• About

dearapples

dearapples

Category Archives: travel

Poetry Archives: Naomi Shihab Nye

26 Monday Dec 2016

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

≈ Leave a comment

“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”

Check out these sandals…

14 Wednesday Sep 2016

Posted by marie in footwear, kickstarter, maku, sandals, travel

≈ Leave a comment

14095759_1627439187586878_7648096906329093937_n

I interrupt my usual postings (are there usual postings on this random blog??) to share this exciting project that has been in the works for quite some time, and is now live on Kickstarter as of today!!  It’s been so fun to watch this come to life and to help out with it as well.

I can personally confirm that these sandals are uber comfortable, durable and versatile, and I’m so happy to see that they might just become available to everyone!!  Great team and great product.

For more information, visit their website

14199364_1627439214253542_238773914062451576_n
14355749_1634888883508575_6785654777728976498_n
14322231_1634886920175438_7607985024804005896_n

 

 

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

03 Wednesday Jun 2015

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

≈ Leave a comment

…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.

And so it goes

21 Thursday May 2015

Posted by marie in dear apples, journal, Lebanon, travel, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

IMG_7033

Dear Apples,

I am sitting here eating apple slices sprinkled with salt and listening to some very good music and wishing I could talk to you in person; I very much miss you right now.

Oh Apples what shall I do?  I am sleepy today but I have not finished my checklist for the day, and if we’re being honest, it was a very manageable checklist.  Lebanon is cooler than it was yesterday; the clouds rolled in a bit with the faintly dusty wind.  It’s soothing and I am being lulled to sleep against my will!  I walked in the morning before the sun became too omnipotent, and my hair whipped all about with the wind.  I looked for the ant parades on the side of the road, but it seems the ants only parade on Sundays.  Twice now, on my Sunday walks alone, I have seen countless parades of ants running back and forth to their hole with enormous leafs and crumbs and whatnot strapped to their back.  Consider the ant! Well, perhaps the only reason we consider the ant is that they have a one day work schedule while we have a five or six day work schedule, and our day off happens to fall on their work day.  “What diligence!  What perseverance!,” we say in awe.  But in reality it is we who are too busy to notice their 6 day rest.

Well these days, Apples, I am like the ant.  I am not sure I am enjoying my leisure as much though.  Instead my brain is saying “Just be patient just be patient just be patient,” while my body is fiddling around and taking long walks and doing exercises to release this tension of waiting.  Waiting for responses and for residency permits and for citizenship and for home projects.  Al mientras, in media res, in limbo land, in between, I listen to podcasts and self-soothe with posts like this, which tell me that nothing is in vain.

On the one hand, everything is new and lovely and exciting and more peaceful than ever before.  I have a love at my side for my life and still can’t believe my luck.  I am also in love with Lebanon, and having lived here before and visited since, this love is now more deep-seated and holds a greater understanding of all the beauty and frustration of the country.  I am content.  Waiting, and knowing that the waiting itself holds growth. And on the other hand?  Well I guess I forgot about the other hand after all.

All my love to you Apples.

IMG_6970

Lebanon: Personal Profile

21 Thursday May 2015

Posted by marie in dear apples, journal, Lebanon, travel

≈ Leave a comment

IMG_7169 If countries were people and traveling was like making new friends-or enemies-let me tell you about Lebanon the Person.

Lebanon has a big generous open heart and is very curious about other people and loves getting to know them. She will take good care of you and invite you into her circle and show you the best she has to offer and almost suffocate you with her need to make sure that all your needs are met. She will offer you the mountains and the sea and the heat and the snow and tremendous thunderstorms followed by months of sunshine.  She will feed you more than you will ever be able to eat.

She has a wonderful sense of humor, and puts you at ease and even loves to make jokes at her own expense, but with a healthy sense of fondness. She likes to enjoy life.  She knows who she is.  She is very established in her personhood and is not afraid to give her opinion.  She is definitely an extrovert and wears her emotions on her sleeves.  She will talk to you ceaselessly and likes to mix her languages in a tumble of words and sounds and accents.

She is also very proud and a little hot-headed.  She thinks she is right about everything.  She can be quite demanding in some ways, but somehow balances it out with a lenient and open attitude.    She is sort of quixotic in that she values her past but is also impatient to rush into her future, and always feels that she is behind in this way.  She can be quite picky and anal and likes to make processes long and painful.  She loves to argue and have the last word.  But just when you think you’ve had enough of her, her beauty and old wisdom and laughter will win you right back over to the heart of her.

Settling In

11 Monday May 2015

Posted by marie in dear apples, everyday poems, journal, Lebanon, travel

≈ Leave a comment

IMG_6884 Dear Apples,

Last week, I found myself sitting in front of my laptop and –quite miserably–observing the various achievements of creative individuals, whose beautiful websites appeared in droves at the merciless commands of my own browsing.  Crowded tabs of virtual success stories popped up one after the next, while I found my shoulders slinking further down as I considered the companies I have not started, the books I have not written and the Great Unknowns of my current state of affairs. I was recently talking with a friend about career paths, and we were both commiserating about how so many others have quite specific skill specializations, or a drive to produce that seems greater than the uncertainty of the outcomes.  I, on the contrary, feel myself to be carried along by the flow of life; I perceive myself to be a recipient of circumstance rather than a molder and shaper.  And yet, I am not sure whether or not this is an accurate explanation of where I am and how I arrived at this point.  It’s quite clear that I also chase after my desires, which is why I now find myself landed in an improbable, yet somehow delightfully fitting, life path.

Having returned once again to Lebanon after a sojourn around the UK, now newly married, and with plans to settle in for a good while, I find I need to re-center myself.  The honeymoon was lovely and surreal, but even as we were trekking through breath-taking expanses of landscape or hiking up buttery gorse scented climbs, I think we both realized that we prefer building the rhythm of daily life. The sweet mundane of home, with the challenges and joys that make it our own.

For me, though, this is all still new. I am learning the particular symbiotic between open trust and active pursuit of what I want in life.  It’s a relationship that requires a bit of discernment.  Control is mostly partial.  We have autonomy over our response to our circumstances, and over the actions we take to influence certain outcomes, but there is also the wide and wild realm of possibility and chance that is largely outside of our jurisdiction.  This is the space that I have come to respect and revere.  What has become most essential to me is an abandonment to the mystery of that which we cannot fully predict or foresee.

Here I am walking down the vibrant, aching-with-passion Hamra street in the heart of Beirut.  Here I am waking up each morning to a pack of garrulous garden roosters, and opening the window to the mountain breezes.  Moving to the balcony to enjoy an early daily coffee with my C. Here I am calling Lebanon home with a sureness that still surprises me.  Here I am feeling homesick and unravelled and often rather lost.  But I try to welcome that discomfort, because the alternative would be to clench my fists so tightly around certainty, that my life might become a series of narrow calculations.

Instead, I want to answer to the guidance that comes when I meet the demands of the present. I know that perspective is a key to the puzzle, but I don’t think this openness I am working towards is reached simply by maintaining a positive attitude.  It’s more of a virtue than an outlook, in the sense that it takes practice and work to acquire.  What an admirable trait it is to develop the courage to refuse victimhood, and to look squarely at the whole beloved broken package of yourself, and say “This is it.  Here I am. Let’s go.”  To bless your failures for the roads they take you down and the lessons they teach you.  To realize that in everything there is hope–and that hope, when chosen, is more reliable than what may appear impossible in the moment.

I know that I’ve been most amazed by life when I’ve been willing to both walk forward without being sure what’s out there, and to meet the demands of the present, here and now, and then watch in wonder at how life unfolds.

We borrowed Mary Oliver’s articulation of these thoughts for our wedding brochure:

Mysteries, Yes

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous to be understood.
How grass can be nourishing in the mouths of the lambs.
How rivers and stones are forever in allegiance with gravity,
while we ourselves dream of rising.

How two hands touch and the bonds will never be broken.
How people come, from delight or the scars of damage, to the comfort of a poem.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers.
Let me keep company always with those who say “Look!” and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads.

—Mary Oliver

Lost in Translation

17 Saturday Jan 2015

Posted by marie in dear apples, journal, learning a language, Lebanon, travel

≈ Leave a comment

IMG_4506

Dear Apples,

I found a project called Journal 52, which offers weekly topics to journal about. They began in the New Year, so I’m several weeks behind, which I regretted when I saw that the first prompt was “Pathways” (because when I think of all the serendipidous pathways that have taken me to today I am almost flabbergasted), but then when I saw that the second prompt was “Just Be,” I felt much better. I don’t know what to do with such nebulous phrases that just stir up bubblegum-filtered images. Maybe that’s not the worst image in the world, but it’s also not one that elicits any thoughts that are particularly relevant or significant to my own life.

This week, however, the chosen topic “Conversation Starters” immediately garnered up all sorts of memories and sent me spiraling down curious thought-circuits. First off, I’ve been appreciating the kinds of conversations that draw out the human side of….humans, such as those highlighted by Humans of New York or the conversation starters initiated by this experiment, but then I thought of my experience with languages. The subject broaches a whole new arena for the person who stands outside the territory of a common language as I have done twice in my life, solo.

To be fair to travelers of the past, it is now difficult to find any place in the world where at least a significant portion of the population does not speak English. For me as an American, it is almost impossible to totally immerse myself amongst people who do not speak a word of English. Travel is easier in this regard. But still. I will not undermine the experience of going it alone for a long term stay (and without the immediate resources to take classes) to a country whose language you don’t speak. I have done this in both Mexico and Lebanon, and both experiences have been wonderful, aggravating and challenging in a good way. I’ve taken some notes along the way.

The difference between spending time with one person and spending time with a group of people becomes chasmic all of a sudden. When you talk with one person, chances are pretty high that the person will speak some English, and so…you can hold a conversation! If they don’t happen to speak English, you have a great opportunity to practice your Spanish or Arabic or Swahili or whatever you’re attempting to learn. However! If you are in a group setting and are an amateur speaker, you become a silent observer. The conversations swerve and twist and jolt forward too quickly for you to catch the content. By the time you’ve forced your brain to focus enough to piece together a collection of words and tones and hand gestures, the topic has changed. By the time you leave, your brain hurts, you wonder if you still have a personality, you feel even more shy and distant from people than before, and you have pretended to laugh at jokes you did not understand just to prevent people from thinking that your total lack of emotional response implies that you hate them. After awhile, you begin to become more comfortable in these settings, and you find yourself retreating to your own world. While everyone thinks you are still mentally present, you are, in fact, long gone in the recesses of your mind.

The new sounds and meanings of the language are delicious. I am a slow language-learner and can’t push myself to rush right into it. I need to hear it for awhile first, become comfortable with the sounds, begin to decipher the points where one word ends and another begins as people are talking, and then venture in myself. This whole process is wonderful. Each language is expressive in different ways, and it’s beautiful and educational and thought-provoking and hilarious to learn new expressions and see the connections that language makes. I loved learning that the verb for “hope” and “wait” is the same in Spanish. I love hearing the passion in both the many terms of endearment and the array of colorful curses in Arabic.

You are forced to be patient with yourself. Because if you’re not, you’ll internally combust. You have to get over the sense of guilt that comes from not being able to communicate with people. You have to accept that it will take some time. You have to get over yourself and let yourself sound ridiculous as your mouth tries to wrap itself around sounds it has never before emitted. You have to think your way around words you do not know. I found myself describing a dream one time as “a picture in my head when I’m sleeping.”

You will make many many mistakes and realize that it’s not the end of the world, but simply means that you’re progressing. Sometimes, you will begin a conversation and realize that you don’t have enough vocabulary to continue it, and so you will simply shrug your shoulders, stop short, and leave the other person hanging. You have to learn that sometimes, when you think someone is talking about a husband, they are actually talking about a walnut. When you’re wondering why someone is talking about the chickens and cheeks between Lebanon and Syria, the answer is, they’re not. They’re talking about the army on the border.

316080_10150293762369837_6803771_n

Apples, there are so many life lessons to be gleaned from the experience. One that we talked about that I have mentioned before, is that learning the context of a place or a culture or a person is always worthwhile. This is something you told me once that has stuck with me ever since. When you can withhold judgment long enough to let someplace or someone expose their true colors, the original feeling of frustration or anger usually melts away. If anything, I hope that this experience has forced me to be a better listener and a more open observer of the world.

313468_10150293752464837_6283366_n

Lebanon Love: Two for Tuesday

23 Tuesday Dec 2014

Posted by marie in dear apples, journal, Lebanon, travel, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Dear Apples,

When you live in a new place, it’s pretty important to learn about it and appreciate it and enjoy it without comparing it to what you’re used to.  Obviously there are challenges to living in a new environment, and one thing that will ruin you is to have a stingy outlook.  If I feel myself getting anal, its best to just shut up and refresh my vision.  It’s easy to fall in love with a place if you give it your attention.  One time you told me that context never hurts.  You were talking about people, and how knowing more about someone and understanding their story is rarely ever a bad thing.  It usually just makes you more open and compassionate.  I think the same is true for places.  I love Lebanon and don’t want to miss out on anything, so I decided I want to start documenting some of the best bits of it here, little by little.

Lebanon is great at:

1) Home cooked meals and good family company. Lots of variation and many ways to prepare many different vegetables, legumes, fruits and meats.  Lots of people to sit around the table and enjoy it with, and usually a heart-warming amount of  intergenerational solidarity.  All these are things I’ve loved about Lebanon since my first visit here.

IMG_5354IMG_5445

 

2. Views.  You can’t go far without running into a sea vista with the mountains jutting up beyond it, or beautiful circuitous roads or an old stone house of set into the roadside.

IMG_5438

IMG_5475

 

 

United Arab Emirates: Dubai

09 Tuesday Dec 2014

Posted by marie in dear apples, journal, Lebanon, travel, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Dear Apples,

When time expands the distance between then and now, remind me not to forget the sweet surprises of these weeks.  Remind me not to forget the last day in Dubai: the warmth of the sun, the blue of the sea from under the soft lapping waves, and its remote expanses around my bobbing floating body drifting further and further out from shore, the soft glowing evening and dinner looking out at the fountains rising and dancing to the ebullient music, the magnitude of Burj Khalifa, the hidden halls of Dubai mall with their stunning tiles and arcs, and the whirling dervish that we happened upon as he spun himself into a spiraling trance, and how it felt like the world went out of its way to perform for us, the long walk to and from the metro, the goat milk ice-cream and mint tea in the old turkish tea house with the quiet fountains and cushioned chairs.  Remind me about how reassuring it felt to be away from home but still have my home in the person alongside me.  And also how very glad I was to land back in Lebanon, and pick up the lovely rhythm of my days again with a far more heightened sense of belonging and gratitude for the routine and simplicity of my place here.

IMG_4988 IMG_5012 IMG_5025 IMG_5024 IMG_5016IMG_5161IMG_5158IMG_5096IMG_5093IMG_5119IMG_5173IMG_5279

Dubai in Towers

09 Tuesday Dec 2014

Posted by marie in dear apples, journal, travel, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Burj Khalifa, Dubai, United Arab Emirates

 

Words for Dubai:

climbing, reaching, fast, desert, luxury, comfort, fulgent, ease, lonely, dynamic, dazzling, lights, larger-than-life, alive, sand, prosperity, international, air conditioned, ethnic, spurious, malls, shopping, novelty, sky scrapers, dramatic, soaring, touristic, luminous, competition, young, stimulating, ostentatious, ultra progressive, ultra conservative, expatsIMG_5107

Marina walkIMG_5105

Creativity in urban architecture: spiraled skyscraper

IMG_5014 IMG_5013

Blue skies, blue windows.  Made me jealous of the window washers propelling down the sides of these towers with their squeegees and buckets of suds

IMG_5191

The Great Burj

IMG_5300

Burj Khalifa showing his dreamy side

IMG_5204

How others compare to him

IMG_5280

…But when he is not in their periphery, they’re kind of lovelyIMG_5209

The Burj being modest and making himself look small next to C’s finger

IMG_5277

View of Dubai as seen from Floor 124, after a ride up the world’s fastest elevator #poppingears and an Indian man reading each floor out loud as we went….basically counting from 1-124 in a very loud, very fast voice while his wife looked mortified and tried to shush him.

IMG_5247

…But even from Floor 124, there’s still a few skyscrapers’ height above us

IMG_5258 IMG_5297

Burj Khalifa is truly magnificent.  The project, the team, the timeframe, the architecture, the innovative experiments, the imagination required to create this breath-taking tower is quite mind-blowing.  It was good to see that these kind of immense undertakings that demand so many hands and brains and skills still take place.

A couple of months ago I took a walk through Central Park with a friend, and we were discussing the making of Central Park and the wonderful detail of it and the solidarity required for such a collective project.  I remember feeling sad afterwards and writing to C about what a project it was to create that, and how perhaps capitalism has highlighted functionality and individuality and competition over everything else, so there’s no room for those types of cultural initiatives that require so many people working together. I mean, wow!! In Bethesda Terrace, the staircase is divided into four sections that represent the four seasons, and all the stonework reflects the celebration
of the seasons. In the wall overlooking the fountains below, there are
little orbs set into the stone, and each have a different design because Olmstead (the architect of Central Park) allowed each of the commissioned Irish stoneworkers to leave their signature in the stone by creating whatever design they wanted in those little circles. The production!! I remember asking C if we still have such huge endeavors that involve so many people working together to create something that’s simply beautiful and there for purely aesthetic purposes.  Perhaps I am ill-informed, but I don’t really see it anymore.

But seeing Burj Khalifa was really stunning in that regard. It gave me goosebumps to emerge from the elevator after descending the tower, to walk down a hall lined with huge photos of many of the architects, project directors, plumbers, electricians, engineers, cleaners, designers, foremen, etc who had each played a crucial role in the building process.  An aerial view of Burj Khalifa shows how it resembles a flower from above, with many pedals spread out around the stem.  From below, you only see the multi-leveled stems leaping up from the base and growing gradually taller and taller until they drop off and the center juts upward, and when it cannot go further it is completed by a 200 meter spire.

Although the pace and dazzle of the city overwhelmed and estranged me, I suspended my own preferences as best I could, and marveled to see such proof that we humans are still moving forward and struggling to see our hopes and dreams materialize in tangible and remarkable audacity.

 

 

← Older posts
Follow dearapples on WordPress.com

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 58 other followers

Instagram

No Instagram images were found.

Blog at WordPress.com.

Cancel