Prague, 1968

Prague, 1989

PRG

I have to first apologize for my long absence- my only excuse is that I’ve been having too good a time to stop and think about writing about what a good time I’ve been having. Long story(ies) short, Eric and I arrived in Prague after a month in Montreal to begin our next set of adventures, albeit in somewhat more conventional locations. We were greeted with a small surprise from our new university, Univerzita Karlova, who informed us that classes would be starting a week later than previously anticipated because, in the words of our International Office liaison “Under normal circumstances, classes would start on 28th September. However, because Monday 28th September is a public holiday in the Czech Republic, we cannot start classes that day, and our teaching departments are adopting various strategies to deal with this. Some are starting their classes on Tuesday 29th September (skipping the Monday classes in their first week), others are delaying the start of classes until Monday 5th October.” Can any of you imagine the department of Political Science at McGill deciding 2 weeks before the start of the semester that it wanted to start a week later than everyone else? HMB would laugh hysterically I’m sure. Lucky for us this meant 2 weeks to settle into Prague (i.e. find a place to live) and to travel a bit.

St. Vitus Cathedral

Mucha window in St. Vitus

First impressions of Prague were lovely. A city caught between Holy Roman pride and Slavic roots, Prague exhibits a unique blend of East and West that is evident everywhere, even in spite of the more recent layer of Soviet uniformity clinging persistently to the city walls. This isn’t my first time to the city, but there are still three new things that caught my eye this time around:

1. The transit system Prague has three public transportation systems: the Metro, the tram system, and the bus system. All three seem to operate under an honor code of sorts. There are no turnstiles to the metro and no one checking tickets to get onto the bus or tram. You are supposed to buy tickets and have them stamped at machines located at the top of the escalators to the metro platforms, or inside the bus/tram cars, but since there’s no one around to make sure that the hundreds of people who just walk through have monthly passes, I can’t help wondering how many people never bother to buy tickets. I would consider this true “transportation of the people”, perhaps a remnant of Communist influence???
2. The Vegas Factor There are casino’s EVERYWHERE. Even bars often have a couple of slot machines handy (I suppose to make up for the low price of beer). We’ve assumed that the “Nonstop” signs mean that they’re open 24/7, just in case you really feel like playing a hand of poker before work.
3. Erotic City Prague’s most successfully commercialized sex shop, Erotic City appears with the frequency of Sean Turner’s name on a McGill bathroom wall. Between this, the casinos and the cheap beer, I’m beginning to believe my Polish father’s insistence that “the Czech’s don’t take ANYTHING seriously!”

The Seine at sunset

A familiar face; Peace pagoda

As nice as Prague is, we decided to take advantage of our extra week and go to Paris to visit Eric’s friend Jérémie and enjoy ourselves. It’s been 5 years since I was last in Paris and returning gave me the same sense of relief that I feel when I arrive back on Montréal island. It’s sort of like returning from some great foggy void to cool reality- I suppose it’s the same feeling New Yorkers have when returning to Manhattan. We had an incredible week of fine weather and relaxed wandering, and then to top it all off took a short weekend trip courtesy of Jérémie and his voiture to Rennes, Fougères, and Mont St Michel.

Jérémie

It’s all too beautiful to explain, so our experiences will have to speak through a few pictures, but suffice it to say we found ourselves wondering if we should not have gone to France for the semester instead.

Rennes: authentic Brittany

Fortress at Fougères

Mont St Michel from below

From above

We were reassured in our decision when we finally returned to Prague and settled into our flat to discover that we are literally 15 minutes from Wenceslas Square and just around the corner from the Prague Symphony Hall, but nonetheless there is something about Paris that is impossible to replicate anywhere else.

View from our bedroom window

As for now, school has finally started so we have a bit more structure in our lives, but this isn’t deterring us from planning future trips. Next on the agenda: Rome, Berlin, Krakow, and Budapest. Life is very, VERY good.

Home Sweet Prague

Quarreling over Quneitra

Excuse the hiatus, sometimes life looks you square in the eye and asks you to live it, and you are paralyzed to answer in opposition. That would have been a better excuse than indifference and laziness. Like everything, however, I think the cause is somewhere in between the two proposed situations. Anyway, before my Syrian life becomes a barely visible speck in my mind's eye have tasked myself to finish what I've started, and quickly.

The IFPO in all of it's wisdom decided that taking it's students of the Near-Orient to a fought-over territory would be a great experience. One part education, one part propaganda, what could be better for those of us willing to see and to learn and those of them willing to show and teach us? So off we filed into our comfortable air-conditioned bus, single file into the south-western corner of Syria, into land that was once occupied by six-sided star toting military personnel. Golan (جولان) is the south-western most province in Syria, not to be confused with the Golan Heights (هضبة الجولان) which is the Israeli-occupied (now settled) mountainous region further west. Naturally there is a UN-administered portion in the middle with cute little white-with-black-letter vehicles roaming around, driven by people in blue hats. (Presumably) Map below for reference.



Our first stop was in Quneitra (al-Qunaytirah on the map). Formerly the largest inhabited city in the Golan, now a ghost town of only a handful of families. The story goes that after the 1967 6 Day War the Israeli army occupied the city, but eventually withdrew. As they were withdrawing they took every salvageable item and then razed the city, leaving it a burnt out carcass. The Syrian government decided not to clean up the mess or rebuild the city, choosing to leave it as a reminder of "Zionist brutality".

Of course the other story goes that once the Israel army withdrew they did take some things with them, but after they left the Syrian army destroyed anything left standing in the name of propaganda so they could have a "smoking gun of Zionist brutality". The truth? Probably somewhere down the middle. (reoccurring theme) The following are pictures of Quneitra.


The town is little more than a collection of rubble like this one

(Someone should have told the Syrians that propaganda, regardless of it's truth, is most effective when grammatically correct)

The whole hospital is a bullet-laden carcass. The not so subtle ironic point that an institution of life should be transformed into a symbol of destruction is deafening.


Contentious Issue #1: The Golan is a member in a small community of arable lands in the south of Syria. Note the greenery.

We carried along on our trip and saw various sights, the most memorable being the border. Oh what fun with barbed wire, UN patrols, and minefields. It was simply a modern fairytale of Near Eastern origin.


Empty fields usually mean one thing: mines.


Barbed Wire party!


Contentious issue #2: Disputed territory that is settled on. The civilization before you is all brand-spanking post-1967 new. That's because it wasn't part of Israel before that year. Peace process? I don't think so.


Patriotic border.



My favourite picture (courtesy of Jeremie), note the "Welcome to Israel" sign past the UN guard stations. That sign is ready for the day that diplomatic relations between Syria and Israel normalize. Regardless, I wonder just how 'welcome' the Syrians will feel.

So we made our merry way back to Damascus after a long and tiring day of Zionist hating. Our attempt was thwarted on a deserted highway when our front tire spontaneously popped. Coincidence? I think not. This could only be the sinister work of The Zionists! Fortunately we needed only wait 45 minutes before the charter bus company came and rescued us. Thank goodness for kind, hard working Syrians to save us from the evil, maniacal Israelis. !يا الله


Pop goes the bus tire.

(this tour really was a sham)

E

Roamin' with the Romans

Daytrip #1. As life develops a daily rhythm here in Damascus I find the wanderlust stirring me in unplanned directions. With an apartment, daily classes+homework, general knowledge of a familiar city, a gym membership and (very) basic communication skills, it is easy to sink into an apathetic splendor, scarcely wandering into the vast unknown. No thanks. So a week ago I was asked on friday night if I had any desire to visit the city of Bosra. Basra? like the Garrison City in Iraq?? No. BOsra, in southern Syria. Whip out the guidebook; OH, there it is! What's there to see? Reading Reading. Can't focus on the lines... Bah, who cares, it's a trip...

So Early the next morning off we go to Bosra in the south of Syria. An important dot on the map of three ancient civilizations: Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic. Who knew? Alright, so maybe I actually did read every line for line in the Lonely Planet, but where knowledge comes from is irrelevant, so long as its credible, right? If my knowledge is guidebook + wiki fusion I can still rest easy knowing that anyone who tries to contest my thoughts will utilize the same tools. Right now Bosra doesn't have much in the way of sights or (contemporary) culture. So that leaves a plethora of ruins from first the Nabateans, then by the Romans (who made it their capital of the province Arabia Petraea), then the Persians took it over, finally to be recaptured by the Byzantines. The city changed hands again the 7th Century and became an Islamic posession and remained (more or less) so. (never mind that there is no Islamic Empire anymore, depsite what they would have you believe) (I think Wikipedia disregards the coming of modernity, the Ottoman Empire, the French colonization and the modern Syria state, but that's a rant for another time)

To be succint for once, Bosra has a major historical footprint. Here are 16,000 words to make up for above.


RM Jeremie + mosiac before entering the fortified Roman theatre

Nice and cool despite 40+ deg. outside

Before the PC, Tablet had a different meaning

Scale is lost, but the Romans know how to make a big theatre. I promise.

from the theatre, as a spectator.

Welcoming Uncle Hafez

Around Bosra ruins. (outside the theatre)

I think that during this photoshoot in the more or less open ruins we pissed off the Gods. I guess if I were an eternal being and kids were running around on the unprotected ruins of my ancient cilization I'd be angry too. While wandering through Bosra we decided it would be a great photo-op to take a picture of us standing on adjacent columns. So we set up our cameras to self-timed shots, and all his the "shoot" button, but in transit I jumped from a Roman fence, lost my fickle Birkenstock and managed to stub my toe on some ruins enough to peel have my (big) toe's nail back. At the same time I hear a sickening thump as japenese plasticmetal + gravity comes in full contact with roman stone. Fortunately not my camera, and after an hour of fear and sadness technology prevailed. My toe also healed, though it took a few days.


This is the photo that caused so much pain. I'm to the bottom left, pulling my toenail back into place.

Bloodied, but attached.

Crazy man. Good thing the gods weren't mad at him.

(they love these pillars, eh?)

The population has decreased over the centuries and the small local village makes use of what they can for their own homes. Good for them, bad for archeologists.

Essential camel shot.

Then we hopped in a minibus and drove to another city in the south, perched atop Jebel Druze, called Shahba. What did we see there? More ruins!


en route landscape

moodsy, rugged-individual picture with mountain + moon

Old + New.

Bottom Line: civilizations come and go, but they're hard to kill. I just hope that when our civilization falls that the rust bucket automobilies and the wooden and brick homes we've constructed can withstand 1800 years. Something tells me that our evanescent society won't hold up against the cold eternal face of stone. Way to go guys.

E

I always loved a good Rumsfeld quote...

So I was walking back to my guesthouse yesterday and there was this giant cow sitting on the sidewalk….but no seriously it was HUGE. I had to walk out into the street just to pass by. I wish I had a picture but you’ll just have to take my word for it I guess.

Anyway, it’s been awhile since I posted, which is largely the result of my busy schedule the last few weeks. My translator Swastika started on July 1, and since then we’ve been interviewing everyday at the Kathmandu and Lalitpur offices of BDS, as well as Cruise Aid, which is one of the community-based organizations under the Federation of Gender and Sexual Minorities of Nepal (founded by BDS). She’s been terrific- as a recent graduate of social work here in Kathmandu, she already has experience interviewing and translating, and is aware of some of the obstacles I’ve faced to obtaining a substantive interview (like getting people to voice their criticisms). She did her field work as a student at BDS as well, and so is familiar with the organizational structure of the offices, as well as a number of staff members. She has also become a good friend of mine since we spend most work days together now- it’s so great having someone to show you around and help you find places when you don’t know where you’re going! Between my host sister Tara and Swastika, I actually have gotten to know Kathmandu pretty well, which has made things a lot more comfortable for me here.

Since I haven’t done much tourist-ing in the last 2 weeks, I just tell you a little more about how my work is going. I’ve come up against a couple obstacles this month as I’ve gotten deeper into my case study. The most obvious is that since I don’t speak Nepali, I often miss conversations about events or programs being held at the various offices that would be helpful for my project. I typically need to ask very directly if I can go to an event because the staff I am in contact with don’t seem to think that it’s the sort of thing I’m interested in, and if I’m not even aware that anything is going on then I usually end up missing the event (this week it was the human rights training for staff members). I think that I’ve made it clear that I would like to observe the workshops, however, and so this week I think I will get the opportunity to sit in on one.

The second major obstacle I’ve been facing is the absence of a clear paper trail on a lot of the programs that they have done over the last 9 years. Whereas we tend to document everything obsessively, the reports here at BDS are scattered through various locations, and I need to give a heads up in advance if there is any report I’m interested in looking at since it takes a while to track them down. At this point I have some documents and know I’m missing a couple more, but on the whole it’s hard to know whether there are any major reports that I should have that I don’t even know exist (the unknown unknowns anybody?).

The staff at BDS, however, is very accommodating, and when I figure out that there’s something I need to that I don’t have they are happy to help me out. As my key informant Pradeep warned me at the beginning of my project, doing any kind of work in Nepal requires a high degree of personal initiative, otherwise nothing will get done. With Swastika at my side, however, it is much easier to let them know what it is I’m interested in, and so my case study has definitively sped up considerably. So far I’ve done about 30 interviews, with about 20-25 to go in the next couple weeks. Whew! Needless to say I’ll be busy, but not too busy to enjoy a few days with my supervisor Magda when she comes to do her site visit this week! I already have a few fun things planned for us, so hopefully the weather cooperates and I have some more pictures to share with you next week!

P.S. I'll add some photo's in a few days...right now it seems that the blog is suffering "technical difficulties."

Living the (literal) High Life

It's nice not being homeless in Damascus. Not that there was ever any risk of that, but to live in a wardrobe is incredibly different than living in a suitcase. When we initially got to Damascus our hostel host offered us to stay in his apartment for 2000 SYP a month (equivalent to 500 CAD) which divided by 3 would be... hella cheap. Unfortunately, he thought our French "Institute" was the French Embassy and so the relative closeness he described was fictitious. So back to the drawing board for the weary travellers, spending exorbatant amounts of money each day in a cushy hostel. The next day we went to our Institute and looked to see what they had posted. The first post seemed promising, advertising a 2 bedroom apartment very near to the French Institute. We met with the landlord who seemed willing to negotiate the 2500 SYP a month, under one condition: no boys. Our mixed household was quashed, and while my compatriots had a comfortable 2 bedroom dwelling, I was again homeless. The landlord's name was Osama (reoccuring theme, eh?) and he actually had 2 2 bedroom apartments. So we went back to the insitute and tried to figure out what to do, having not given Osama a definite answer.

While putting our heads together a boyman walked into the institute and said "hello" to us. His name was Jeremie and was from France. He arrived in Damascus two days before and was looking for an apartment. ohhh really???? He went into the institute, came our a little while later, and then I asked him, having met him 55 minutes earlier, if he needed a place and a roomate. He said, "euhh, bah, oue." (but in English) and so 20 minutes later we were scoping the APT. After a brief deliberation it was ours and that evening we moved in. Jeremie and I on floor 4, Leah and Jordan on floor 3. Their APT is nicer and had AC, but hey, we've got the balcony and the view so we winl.

SOur apartment has a tiny kitchen, 1 1/2 baths, 2 separate bedrooms, a salon that has a TV room/ attached hallway/dining room and then a wrap around balcony with access to the roof. In other words, on top of the world and big. For about $300 CAD per person a month, things could be worse. Not to mention 3 minutes walk away from classes, so the 8:10 alarm for an 8:30 class is manageable. Here are some pictures, emphasis on the view of Mount Qasioun (جبل قاسيون):


View from my bedroom window


Bookshelf: Nerd alert, 5 Arabic Text/Reference Books


Hallway/Dining Space (in the background in the TV/salon)


Our (messy) Deckspace


Down from the Roofstairs


View of the Mountain. Civilization creeps up like a fungus.


Sundown from the rooftop with da moon


Mount Qasioun again

Our neighborhood is in the embassyville of Damascus. Our apartment/institute is in the neighborhood Shaalan/Abu Romaneh whereas our hostel was in the walled Old City. In between is "central Damascus" which is essentially the "real-person" commercial district, still more vibrant than our niche, but not as impressive as the old city (from which my last blogs pictures were taken). So while it is large and relatively cheap (surprising since this neighborhood in notorious for expensive rent) the neighborhood is for the foreigners/well to-do locals. Maybe living in the old city would be more fun, at least we're near the study destination. Below is a Damascene map for orientation:



So good roomate, good place, and okay location. Not bad at all. My roomate and are are getting into cooking things, exploring things, and generally being travellers. I think we have a lot in common and that we'll be very compatible flatmates and travel companions. All in all, things are looking up. (literally) Lets just hope Osama fixes our Air Conditioning.

E