little girls and two little boys who are usually playing together on the gated ground floor of an apartment complex, and they are some of the happiest, sweetest little people I know.  They always stop their play to run up and talk to me for a bit when I pass by, and their cheer is infectious.

And then there is this wonderful dog.  He started walking alongside me way back in May of last year.  I don’t know who he belongs to, but he usually finds me about ten minutes into my walk and accompanies me for around twenty minutes.  When I was very obviously pregnant, he walked with me for almost the full hour of almost every day.  He seemed to sense that I might need the extra care and company.  He doesn’t want to be petted or played with; he’s just content to be there.  I love his gentle comforting presence.

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All in all, it’s been a good year.  I’m glad I get to be here for the time-being, and I’m grateful for friends who bring me joy along the way.

 

The Fearless Foreigner: Learning the Language or How to lose friends and alienate people

03 Wednesday Jun 2015

Posted by in expat life, learning a language, Lebanon, travel

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…Or at least try. There are those who can pick up languages faster than they can pick up their luggage at the airport, and then there are the rest of us who need a while to fumble along. If you have the resources, enroll in language classes. They force consistent practice, help you understand the structure of the language, and allow you to become comfortable making egregious and embarrassing errors in public. Do I speak from experience? Barely.  I have probably taken a grand total of about seven Arabic courses over the entire extent of my time here (#financiallychallenged), but I’ll get there soon.  For now, I get to make the egregious errors without the support group of fellow fumblers.

When I was living in Mexico after high school, and before I’d picked up Spanish, someone once asked me why I was so quiet in group settings. It was because I was embarrassed about my lack of Spanish, and I wanted to explain myself. I responded: “Porque soy demasiado embarazada para hablar” (“I’m too pregnant to speak”).  Right.  Classic case of a false cognate. Swallow your pride and move on.  Luckily, the Arabic language also provides ample opportunities to familiarize yourself with the feeling of linguistic failure in that department.  The Lebanese word for “pregnant” is remarkably similar to the word for “stupid.”  It’s as if they did that on purpose.

Then there is the matter of trust.  When learning a language, there is a remarkable degree of trust that you must place in the people around you.  This is something I very quickly learned on my first full day in Lebanon back when I moved here to pursue my masters in 2011.  I was introduced to the extended family of the woman I’d be living with, and her sweet, kind, compassionate nephew took me out to coffee to meet up with his friend.  Before the friend arrived, I was given my first Arabic lesson.  I was told how to say a simple “How are you?,” which I could practice once the friend arrived.  I repeated the phrase over and over and felt proud of myself for memorizing it so quickly.  I even felt I was beginning to master the accent.  So, when the friend arrived, I stood up to greet him boldly with,

“Shou hal jasad ya asad”

Tremendous laughter followed.  Maybe my accent was off?  Maybe they were just astounded at my courage?  No.  Through tears of laughter, the friend asked me if I knew what I had just said.  “How are you?,” I asked tentatively.  No. No, that is not the meaning of the first phrase I was taught.  I had been told to say “What a body you have, you lion!” to a complete stranger.

So yes, trust is important as well.  Choose your teachers wisely, and don’t say much when addressing a pregnant person.  Then again, you can’t really learn if you never open your mouth and try.  Just accept that you’ll be a language loser far longer than you like, unless of course you’re one of those special language learners.  Or are surrounded by trustworthy teachers.  Not me, friends, not me.