Yes, 'awesome'.
1. It's hot. It's sunny. It's so humid I barely have to moisturise my legs. My hair is returning to its rightful shade of blonde, my skin has sufficient colour so that I no longer look like I have some kind of wasting disease, and my stores of vitamin D are no doubt being replenished. The tropics are a thousand times better than any chemical drug. I am actively NOT thinking about how people start wearing shorts when the temperature in the UK climbs to a mighty ten degrees, because really, that is horrifically depressing.
2. Everyone-everyone!-waves and says hello and much of the time, they don't even want to sell anything. My suspicions are that the vast majority of the country is so chilled out because of the tropical weather. It's even more amazing just how friendly and smiley everyone is when you think about the decades-long civil war and the tsunami that recently hit.
3. There are monkeys everywhere. I know, I know, they're annoying, vicious, thieving pests, but in the same way that visitors ooh and ahh over the wild garden-destroying deer that live in Northern California, I find the monkeys wonderfully entertaining. We spent a good two hours watching a troupe of them swing from vines and chuck coconuts at our heads. Prepare yourself for a lot of pictures of monkeys. The other thing is that they look so ridiculously human. It adds to their odd and novel appeal, but they look so human as to be kind of revolting. The babies all look like little old men, and monkeys of all ages have those unnervingly human little hands and fingernails.
4. All the tropical fruit I dream of when I watch the rain lashing my window is spilling out of fruit stalls just waiting to be bought and eaten. There are the ones you just don't find in the west, like mangosteens, rambutans, custard apples, soursops, durians, and Chinese guavas, which are ridiculously delicious. And there are the ones you can technically buy in your local Waitrose-pineapple, bananas, mangos, papayas-but the ones here are so sweet, juicy and ripe that the ones you can buy back home seem like a different species. When I die, entomb me in a giant coconut. I actually love tropical fruit so much that if people knew the full extent, I would be deemed mentally unstable.
5. The rest of the cuisine here is actually spicy enough to put a bit of colour in my cheeks. It has been a long, long time since that has happened, and the burn feels fantastic.
6. Is it insensitive to mention that it's cheap? Well, it is. It's rather great to dine for about three pounds a head. The only exorbitant prices I've seen were for a box of cornflakes (530 rupees, about 5USD or three quid) and, oddly enough, a pack of spiced cashews.
7. Even though Sri Lanka lost the cricket World Cup to India last night, people were still celebrating by chucking firecrackers around and having dance parties on the beach. When I offered my condolences about the match this morning, no one really seemed terribly distressed. The most dramatic reaction I got was (wait for it!) a shrug. It's hard not to love a place like this.
8. The crows are for some reason very sleek and robust. Much better than crows elsewhere. I have no idea why this is.
9. The beaches of the southwest are exquisite. If I believed in intelligent design or God or any of that, I would say that he had a soft spot for this island, because the golden sand and turquoise water of Unawatuna are dreamlike in their sheer perfection. It is utterly unsurprising that the people here seem like they're in such good moods all the time.
You might have asked yourself, 'Why nine things?' That is because I wrote down nine things and then, to be honest, felt like drinking mango juice and reading my book. Oh, tropics, you beguiling thing, you.
03 April 2011
28 March 2011
You can't spell 'team' without 'tea'
Forgive the really stupid title of this post. I'm sure there are better puns about tea or about Sri Lanka in general, but I can't think of them right now and I'm trying not to run up an astronomical tab here in this Nuwara Eliya internet cafe. Though considering it costs all of 400 Sri Lankan rupees an hour (about a pound fifty or so) that would be difficult.
I've always wanted to come to Sri Lanka; first, because I liked the name, and then later, because in spite of its decades-long civil war, the spirit of the island seemed so beautifully zen. There it was, hanging off southern India like an earring or a tear, just quietly existing in all its tropical satisfaction in one of the world's most beautiful oceans beneath its much larger and brasher neighbour. The war ended, Natasha and I were in desperate need of a break from the soul-wrenching dampness and greyness of Scotland, and lo and behold, here we are. We landed in the damp heat of Colombo at about 4am on the..erm...26th? 27th? Things are so laid-back here I don't even remember; needless to say, I am slowly being restored from my late March-self, which is pasty, exhausted, and fed up with all things St Andrews, to my mid-April self, which is usually tanner, more energetic, and generally likes life better.
After a gloriously languid day spent drinking iced coffee and wandering through the cracked and leafy streets of Colombo, we hopped a train up to Nuwara Eliya, Sri Lanka's highest town. The moist and heavy air cooled as the old colonial-era train snaked its way up into the hill country, and the palms and grasses of the lowlands gave way to eucalyptus trees so tall as to be surreal and sweeping valleys coated in tea bushes. Hanging out the side of the train (the doors are just left swinging open because some countries aren't slaves to health and safety), I could feel my eyes bug out more and more with every bend we rounded. It is stupidly beautiful up here, ethereal in the afternoon clouds that fringe the peaks, festooned with flowers of all shapes and colours, and so verdant as to look unreal. Were the garden of Eden real, it would look like the Sri Lankan hill country. My dad, a genuine gardening fanatic, would have a field day up here (no pun intended).
The reason for coming all the way up here was because of the tea plantations. To state the obvious, tea is a big thing here. The mountains are positively covered in it; the velvety green slopes are broken only by reddish dirt footpaths, the occasional towering, spindly tree and white-clad tea pickers filling the sacks strapped to their shoulders. We caught a local bus about 20km down the road to Labookelie to a local factory, where I finally learned the difference between white tea and green tea and silver tips and golden tips and all that, and then proceeded to have our minds blown by the utter gorgeousness of the surrounding hills. As far as the eye could see, tea grew and lent the mountains such a vivid colour that they appeared to be glowing in the soft afternoon light that filtered through the clouds. We walked back up the winding road to Nuwara Eliya with our mouths agape at how unreal it all looked, which of course made the locals piss themselves with laughter. Apparently they love weird Westerners.
Ceci and Natasha: providing roadside entertainment in South Asia since 2010
Walking through the giant teabag that is Sri Lankan hill country, it's easy to see why everyone here is so relaxed and indeed why this place is one of the last strongholds of Buddhism. When you have all this amazingness to look at and very probably the world's best cup of tea right out your doorstep, what's not to love?
Your morning cup of Orange Pekoe in its infancy
The hills are alive with the sound of...erm...tea
For those of you without an imagination, if you find this all really boring, there will be pictures added later.
Edit: see?
I've always wanted to come to Sri Lanka; first, because I liked the name, and then later, because in spite of its decades-long civil war, the spirit of the island seemed so beautifully zen. There it was, hanging off southern India like an earring or a tear, just quietly existing in all its tropical satisfaction in one of the world's most beautiful oceans beneath its much larger and brasher neighbour. The war ended, Natasha and I were in desperate need of a break from the soul-wrenching dampness and greyness of Scotland, and lo and behold, here we are. We landed in the damp heat of Colombo at about 4am on the..erm...26th? 27th? Things are so laid-back here I don't even remember; needless to say, I am slowly being restored from my late March-self, which is pasty, exhausted, and fed up with all things St Andrews, to my mid-April self, which is usually tanner, more energetic, and generally likes life better.
After a gloriously languid day spent drinking iced coffee and wandering through the cracked and leafy streets of Colombo, we hopped a train up to Nuwara Eliya, Sri Lanka's highest town. The moist and heavy air cooled as the old colonial-era train snaked its way up into the hill country, and the palms and grasses of the lowlands gave way to eucalyptus trees so tall as to be surreal and sweeping valleys coated in tea bushes. Hanging out the side of the train (the doors are just left swinging open because some countries aren't slaves to health and safety), I could feel my eyes bug out more and more with every bend we rounded. It is stupidly beautiful up here, ethereal in the afternoon clouds that fringe the peaks, festooned with flowers of all shapes and colours, and so verdant as to look unreal. Were the garden of Eden real, it would look like the Sri Lankan hill country. My dad, a genuine gardening fanatic, would have a field day up here (no pun intended).
The reason for coming all the way up here was because of the tea plantations. To state the obvious, tea is a big thing here. The mountains are positively covered in it; the velvety green slopes are broken only by reddish dirt footpaths, the occasional towering, spindly tree and white-clad tea pickers filling the sacks strapped to their shoulders. We caught a local bus about 20km down the road to Labookelie to a local factory, where I finally learned the difference between white tea and green tea and silver tips and golden tips and all that, and then proceeded to have our minds blown by the utter gorgeousness of the surrounding hills. As far as the eye could see, tea grew and lent the mountains such a vivid colour that they appeared to be glowing in the soft afternoon light that filtered through the clouds. We walked back up the winding road to Nuwara Eliya with our mouths agape at how unreal it all looked, which of course made the locals piss themselves with laughter. Apparently they love weird Westerners.
Ceci and Natasha: providing roadside entertainment in South Asia since 2010
Walking through the giant teabag that is Sri Lankan hill country, it's easy to see why everyone here is so relaxed and indeed why this place is one of the last strongholds of Buddhism. When you have all this amazingness to look at and very probably the world's best cup of tea right out your doorstep, what's not to love?
Your morning cup of Orange Pekoe in its infancy
The hills are alive with the sound of...erm...tea
For those of you without an imagination, if you find this all really boring, there will be pictures added later.
Edit: see?
28 February 2011
Why you may not get to have an opinion on the monarchy
In the entire month of February I have managed exactly one blog post and I have managed to post it on the last day of the month. I believe that this technically makes me bad at blogging. Thankfully I don’t rely on things like the blogosphere and Twitter for personal validation.
For those of you that have either been in a coma for the last few months or managed to avoid reading the newspaper, going on the internet, listening to the radio or hearing people’s voices when they talk to you, Prince William and his longtime girlfriend Kate Middleton are getting married on the 29th of April. At this point, a Google search for ‘Prince William and Kate Middleton’ will garner approximately one kajillion results (I might have made that number up). The day, nay the moment, the engagement was announced, the entirety of Britain experienced an unprecedented Kate and Wills onslaught by every form of media, and somewhat alarmingly, it hasn’t stopped. I was in the gym at the time and heard it on Radio One when I was wiping down the elliptical trainer and had my earbuds out. Sweaty, wheezing a bit and full of endorphins, it didn’t fully hit me. But I try and make my way through about four papers a day (Times, Telegraph, Guardian and Financial Times) and by the time I finished my morning reads a few hours later, I knew more about these two people than I did about most of my first cousins.
Another little factoid for the coma victims and ignoramuses out there: Kate and Wills met and indeed starting dating at none other than the University of St Andrews, a few feet from where I’m sitting right now. Cue news vans descending upon our very staid little town for a scoop that doesn’t really exist and the university milking the event for all it’s worth.
The future king and queen: they had to meet somewhere
Without contributing to the ever-expanding pile of royal wedding-related media drivel, I just want to mention something rather central to the topic: I don’t actually get to have an opinion about the Royal Family. No, no one is censoring me per se—I don’t live in Belarus or Saudi Arabia—but it is truly a situation of damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t. The reason for this resides in the drawer of my bedside table next to my Nyquil stash: a fat little beat-up navy blue booklet featuring the stamps and visas bearing testament to my layovers in Amsterdam and my summer spent working in Shanghai. Yes, it is the passport issued to me from the government of United States of America. As an American, I simply don’t bother espousing an opinion on the monarchy, because no matter what I say, I will most likely be patronised, ridiculed, or just disregarded, and I don’t particularly enjoy any of those. I don’t even bother having an opinion, not even a little inconsequential one that I hold close, tell no one, and can ponder when I’m lying in bed just after I’ve turned off the light and before I start dreaming of axe murderers on tandem bikes chasing me around Lake Geneva.
From personal observation, it would seem that most Americans fall into one of two categories when it comes to the British Royal Fam.
Category A: ‘Democratic republicanism is the VERY BEST SYSTEM EVER, so if it’s not a democratic republic, it’s just wrong’.
The America with which the West is familiar can be boiled down to essentially three things. Number one is an ideological emphasis on liberalism that is so extreme I’m failing to come up with an adequate word to describe it. Number two is the fact that the United States, as a result of its post-World War II adoption of the superpower moniker, has been able to do pretty much whatever it wants—and get away with it!—for the better part of a century. Number three is an utter conviction in America’s moral righteousness thanks the Protestant nutjobs that were kicked out of Britain and founded the country in the first place. Mash all these together and you get a lot of people that believe democracy is unequivocally and unerringly the universally best system, and of course everyone wants democracy, and if you don’t yearn for democracy, you’re probably just unenlightened. Add to this conviction an old grudge about being taxed without representation and you can easily trace the origin of American resentment of the British monarchy. This opinion knows no political divisions; you see it in Americans of the jingoistic right-wing variety who cannot fathom that the ’merican way ain’t the best way and in Americans of the uber-politically correct left-wing variety who cannot fathom a people willingly living under the tyranny of a despot (even if that despot exercises no political power whatsoever).
You can’t deny that the American who jumps up and shouts, ‘My spidey sense is tingling! The liberal republican in me senses that this monarchy is just—not—RIGHT!’ is obnoxious and probably deserves a swat with a rolled-up newspaper. But voicing an opinion that carries a much less annoying and toned-down connotation of such thinking will elicit copious eye-rolling should the voicer be American, for the opinion will be dismissed as ‘knee-jerk American’. The modern-day British counterpart of Edward Said will snap, ‘Oh, you’ll never get it, because you’re not British. Americans really just don’t understand it’. The underlying message is that an American’s opinion is simultaneously not real and wrong…despite the fact that that makes no sense.
Category B: ‘I love the Royal Family! Europe and its little traditions are so cute! How can anyone dream of getting rid of the monarchy?’
Frankly, this is just irritating. Unless you’re talking about, I don’t know, gnomes, squealing over foreign things because they’re ‘cute’ reveals a person to be not merely an idiot but a condescending, uninformed and generally insensitive idiot. The European monarchies are institutions that have been around for hundreds if not thousands of years and are products of long-term cultural, religious and political trends—not a theme park attraction dreamt up for the purpose of entertaining New World tourists. Sadly, though (and annoyingly), it seems like quite a lot of Americans view the world as such.
However, if I were ever to come out with anything like the aforementioned statement (albeit something much more understated because I try and make it a point not to sound like a total moron), I would immediately be dismissed, scoffed at, you name it. That opinion, after all, would be simply irrelevant because it came from a naïve American who only thought that way because the idea of having a royal family is ‘novel’ and ‘quaint’. And our modern-day British counterpart of Edward Said would say something along the lines of ‘oh, you’ll never get it, because you’re not British. Americans really just don’t understand it’.
And…well…yeah. There are quite a lot of frighteningly uninformed and poorly read people from the US of A that don’t really seem to understand a lot of things. We get them in St Andrews, too; they’re the ones who spoil my Starbucks time by conducting a conversation at 900 decibels about how they couldn’t figure out how to take the train to ‘Edin-berggg’. Thanks to these twits and the numerous other twits that venture abroad without ever picking up a newspaper, Americans are all tarred with the same twitty brush, which means even the non-twits don’t get to have an opinion about the Royal Family.
To give you an idea of how a depressingly large number of Americans view the rest of the world, aka 'them'
There are a lot of people out there who don't seem to realise that Scotland, Northern Ireland etc exist at all and refer to the UK simply as 'England'
Which is why I remain completely and utterly ambivalent about the issue. If you want an opinion, ask me about Bill Clinton. I don’t care what was going on under his desk; what a champ of a president.
For those of you that have either been in a coma for the last few months or managed to avoid reading the newspaper, going on the internet, listening to the radio or hearing people’s voices when they talk to you, Prince William and his longtime girlfriend Kate Middleton are getting married on the 29th of April. At this point, a Google search for ‘Prince William and Kate Middleton’ will garner approximately one kajillion results (I might have made that number up). The day, nay the moment, the engagement was announced, the entirety of Britain experienced an unprecedented Kate and Wills onslaught by every form of media, and somewhat alarmingly, it hasn’t stopped. I was in the gym at the time and heard it on Radio One when I was wiping down the elliptical trainer and had my earbuds out. Sweaty, wheezing a bit and full of endorphins, it didn’t fully hit me. But I try and make my way through about four papers a day (Times, Telegraph, Guardian and Financial Times) and by the time I finished my morning reads a few hours later, I knew more about these two people than I did about most of my first cousins.
Another little factoid for the coma victims and ignoramuses out there: Kate and Wills met and indeed starting dating at none other than the University of St Andrews, a few feet from where I’m sitting right now. Cue news vans descending upon our very staid little town for a scoop that doesn’t really exist and the university milking the event for all it’s worth.
The future king and queen: they had to meet somewhere
Without contributing to the ever-expanding pile of royal wedding-related media drivel, I just want to mention something rather central to the topic: I don’t actually get to have an opinion about the Royal Family. No, no one is censoring me per se—I don’t live in Belarus or Saudi Arabia—but it is truly a situation of damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t. The reason for this resides in the drawer of my bedside table next to my Nyquil stash: a fat little beat-up navy blue booklet featuring the stamps and visas bearing testament to my layovers in Amsterdam and my summer spent working in Shanghai. Yes, it is the passport issued to me from the government of United States of America. As an American, I simply don’t bother espousing an opinion on the monarchy, because no matter what I say, I will most likely be patronised, ridiculed, or just disregarded, and I don’t particularly enjoy any of those. I don’t even bother having an opinion, not even a little inconsequential one that I hold close, tell no one, and can ponder when I’m lying in bed just after I’ve turned off the light and before I start dreaming of axe murderers on tandem bikes chasing me around Lake Geneva.
From personal observation, it would seem that most Americans fall into one of two categories when it comes to the British Royal Fam.
Category A: ‘Democratic republicanism is the VERY BEST SYSTEM EVER, so if it’s not a democratic republic, it’s just wrong’.
The America with which the West is familiar can be boiled down to essentially three things. Number one is an ideological emphasis on liberalism that is so extreme I’m failing to come up with an adequate word to describe it. Number two is the fact that the United States, as a result of its post-World War II adoption of the superpower moniker, has been able to do pretty much whatever it wants—and get away with it!—for the better part of a century. Number three is an utter conviction in America’s moral righteousness thanks the Protestant nutjobs that were kicked out of Britain and founded the country in the first place. Mash all these together and you get a lot of people that believe democracy is unequivocally and unerringly the universally best system, and of course everyone wants democracy, and if you don’t yearn for democracy, you’re probably just unenlightened. Add to this conviction an old grudge about being taxed without representation and you can easily trace the origin of American resentment of the British monarchy. This opinion knows no political divisions; you see it in Americans of the jingoistic right-wing variety who cannot fathom that the ’merican way ain’t the best way and in Americans of the uber-politically correct left-wing variety who cannot fathom a people willingly living under the tyranny of a despot (even if that despot exercises no political power whatsoever).
You can’t deny that the American who jumps up and shouts, ‘My spidey sense is tingling! The liberal republican in me senses that this monarchy is just—not—RIGHT!’ is obnoxious and probably deserves a swat with a rolled-up newspaper. But voicing an opinion that carries a much less annoying and toned-down connotation of such thinking will elicit copious eye-rolling should the voicer be American, for the opinion will be dismissed as ‘knee-jerk American’. The modern-day British counterpart of Edward Said will snap, ‘Oh, you’ll never get it, because you’re not British. Americans really just don’t understand it’. The underlying message is that an American’s opinion is simultaneously not real and wrong…despite the fact that that makes no sense.
Category B: ‘I love the Royal Family! Europe and its little traditions are so cute! How can anyone dream of getting rid of the monarchy?’
Frankly, this is just irritating. Unless you’re talking about, I don’t know, gnomes, squealing over foreign things because they’re ‘cute’ reveals a person to be not merely an idiot but a condescending, uninformed and generally insensitive idiot. The European monarchies are institutions that have been around for hundreds if not thousands of years and are products of long-term cultural, religious and political trends—not a theme park attraction dreamt up for the purpose of entertaining New World tourists. Sadly, though (and annoyingly), it seems like quite a lot of Americans view the world as such.
However, if I were ever to come out with anything like the aforementioned statement (albeit something much more understated because I try and make it a point not to sound like a total moron), I would immediately be dismissed, scoffed at, you name it. That opinion, after all, would be simply irrelevant because it came from a naïve American who only thought that way because the idea of having a royal family is ‘novel’ and ‘quaint’. And our modern-day British counterpart of Edward Said would say something along the lines of ‘oh, you’ll never get it, because you’re not British. Americans really just don’t understand it’.
And…well…yeah. There are quite a lot of frighteningly uninformed and poorly read people from the US of A that don’t really seem to understand a lot of things. We get them in St Andrews, too; they’re the ones who spoil my Starbucks time by conducting a conversation at 900 decibels about how they couldn’t figure out how to take the train to ‘Edin-berggg’. Thanks to these twits and the numerous other twits that venture abroad without ever picking up a newspaper, Americans are all tarred with the same twitty brush, which means even the non-twits don’t get to have an opinion about the Royal Family.
To give you an idea of how a depressingly large number of Americans view the rest of the world, aka 'them'
There are a lot of people out there who don't seem to realise that Scotland, Northern Ireland etc exist at all and refer to the UK simply as 'England'
Which is why I remain completely and utterly ambivalent about the issue. If you want an opinion, ask me about Bill Clinton. I don’t care what was going on under his desk; what a champ of a president.
28 January 2011
Oy vey
New Year was a bit difficult this year—difficult in the way that eating ten packets of saltine crackers without water in under a minute is difficult. For reasons unbeknownst to my older and somewhat wiser self, we used to undertake the Saltine Challenge in high school when we were bored, had had a class cancelled and had ready access to saltines. No one ever seemed to succeed; instead, whoever was making the attempt always ended up covered in crumbs and choking on the dry off-white lump in his or her throat in a somewhat non-dangerous way.
Just try eating ten packets of these babies in under a minute with no water. It's easier to eat human hair.
On the first of January, I woke up with that same oh-my-God-I’m-choking-because-cracker-paste-is-blocking-my-airway sensation—something I hadn’t experienced in years—and it wasn’t the result of a light-hearted and stupid saltine-eating contest; rather, it was the first day of 2011. There was an irrational but rather large part of me that thought 2011 would never come. That it would exist only on facebook as part of my network information (‘Cecile Babcock, University of St Andrews ’11’). That really, I had just started university, so it must be closer to 2007 than 2011. That 2011 was just a year from 2012, ie the London Olympics, the next American presidential election, and the Mayans’ predicted end of days. But no, I opened my eyes to a cold and soggy day in St Andrews (our sunny Middle Eastern family holiday had since ended) to find the entire world telling me it was 1 January 2011. I stifled the urge to yell FUCK! as I rolled out of bed and mentally prepared myself for the coming year.
Providing I don’t screw up catastrophically in the coming semester, 22 June 2011 marks my own personal end of St Andrews days, also known as graduation. By that point I am expected to turn into a ‘real person’ with a job, a tastefully furnished flat, and a general idea of what I am doing with my life. I have a tentative grasp of the last one—which means I know the general industry in which I’d like to work and that I’d like to make a tonne of money, though the geography of my life is still very much up in the air—leaving me with .5 out of 3 so far.
I’m not one of those people who is going to mourn the ‘student lifestyle’ whereby I only have four hours of class a week, can sleep in until noon and can get a pass from the rest of society for an indolent and slovenly lifestyle. For one, I’ve never been the sort to sleep until noon, which, during a Scottish winter, means you miss most of the daylight. But I also get antsy without a full schedule and find a Monday to Friday nine to five job very satisfying. Plus I love earning money; it’s like working out and getting endorphins that go straight into your bank account. It also must be said that yes, I am looking forward to leaving St Andrews for London, ie a place with more than three streets. I’m thrilled to be able to celebrate Chinese New Year, go to proper clubs, and shop somewhere other than New Look and Jack Wills. There is no doubt that I’ll miss St Andys, but the time has come to say, city life? Yes please.
So it’s not that I want to stay a student forever and ever or that I wish to spend the rest of my life ensconced in a small Scottish seaside town. Nor is it that I think I’ll fail or end up with some really heinous degree. I’m just a) a bit worried about landing a decent job in the midst of a global recession and b) not that great with change. There. I said it. I’m awful at change. I can’t even throw out a pair of old heels without a lot of mental preparation and deep breathing. My tendency towards borderline irrational nostalgia doesn’t help things, either.
It's been fun, St Andrews...you good-looking town, you
It’s a weird time for all us in the winter of our St Andrews years. People have been graduating from university for millennia, and barring death or perpetual failure to hand in essays, the end is imminent. I could toss around the usual slew of clichéd adjectives—scared! excited! nervous! confused!—but I’ll stick with that not-altogether-dangerous choking sensation. I suppose the best way to deal with it is to quit eating saltines and drink a bit of water. Or a frappuccino or a Golden Cadillac, as the case may be.
Just try eating ten packets of these babies in under a minute with no water. It's easier to eat human hair.
On the first of January, I woke up with that same oh-my-God-I’m-choking-because-cracker-paste-is-blocking-my-airway sensation—something I hadn’t experienced in years—and it wasn’t the result of a light-hearted and stupid saltine-eating contest; rather, it was the first day of 2011. There was an irrational but rather large part of me that thought 2011 would never come. That it would exist only on facebook as part of my network information (‘Cecile Babcock, University of St Andrews ’11’). That really, I had just started university, so it must be closer to 2007 than 2011. That 2011 was just a year from 2012, ie the London Olympics, the next American presidential election, and the Mayans’ predicted end of days. But no, I opened my eyes to a cold and soggy day in St Andrews (our sunny Middle Eastern family holiday had since ended) to find the entire world telling me it was 1 January 2011. I stifled the urge to yell FUCK! as I rolled out of bed and mentally prepared myself for the coming year.
Providing I don’t screw up catastrophically in the coming semester, 22 June 2011 marks my own personal end of St Andrews days, also known as graduation. By that point I am expected to turn into a ‘real person’ with a job, a tastefully furnished flat, and a general idea of what I am doing with my life. I have a tentative grasp of the last one—which means I know the general industry in which I’d like to work and that I’d like to make a tonne of money, though the geography of my life is still very much up in the air—leaving me with .5 out of 3 so far.
I’m not one of those people who is going to mourn the ‘student lifestyle’ whereby I only have four hours of class a week, can sleep in until noon and can get a pass from the rest of society for an indolent and slovenly lifestyle. For one, I’ve never been the sort to sleep until noon, which, during a Scottish winter, means you miss most of the daylight. But I also get antsy without a full schedule and find a Monday to Friday nine to five job very satisfying. Plus I love earning money; it’s like working out and getting endorphins that go straight into your bank account. It also must be said that yes, I am looking forward to leaving St Andrews for London, ie a place with more than three streets. I’m thrilled to be able to celebrate Chinese New Year, go to proper clubs, and shop somewhere other than New Look and Jack Wills. There is no doubt that I’ll miss St Andys, but the time has come to say, city life? Yes please.
So it’s not that I want to stay a student forever and ever or that I wish to spend the rest of my life ensconced in a small Scottish seaside town. Nor is it that I think I’ll fail or end up with some really heinous degree. I’m just a) a bit worried about landing a decent job in the midst of a global recession and b) not that great with change. There. I said it. I’m awful at change. I can’t even throw out a pair of old heels without a lot of mental preparation and deep breathing. My tendency towards borderline irrational nostalgia doesn’t help things, either.
It's been fun, St Andrews...you good-looking town, you
It’s a weird time for all us in the winter of our St Andrews years. People have been graduating from university for millennia, and barring death or perpetual failure to hand in essays, the end is imminent. I could toss around the usual slew of clichéd adjectives—scared! excited! nervous! confused!—but I’ll stick with that not-altogether-dangerous choking sensation. I suppose the best way to deal with it is to quit eating saltines and drink a bit of water. Or a frappuccino or a Golden Cadillac, as the case may be.
08 January 2011
[statement expressing surprise and bemusement at the stringency of Israeli security here]
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29 December 2010
Heathen Christmas '10
Sitting in the sun in Tel Aviv, I can confirm that travel in Jordan and Israel has really agreed with me. Between the sun, the fresh produce, the magnificent ruins, and that wonderful thing the Dead Sea mud does to your skin that makes it feel deliciously smooth, I have been a very happy girl for the past fortnight—especially when I hear about the highs of -1 in the UK or the rain apparently bucketing down in Marin.
But I can’t help thinking that there’s something ever so slightly ironic about three very secular people travelling to the Holy Land for Christmas, of all places at all times. You could probably find tree stumps that are more religious than I, yet here I am in the heart of Abrahamic spirituality, somewhat guiltily. Walking through the Old City of Jerusalem, you can practically feel the piety radiating off the Franciscan monks, nuns and ultra-Orthodox Jews. And I can’t help but be a tiny bit fearful that passersby will take one look at me and immediately know that I’m a heathen and chase me all the way out to Jaffa Gate with a flaming torch…or more realistically, shake their heads and tsk-tsk.
It all began a few months ago when I became aware of the fact that, when speaking to people who I knew to be religious—Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Druze, Sufi, whatever…though to be fair I don’t actually know any Druze or Sufi—I would go out of my way not to mention my family’s Christmas plans. I had this horrible image of letting slip that I would be in Jerusalem on Jesus’s birthday and some deeply Christian person looking at me, widening their eyes, and hissing, ‘Unbelievers have no place there!’ It’s ridiculous, I know, and you can call me paranoid, but we atheists do take a lot of crap. (I believe that George Bush, Sr once had the audacity to say that atheists weren’t real American citizens because the US is meant to be ‘one nation under God’. I was only twelve when I heard about that gem but I remember being royally pissed off.)
Refreshingly, in Jordan no one really seemed to give that much of a crap about religion or lack thereof. The north, especially, is full of biblical sights—places like Mt Nebo, where Moses looked upon the Holy Land, and Bethany-Beyond-the-Jordan, where John the Baptist was born. But, all things considered, they’re presented with a minimum of hullabaloo. You’ve got your informational signs explaining what supposedly happened in these places, so straightforward as to be funny, and maybe two or three tourists murmuring something along the lines of ‘that’s nice/interesting/pleasant/[positive but bland adjective]’. Then there are places like Madaba, (a market town outside of Amman that was our first port of call), which is sixty-something per cent Christian, but all that really meant was that the town council had whacked up a Christmas tree on the central roundabout. As far as I know, nobody has thrown eggs at it or tried to kick it down or anything—everyone seemed pretty laid-back. Moreover, every time The Question of Faith came up in conversation with Jordanians we met, whether they were Muslim, Christian, or something else, the response from my mom, brother or me that we ‘erm…aren’t really anything’ was met with little more than a shrug. Although you’re more than likely to get woken up by the muzzein’s call to prayer at an unsociable hour of the morning, Jordan is hardly what you would call a religious country. If you’re looking for one of those, try Saudi.
It was the same story when we crossed the Israeli border into in Eilat, a Red Sea port city at the southern tip of the Negev; in Eilat, the only things people seem to worship are the year-round sun and terrible but curiously appealing techno. After my mom and brother made perfunctory comments on how all the signs were now in a different non-Roman script, the three of us heaved our luggage aboard an Egged bus bound for Jerusalem and spent the next half hour or so wondering at how exactly one is meant to pronounce Egged. Is it like the past tense of the verb ‘to egg’, as in ‘I hate my neighbour so I egged his house’? Does it rhyme with the ‘legged’ in ‘three-legged dog’? Does the emphasis fall on the last syllable, ie Eg-GED? Anyway, after a while we all shut up and settled back for our five-hour journey.
As we made our way past Be’er Sheva, I noticed that the land started looking a lot more…biblical (for lack of a better word). The southern half of Israel is a dramatic mountainous desert that is best described as unforgiving; in other words, exactly the sort of place one can envision an old bearded man leading his increasingly grumpy peoples back in the day. And of course a good number of the places mentioned in the Bible and Old Testament lie within this area. We started passing brown signs pointing the way to Mt Sodom and Lot’s cave, not to mention Bethlehem, Nazareth, Hebron and oh, right, Jerusalem. There might as well have been a sign that read, ‘WELCOME TO BIBLE COUNTRY!’ But real Bible Country! Different from, say, Oklahoma. Even as a secular person, seeing those place names was mind-blowing simply because they’re central to the cultural foundations of the Western world. Everyone knows them and has at least a vague idea of each one’s significance…though I’ll admit I’ve forgotten what exactly went down in Hebron with regards to biblical history.
Jerusalem itself is, in many ways, a city unlike any other simply because it is so very sacred to the world’s major monotheistic faiths, and on Christmas Day, the Christians are really and truly out in force. Not just local Christian Jerusalemites (is that right?) either—countless pilgrims from all corners of the earth descend upon the Holy Land for the holidays. In a great show of naivety, our family of secular humanists ventured into the Christian Quarter of the Old City on the 25th so we could look upon the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (built over Golgotha, where Jesus was supposedly crucified) and the Via Dolorosa (Jesus’s last very painful walk). We arrived at the church to find a veritable mob of tour groups, nuns and religious wackjobs all jostling each other and screaming at the top of their lungs. So many candles were being lit that men in long black robes (monks? friars? some other kind of special church employee?) had to bustle in and sweep away the burnt wicks and hardened wax droppings every few minutes. The church itself is quite interesting, as it’s developed into a simultaneously ridiculous and magnificent patchwork of Armenian, Coptic, Syrian and Greek Orthodox influences, but I personally found the whole mass migration thing more intriguing. It made me think—imagine if you could harness the will, the devotion, the determination, the conviction of all those Christians who had made the effort to be in the Holy Land for a 2000-year-old political dissident’s birthday! The potential for that kind of thing sort of makes me want my own religious following, but I won’t get into that now.
Oddly enough, though, I couldn’t help but feel a bit left out. It was as though everyone knew some massive wonderful secret and I didn’t. Like they had all received invites to a fabulous party that I had happened to stumble across without the faintest idea of what was going on. I didn’t grow up under a roc—I know what Christianity is, of course—but I couldn’t actually believe in it no matter how hard I tried, which I think is a pretty crucial part of the whole religion thing. And because it is a place that is so steeped in holiness, I’m inclined to think that my visit to Jerusalem is, in a way, much less significant to me than it is for Christians, Jews or Muslims. As an historian and as someone who is generally interested in humans, Jerusalem is fascinating, but I imagine that religious pilgrims’ experiences are infused with a kind of meaning I will never understand as an atheist.
(Before you start feeling sorry for me, I’m fine with it. Seriously, I am. I’m more than perfectly happy to eat pork, keep my head uncovered and spend my Sunday mornings drinking coffee and reading the paper, thanks very much.)
One of the other funny things about Jerusalem is that it is precisely where ‘the conflict’ to which we all refer when talking about the Israel-Palestine ‘situation’—that whole Judeo-Christian vs Muslim East-West Orientalist thing—comes to a head. East Jerusalem, which refers to the bit east of Route 1 (ie the pre-1967 frontier), is Muslim. West Jerusalem is unequivocally Jewish, particularly in ultra-Orthodox Mea Sharim. It is a city full of very different people living practically on top of one another, and if you let your mind wander, you can cross from one Jerusalem to another in the blink of an eye. So my secular family and I wove our way out of the Christmas crowds towards Damascus gate and into an ambient hole in the wall that served fresh hummus and falafel. Through the doorway I could glimpse the Christian pilgrims streaming by on their way out of the Old City, their faces portraits of a kind of awe I doubt I’ll ever experience or understand.
But I can’t help thinking that there’s something ever so slightly ironic about three very secular people travelling to the Holy Land for Christmas, of all places at all times. You could probably find tree stumps that are more religious than I, yet here I am in the heart of Abrahamic spirituality, somewhat guiltily. Walking through the Old City of Jerusalem, you can practically feel the piety radiating off the Franciscan monks, nuns and ultra-Orthodox Jews. And I can’t help but be a tiny bit fearful that passersby will take one look at me and immediately know that I’m a heathen and chase me all the way out to Jaffa Gate with a flaming torch…or more realistically, shake their heads and tsk-tsk.
It all began a few months ago when I became aware of the fact that, when speaking to people who I knew to be religious—Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Druze, Sufi, whatever…though to be fair I don’t actually know any Druze or Sufi—I would go out of my way not to mention my family’s Christmas plans. I had this horrible image of letting slip that I would be in Jerusalem on Jesus’s birthday and some deeply Christian person looking at me, widening their eyes, and hissing, ‘Unbelievers have no place there!’ It’s ridiculous, I know, and you can call me paranoid, but we atheists do take a lot of crap. (I believe that George Bush, Sr once had the audacity to say that atheists weren’t real American citizens because the US is meant to be ‘one nation under God’. I was only twelve when I heard about that gem but I remember being royally pissed off.)
Refreshingly, in Jordan no one really seemed to give that much of a crap about religion or lack thereof. The north, especially, is full of biblical sights—places like Mt Nebo, where Moses looked upon the Holy Land, and Bethany-Beyond-the-Jordan, where John the Baptist was born. But, all things considered, they’re presented with a minimum of hullabaloo. You’ve got your informational signs explaining what supposedly happened in these places, so straightforward as to be funny, and maybe two or three tourists murmuring something along the lines of ‘that’s nice/interesting/pleasant/[positive but bland adjective]’. Then there are places like Madaba, (a market town outside of Amman that was our first port of call), which is sixty-something per cent Christian, but all that really meant was that the town council had whacked up a Christmas tree on the central roundabout. As far as I know, nobody has thrown eggs at it or tried to kick it down or anything—everyone seemed pretty laid-back. Moreover, every time The Question of Faith came up in conversation with Jordanians we met, whether they were Muslim, Christian, or something else, the response from my mom, brother or me that we ‘erm…aren’t really anything’ was met with little more than a shrug. Although you’re more than likely to get woken up by the muzzein’s call to prayer at an unsociable hour of the morning, Jordan is hardly what you would call a religious country. If you’re looking for one of those, try Saudi.
It was the same story when we crossed the Israeli border into in Eilat, a Red Sea port city at the southern tip of the Negev; in Eilat, the only things people seem to worship are the year-round sun and terrible but curiously appealing techno. After my mom and brother made perfunctory comments on how all the signs were now in a different non-Roman script, the three of us heaved our luggage aboard an Egged bus bound for Jerusalem and spent the next half hour or so wondering at how exactly one is meant to pronounce Egged. Is it like the past tense of the verb ‘to egg’, as in ‘I hate my neighbour so I egged his house’? Does it rhyme with the ‘legged’ in ‘three-legged dog’? Does the emphasis fall on the last syllable, ie Eg-GED? Anyway, after a while we all shut up and settled back for our five-hour journey.
As we made our way past Be’er Sheva, I noticed that the land started looking a lot more…biblical (for lack of a better word). The southern half of Israel is a dramatic mountainous desert that is best described as unforgiving; in other words, exactly the sort of place one can envision an old bearded man leading his increasingly grumpy peoples back in the day. And of course a good number of the places mentioned in the Bible and Old Testament lie within this area. We started passing brown signs pointing the way to Mt Sodom and Lot’s cave, not to mention Bethlehem, Nazareth, Hebron and oh, right, Jerusalem. There might as well have been a sign that read, ‘WELCOME TO BIBLE COUNTRY!’ But real Bible Country! Different from, say, Oklahoma. Even as a secular person, seeing those place names was mind-blowing simply because they’re central to the cultural foundations of the Western world. Everyone knows them and has at least a vague idea of each one’s significance…though I’ll admit I’ve forgotten what exactly went down in Hebron with regards to biblical history.
Jerusalem itself is, in many ways, a city unlike any other simply because it is so very sacred to the world’s major monotheistic faiths, and on Christmas Day, the Christians are really and truly out in force. Not just local Christian Jerusalemites (is that right?) either—countless pilgrims from all corners of the earth descend upon the Holy Land for the holidays. In a great show of naivety, our family of secular humanists ventured into the Christian Quarter of the Old City on the 25th so we could look upon the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (built over Golgotha, where Jesus was supposedly crucified) and the Via Dolorosa (Jesus’s last very painful walk). We arrived at the church to find a veritable mob of tour groups, nuns and religious wackjobs all jostling each other and screaming at the top of their lungs. So many candles were being lit that men in long black robes (monks? friars? some other kind of special church employee?) had to bustle in and sweep away the burnt wicks and hardened wax droppings every few minutes. The church itself is quite interesting, as it’s developed into a simultaneously ridiculous and magnificent patchwork of Armenian, Coptic, Syrian and Greek Orthodox influences, but I personally found the whole mass migration thing more intriguing. It made me think—imagine if you could harness the will, the devotion, the determination, the conviction of all those Christians who had made the effort to be in the Holy Land for a 2000-year-old political dissident’s birthday! The potential for that kind of thing sort of makes me want my own religious following, but I won’t get into that now.
Oddly enough, though, I couldn’t help but feel a bit left out. It was as though everyone knew some massive wonderful secret and I didn’t. Like they had all received invites to a fabulous party that I had happened to stumble across without the faintest idea of what was going on. I didn’t grow up under a roc—I know what Christianity is, of course—but I couldn’t actually believe in it no matter how hard I tried, which I think is a pretty crucial part of the whole religion thing. And because it is a place that is so steeped in holiness, I’m inclined to think that my visit to Jerusalem is, in a way, much less significant to me than it is for Christians, Jews or Muslims. As an historian and as someone who is generally interested in humans, Jerusalem is fascinating, but I imagine that religious pilgrims’ experiences are infused with a kind of meaning I will never understand as an atheist.
(Before you start feeling sorry for me, I’m fine with it. Seriously, I am. I’m more than perfectly happy to eat pork, keep my head uncovered and spend my Sunday mornings drinking coffee and reading the paper, thanks very much.)
One of the other funny things about Jerusalem is that it is precisely where ‘the conflict’ to which we all refer when talking about the Israel-Palestine ‘situation’—that whole Judeo-Christian vs Muslim East-West Orientalist thing—comes to a head. East Jerusalem, which refers to the bit east of Route 1 (ie the pre-1967 frontier), is Muslim. West Jerusalem is unequivocally Jewish, particularly in ultra-Orthodox Mea Sharim. It is a city full of very different people living practically on top of one another, and if you let your mind wander, you can cross from one Jerusalem to another in the blink of an eye. So my secular family and I wove our way out of the Christmas crowds towards Damascus gate and into an ambient hole in the wall that served fresh hummus and falafel. Through the doorway I could glimpse the Christian pilgrims streaming by on their way out of the Old City, their faces portraits of a kind of awe I doubt I’ll ever experience or understand.
22 December 2010
The wonders of vitamin D
That's the vitamin you get from being in the sun. Some absurdly high percentage of people living in Scotland suffer from a deficiency.
As a hot weather fiend living in the north, I consider the winter solstice immensely important, and not in an eclectic druid way. Personally, I'm thrilled it's past. For what feels like forever (technically six months), I have watched the daylight around me dwindle to those pathetic few hours it takes for the sun to bob above the horizon and tuck itself away again. The UV-simulating lamp perched on my desk does its best, and if I’m really desperate, I’ll crank up the heat and put on a bikini. Nevertheless it’s impossible to escape the fact that, in winter St Andrews, one lives in the dark like one of those proverbial giant alligators that roams the sewers beneath Manhattan, and that, my friends, is immensely depressing.
But that winteriness is festive! It’s part of the Christmas season! Things just wouldn’t be RIGHT without that icy darkness! everyone insists. To which I say, shut up (and no, I’m not one of those people who hates Christmas to ‘be different’).
Despite the lack of pine garlands or plastic reindeer or creepy fat men dressed in Santa suits, I’m pretty convinced that I’m in one of the more perfect spots on earth right now, for I am typing this from a massive egg-shaped chair with a view of Israel and the Sinai peninsula across the Red Sea. There are of course Christians in Jordan, but the majority is Sunni Muslim, so the manifestations of Christmas cheer that every British or American shop vomits all over you the moment you enter are for the most part absent. The market town of Madaba, our first port of call upon arriving in Amman eight days ago, has enough Christians to put up a tree in the main roundabout, but no one seems determined to asphyxiate you with festiveness. When I explained to a shopkeeper that we were heading to Jerusalem on the 24th for Christmas, he paused for a second and commented, ‘Huh. That’s right, I guess it is Christmas’. Again, I don’t hate the holiday—far from it; I love roast goose and Baileys and the Nutcracker and all the rest of it—but there are few things that ride me more than people forcing me to be cheerful. Here in Jordan, the nonchalant attitude is almost as refreshing as the sun and fresh dry air.
Indeed, the past eight days have reminded me what it is like to feel warmth on my skin and to see the sun overhead in a wide-open blue sky; much to my joy I feel human again. As I made my way into central Aqaba this morning, I was all of a sudden aware that I was smiling in that rather absent way that usually makes an appearance only after a few glasses of wine (and I assure you that my time in Jordan has been far from a boozefest). The iced-over island of Britain seems about a billion miles from the soft warm breezes and bubbling hookahs of Aqaba. To those of you that have been stranded by the snow back home, be it in your houses or in airports, I am so tremendously sorry. The whole thing just seems very unfair, and had I not skipped my last history seminar (oops) I would probably be in the same boat. Or the same terminal at Heathrow, if you will.
Though there is a rather large part of me that is praying for Schipol and/or Edinburgh to be hit by an enormous horrific snowstorm on the 30th, leaving me no choice but to—oh no!—stay in Amsterdam or Tel Aviv for a few days at KLM’s expense. One can dream.
Apart from the stellar weather it enjoys in December, Jordan has been exceedingly pleasurable because almost all of the Jordanians with whom I’ve interacted have been friendly to the point of absurdity. I know that this suggests a sweeping generalisation and that there’s usually been a cash transaction involved, but people are so ridiculously hospitable here that it blows my mind. It seems as though Lonely Planet and Rough Guide wax poetic about ‘the people’ of every single country/city/region guide they produce (‘…however, it is the people of Ghana/Thailand/Tajikistan/the Maghreb/the Moldovan breakaway republic of Transnistria that are its best asset’), but it is hard to exaggerate the kindness and effervescence of Jordanians. I attribute this to good weather, good food, and possibly the relaxing effects of a good hookah session (very scientific, I know). I’ve been served countless cups of free tea and Turkish coffee, gifted about ten pounds’ worth of sticky Arab sweets, and complimented for my extremely limited Arabic language skills, amongst other things. Even the airport employees issuing visas and stamping passports were unfailingly polite and—gasp!—friendly, whereas whenever I go through customs at SFO, I’m booted into the baggage claim with a flat, sarcastic ‘welcome home, I guess’.
Actually, here in Aqaba, a guy named Zalif seems to have taken it upon himself to make my stay as relaxing as possible (he works for the hotel; he’s not just some random). It began yesterday, when we arrived a few hours before check-in so that Ted could fit in a dive. We had all left Wadi Musa at half six in the morning, which meant that my mom and I were practically gagging for caffeine. Although we technically shouldn’t have gotten any breakfast, I asked Zalif, who was surveying the buffet, if we might possibly get some coffee, preferably the Turkish variety that Jordan does so well. My mom, brother and I were immediately seated with a view of the Red Sea and given our own pot of coffee, as well as hot milk, sugar and some sweet cakey bread. Later that afternoon, as I walked out to the beach for a much-needed bit of tanning, Zalif appeared out of nowhere with a cushion and turned my chaise so that I could enjoy the sun without being bothered by the sea breeze. ‘That was nice,’ I thought to myself, and had closed my eyes for all of about two minutes when he turned up with a plate of sliced oranges and a query as to whether or not I desired any lunch (already stuffed with fresh pita, hummus and cucumber, I declined). Since then, he has plied me with enough Turkish coffee to give me heart palpitations, which is great and everything, don’t get me wrong, but he’s also asked for a few pictures of the two of us waltzing together. That strikes me as weird, so I’ve foregone the free coffee for this afternoon.
There has of course also been Petra and the Roman city of Jerash and the crusader castles and the Dead Sea and all of that (I figure I’m obliged to mention these things in a post about Jordan). Photos hardly do these things justice; nonetheless they do a much, much better job describing them than my blog can. Or maybe I’m just in the mood for a puff on the hookah right now.
As a hot weather fiend living in the north, I consider the winter solstice immensely important, and not in an eclectic druid way. Personally, I'm thrilled it's past. For what feels like forever (technically six months), I have watched the daylight around me dwindle to those pathetic few hours it takes for the sun to bob above the horizon and tuck itself away again. The UV-simulating lamp perched on my desk does its best, and if I’m really desperate, I’ll crank up the heat and put on a bikini. Nevertheless it’s impossible to escape the fact that, in winter St Andrews, one lives in the dark like one of those proverbial giant alligators that roams the sewers beneath Manhattan, and that, my friends, is immensely depressing.
But that winteriness is festive! It’s part of the Christmas season! Things just wouldn’t be RIGHT without that icy darkness! everyone insists. To which I say, shut up (and no, I’m not one of those people who hates Christmas to ‘be different’).
Despite the lack of pine garlands or plastic reindeer or creepy fat men dressed in Santa suits, I’m pretty convinced that I’m in one of the more perfect spots on earth right now, for I am typing this from a massive egg-shaped chair with a view of Israel and the Sinai peninsula across the Red Sea. There are of course Christians in Jordan, but the majority is Sunni Muslim, so the manifestations of Christmas cheer that every British or American shop vomits all over you the moment you enter are for the most part absent. The market town of Madaba, our first port of call upon arriving in Amman eight days ago, has enough Christians to put up a tree in the main roundabout, but no one seems determined to asphyxiate you with festiveness. When I explained to a shopkeeper that we were heading to Jerusalem on the 24th for Christmas, he paused for a second and commented, ‘Huh. That’s right, I guess it is Christmas’. Again, I don’t hate the holiday—far from it; I love roast goose and Baileys and the Nutcracker and all the rest of it—but there are few things that ride me more than people forcing me to be cheerful. Here in Jordan, the nonchalant attitude is almost as refreshing as the sun and fresh dry air.
Indeed, the past eight days have reminded me what it is like to feel warmth on my skin and to see the sun overhead in a wide-open blue sky; much to my joy I feel human again. As I made my way into central Aqaba this morning, I was all of a sudden aware that I was smiling in that rather absent way that usually makes an appearance only after a few glasses of wine (and I assure you that my time in Jordan has been far from a boozefest). The iced-over island of Britain seems about a billion miles from the soft warm breezes and bubbling hookahs of Aqaba. To those of you that have been stranded by the snow back home, be it in your houses or in airports, I am so tremendously sorry. The whole thing just seems very unfair, and had I not skipped my last history seminar (oops) I would probably be in the same boat. Or the same terminal at Heathrow, if you will.
Though there is a rather large part of me that is praying for Schipol and/or Edinburgh to be hit by an enormous horrific snowstorm on the 30th, leaving me no choice but to—oh no!—stay in Amsterdam or Tel Aviv for a few days at KLM’s expense. One can dream.
Apart from the stellar weather it enjoys in December, Jordan has been exceedingly pleasurable because almost all of the Jordanians with whom I’ve interacted have been friendly to the point of absurdity. I know that this suggests a sweeping generalisation and that there’s usually been a cash transaction involved, but people are so ridiculously hospitable here that it blows my mind. It seems as though Lonely Planet and Rough Guide wax poetic about ‘the people’ of every single country/city/region guide they produce (‘…however, it is the people of Ghana/Thailand/Tajikistan/the Maghreb/the Moldovan breakaway republic of Transnistria that are its best asset’), but it is hard to exaggerate the kindness and effervescence of Jordanians. I attribute this to good weather, good food, and possibly the relaxing effects of a good hookah session (very scientific, I know). I’ve been served countless cups of free tea and Turkish coffee, gifted about ten pounds’ worth of sticky Arab sweets, and complimented for my extremely limited Arabic language skills, amongst other things. Even the airport employees issuing visas and stamping passports were unfailingly polite and—gasp!—friendly, whereas whenever I go through customs at SFO, I’m booted into the baggage claim with a flat, sarcastic ‘welcome home, I guess’.
Actually, here in Aqaba, a guy named Zalif seems to have taken it upon himself to make my stay as relaxing as possible (he works for the hotel; he’s not just some random). It began yesterday, when we arrived a few hours before check-in so that Ted could fit in a dive. We had all left Wadi Musa at half six in the morning, which meant that my mom and I were practically gagging for caffeine. Although we technically shouldn’t have gotten any breakfast, I asked Zalif, who was surveying the buffet, if we might possibly get some coffee, preferably the Turkish variety that Jordan does so well. My mom, brother and I were immediately seated with a view of the Red Sea and given our own pot of coffee, as well as hot milk, sugar and some sweet cakey bread. Later that afternoon, as I walked out to the beach for a much-needed bit of tanning, Zalif appeared out of nowhere with a cushion and turned my chaise so that I could enjoy the sun without being bothered by the sea breeze. ‘That was nice,’ I thought to myself, and had closed my eyes for all of about two minutes when he turned up with a plate of sliced oranges and a query as to whether or not I desired any lunch (already stuffed with fresh pita, hummus and cucumber, I declined). Since then, he has plied me with enough Turkish coffee to give me heart palpitations, which is great and everything, don’t get me wrong, but he’s also asked for a few pictures of the two of us waltzing together. That strikes me as weird, so I’ve foregone the free coffee for this afternoon.
There has of course also been Petra and the Roman city of Jerash and the crusader castles and the Dead Sea and all of that (I figure I’m obliged to mention these things in a post about Jordan). Photos hardly do these things justice; nonetheless they do a much, much better job describing them than my blog can. Or maybe I’m just in the mood for a puff on the hookah right now.
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