The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Good news and bad news, everybody.

The good news, I found out today that women aren't allowed to visit graveyards in Saudi. Thank goodness. So noisy and irritating. They'd either wake the dead or seduce them. Better to keep them out altogether.

The bad news, thanks to Saudi fantasticness, I was called at 8am and told that I had an hour to decide if I wanted to leave on vacation after all, knowing that what with the visa process I almost certainly wouldn't be able to come back on time. Yay!

So now I'm staying here indefinitely.

No, seriously. The REAL good news is that thanks to some very nice people and an excellent nap I am no longer crying hysterically and dehydrating myself further. Now i'm making plans as to how much time to spend on my Arabic presentation.

Ciao everyone. Enjoy your family time. Sorry I'm not coming home.

But you never know. Perhaps there will be a miracle of some sort.

Merry Christmas!!

Hello everybody, life's been busy and lazy over the last couple of weeks, but now it's crunch time. Thursday night I fly out of here, headed home for New Years.

But that's not the exciting thing. The exciting thing is that for the first time ever I'm celebrating Christmas far away from my family and everything, but that people here have conspired to make it fabulous. I've baked two batches of cookies, with two different batches of girls, and I've got christmas lights and christmas music. What more could I want? You should have seen the four of us today dancing around in the dark with the sparkling lights. Instead of being upset I was laughing hysterically. And that was only Christmas Eve! I've also had one dinner-party already, and another one is in the offing for tomorrow. None of this is very conducive to work, but you know, it's Christmas. You can't work on Christmas. So now it's 2:16 am, and I am sitting here dancing to some pop Christmas songs, talking to my lovely mother, and trying to think of how I will spend the rest of my evening.

Life is looking up. Of course, even though it's Christmas, I have class in 6 hours, but I can't take that too seriously.

It's fabulous how strange things turn out well, isn't it? We might even dress mona up as Santa Claus, although I think none of us have bright red clothing.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to everybody! Enjoy it!

Bahth Party

Wow. There's always so much to say. It's particularly bad when I've been out of commission for the last couple of weeks. But I like to think perhaps now I can be slightly more pro-active, at least until the term ends.

So my most recent project has been the creation, over the past two weeks, of my first ever arabic research paper, or bahth. Obviously, what I turned in was pretty pathetic, and took a heck of a lot of time, but I am proud that I managed to create something 8 pages long, in Arabic which, while full of mistakes, was at least Arabic and not gibberish. I found it really frustrating to discover that I really can't put together complex thoughts yet. I also can't create any sort of subtlety or nuance in my writing. So I have to stick to the textbook-style simple sentence, declarative active verbs, kindof like I was writing a story. A badly written story. But I have to start somewhere, right?

So I turned it in today, and I'll just have to hope she takes pity on me for not actually speaking Arabic. I also realized, as I was talking to her (haltingly) today, that I am capable of carrying on a conversation with people, if they are patient enough. Or if they don't speak English.

On that note, I love people. I have been very fond of my friends over the past two weeks... well, everybody else too. Everyone I've talked to has offered to help me. S2 and D spent hours and hours going over my paper with me, helping me correct it and at least make it grammatically correct. The last three pages, hehe, may be slightly lacking in the grammar department, but my introduction is dynamite. And the girls down the hall offered to help, and everybody gave me so much encouragement. Everybody is great.

Speaking of great, D and S2 (Dr. Doom) and Mona and I were in my room after school one day, and we got out Pictionary and started to play. I haven't laughed that hard in years, I think. The four of us sat on the floor crying with laughter for practically three hours. It was fabulous. I could try to describe it, but suffice it to say none of us are very talented artists, except for S2, and so what we came up with was... unorthodox, to say the least.

Also, Mrs. West gave me a bag full of Christmas music and some Christmas lights today, so I can decorate and get in the Holiday spirit!

Basically, the world is treating me well at the moment. Of course, last night was the first time in two weeks I've actually slept through the night. I'm not sure if that had to do with the fact that my sleeping habits are totally messed up, or whether it was stress or what, but it felt great. And I have great friends.

Of course, because I've been wholly distracted the past two weeks, I've been totally ignoring my other classes, and I completely forgot that I had a meeting with Ms. East-West today. So I feel pretty bad about that. I seem to be more easily stressed out here by work, since the actual quantity of work I have is clearly less than what I am used to. I am going to guess it has something to do with the fact that I don't have as much opportunity to release that stress in creative ways, but I think maybe that just means I'm not creative enough. I have this sneaking suspicion that if I were a normal Saudi girl I would be releasing that stress in any number of not-entirely-legal ways, but I appear to be more conservative than many of them in terms of the behavior that makes me comfortable here. There is, for example, no way on earth I'm going to go to a party with a bunch of guys I have seen once in my life, with no obvious quick exit strategy, and just assume everybody will treat me well. I also have no desire to drink illegally, or run screaming through the streets. There is at least one crazy girl I know who really demonstrates the worst judgement in the world when it comes to what behavior is appropriate, and I am going to have to watch out that she doesn't get me in trouble.

I have all sorts of interesting comments to make on things, but I think this will have to do for now. I think it is becoming clear to me that more and more I feel like this place is home. I haven't quite gotten there yet - one of the Ablas told Mona she wasn't allowed in here during the school day, so that's a little unfortunate, but overall I am feeling very much at peace with my surroundings. Of course, I also have boatloads of stunningly insightful observations of life here, but I prefer to bask in the normalcy I am feeling at the moment, and make insightful comments later.

And on that note, my fabulous Christmas music is calling me. As is my reading. And my laundry. I still have mountains of stuff I ought to do. In fact, I have so many mountains I've actually created a list of things to do. Which was bad, because I didn't list my meeting, which I subsequently forgot. Sigh.

Oh, I have so much to do.

But who doesn't?

Binat Arriyadh

Check this out! The economist mentions not only the election of women into the Jeddah Chamber of Commerce (yes, this is a big deal, it's the first time women have gotten to be involved in an election and run and vote and everything), but they mention a book, Girls of Riyadh, that I really want to read. D suggested it to me. I wonder if it's in English.

I will post over the weekend. Promise.

apologies

Hello faithful blog-fans. Sorry I have been so remiss in my updating. There will be something interesting soon, I promise. Hilights include:

1) Exploration of the total lack of historical education of Saudis
2) First Arabic Paper experiences
3) General comments on end-of-semester crunches

And much, much more.

And now, to sleep.

Malika al-Bing Bong (Queen of Ping Pong)

I participated these last two days in a ping pong tournament held at Effat... all women, of course. It was great. I have gotten to know, and really like, all the girls who we played against from King Abdulaziz University (all three of them) and also their coach, and I've also gotten to really like the girls on my team. There were a couple of highschools there as well who were very talented. It was a new experience for me, as they really played it up and had people cheering and screaming on the sidelines - not huge numbers, but still, it was just a ping pong match. I, of course, got hugely nervous, and messed up a bunch of times, but it was great all the way around. A good experience. And hopefully I'll play more this next semester, since I won't have smushed my toe with a ping pong table. That really ruined my season.

Mona was there cheering me on, with D today, and I got a really nifty shirt. So even though I lost badly to the King Abdulaziz girls, I think I came out ahead.

Nafla, this really sweet girl who lives in the dorm with me, got up and read (sang) a bit of the Qu'ran which was just beautiful. It was apparently the first time she'd ever read the Qu'ran in public, but she did fabulously. And we had a huge ornate awards ceremony to follow that. And pictures galore. I hope I can get my hands on some of those pictures.

And THEN, I went to get converted. One of my friends from outside Effat had arranged for me to go meet with a political science professor who is, on the side, extremely knowledgeable about both Islam and Christianity, and Judaism to some extent as well. Of course, all of this from a Muslim perspective. So we got together, and talked for three hours about God, and the purpose of life, and whether or not Islam is right for America. And I really like this man. I thought he was a little sketchy the first time I met him, since he told me he could get me into Mecca if I only admitted to believing in God, but since then I've decided either he's a really good used-car salesman, or he's not as sketchy as I originally believed. On the other hand, I think he did a fabulous job turning the conversation away from the points I wanted to make... I will have to prepare better for the next time I see him. But he said some very interesting things that will really make me think. He didn't change my mind about anything, but he did an excellent job presenting Islam in a very non-frightening way, and connecting it to the 'big picture' of God and the rest of the universe. Of course, none of this convinces me that Islam is "The Truth", but at the same time I think there's an excellent possibility that Islam, like Christianity, Judaism, Bhuddism, Hinduism, and every other philosophy of life, all are so popular because they manage to tap into something universal in humanity, either God or a force of nature one could easily describe as God.

Remind me that I have another Aramco post coming. D and I had some FABULOUS conversations (she was my roommate at the hotel in Dahran, and one of the reasons I got so little sleep was because she and discovered we had a lot in common in terms of philosophy of life).

But for now, it's Wednesday night and I'm either going to party, or sleep. These are the only things one should ever do on the first night of weekend.

Thank Allah it's Wednesday!

'Men are Mean'

I have a lot of other things to talk about, but what happened today in my Parenting for Muslims class warrants a post now rather than later. My professor was talking about the way in which modern psychology differs from Islam. She says that modern psychology says that letting out your anger is healthier mentally, but that Islam says suppressing your anger is better. She then went on to give her own personal example of how suppressing your anger results in good rather than bad. Her example was as follows:

A while ago, her sister-in-law decided to help her husband find a second wife. The sister-in-law had apparently decided that our prof wasn't a good enough wife and that the husband deserved another, better one. Needless to say, our professor was mad about this. And because they're family, she knew that she would have to see her sister-in-law at some point. So she did the martyr-like thing, and spent the next few weeks convincing herself not to be angry and to control herself when they finally did meet. So, as expected, they eventually got together for a family event, and when our prof and her sister-in-law were left alone together the sister-in-law began saying terrible things to our prof, telling her all about the beautiful women they were looking at for her (our prof's) husband to marry, and when our professor controlled herself the sister-in-law just got more abusive. Our professor said nothing. And eventually, the whole thing blew over and our professor's husband did not, in fact, take a second wife. So the moral of the story is, keep your temper. It's the Islamic thing to do.

What surprised the class was that her anger was directed at her sister-in-law rather than her husband. We asked her "So your husband agreed to take a second wife?" and she said "yes, but he didn't." We said "That's horrible!" and she replied "Men are mean. That's why there is paradise for mothers. Men are always mean. If they get the chance, they will all take second wives."

Great lesson for the future wives in the class. It's good to know the genders are communicating so well. Ha.

ARAMCO: Energy For the World

Having just returned to my room, let my hair down (literally) and let it all hang out (figuratively), I figure I should get down as many of my impressions of this trip as I can while they're still fresh in my memory. And, surprisingly, I've even got some energy to do that, although I'm totally exhausted. They had us keeping very bizarre and un-college-like hours, and even two days of that took its toll on me.

Anyway, the background of the trip is this: Aramco invited Effat, or more accurately about 60 of its students and staff supervisors, to their head offices in Dahran to tour and meet some executives and get a feeling for the company, with the general future aim of creating some sort of lasting relationship that would permit the Effat graduates to be funnelled into the Aramco world. It's too bad Saudi Aramco doesn't hire Americans; it seemed like a great place to work. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I don't know how much of Aramco's history you all are familiar with, so I'll give a basic background as I now understand it. It's been, I think, well accepted that Aramco as a company has been integral in the political and (obviously) economic development of Saudi Arabia. Originally created as the California Arabian Standard Oil Company (Casco), it began as a division of the company that is Chevron today. They were granted oil concessions in 1933, and for a long time they hunted around without hitting paydirt. They'd found oil in Bahrain, and so they expected to find some in the Eastern Provinces, but they were continuously thwarted. They, at the very end of the line, one of their prospectors (so the myth goes) was sitting dejectedly on a hill by one of the oil wells (Well #7, now known as Prosperity Well) and was gazing out to Bahrain thinking about how unfair life is. What he noticed, something any Arab in the oil business could tell you today, is that Bahrain is significantly lower than the Eastern Province (the tectonic plate they're both part of slopes downwards almost continuously from the edge of the Red Sea near where I am now). He managed to convince his skeptical leaders to put in just a little more money and dig down a little further in Well #7, and obviously they found what they were looking for.

From there Aramco got progressively bigger and, as time passed, became more and more controlled by Saudi Arabia and less by the American companies originally responsible. By the late 70's the Saudi government held complete control. In 1984 the Minister of Oil also became the first Saudi CEO of Aramco, and since then the company has been run almost exclusively by Saudis and now hires almost exclusively Saudis for their Dahran offices.

One of the things I found particularly interesting about Aramco was the way that they've imbued the company with a culture that is different from typical Saudi stereotypes, and kindof seems like a throwback to the early days of IBM, with people living a life like Leave it to Beaver in Southern California, and with a sort of family-loyalty-employee committment attitude that is very early-corporate-America. I had an interesting argument with some of the other girls about whether or not they have a moral imperative to provide that sort of support and financial commitment to society outside of Aramco or not. Certainly, Aramco has always seen it to be in their best interest to help build the human potential of the country, since it is from the youth of Saudi Arabia that they draw their fresh meat, but they definitely aren't playing as big a role today as they did in the early days, when the living standards in the Eastern Province were uncontestedly the best in the country.

The other thing I was honestly impressed by was how much everybody seemed to like working there. I mean, yes, they weren't about to show Effat students people who were unhappy, but they did a very good job giving us the impression that Aramco takes care of them and in return they give their hearts and souls to The Company.

Anyway, I'll describe more of what went on later, when I get access to the pictures. I'm also losing steam on the enthusiasm. I do want to say, however, that traveling with people is a fantastic way to get to know them better, and that definitely happened here. I met some wonderful people from Aramco who offered to help me, and most importantly I really got to know the girls who were with me and the professors. I even know more names now, which is great. And I was more 'one of the gang' this trip than I am normally. And I think a lot of people got to know me better as well.

Ther ewas a girl who had her camera encrusted with pink rhinestones, though. THAT was interesting. There was a lot of childishness - the girls couldn't stay quiet, the men insisted on reminding us to go to the bathroom, the teachers continuously had to tell us to be nice to each other and to be polite and quiet and everything. And they kindof had to. But it reminded me a lot of trips I took in middle school, and NOT of trips one takes in college. But it is Saudi Arabia, and the fact that sixty girls are now really interested in getting jobs at Aramco is clearly a step in the right direction. In fact, we met a Vice President of Saudi Aramco Affairs, and he said that Saudi Arabia had to start employing its women, because at the moment it was like a boxer with one hand tied behind his back. Just that such a metaphor was used makes me have hope.

That's all I have energy for at the moment. More details to follow....

Happy Thanksgiving!

Well, it's not really Turkey Day without turkeys, or mashed potatoes, or family. But hey, I can have fun all the same. In fact, I didn't even spend the whole day in the dorm - yes, I have friends! And I went out with one of them yesterday. We got coffee, we had dinner, we wandered about looking for things to buy. Ah, shopping - the primary source of fun for women in Saudi Arabia.

Anyway, I have a few interesting things to say. First off, I'm hearing ridiculous amounts of weird gossip I am going to share with you all simply because it's the sort of thing you read in Princess but I, for one, never expected to find it here. There are two different stories, and both of them are kindof bizarre. The first, really terrible in every way, describes a girl who just got married for the second time. Her first husband abused her, and her second began doing the same right after they were married at the insistance of her family. She's now trying to get out of the country, but may have to leave her child here. Horrific all the way around. The second told me about her mother, who is probably going to divorce her father fairly soon because he just got married for the second time to their Indonesian maid. It sounds like the nationality of the maid is maybe more insulting than the second marriage on its own.

Anyway, there you have a few of the less fantastic things going on.

I also recently had an amazing talk with one of the girls down the hall who told me about her hopes and dreams and the way her parents affect her choices. She feels a bit trapped here, I think, as her mother has essentially chosen her path in life for her, down to the fact that she will probably be married in the next year. She said she doesn't even want to marry a Saudi, but apparently Saudi women need the permission of the government to marry a non-Saudi, and that would be tough to get even if her parents agreed, which they won't.

I think there are plenty of Saudi women who are treated well by those around them, and who feel empowered and just as able (if not more) to influence their world for the good as their peers in the States, but women here really don't have the legal and societal protection that women in the States have. The whole policy of total privacy within the home means that if the man chooses to abuse the women it's much more difficult for her to get help. On the other hand, as one of the girls mentioned to me, women here really are treated like princesses in many ways, as they don't have any financial responsibility for themselves or their children in any way. In fact, I heard an excellent argument explaining the societal taboo on extramarital and premarital affairs. If a child is born out of wedlock, there is nothing forcing the father to acknowledge it, and in Saudi society it is still the exclusive duty of the father to provide for mother and children. Without the official bond of marriage, there is nothing forcing the father to live up to those obligations. A woman is therefore financially much better protected if she waits till marriage. In fact, a married woman should, in Islam and Saudi society, never have to work unless she wants to. Any money she makes is hers alone, to spend as she likes on shoes or travel or anything. Her food, her housing, and all of her children's needs will be provided for by the husband, regardless of how much money she makes.

Obviously, Saudi society has taken separation of the sexes to the extent that men and women really do move in entirely different circles, and the women's circles very rarely intersect with the 'real world' as Westerners see it, because they're never responsible for paying the bills or buying the food or making sure their kids have enough money to go to the best schools. They focus more on the idealistic aspects of life, the NGO work and the volunteer positions, or alternatively on the frivolous things - clothing, fashion, avoiding boredom. The women who work do so because they want to change things, or they are too bored and want something to do during the day. As a side note, I should say that most of the women at Effat are there because they have a mission to provide good education to women, and are dedicated to that mission.

It's an interesting world, a bit like being a professional student. Obviously, I fit right in.

I'm not trying to imply that the work the women do is any less important than that of the men. In fact, in many ways I think it's more important, because while the men are out there working to earn money for their families, the women are campaigning for the right to drive, the right to learn, the right for freedom of speech.

I hear the screeching of tires outside. Again and again. Either somebody's racing around the turnaround right outside, or there's a high-speed car chase involving three or four different cars going on.

Goody.

Anyway, I'm writing here mostly as an excellent way to avoid what I need to do as far as work and all goes. I'm off to Aramco for the next three days, and that means there are things that simply must get accomplished today. And because, since yesterday was thanksgiving, I felt I ought to spend a bit of time in contemplation.

In that vein, I would like to say I am thankful. I am thankful to be an American, although I understand that I would feel differently, perhaps, if I weren't one. I am thankful to have this opportunity to see a completely different nearly hidden world. I am thankful to have patient people around me who are willing to listen to, and correct, my misunderstandings and misapprehensions. I am grateful to be aware of the dangers involved in making judgements - I hope I protect myself from them. I am thankful mostly for my friends and family back home who are there for me.

And now to work.

Wish me luck.

The Importance of Being Energetic

I have been preoccupied recently and thus I've been paying far too little attention to the blogging aspect of my extremely exciting life. Don't let this give you the impression that nothing has happened.

I've been doing a lot of thinking recently, and I'm sure most of my thoughts have been both insightful and fascinating, but unfortunately I didn't write them down and so they have gone the way of late-night dreams and the names of my highschool classmates. Some highlights occur below:

- So many of these 'girls' have children! The number of women who take off for maternity leave and get the professors to postpone their exams is just insane!
(And they still tend to dress the way 13-year-olds dress in the states - rhinestones and platform shoes)

- Remembering names which are unfamiliar is really, really hard. I've had to 'trick' these girls (whose names I should really know by now) into putting their cell phone numbers and their names into my phone, so I can go over them later and memorize them.

- Professors tend to give in to student demands a lot more than they do in the states, and the girls tend to make silly demands. For instance, the last three days in a row in two of my classes professors have had to bribe the students into working at all by promising that they'd get out early.

- Cell phones are the only reliable method of communication. Without one I would be doomed to wander the corridors aimlessly forever, never knowing what is happening or where anybody is. Nobody checks their school email and nobody posts things in a central location. In fact, there really IS no central communication. And despite this, people seem to know how to get to things through word of mouth... everyone but me. I remain the least well-informed person on the campus. But at least now people recognize the problem.

- I still haven't figured out how people do the research for their research projects here. Remind me to do that....

- People are nice. I enjoy them. The girls are nice, too, although it's kindof tough to connect with a lot of them still. But at least they're warming up to me and I can actually have conversations now.

So those are just a few of the many things occuring to me regularly. Now on to the more prosaic aspect of my blog. I'm still insanely busy, although I've been putting off actually doing anything to rectify that situation. Instead, I went to a Western-produced version of "The Importance of Being Earnest" with a bunch of the professors and admin, and it was great. The actors were hilarious, the group was clearly enjoying itself, and it was generally wonderful to get out and do something normal. When your life is totally abnormal, normalcy is like a breath of fresh air.

By the way: Pride. Effat was on CNN the other day, although not mentioned by name, when Nick Roberts had a segment on how women can now officially study engineering in Saudi Arabia. That's right: Effat is the only school offering an engineering degree to women. And D is one of two students in that degree! Yessir, I know one of the first two engineering students in the kingdom! I am going to be famous one day!

Or... she is. But I'm going to take total credit.

I've also managed to land myself a paying job (!!!) working for Mrs. West on this accreditation stuff, although I should probably start actually doing something useful for her before I start patting myself on the back. And what interests me as much is the fact that more and more Saudi girls have been coming up to me asking for help with their English. I figure I'll give lessons in return for making them listen to me mangling Arabic, and we'll see how that works for all of us.

So, while my life is still busier than I can handle, that's clearly an improvement over the first bit of time where I sat around doing nothing. At least now I can safely and happily say I won't get bored. And with luck I'm now involved in some really really interesting things. Other things to keep your eyes out for on these pages include future plans for thesis researching (I've had some ideas) and the journalism club (no ideas yet, but I'm gonna start whipping these girls into action soon) and the ping pong championship (more practice tomorrow at 10am - the coach expects me to win, and as such has been getting me to practice every free moment).

So that's about it for now. I think sleep may be in order.

Another .... Wow

This movie almost makes me cry even from the trailer. If you want to talk controversial...

The War Within

Make sure you read the interview with the writers. All of it. Particularly the bit at the end about shooting in Grand Central Station with the National Guardsmen.

I can't wait to see it. Although I think I will have to be careful who I go with.

Comedy or Travesty?

Kei sent me this link today, asking me whether I thought this was a good or a bad idea. I think it's the sort of thing that will either be really good, or really really bad. But, as I've said before to people who disagree strongly with me, I think it's important that anything be open to comedic interpretation. Thus, I am completely in favor of this movie being made. But I may not be in favor of the movie itself. Does this make sense?

The Mosquitos Ate My Family

Luckily, my family is nowhere near Jeddah right now, or I'm sure the mosquitos would have eaten them. Unfortunately, I, myself, am in Jeddah, and I'm being eaten piece by agonizing piece. Originally I thought there was only one mosquito in my room, because it kept buzzing at me just as I was about to go to sleep. That's kindof like asserting that there is only one family of deer in America because that's all you see in your back yard. Yes, there are colonies of mosquitos, apparently, with hungry children, and I'm the only one on the menu. What's even more bizarre and disturbing, they somehow manage to get under the covers. I resorted to wearing a long-sleeved t-shirt to bed so as to protect my arms better, since they'd eaten me up to the elbow on both arms, and I always wear long pants to bed (although I still got a bunch of bites on my knees - who knows how). Despite that, the mosquitos are doing their best, and today I woke up with two (count them!) bites on the BOTTOM OF MY FOOT. Does anyone have any idea how uncomfortable this is? I almost wish I could just stay unconscious so as to avoid the misery. I can't scratch without tickling myself, either, which is frustrating.

So now, because the mosquitos have invaded my private sanctuary, I've gotta be on the lookout for things like West Nile Virus and what have you. Maybe I should get insect repellent? It seems awfully sad to have to put some on to go to bed...

Moving on to slightly less immediately important topics, I had a bizarre exchange with Abla I yesterday as I was about to walk up the stairs to my room (Remember that earlier post I had about how people insist on taking the elevator even if it's only one flight of stairs up? Keep that in mind here):

Abla I (as I go to head up the stairs): Come, Elisabeth, the elevator.
Elisabeth: No it's okay I like the stairs.
Abla I (pointing to the elevator and smiling): Look, it's here. Come.
Elisabeth: No, it's okay, I like the stairs. It's just one floor.
Abla I (smiling an indulgent smile): Are you afraid?

I wonder if her misconceptions about me have to do with the fact that I act shy, or whether she doesn't think America has elevators.

Also, I have a comment to add to yesterday's post about the disorganization of everything. I should add that Effat doesn't get any advance warning when guests show up either, so they have kindof the same problem I do except that it's worse for them. This would be like Liz Cheney showing up on my doorstep while I'm walking around in a towel. Which luckily, she didn't do. Also, apparently at the last minute a prince came along, and because of his schedule things got pushed even farther out of wack. I wonder if this is a common problem - if, for example, colleges in the states are just as badly informed about when, for example, the Chinese President is showing up - or whether this is uniquely Saudi. It certainly seems more obvious here.

Anyway, yesterday Team Fabulous went to Toys R Us. Well, D and Mona and I did. And to Chili's, also, where we laughed about a bunch of stuff that I don't remember any more. There was at least one good comment made about how they're so much younger than me, I will babysit and mash peas for them, to which Mona repied that I was the toothless old one and they should be mashing peas for me. We've agreed to mash peas for each other. Anyway, today we will officially inaugurate the pick-up-stix (remember them!??! I'm so excited!) and foursquare and Twister. Look at us, making plans and then carrying through.

We also decided that S2's special super power is that of Evil Geniusness, and her new superhero name is Dr. Doom. We haven't told her this yet. We also established that Mona/Melvianna/Andrew's proper title is Andrew Lightwood the Third, Queen of Confusement.

D still doesn't have a name yet. Nor do I, although D suggested the Namer of Names and I kindof like that since it seems to be what I'm doing.

I also tried to take a stand yesterday when Abla I wanted to know all the details of my excursion, but my heroic stand took the form of being deliberately vague. I feel like a bit of a worm.

Man, I feel like the mosquitos bit THROUGH my callouses!

On a slightly less frivolous note, I took my Arabic exam yesterday. Ouch. Ouch is all I have to say. She seemed (Mrs. S) so very sad to see me leave things empty. I think if I'd studied more I could have done better, so I haven't given up complete hope on me. The other fabulous thing was that there was no question in my mind what the test was asking for from me. I just didn't know some of the answers. For example, when the question asks (in approximate english) for an "expression" which fulfills a bunch of criteria, what are they looking for? The question like this that got me the most was "What is the expression that, standing alone, doesn't mean anything, and needs something added to it?" (this is very approximate translation). Now, I wasn't really sure. Incomplete sentence? We talked about complete and incomplete sentences. She came over and repeated the question to me in an effort to make me understand, and ended up kindof giving me the answer by saying something like "come on, there are three sorts of words, Ism and Fa'il and ......" at which point obviously the answer became clear - harf, which acts as prepositions and whatnot, and yes, has no meaning by itself. But how was I to know that it was asking for one of the three sorts of words? Are they called "expressions"?

Anyway, that was the sort of confusion I faced. Even my dictionary couldn't help me there. If I'd done a better job studying I probably would have remembered more of the specific terminology. But life continues, and next time I'll know which parts of the notes and information I really need to just memorize.

Or, like, another question: "What factors does Jahiliyyah poetry depend on?" Followed by two blank spaces. What on earth does she mean by "factors"? Does she mean lifestyle and politics and economy (as I later found out she probably did)? Does she mean literary style and skill of the poet and inventive ideas and strong emotion? Does she mean war and love and different topics of poetry? And in order to explain this to me, when I had left the answer blank, she said something like, "When you travel, and you see beautiful surroundings, can you write poetry about this? Yes!" Again, if I'd memorized this heading on the notes I would have known what to answer, but instead I sat there saying "gee, I know I've seen that somewhere, now if I could only remember what came after it..."

So, anyway, it's all very interesting. I am like a small child trying to wield a tree as a hammer. I generally understand the basic gist of what's going on, but trying to get nuance is just ... wow.

I have a couple of interesting sites for everybody, none of which have anything to do with the Middle East or, really, anything academic. First is this site one of my fabulous friends sent to me (this is for you, maman). There's a story that goes with this, but I'll leave that for another time. Suffice it to say, my mother and I have long maintained that all teenage boys are turkeys. Most non-teenage ones as well. In fact, most males. I once heard someone claim this made me a man-hater, but we say it with love. In fact, most turkeys are better friends of mine than the women I know. My response to the man-hater accusation was "does it count if I hate women more?" So now there's at least one person out there who thinks I hate everyone. Not true. Turkeys are fabulous beasties, as I think this site will prove. And for those of my friends who hold the mistaken idea that they are no longer turkeys once they turn 20, I would just like to laugh at them briefly.

hahahaha.

Okay. So today's schedule looks to be one of exams and meetings, followed by more exams and meetings. Ah! The journalism club may be gasping to life! There are now four members, and I have their names and phone numbers so they can't escape from me. I'm meeting with one other today, too, so we're up to a handful! With luck, this will mean that the magazine exists. Parenting for Muslims is today, and on a normal Wednesday I'd have ping pong in the afternoon, but I think the sports lady is gone until Saturday. At least, that is, I think, what the guard said to us (in Arabic) when we went to ask.

I love being continuously uncertain what's going on. I'm like an adrenaline junky, but more afraid.

More fabulous things to announce! Isn't it great when I have so much to say I forget half of it?

This morning I have a meeting with Mrs. West to talk about some of the stuff I am going to do for her. Mostly so she can explain to me what it is I'm doing, because I'm a little unclear on how to translate some of the fuzzier academic-speak they use.

And, most exciting of all, I may get to travel in the coming month and a half. (I still have to make reservations to get out of here for Hajj). Apparently Effat is chartering a plane to take 40 girls to the Aramco compound in Dahran to look around and get shown around for three days. This would be EXTREMELY exciting to go on, since I've obviously read a lot about Aramco's place in Saudi history and society. It's a really interesting company - I'll do more research and inform y'all better whenI get a chance.

Secondly, it sounds like there may be a Saudi college fair (which is interesting in itself) in Dahran which I may get to go to as an assistant/student and talk to students and other schools and stuff.

Also, Ms. East-West sounded enthusiastic about my staying for the next term, so I think I'll start making plans for that!

With so many things going on, how can a girl get a chance to sleep? Well, the easy answer to this is that I went to bed at 9 yesterday. But wait! My day wasn't over! At about 10:30 there was a knock on my door and it was one of the girls from upstairs (I should stop saying 'girls' - this one had a son, for example) who was looking for help with her English writing! Yessssss! And she asked me why I wasn't upstairs more often. So when I get a chance to sit down and breathe I am absolutely going to go upstairs and explore more, and meet some more people.

I feel like there are four or five other things going on right now, but I'm afraid my shower is warm and it is time for me to get clean.

Adios!

A Note on Saudi Organizational Skills

So, literally as I was sitting writing my previous post about the dirty plumber, Liz Cheney arrived and began talking. I should have expected it simply because nobody told me about it, but unfortunately I haven't adapted properly. I wasn't on campus because I didn't have class until 11am, so I missed what everybody who was on campus discovered - that she came early. Did anyone think of calling me? not until 10:30. Apparently they were even talking about me and I wasn't there. And then, to make it better, nobody told me there would be tons of men around, so I didn't bring my abaya, and then had to rush back to my dorm to find it. So I caught the last 7 minutes of her talk, and didn't get to ask any questions. I did get to shake her hand and briefly say hi, so that was impressive, I guess, but I didn't get a good feel for how she thinks or anything, and I didn't get to talk to her, so I was a little upset about that.

Pissy is probably a better word. I was downright pissy about that. Why is there no way of informing people? Everybody knows I live right here. It's absurd to think I would hang around on campus when I don't have class just in case something happens that I'm not going to be informed about. And, because I was afraid something like this would happen, I was even checking email obsessively, but noooooo... nobody thought to send an email. This school, as I was telling Mona, "has terrible organization" when it comes to information distribution, an assertion to which she replied, "oh, so you think it has organization?" A cogent point. I stand corrected.

So I was a little disappointed, but I survived. This would have really irritated me earlier this year, but now I take it in stride. Patience, young grasshopper, all good things in time.

And in more positive news, I spent a lot of time today feeling like I belonged here. First, I brought my essay to Mrs. S and she seemed pleased with my results and I may actually have a hope of doing well tomorrow, not just of passing.

Second, D and I went swimming for about an hour and chatted, and then she came along to translation because her teacher for her class didn't show and she was bored. Third, Mona was over reviewing for the Arabic exam with me, and D was here getting some stuff she left pre-swimming, so I had three different people in my room hanging out! It was almost like a party!

AND, we're definitely on for tomorrow's Toys R Us shopping adventure.

Will the fun never end??

An interesting thought - it must be awfully strange for people like Mona, Arabs by birth and by family, and who consider Arabic their native language, who still feel more comfortable in English. We were talking about her Arabic classes today, and how she can generally remember the Arabic only if she thinks about it in English first. She learns the information in English and that helps her remember the Arabic. She also said she has trouble because she talks and writes as though she's translating directly from English, even though she's generally not thinking about it that way. It must be very weird to feel more comfortable in a language you don't think of as 'yours'.

Now that my busy busy social life is momentarily at a lull, I can focus on the Arabic material, and nap. I think perhaps the Nap, with a capital N, is more significant at the moment, since I can feel a headache starting. I filched a Pepsi for later (caffeine is sometimes very useful) and so if I sleep until dinner I can see possibly getting three or four hours of studying in before I collapse for good. And three or four hours of studying Arabic should give me SOME idea what's going on. And I already know much of it. I'm also tempted to go searching for the Girls Down the Hall since I haven't seen any of them but one since we all got back, and i want them to know I'm not a total loser. Also, I want to try out my cool Arabic skills on them. I've started saying things like "keefik?" (how are you?) and "feyn inti?" (where are you?) and "keyfa kana eidik?" (how was your eid?) INSTEAD of the English versions, so even though they're extremely simplistic and easy phrases, it's good to see that I'm slowly becoming acclimatized to the language and now occasionally even use it naturally without sounding like a total moron.

And people are starting to understand all of that and to help me a lot - some people by talking to me in Arabic, some people by letting me talk to them. And generally if I think of a phrase I want to say, I'll ask a couple of people to help me with it. And most of them are willing to correct me in a way which isn't snotty. There's one girl in particular in my Parenting for Muslims class who is really really fantastic. If only I knew her name...

Ah, me, it is so difficult when you finally get a life....

First Rule of Saudi Arabia

Expect the unexpected.

Turning off the electricity in the middle of the morning, and of course the internet is also affected? Of course!
Strange people walking down the street wrapped in plastic? Naturally! (Yes, I actually saw this over the summer in Riyadh)

Strange men walking into your room at 8am to take apart the shower? Well, I wouldn't have thought so.... but why not? This is Saudi Arabia! Anything goes!

I found it particularly amusing in that I was still in my pjs and CLEARLY not prepared to have visitors. At least I was showered - I have no desire to go back in there now. The man, in typical plumber fashion, had huge boots and smeared dirt and dirty water all over my bathroom floor. Then, to top it off, he smeled HORRENDOUS. I didn't notice this at the time because he was studiously avoiding my gaze and since I was in my pyjamas that was just fine with me - I sat on my bed and did work and prayed he'd be gone by the time I needed to get dressed. And he was - it was fairly painless. Apparently my shower was leaking downstairs. So they literally removed the whole head and pipes and all and put new stuff on. But then when he was gone, and I tried to go into the bathroom to brush my teeth and all, I was hit by this wave of nauseating stench. Now, I like sweat as much as the next person, but this was too much. I can't even enter my bathroom. Hopefully, with the air conditioning still functioning (for the moment) it will have aired out a little by the time I need to head out.

What particularly entertains me about this morning's episode is that nobody warned me, and people thought it was fine to knock on my door at 8am. If I weren't so jet-lagged I would absolutely have been asleep, and what would they have done then? Plus, isn't there supposed to be something against strange men hanging out in the rooms of strange partially dressed women? I mean, in terms of supervision, one of the ablas was there... but is that really all they're worried about? What about propriety? What about the fact that I was undressed? What about privacy??

Privacy is a myth.

Sooooooo now it's 10, I finally got all of my work done, and I've got another 45 minutes to hang about excitedly before I wander over to confront Liz Cheney with my no-nonsense liberal attitude. Go America! And then I'll go talk to Mrs. S of Arabic fame and hope that my five sentences on women in Jahiliyyah makes at least a little sense. Post-classes, Team Fabulous is playing ping pong and then swimming, so that should be good, and then lovely Mona may help me study for the Arabic, if she's really nice.

New-Half-Semester Resolution: Read more current affairs. Keep updated. Being in Saudi Arabia is no excuse.

And on that lovely note, here is something disturbing from the Arab News - what do you suppose this chemistry teacher actually did to get him sued by his own students and sentenced to 50 lashes every week for the next 15 weeks? But if people are suing professors at Stanford because of bad grades, who knows what sort of crazy students might sue a teacher for 'mocking' Islam. Kids these days - think they own the world.

I feel pretty, oh so pretty.....

Hey there li'l cowboys, hang on for the emotional ride of your lifetime!

I exaggerate, as always.

Picture me, demure (ha!) little American girl, sitting attentively in Arabic class oh so many days in a row. I listen hard, and occasionally I even understand what's going on. Scratch that, mostly I understand what's going on, and occasionaly I can even answer questions, particularly when it comes to grammar (can I get a high five!). Then I go home and, when I am not busy being a professional lazy bum (something I got quite good at in the past two months, although I like to blame it on depression and culture shock and say it will be gone now), I sit with my Arabic notes and translate what she has said. Thankfully, we have a couple of books and other written resources (like the lecture notes) that I can work off of, because of course I don't write fast enough to really catch much of what she says on paper.

So, what we have here is a mildly diligent certainly eager-to-learn student of language who starts off with an incredible handicap (ie I don't speak it).

Fast-forward to our quiz/fake test. This was intended to be a practice for the midterm. I went in, I took it without dictionary or aides of any kind, and as you may remember I was rather proud of myself for understanding all the questions and being able to answer some of them. Yes, folks, I took an Arabic test Arab-style and still managed to answer some questions. I thought this was quite the victory, and patted myself on the back quite vigorously.

Fast-forward to today. Mrs. S, our Arabic teacher, says she has the tests and we can come to her office later to get them back. She then pulls me aside after class to say (I think) "Why didn't you ever come to see me? Did they teach you to write in Arabic? I want you to get a better grade! You should be asking me for help!" I was, needless to say, rather deflated, and I agreed brokenly that I would come see her later that afternoon to get my test and talk it over with her. Remember, this woman speaks no English (which is actually great for me in terms of making me try to speak, but terrible in terms of Fear Factor).

So I spent the next hour and a bit hyperventilating. Was all of that semi-coherent Arabic that I had thought I'd written merely complete gibberish? Were all of the things I thought I understood in fact about something completely different? Had I gotten something appalling like a zero!?! Worse, had I accidentally managed to convince Mrs. S that I had excellent Arabic skills, and she was now appalled and betrayed to discover that I had been leading her on and should never have been in the Arabic for Native Speakers class in the first place?!!?!

You can see how it went. I even called a friend in London, woke him up in the middle of the night, and begged him to tell me I wasn't stupid. Thankfully, he did.

Mona eventually got tired of me sitting at the table like a possessed Energizer Bunny with no self esteem, ranting about how of COURSE I can't speak Arabic but I had thought she understood that and could I really have done that badly and in any case how am I going to explain things to her when I can't speak Arabic and I only sound like a demented infant and don't even know the proper words and I hate thinking I did okay and then discovering I did miserably and I'm really here to learn the Arabic but I'm just an idiot and it's impossible and why can't it just all be in French, that would be so much easier, because French at least makes vague sense and I can babble more convincingly and at least sound like I'm almost functioning at normal speed whereas with Arabic I just stare at people and say "uhhhhhhhhhhh" a lot.

Breathe here.

By the way, I'm giving Team Fabulous special super powers. I have no idea what they are yet, except that Mona is the gender-confused forest fairy Melvianna/Andrew. This makes sense if you accept that every time I try to speak Arabic to her I mix up the genders and say something masculine. She finally got tired of it and started calling herself Andrew, and at that point I finally got it figured out and started using feminine.

Anyway, so Mona agreed to come with me to act as buffer and translator, and wanted to see her own grade anywho, so we wandered over, me still ranting. It's amazing how much babbling I can do without breathing - perhaps I could turn it into a money-making talent somehow. Join the circus. The amazing breathless wonder. Listen to her Rant on the State of the World until she Turns Blue!

Aaaaaaand long story short, we discovered to my joy and disbelief that I had, in fact, PASSED my Arabic test, even by normal standards! Yes, I got a D, but it was a HIGH D (67.5%, I am proud to say). And this without any external aids beyond my own fabulous cerebrum! And she sounded a lot less shocked and dismayed when I actually showed up. She explained to me how it was clear I understood what the questions were asking but I wasn't good at expressing myself in Arabic. I agreed wholeheartedly. After all, I could talk about Jahiliyyah for hours in English, it's the translation and the description that escape my miraculous abilities.

So she gave me some pointers, and I'm going in tomorrow to get her to help me with writing. She's also said I can use my dictionary and even take extra time if I want on the midterm on Tuesday. This is very kind of her.

So now here it is, 8pm, and I have an Arabic exam to study for, but I feel much less fear. Maybe I'll even ask her to meet with me once a week or something for extra help. I have proven I can simulate a stupid Arabic student, and I have nowhere to go but up!

Oh, but I am tired.

No sleep for the intellectual!

Rockin' in the Cradle of Islam

Day two of my new policy - Project BE HAPPY - seems to be going swimmingly. What's better, I now have a Team. Yes, a Team. I will call us Team Fabulous, although I think the members of said team might think I was nuts were I to actually suggest it. Let us say that this team consists of D, S1 and S2, Mona, and myself. The Fabulous Five, let us say. No, I prefer Team Fabulous. Anywho, these are all mildly disgruntled freshman who are bored to tears and want something entertaining to do with their lives. Also, they are all people I have gotten to know fairly well because some of them are in my classes and some of them are just nice. So it would also be safe to say that Team Fabulous comprises the best of my Effat friends.

To make a long story short, we are tired of being trampled upon by the cares of the world, and we have decided to fight back. What this means is that we spent lunch today coming up with lists and lists of plans to make our lives more entertaining. At least half of them will probably even happen one day. I also taught them to make paper cranes. That was exciting. Anyway, possible entertainment for Team Fabulous includes the following:

1) Games - Twister Tuesdays is our current favorite plan, if we can get our hands on a version of Twister. Card games also a big hit, and if we can find some sidewalk chalk and a bouncy ball at least S1 and I are eager to create a foursquare court.

2) Crafts - Origami is always fun, but we also want to paint the entire cafeteria (I doubt they'll let us do it but hey, anything's possible) and perhaps create tshirts or something equally crafty. S2 is REALLY UNHAPPY with the idea of crafts and artsy stuff of all sorts, so we may forego these plans.

3) Swimming - all of us are interested. We already have a swimming date for Monday. We could make this a tradition!

4) Outings - this is my favorite idea. D and S1, at least, have access to transportation, and D even lives close to Effat and is willing to give me rides places. We could have a weekly coffee outing! Or go out for lunch sometimes! Or go shopping! I think we might go out soon to acquire Twister and sidewalk chalk and other materials for further entertainment.

5) Movies - there is apparently a huge projector screen someplace. I'm not sure who's allowed to use it, but it can't hurt to ask. They're all into horror. Eep. But at least I have a lot of laps to sit in.

6) Parties - The ideas include sock-hops with S1's boom box, cookie-making extravaganzas (or baking parties of all types), pot-lucky dinner parties, and the list goes on.

Anyway, obviously we couldn't do much today, although I did establish that if there are board games at Effat nobody knows where they are. And D suggested perhaps a Tuesday outing and that sounds mighty good to me. I'm looking forward to hunting down a Twister set.

So I'm not the only one bored and lacking motivation. Me and my Team will go far, and things will happen which are fun. That's my prediction.

Of course, at the moment I have Homework with a capital H and EXAMS to study for. Tuesday is Arabic. ... death in a box.... and I have other exams coming up which I haven't paid much attention to. I think it's only Arabic and Parenting for Muslims that I have this week, so I can afford to concentrate on my linguistic failings.

OH! And Liz Cheney, Dick's daughter, is coming on Monday.... she's apparently something of a big wig in the State Department. I'll have to google her and also try to find out exactly when she's coming and what she's doing here, but I don't want to miss that! It should be quite interesting!

And more entertainment - my efforts to singlehandedly construct a Journalism club continue. I'm giving people one last chance to show up to a meeting and then I'm sending out all-purpose requests for submissions from everybody, and Mona and I will just have to create the damned thing ourselves.

And my final project, the one that Mrs. West gave me, is sitting on a shelf. I'll have to go talk to her about it, because I really am entertained by the concept but I'm getting really bogged down in the details and the fact that I really don't have any idea how things function in an educational institution. Creating a list of 'things to do' is tough when you have no idea what sorts of things one could, hypothetically, do.

Look at all the optimism! It's practically oozing from my pores!

Return

At the gate, I sit in a row of blue seats
with the possible company of my death,
this sprawling miscellany of people -
carry-on bags and paperbacks -

that could be gathered in a flash
into a band of pilgrims on the last open road.
Not that I think
if our plane crumpled into a mountain,

we would all ascend together,
holding hands like a ring of skydivers,
into a sudden gasp of brightness,
or that there would be some common place

for us to reunite to jubilize the moment,
some spaceless, pillarless Greece
where we could, at the count of three,
toss our ashes into the sunny air.

It's just that the way that man has his briefcase
so carefully arranged,
the way that girl is cooling her tea,
and the flow of the comb that woman

passes through her daughter's hair...
and when you consider the altitude,
the secret parts of engines,
and all the hard water and the deep canyons below...

well, I just think it would be good if one of us
maybe stood up and said a few words,
or, so as not to involve the police,
at least quietly wrote something down.

- "Passengers" by Billy Collins, from Picnic, Lightning

I don't think I've ever had less desire to get on a plane. A lot of the adventure has worn off now that I've been here for two months, and all that is left seemed, from that vantage point, to be the misery. But I've convinced myself, and I think correctly, that I have a lot left to learn. I also know, from experience, that things always get better. Particularly when it comes to new places and new people. Unless I give it a good chance, here, I really will have been a failure. And I haven't given it a good chance. I've been too busy feeling sorry for myself. Granted, I had good excuses - smashing my toe, going hungry, and suffering culture shock all at the same time - but that time is over. Now is the time for grabbing at life with both hands and a good appetite.

There is a fine line between persistence and muleishness. I hope somebody warns me when I cross it.

Vacation was exactly what this girl needed to put me back on my feet again. So here I am. I did a lot of dancing, a lot of reading, and a lot of reconnecting with family and friends. I'm back, a stranger in a strange land, but I've got all sorts of people to remind me who I am and that it's okay for me to be different. And I'm not that much of a stranger any more. Granted, I still sound like a demented infant when I try to speak Arabic, but all good things come in time. And now I know people, and I'm more comfortable with the system (or lack of one), and I'm ready to stop being the shy and unadventurous girl the girls down the hall think I am. Ha.

Jeddah, the bits of it I've seen since I got in last night, hasn't changed much. I got into my room and noticed immediately that the place had been 'neatened'. I hate it when people mess with my stuff, and now everything I had organized in relatively memorable places is stacked in 'neat' piles. I even left one bit of work sitting on my pillow so I wouldn't forget it, but even that had been moved and put under thirteen other things. It took me a while to re-messify my room to my liking. But now I feel pretty comfortable and in control. Of course, I haven't left the room basically since I got in, but I'm nearly done unpacking and I've even done a bit of work.

If I've learned anything here so far, it is patience. When I was in Riyadh before my father and I used to talk about how one of the neat (and irritating) things about living in Saudi was the fact that the language is always an issue - every communication contains within it at least a seed of uncertainty. I always enjoyed that - call for pizza, speak to a man whose first language is probably Tagalog or Tamil but who speaks broken English, and wait to see how much of the order actually gets delivered. You stop taking it seriously after a while, and it becomes a game instead. How long is it going to take me to get my point across, and how long after that to be sure I understand what is going to be done about it? I tend to use this same attitude when navigating the ridiculous corridors of Heathrow, because if I actually pay attention to how long it is taking me to get from one place to another, and how many lines I have to stand in to get there, I will drive myself mad. Much better to make it a game.

Today, as I was in the shower, the lights went off. The internet too - I hadn't realized they were connected but apparently they are. And when I say "off" I mean "off" - it was a little after dawn, but in any case my bathroom has no windows and the shower was in the far corner anyway. There I was, washing my arms, and the next minute I couldn't even SEE those arms. Luckily the water didn't turn off. I finished up my shower in the dark, stumbled over to where I had hung the towel, and escaped into the moderately better lit center of my room. Was I bothered? Eh, not really. I was a bit put out that my speakers, which require an external source of electricity, wouldn't work any more, so I had to depend on the less impressive speakers imbedded in my laptop. I was also entertained that nobody seemed bothered by this - apparently it was planned. I went downstairs looking for juice (juice! juice! the best part about living here is the freshly squeezed orange juice I get every morning except during Ramadan) and instead ran into Abla I and the rest of the staff hanging out in the cafeteria. When I asked what happened to the lights Abla I said she didn't think I'd be awake yet and they'd cut out the electricity to do something with the air conditioning - I found this amusing, since the air conditioning units were still working - and that it would be on soon. Two hours later, it came back on. I ALMOST had to go without music for a while, and that could have gotten ugly. Instead, I just had a bit of a morning adventure. Perhaps I should start keeping candles in my cabinet. Fire! Fire! Ooh, candles might be fun.

I'm also making plans, and elaborate ones, for Christmas. I'm hoping to get enough access to the kitchens to bake some cookies. Then I'll get the girls involved, if I can.

I'm almost looking forward to it! I have a lot of shopping to do, obviously. And lists of other things to do. If I keep up my energy, I will be completely occupied and also happy. Things are looking up!

Another thing that helped with my amazingly improved mood was meeting neat people on the planes. "Eww," says Rachel, "are you one of those people that talks to random people on airplanes!?" No, I am not, but there are exceptions to every rule, and I got lucky. I wouldn't have gotten on the plane in London to go to Jeddah if it hadn't been for the nice man, Mansoor, I met there. He had a rather endearing stutter, and a wife and two kids he'd just left in New Jersey, and reminded me a lot of my dad in his commuting back and forth to see his kids. I had a good time talking to him. And on the Philly-London trip I met Travis, a Main Liner if ever there was one, who entertained me by complaining about the color (white - what is it, the prom??) and condition (covered with circus peanuts!) of the limo he'd hired to take himself to the airport, and by knowing all the places I know. It's always fun to talk to someone from home.

Note the optimism. It's nearly oozing now. It's 10pm and I think I may try to sleep a little more. I have class tomorrow morning, 11am, and homework up the wazoo, but I feel justified in taking it a little easy today. I'm thinking perhaps I'll start living in the library for a couple of hours after school every day. That will serve the dual purpose of forcing me to work AND keeping me out of my room.

I'm trying to avoid stressing. This is supposed to be my stress-free year. I better keep that in mind.

Over and out.

Afoot and light-hearted....

There is something eternally uplifting about Walt Whitman, and I am thankful I remembered to bring my copy of Leaves of Grass back with me. There's nothing like a couple of verses to convince me that the world is really quite a fantastic place.

From this hour I ordain myself loos'd of limits and imaginary lines,
Going where I list, my own master total and absolute,
Listening to others, considering well what they say,
Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating,
Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me.

I inhale great draughts of space,
The east and west are mine, and the north and the south are mine.

- from Song of the Open Road, arguably the most fabulous poem ever written

May I live in his spirit.

Pre-Vacation Blues

NOT!

Hahahahahaahahahaha!

An interesting note -- both my best friend and I (one of my best friends - she and I had a great time dancing on the Pont des Arts with two bottles of terrible white wine this last summer) have moisturizer made from Dead Sea salts - hers from Israel, mine from Jordan. Ah, internationalism.

SO I have a little more than 11 hours before I get in a bus and go to the airport, on the way to London. And a little less than five days before I see my family! I could go on forever. I also could make a huge list of things I want to do while I'm home. Shop at King of Prussia. Go into a bookstore and spend ludicrous amounts of money and then lie in the middle of the floor breathing in the new-book smell. Pork and alcohol. In fact, there's an awful lot I want to eat. I want to run around screaming like a lunatic wearing something totally inappropriate.

Anyway, we'll see how much of that gets done. Obviously I have a lot of people to see and to call also. This is going to be an amazingly good two weeks.

Hooray. But I'm going to get wet and cold, so maybe I'll have to buy some new clothing (haha!).

Joy and love. I'll be around.

On the Road Again

The last couple of days have reawakened my love of music. They've also gotten me completely and eternally addicted to soduku, the number game that was so popular last year and I never got into. Find it here if you're interested in wasting ten or eleven hours a day. At least I feel that I'm doing something mildly mental. The last couple of weeks have involved very little brain and a whole lot of vegetation, which is fine in that it passes the time quickly - but overall I don't think it's that useful. And then Tuesday I went to Dr. Sami's, and Wednesday I stood next to Ms. East-West as we tore a (cooked) sheep apart with our bare hands.

So now that I've proven myself obsessed with things completely unrelated to my purpose in being here, I am faced with the prospect of weaning myself away from all of these wonderful things. Luckily I think I can afford to wait until after break.

Which brings me to the fantastic news. BREAK ON WEDNESDAY!

I am going to the travel agent tonight to get my tickets and pay for them - or that's the idea anyway. I realize I don't really know where the agent is, and so I'm hoping that the driver knows (or else I'll call and ask them to give me directions). And I have a toe appointment. So today I have dubbed 'errand day'.

And THEN the real fun begins - I get to come back to my room and study for an Arabic test/quiz tomorrow. A practice midterm. HAahahahaha. Death in a hat. But at least it will show me how much I still have left to do - and I'm sure there's a lot. I feel fairly clear on the grammar, because it's all simplistic stuff, although obviously learning the terms in Arabic is a little tough. What's particularly weird is that not only do the terms have different names, the entire concept of the sentence is different. For example, when you conjugate the verbs you think of "katabtu" as "I wrote" - the verb, conjugated for first person singular. Then you learn, separately, that Arabic doesn't require explicit definition of the subject because it is implied in the verb. Thus, "katabtu" literally means "I wrote" - the complete thought. But in Arabic terminology, this is thought of differently. A subject is still required, but the "-tu" part of "katabtu" isn't considered a verb, per se. It's the pronoun. So "katabtu" rather than a verb, is a verb, "katab" and a pronoun "-tu". Or, not a pronoun, exactly....

Anyway, I don't understand it that well, obviously. But I'm working on it.

After I master the intricacies of Arabic grammar, my nxt step (and the harder one) is to prepare myself to competently discuss the Jahiliyyah period of Arabic history (being the period prior to Islam - jahil means "ignorant"). That's going to be the real challenge.

And on that note, I'm back to trying to motivate myself.

When it rains, it pours

Wow. By yesterday night I was running completely on empty - and after only two days of mild activity. Who knew doing nothing for so long could make you so lazy. In fact, though I didn't notice it, Tuesday was the day I was supposed to meet with Ms. East-West for my fortnightly meeting to go over how I was doing. Since I'd been doing NOTHING for those two weeks, I somehow managed to convince myself that it had only been one week since my last meeting - so I was a no-show. Of course, I really DO have almost nothing to show for the last two weeks, except a gradual increase in comfort level and an even more gradual increase in Arabic skills. And my Iftar with the Easts. And the saga of my foot.

To make up for those two weeks of inactivity, the past two days have been crazy-busy. I'll start with Tuesday.

Ms. East-West invited me to go with her to the house of Dr. Sami Angawi, a well-known Hijazi architect who happens to live two doors down from her. She was bringing the American visitors anyway, to get a tour of the house, and thought of me because she figured I'd like to see the house (correct!) and she figured that I might be interested in sticking around for his weekly Tuesday-night meetings of thinkers who discuss issues related to Islam and the world (correct again!).

One of my friends tells me I get too irritated at things these days. That's probably true. But he also said, and I think this is also true, that it's because I see a lot of it all at once and everywhere I turn, and it becomes difficult to ignore it. But just think - if I can learn to accept all of these things, even their unacceptance, then I will really be able to be comfortable here.

That was a bit random. Back to Dr. Sami. He met us looking every inch the ancient Hijazi gentleman. I'm putting in a picture here off of the PBS website (he did an interview with them a while ago) of him and his house - you can't see either very well, but I think you can get at least a fair idea of what it looked like. Something directly out of Alf Layla wa Layla (the 1001 Nights). Yes, he has a courtyard surrounded by plants and balconies of different heights, with a giant pool in the center with a tile mosaic of a Persian rug on the bottom. The whole house looked like this, designed to capture whatever stray breezes the sea would provide and surround the inhabitants with green a beautiful things. Even in his office, he has a small round clear table with a tiny fountain and a fishpond under it. It was the most fabulous house I've ever seen and I now want one exactly like it.

And apparently he personally knew the workmen who created the tile and woodwork that decorates every corner of his house.

Anyway, his philosophy is a return to the ''balance'' that characterizes early Muslim life. He also made a very interesting distinction between 'tolerance' and 'acceptance', pointing out that toleration implies 'I don't like you, but I'll tolerate you', while acceptance actually implies what tolerance is generally taken to mean.

Getting to meet the guys from the States was great as well. They all seemed like really smart interesting people and I was sad I was a mere student and not allowed to follow them around all the time.

And then after seeing this magical house Ms. East-West went off with the others and left me to experience the Makiyyah, the gathering. I went to sit with the rest of the women, in the very back of the meeting place, in the dark. There were less than a dozen of us, to the maybe 30 or so men sitting in the front, in the light. We sat and chatting amongst ourselves, listening now and again to the Arabic discussions going on in the front. It turns out that the night I was there was in the memory of an Islamic thinker, Muhammad Allawi al-Maliki (I think), who had died about a year before and was a good friend of many of the men there, so much of what was discussed was what a wonderful man he was. I didn't miss much by meeting the women around me. And there were some fascinating women. One, who I intend to see as soon as possible, told me to call her Natalie. She is Saudi, born in the States, and thinks of the States as her second home. She seemed really interesting. I got introduced to her fiancé as well, which was a completely new experience. He seemed like a nice guy too.

And of course I was given a series of pamphlets on Islam "to help with my studies." It's really beginning to irritate me how everything I am given on Islam is the propaganda stuff designed to convert me. Either they don't understand what it means when I say "I've studied Islam" (and thus actually know something about it) or (and I think this is the most likely) they remain hopeful that if I just see the truth, I'll convert. I can't blame them for trying, but after being given pamphlet after pamphlet it's getting old. My favorite one to date is called "A Muslim Christian Dialogue" but by the end of the pamphlet the Christian has converted, so it's a Muslim-Muslim dialogue.

And speaking of conversion! Two Philipino men who were there with their employer and his wife stood up and spoke the Shahada right in front of everybody, officially converting to Islam. It was a surprise for their employer. The wife turned to me excitedly and told me that one day her driver (one of the men) had turned around and told her he didn't believe that Jesus was the son of God, he only believed he was a prophet. To which, the woman tells me, she responded "well, what are you waiting for? convert! I expect you to be fasting this Ramadan." and then forgot all about it. Well, Ramadan came around and one day the driver said "Ma'am, I'm fasting" and then they planned together how to surprise her husband with the news of their conversion. So they got up and gave the official shahada ("I witness that there is no God but God and that Muhammad is his messenger") making them official Muslims, right there in front of the very happy group.

I've met a bunch of new people, then, who seem more than willing to help me with my studies (really, not just to make me convert) and who seem willing to let me follow them about and learn things from them (Dr. Sami invited me to come over some other time with Ms. East-West). Also, at least one woman (Natalie) has offered to help me with my Arabic and be a friend! How exciting!

That's all for Tuesday night. I'm going to take a break to break my fast. Haha. More on Wednesday to follow.

The Americans are coming! The Americans are coming!

We've been getting emails the last few days warning us that there may be men (gasp!) on campus this week. Now, being well-informed by a number of friendly administrators, I know that these are people here to do curriculum development for the business administration program Effat is trying to start up. So... Americans! Americans from a university! These are my kind of Americans!

Hopefully I will catch a glimpse of them. They are understandably hugely busy, and since this is their first visit here most of the time will be spent showing them Effat and Jeddah and generally being touristy. I am amused at myself for being so excited - these are people from the business world, not the fluffy liberal arts world, and they're admin, not students. But just the idea that there are Americans about warms my heart.

I've had a bit of a dilemma deciding what to do about the abaya issue. The reason all these emails have been circulated is that they want the girls to be prepared to cover up if the men come around. Do I fit into this category? I'm American, they're American, I can't imagine any of them will be surprised to see an American girl not fully covered. At the same time, I am an Effat student. So I've been wondering about this. I haven't worn my abaya to the two Western diplomats' talks, but that was mostly because I forgot. So today I carried around my abaya. I don't know if I'll do that tomorrow or not.

I understood almost all of my Arabic class today. ... well, that's kindof a lie. But I understood enough to know I wasn't missing anything terribly important. She was telling us what will be on the midterm exam. Oh, I can see studying in my future.

But not now! Now I translate a bunch of economic stuff from Arabic to English. I really enjoy this translation, although it's really hard. I'm getting a lot better, though.

I'm so happy today, for some reason. It might have to do with the fact that I took a 6 hour nap this afternoon. So much for sleeping tonight. ha ha. It also might have to do with the music. I LOVE the music.

On that wildly cheerful note, I am going to get down to business. I should have some more entertaining things to say by the end of the week, because I've been invited to a neat Islam meeting at the house of a famous architect by Ms. East-West. That should be extremely neat.

I Want My Mommy

I am 21. Granted, I don't make any money and I have very little actual real-life experience, but I feel that nonetheless I am adult-like in that I am qualified to make my own decisions and, given the necessity, could probably even come up with a reasonable living for myself. Okay, not REALLY reasonable, but, you get my point. I am mildly independent.

When I was 16 my mother was very paranoid. She has since improved dramatically although she still remains a little worried occasionally (but for good reason - I am in Saudi Arabia), but my friends still make comments about how paranoid my mother used to be. It's something of an urban legend at college. And the women who live here make my mother look like a crazed adrenaline-junkie who makes it a point to jump off of tall buildings sans bungie cord as often as possible. These women are nuts. I've taken to calling them the spider women, because they lurk downstairs in the dining hall waiting to quiz me about my eating habits, my sleeping habits, my mental health. As if it's any of their business. And on top of that they know my every move in and out of the college. Worse, they control my every move. Well, I can fix that last bit, because I can hire my own taxi drivers to take me around, and starting very soon I will do that. But otherwise I have to ask them for a car, and then they send a mushrafa with me to make sure I am well-guarded. And in the case of hospitals and whatnot where I'm not sure what the directions are, it seems safer to put up with the mushrafa in order to get the superior directions.

Well, today, I suppose because it was an important doctor's appointment or something, they sent a full-blown Abla with me. The Ablas are the four head mushrafas. They're very nice women, all of them, and have taken very good care of me, but there is such a thing as too much care. And believe me, that's what I'm getting.

So they sent Abla M with me today. In addition to worrying like crazy over my eating habits (worse than my real mother), Abla M has made it her individual duty to ask me every day whether my toe is giving me pain. Despite the fact that I answer 'no' and look cheerful-to-the-point-of-death every time she asks me this, she never gives up the worry that I'm hiding a festering wound of death. Maybe she just doesn't think I am understanding the question properly. So when we went to the doctor's office she insisted on staying with me, in the examination room, and patting me lovingly on the shoulder and/or thigh regularly as if to assure me that it would all be okay. Now, granted, I was a little nervous, and we all know there's nothing like a stranger's hands on your thigh to make everything okay again.

Luckily Mrs. East's brother, the doctor, understood the situation, or at least understood that she was more worried than I was. He ended up asking her to leave or sit in a chair on the side, so I was left to my own devices during the actual painful part. Thank goodness. Pain makes me talk a lot, but it also makes me edgy, and I have no idea what I might have done to that poor woman if she'd started patting me.

The good news - and I know you're all eager to know this - is that my foot is not infected, nor is it going to be a mangled heap of dead flesh. So that's that problem out of the way.

I wonder whether your stereotypical Saudi woman is capable of doing things on her own. They must be - there are so many successful and independent Saudi women around. But I really wonder how they acquire that skill when, even when they're 'away from their family' they're treated like children. And I'm talking 7-year-olds. Of course, I'm sure that the Ablas are more paranoid because we're not actually their children. It's probably better at home, where at least you can prove yourself competent. Here you don't really get the chance. I mean, the Ablas have an excuse, in that the HEAD head Abla has been the Abla here since when the school was a boarding high-school. So she's used to dealing with 14-17 year olds. But even so.

'Abla', by the way, is the respectful (and outdated) term used for older sisters. I think my little sisters could take a lesson from this. Abla Elisabeth. I like the way it sounds.

Disconnected

Hello, loyal blog-fans. It's Friday morning Ramadan-time, which means it's 3pm, and I have just arisen to start my day. I find that the Ramadan schedule is so much closer to my normal schedule anyway that sleeping during the day and eating at night seems completely natural now. This is excellent, because it means I'm no longer starving. Of course, my gorgeous skin-and-bones appearance is on the way out, so we're all crying about that.

I remember complaining at collge in the States about how I wish things stayed open in the middle of the night because that's when I was awake and in the mood to go out - they should take a lesson from Saudi Arabia. I have a doctor's appointment tomorrow at 11:30pm. Things don't even open until 9 or 9:30pm. Of course, here I have no good way of getting out to take advantage of this fantastic schedule... but we can't have everything. And I will acquire the numbers of a few dependable drivers who aren't working for the College, and then I will have my freedom back. Oh, sweet freedom. Of course, I know some of the drivers for the college now and really like them. Mohan, an Indian man from Kerala (is that how you spell it?) has been here 25 years working for Dar el-Hanan and then, when it became a college, Effat. He's got two children in Kerala. He speaks four languages and says he used to be fluent in Korean but has forgotten most of it. He's been here since Jeddah was just a couple of huts on the Red Sea, so he REALLY knows his way around. He says he likes it here because he has a good job.

I'd just like to insert something here. The problem with being in an extreme environment that has access to air conditioning is that the hot-cold-hot-cold makes me sick. I sneeze so much more here than I ever did in New Haven, despite the whole ''winter" thing.

I should explain something basic about my situation here. There are three administrators at the school who have made themselves extremely available to me and have done their best to make me feel welcome. One of them is American, I'll call her Mrs. West for lack of a better name. One is Saudi, I'll call her Mrs. East. And one is a mix of everything, half-Saudi but grew up in Europe and America, I'll call her Ms. East-West. All three have my undying gratitude because without them I would probably have left after a week. These names make them sound old but they're really not. Mrs. West and Ms. East-West are probably ten years older than me, Mrs. East a little older than my parents. I've been referring to them in the blog as "an administrator who..." or something like that, but since my relationship with each of them is different and important, I figured I'd separate them.

I see the Saudi girls who attend school a lot, obviously, but so far I've only really acquired a few people I would consider to be 'friends'. There's Mona, obviously, I rave about her often enough. I'll figure out names for the rest of them when I get there. I don't know to what extent it's fair for me to use people's real names.

Anyway the last couple of weeks, what with my toe and a sudden burst in academic activity (for me, not for the classes themselves - I finally started sitting down and trying to learn Arabic), I've been practically a hermit. But when it rains, it pours, and for yesterday I found I had TWO invitations from wonderful people. Mrs. West and her husband invited me out to play badminton with Dr. A, one of the professors here I've come to like quite a lot. The British school runs a badminton team for teachers and other interested people every Wednesday, and then people generally do dinner or the one time I went there was a surprise party for one of the professors. This would have been an excellent opportunity to get out and see some Westerners. Of course, I couldn't play badminton because of my toe, but I could certainly have cheered.

And then Mrs. East invited me to Iftar at her mother's house! Obviously, that's the sort of invitation you can't refuse. I have met a lot of her family already and they've all been extremely welcoming and very easy to talk to. Her family is fairly Westernized - one of them even married an American - and though individual members may be very religious the family as a whole mixes freely with both men and women, and many of the women don't cover their hair. Not a very traditional family, then. The invitation was precipitated by the fact that one of Mrs. East's brothers is a plastic surgeon and he was kind enough to offer to look at my foot and see if it was healing properly. I felt a bit nervous crashing the traditional Wednesday night family dinner, and during Ramadan at that - but once I got there I no longer felt awkward.

Pretty much it's impossible for a situation like that to bother me. Everybody is very relaxed and at home and I never feel awkward among Mrs. East's family. She has a 13-year-old daughter who I have gotten along with quite well, and an older daughter who is married to a guy who went to college in Connecticut also, so he and I had a good bit of time reminiscing about I-95 (I told some horror stories) and northern winters. Also, one of Mrs. East's nieces, the daughter of 'the American', is involved with the British School and I had actually met her before through the Wests. We had a really interesting conversation about East family dynamics and how HER life had been. Her mother doesn't speak Arabic, and she grew up in Texas and speaking English until first grade, when she was dumped into Arabic-language primary education in Saudi Arabia.

And when nobody was speaking English to me I was listening to the conversations around me and trying to figure out what they were talking about. I wasn't hugely successful, but that's never really bothered me. And I felt significantly more comfortable using basic phrases with the matriarch (Thank you so much, I'll see you again Inshallah, that sort of thing).

The tradition in the house is basically this. One room was set up as a mini-mosque with the entire floor covered with prayer rugs, and family members were continuously wandering in and out to pray. A small table in the entrance hall was set up with sambousas and some sweets and dates and the traditional juices generally used to break the fast. When prayer call appeared on the television (every station shows a live picture of the Qa'aba in the Haram in Mecca as soon as prayer begins - it's a fairly stunning sight to see the millions of people circling the Qa'aba. I heard one woman in the family telling people that someone (this was in Arabic so I didn't catch everything) had gone to pray in the Haram mosque for Fajr prayer one day this week (praying in the Haram mosque is obviously a special experience and since Mecca is so close by people can do it fairly easily, and praying in a mosque during Ramadan is much more important than praying in a mosque any other time of year). Fajr is dawn prayer. And she said that at 4:30 or 5 in the morning, when dawn prayer happened, there was barely standing room in the mosque it was so full. I don't know if you've seen pictures of the Haram mosque, but if you have you probably have an idea how huge it is. And yet for every prayer during Ramadan it is completely packed, as you could clearly see at the beginning of Maghrib. It is moving to see so many people so devotedly involved in an act of worship, even if you aren't part of it yourself. I can only imagine what it feels like for Muslims to see that sort of thing.

I had actually been fasting that day, since my current schedule actually fits with Ramadan fairly well, so I broke my fast like everyone else (futoor is the normal name for 'breakfast', iftar is the name for Ramadan break-fast - see the similarities?). Then we all moved back to the sitting/living room where we all sat on the floor in front of an enormous cloth that had been spread, and we all ate. Then Tash Matash came on (I have no idea what that means so I don't know if I am spelling or even pronouncing it correctly). Tash Matash is the most famous show on during Ramadan. It's been playing during Ramadan probably for almost a decade, and you can tell it's funny even if you can't understand what they're saying. There are some interesting charicatures of people. One scene I remember had a woman in her home getting out of bed and getting ready to get dressed when an old Saudi man wandered in, clearly confused. She started screaming and threw herself into a corner, and he looked around, chewing contentedly, and then sat on the bed and just kindof stared into space. It was entertaining.

So that was my first 'authentic' Iftar experience, and it was fantastic.

Wednesday was a good day for other reasons as well. Obviously, I was looking forward to the weekend - even when I don't have anything in particular to do, it's great to be able to be a bum and do your own thing for a while. I had a quiz in translation and, despite the fact that I'm sure I messed up horribly, I felt a huge sense of victory over the fact that I finished it at all. My Arabic has clearly improved when I can pretend to fit in with a class of bilingual people. Pretend badly, but it's a beginning.

I also had a really interesting conversation about religion with an Indian girl, Y, and a Saudi girl, D, both of whom I have become fairly good friends with. Y came to Effat because she couldn't find a school anywhere else that taught the amount of religious education she wanted. D came but wants to go to Duke if she can. D seems to agree with a lot of American principles, like separation of church and state. Y seems much more faithful to the Saudi-taught interpretation of Islam.

And when I mentioned the video I had seen of those two girls, D had heard of it and knew about the incident. Apparently there was a national issue over it. Some people accused the girls of being too friendly, and that caused an outcry. Others were just outraged in general. The boys are not, she says, going to be killed. She didn't know what was going to happen to them. But she did have an interesting story to add to my collection of creepy-Saudi-guy stories. She knows a woman who is a gynecologist. This woman was in an ambulance rushing to the hospital; she was helping to deliver another woman's baby. They stopped at a red light and some guy in the car behind them, who could see in enough to tell there was a woman in the ambulance, waved a bunch of money at her out of his car window. Hahahaahahahahaha. I have no idea what he expected from this - that the doctor would climb out of the ambulance and offer to have sex with him? It's a ludicrous situation.

One thing I like about life here is that it does seem to have a sort of surreal quality to it. On the way to Mrs. East's house for iftar we passed a woman standing by the side of the road who had a small plastic bag, tied shut, sitting on her head, and was holding a broom with the sweepy side up much like Moses held his staff. This looked, I realized at the time, completely natural for her. And yet anywhere else....

This reminds me....I may to search this picture out. I was sent a picture taken by a friend of a young boy in Pakistan. This is apparently how boys who don't know how to swim keep themselves afloat - by stuffing their pants with styrofoam.

Some things just HAVE to entertain you.