what can I say? not much.

Posted in travel by

I feel weird writing anything new on a blog about all things foreign without acknowledging first that what has transpired abroad over the past three weeks – in the air over Egypt, in Beirut, in Yola, in Paris, in Bamako, and in many smaller terrorist attacks that didn’t make the front pages – is a tragedy on the order of which no words, or at least not mine, can do justice. (Which is why I didn’t try to write any at the time.) The subsequent backlash against refugees – people who are themselves fleeing terror in their homelands – as well as against Muslims in general, is another sickening attack on our shared humanity.

Many years ago, a colleague told me that on the advice of some spiritual counselor or other she had chosen a three-word mantra to repeat every day. (Of course this was in Los Angeles.) I liked the idea and thought long and hard about what mine should be, before settling upon “courage – tolerance – compassion.” For awhile I would whisper the words to myself once or twice a day, and it did have a very grounding effect, though the habit didn’t last long. Seems like a good time to revive it. I believe in the primacy of those three words now more than ever.

 

Aquavit

Posted in foreign food festival by

    fish

A couple of months ago I found myself out late, hungry, and in a self-indulgent mood in Midtown East. Conditions were ripe to finally go to Aquavit, the two-Michelin-star Swedish restaurant on 55th Street that I had been wanting to try for years but had never gotten around to because the last neighborhood I’d choose for an occasion is Midtown East.

So I grabbed the chance to pop in without a reservation at 9:30pm on a Tuesday and sidled up to the bar to order the tasting menu.

I love Swedish food to such a degree that even Ikea’s meatballs taste gourmet to me. So, actual gourmet Swedish food was sort of mind blowing. But the best thing about the meal was the cultural fusion that took place when I realized the man behind the bar was from Manila and I told him about my trip to the Philippines last year.

joey

Because Joey is the classic bartender/storyteller hybrid, this led to him sharing a crazy tale about crushing on his older brother’s friend’s girlfriend as teenagers hanging out in Marcos’ abandoned office in the presidential palace on the night of the revolution (since both of their fathers worked for the opposition leader). Joey moved to America as a young man and didn’t see the girl again until a serendipitous encounter many years later. He picked right up where he left off with his crush, and after a long-distance romance, she moved to New York and they got married.

This incredible story, with too many plot twists to count, unfolded over eight courses of the tasting menu, all of which were presented like works of art.

smoked salmon

crazy good dessert

They were almost as amazing to look at as to eat. The chef took traditional Nordic dishes and spun them in totally inventive and delightful ways. It was a (very) expensive meal but well worth it, once in a lifetime, for the experience of being transported from the everyday to the extraordinary – by way of Sweden, the Philippines, and – most surprisingly of all – Midtown East. More and more lately I’ve been reminded that even in one’s decade-plus home, it’s always possible to see the world with a foreigner’s fresh eyes.

it wasn’t so easy this time

Posted in French, learning tools by

Blythe Sleepy Eyes

Sleep-deprived two Speakeasies in a row. I guess my beginner’s luck had run out because this time the words did not magically flow from my uncooperative brain.

As I was expending copious amounts of energy trying to say anything like something an actual French person would say, I was simultaneously having an out of body experience in which I was hovering above myself taking great pride in every single word that came out of my mouth, because here I was speaking another language, which is just nuts considering I don’t speak another language.

At the same time, I realized with a jolt that the person across from me was opening his mouth and effortlessly releasing words that flowed intuitively one from the other. There was absolutely no struggle on his part because he had been speaking this language from infancy the same way that I had been speaking English. For him, French is neither fun, nor frustrating, nor anything other than utilitarian.

It struck me as utterly bizarre that his native language was my foreign language and vice versa – that what I experience in a French conversation is 100% different than what he does. It’s not as though I have never thought about this before, but at that moment it felt like when you repeat your own name over and over until it sounds completely unfamiliar.

I should really get more sleep before I go back to one of these things…

[Photo: Valeri Passon, Creative Commons license]

passport, please

Posted in travel by

world passports

Though I was born and raised in the United States, I’m a dual American/Israeli citizen. I stopped by the Israeli consulate this morning to renew my passport for the fourth time in less than ten years. That’s because the last two times, they inexplicably extended my current passport for a year instead of actually renewing it. This consisted of pasting an extremely forged-looking document onto the second to last page, so that at first glance it still looked to foreign border agents as though my passport was expired, and I had to point the extension out to them while praying they wouldn’t accuse me of fraud and/or send me back to where I came from.

So this time I made sure to ask whether I could get a brand new ten-year passport as per the terms I had read online. I was told that while I was finally eligible for a new passbook, it would only be valid for three years. This seemed completely arbitrary to me, but I learned it’s because the last time I visited Israel was seven years ago, and my passport cannot extend ten years beyond that date.

Now, I don’t know whether this is customary practice in other countries. It may well be de rigueur around the world. But it struck me as a quintessentially Jewish thing to do: punishing me for not doting enough on my mother (country).

It is almost as if Israel is telling me, “You don’t call, you don’t write.* Oh, but you want something from me? First come for a visit, then we’ll talk.”

The day I return to Israel I become eligible for a ten-year passport. Until then, I’m in the doghouse. As annoying as this is in a practical sense, I can’t help but enjoy the appropriateness of this policy for a people who have perfected the guilt trip.

[Photo: Baigal Byamba, Creative Commons license]

*You don’t speak.

translating spoken language

Posted in interviews by

G20 Interpreteres

Being a United Nations interpreter has always struck me as a glamorous and relatively easy job for someone who knows two languages fluently. Then I read a short and fascinating article in this week’s New York Times Magazine that has me rethinking my assumptions. It actually sounds quite mind-boggling.

The interpreter quoted in the piece is the same one who took the reins from Gaddafi’s personal interpreter after he had a meltdown trying to translate Gaddafi’s hour-plus-long oration.

[Photo: Downing Street, Creative Commons license]

home is where the Hungarian is

Posted in travel by

Hungarian Pastry Shop

Tonight, in a mood, I abandoned my more ambitious plans for an idea that sprung to mind last minute, as I was walking to the subway from work. Instead of heading downtown, I took the train to my old college neighborhood, where I drifted down a familiar path to my once-favorite cafe to do my Spanish homework.

Hungarian Pastry Shop would have delighted me even if I were walking into it for the first time. It’s a miraculous vestige of a bygone era, when individual shops had individual styles, when cafés were authentically warm and cozy instead of corporate. It’s bohemian without being crunchy, perfect for both studying and socializing, a community hub that is somehow also off the beaten path.

The objective amazingness of it was enough to warm my heart, but not enough to account for the visceral sense of goodwill, sentimentality and promise that washed over me when I sat down and took it all in. The fact that this place continued to be here day after day, unchanged, while I went away and came back years later, much changed – and having accomplished much of what I daydreamed about doing then, in this place – that was the fairly overwhelming thing.*

I started this blog for my love of the foreign, but at moments like these I’m well aware that there’s no place like home. (Especially when home is New York City.)

PS I wrote this instead of doing my Spanish homework.

PPS I’m now turning to eavesdropping on two underclassmen on a cute first date. The girl just said, “You never hear of a pet squirrel.”

* disclaimer: hormones may also have had something to do with it.

the simple things

Posted in le week-end, Spanish by

dominoes

I live in a Dominican neighborhood so I have plenty of opportunities to speak Spanish if I so choose. I haven’t thus far because I’m so limited in what I can say and understand.

But this weekend I held the door open for a little old lady with her granddaughter, and she said “Gracias” to me. It took me far too long to switch gears and respond, “De nada,” but I still counted it as a full conversation entirely in Spanish, and I was pleased. You’ve gotta start somewhere.

[Photo: mckinney75402], Creative Commons license]

Speakeasy

Posted in French by

Christine @ Speakeasy

Early Monday morning I had been asleep for about four hours when my radiator came on making sounds like it was being beaten by an angry mob of hammers. It didn’t stop even after I closed the valve, and I couldn’t fall back to sleep.

Both drunkenness and sleep deprivation severely affect my ability to speak a foreign language – but not always in a bad way. They can sometimes render me mute and flailing, but they can also lower my inhibitions and inspire stream of consciousness-style gabbing far more advanced than my wide awake and sober self is capable of. It’s always a toss-up which extreme I’ll swing towards, so I didn’t know whether my Spanish class on Monday afternoon and French Speakeasy event that evening would be disastrous or miraculous.

Turns out it was a little of both. In Spanish I couldn’t put two words together and did more miming than talking, but in French I was transcendent. (Relative only to myself.)

One of my speaking partners was a woman, Christine (in the picture above), who is harboring remarkably similar dreams to mine right now. I think it was four years ago that she took a cargo ship from France to the United States in search of adventure and now she wants to travel the world, learning new things in each country and picking up jobs along the way taking photos for non-profits. We agreed it would be fun to conspire together, and in the meantime I signed up for the next Speakeasy in November…

español no es fácil

Posted in Spanish by

Last week, I got demoted in Spanish. The teacher spoke with me after class and told me she thought I’d be better off in Level 3 than Level 4, where I was having trouble holding my own, to put it mildly. Even though I knew she was right, and had asked the Spanish coordinator to go down a level before the class even started (to which he encouraged me to stay put, give it a week, and re-assess), it stung to be called out as the one out-of-her-depth kid holding up all the others. That’s not quite how my teacher put it – but in contrast to my Spanish, my English language inference skills are excellent, and that’s exactly what she meant.

Apart from my wounded pride, though, I’m happy to have made the switch. Level 3 feels much more appropriate to my aptitude, or lack thereof. And my new teacher is from Buenos Aires, which is awesome because a. falling in love with Argentina was my inspiration for picking up Spanish again (fifteen years after falling in love with Barcelona was my inspiration for attempting to learn Spanish the first time), and b. Argentine-accented Spanish is the most amazing-sounding thing on Earth and I want to be around it as much as possible (though I will never in a million years be able to replicate it).

In completely unrelated news, here are some interesting reads that I missed the chance to post last Friday:

The moral case for eliminating borders completely 

I so wish I had gone to a dual-language public school. They are on the rise. 

Six travel apps every solo female traveler should have

Studying the Pompeians’ lives, rather than their deaths

Can you imagine flying across the Atlantic for $150 round-trip? It may soon be possible…

36 hours in Buenos Aires (though my 36 hours would be a lot different than the Times’)

Have a good week!

[Photo: Corey Seeman, Creative Commons license.]

(get over the) hump day inspiration: Mary Oliver edition

Posted in inspiration & encouragement by

Mary Oliver quote

Mary Oliver’s poem is particularly meaningful to me since I visited Cebu, where Magellan died, while myself far from home, and way outside my comfort zone both personally and professionally.

I went to the Philippines for work almost exactly one year ago. During some free time in Cebu city before heading to the remote outer reaches of the island for a shoot, we hired a tour guide to show us the sights.

I learned that Magellan landed on Cebu in the 1500s, planted a huge cross, converted some important people to Christianity, and proceeded to be killed three weeks later while attempting to forcefully convert some others. (Which is why I wish Mary Oliver had chosen someone less objectionable to illustrate her message. But I digress.)

We visited the cross, which is considered the most important relic in the Philippines. Not being Catholic, I was interested in its historic rather than religious value, and I was disappointed that it is completely encased in a protective covering, so you can’t actually see the 500 year-old timber. Magellan's Cross

Anyway… point is, the tiny villages I spent time in while in the Philippines were the furthest I’ve ever wandered from home, geographically or experience-wise, and Mary Oliver’s metaphor is actually quite on-the-nose and literal in my case. Especially because there were several instances in which I believed (delusionally) that I was going to die in the Philippines.

Thankfully that did not come to pass, the trip was an amazing exercise in stretching myself, and I am now free to find another far-off island to die in.

[Top photo is from Iloilo, two islands west of Cebu.]