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Eastraveller

~ Every day I learn him, every day he doesn't learn.

Eastraveller

Tag Archives: Cultural differences

‘I never forget a face’

07 Tuesday May 2013

Posted by traveller in Friendship, Life in the Middle East, Travel

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Cultural differences, Faces, Living in the Middle East, Memory, People, Personal, Strangers

I used to think I have a reasonable memory of faces.

I remember random faces from the past, strangers that never crossed my path in other ways than through some meteoric quirk, quickly shot down in the sea of their anonymity.

An old Irish gentleman I once saw in an airport calling the waiter ‘boy’. 

An American marine drawling invitations to prayer on the edge of a swimming pool.

A Saudi driver emerging grim-faced from a coffee shack on the side of a dusty road.

A crying toddler, the English father slamming down his thick book in simmering fury at the disturbance, the Spanish mum fading under a sun hat, grandma singing softly to herself .  

They are all revered exhibits in my inner museum of strangers.

But coming to the Middle East has dwarfed my museum to the dimensions of someone’s old shoe box left near the Prado.    

What I used to label as a reasonable ability is in reality quite sub-standard. People here never forget a face. They say they don’t and they don’t. Ever.

I went to a little Red Sea resort a year after first spending a couple of days there. The waiter put down an empty lemonade glass and greeted me with a wide smile.

“Hello! You were here a year ago! You like hummus!”

As indeed I do so I proceeded to create new memories of my appetite.

I once left a bag in the corner shop. A month later, I went back and the guy handed it back to me as if we’d parted 5 minutes ago.

People here care about faces. They scrutinise every centimetre of unknown skin until it is so firmly implanted in their memory that the combined bulldozers of time and new- foreigness can’t possibly dislodge it.  

In Egypt I once spent a morning walking around extremely busy Islamic Cairo.

Later the same day, I happened to be back in (roughly) the same area.

A guy I had never seen in my life stopped me:

‘You’re back! Why?’

‘How do you know I’m back?’

‘I never forget a face.’  

 

7 things about living in the Middle East or Versatile Me

28 Sunday Apr 2013

Posted by traveller in Life in the Middle East, Travel

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

Are you married?, Cultural differences, Icebreakers, Living in the Middle East, Personal questions, Relationships, Shops, Taxi drivers, traffic, Versatile Award

Cairo moto coupleLadies and gentlemen,

Now for some breaking news! It appears that my ramblings have not gone unnoticed in Riga as its smartest, funniest expat (who lives at http://expateyeonlatvia.wordpress.com/) has nominated me for the Versatile Blogger Award! 

So I am to:

  • Thank the person who gave you the award& Include a link to their blog

Thanks again, http://expateyeonlatvia.wordpress.com/:)!

  • Next, select 15 blogs/bloggers that you’ve recently discovered or follow regularly& Nominate those 15 bloggers for the Versatile Blogger Award

I tried!

But versatile as I am, the process of cutting and pasting links& then letting people know they have been nominated had me labouring fruitlessly for about half an hour and then was duly abandoned.

So instead, could I nominate everybody who reads this post for the Versatile Blogger Award? I know it’s not quite how it’s done but I would love it if you could please take me up on this and spare me the misery of endless drafts going to the bin due to excessive pasting.

Living in the Middle East has taught me that rules are optional so instead of telling you 7 things about myself I thought I’d tell you 7 things about living here.

1. There is no such thing as bad coffee (unless you are having it in a hotel for breakfast which is a universal curse so it doesn’t really count)

2. Most men go to the barber weekly

3. The most usual icebreaker is ‘hello, are you married do you have kids how old are you?’  

4. If you think a shop is too small to have what you’re looking for you’re probably right. What you don’t know is that the owner knows somebody who knows somebody who will have it ready for you somewhere.

5. Traffic rules are entirely optional.

6. Nobody uses street addresses. Ever. A typical taxi journey involves the driver staring at you wordlessly as you mumble a street name, then stopping next to a man who’s crouching on the pavement eating pumpkin seeds. The driver asks for directions, the seed eater stares wordlessly. Then he shouts at somebody who’s making a falafel nearby. Who calls his cousin.   

7. ‘With my family” is the default answer to most questions the inquisitive traveller might ask about weekends, holidays or any other form of free time

Love in a Hot Climate or How I Met Your Mother the Bedouin way

25 Thursday Apr 2013

Posted by traveller in Life in the Middle East, Travel

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

Bedouin, Cultural differences, Dating, How I Met Your Mother, love, Marriage, Men and women, Relationships, Traditions

ImageA is a young bedouin. 

He’s smart and quick and very generous. He taught himself English while working in an airport carrying luggage and glimpsing at a world of incomprehensible men and women in flip flops and sun hats.

A likes peach juice (and always shares it with whoever happens to be around), owns a little house and 10 sheep and wants to know about the world. Europe is particularly baffling.

‘Where do European men meet their women?’ he asks, looking in the side mirror and struggling to supress an embarrassed smile.

“Well, it depends. At work, at university maybe. Parties. How about you? How did you meet your wife?’

“Well, I didn’t. Not before the wedding.’

‘That’s a bit risky. What if you didn’t like her?”

‘Well, I knew everything about her. I’d talked to her brothers. And her father. Her whole village knew her. They told me about her.’

 “Ok. But you still didn’t know her personally. That’s brave.”

“No, it’s not. You trust a complete stranger. You know nothing about their family, taste, history, health or good name. You just see them. That’s a bit risky.’

Oh. I never thought of it this way. In retrospect, maybe I should have consulted a few villagers here and there:)
I finished the rest of my peach juice in silence.

Three bad boys who gave reading a bad name

11 Monday Mar 2013

Posted by traveller in Language, Life in the Middle East

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

Books, Classical Arabic, Colloquial Arabic, Cultural differences, Culture, expat, Family, Reading, Social behaviours

I am an obsessive reader. I read everything I can get my hands (or eyes) on. 

I suffer withdrawal symptoms when I haven’t got enough reading matter at hand (and despite being a reading addict I am quite selective about what I like to read, which makes my daily foraging task doubly difficult). 

When I first came to the Middle East my confessions on the subject were met with suspicion.

Hello! What are you doing?

I’m reading a book.

Why? 

It soon became apparent that most of my my bright, charming, lovely new friends hated it with the same passion I hated chemistry in school- and as I came to realise, for pretty much the same reasons: incomprehensible, deadly boring stuff somebody forces upon you for no obvious benefit. As filled with pleasure as a fork in the eye.  

A young Syrian guy I know went to London and he came back full of praise and awe. Everything was so beautiful, he said, but there was one thing I didn’t understand: people read everywhere, on the tube, train, side of the road, cafe, you name it. His mate listened to this account in disbelief, then said: “You must have been in a university district of some sort,  they were probably studying for an exam.”

Every time reading comes up as an entertainment option people shudder in horror. 

So when I said to my inner detective, dear Watson, we must get to the bottom of this, here’s what he found: 

1. There are two Arabic languages. There is Fusha (classical Arabic), the language of books, university lectures, news, serious stuff. And there is colloquial Arabic, which people speak every day and which, by some accounts, bears as much resemblance to Fusha as Dutch does to German. 

Now if you or I had to read the latest Nick Hornby in the language of Beowulf, we’d probably also find that a type of torture. Students are made to read a lot in school and all of it is in a difficult (though beautiful and poetic) language they don’t speak. No wonder the memory of it all is akin to my chemistry nightmares.

I know somebody who needed private tutoring during university to cope with the language of the courses. Eventually, he decided it would be easier to just switch to English.  

2. Reading is seen as a solitary occupation. You basically sit and read and ignore the rest of the world. Now here this is a big no no. The social structure of big families with very strong ties, in permanent verbal contact, means you are very rarely on your own. 

It would be supremely rude of you to sit in a corner engulfed in Pride and Prejudice while Uncle Ahmad is relaying the latest news of your cousin. And if you are on the bus alone, your phone rings every 2 minutes for much of the same, so no time at all to open that Orhan Pamuk novel you thought you might like. 

Obviously, this is a huge generalisation. There are people who love to read, who master the two languages (and more) with an intellectual ease that makes me green with envy. 

But for those who don’t, I have a suspicion that taking the combined baddies of Forced, Solitary and Hard out of the reading would make it fly.

Book clubs, dialogues, reading circles, a spoken follow up to anything you read would just inject life in its tired veins. Take the word of a reading junkie:)

Why are we so obsessed with weekends?

04 Monday Mar 2013

Posted by traveller in entertainment, Uncategorized

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

Chit chat, Cultural differences, European abroad, expat, Expectations, travel, Weekend

I’ve had several revelations since I moved here. Having to do with Europeans abroad and how we roll. And expect the world to roll.  

We are obsessed with weekends. 

“How was your weekend? What are your plans for next weekend?” we chirp merrily at whoever crosses our path.

Upon being thus questioned, people here scratch their heads and try hard. “I sit with my family” they say. More scratching. Benevolent confusion. What the hell is she expecting me to say? 

“Ok, but what did you do?” we press on energetically.

The truth is not much. It’s just not that big a deal. A few hours of not having to go to work. Good. You eat and talk to your family and then eat some more.

Next weekend you do the same. What is there to talk about?

But we won’t stop. Worried that the weather is not of sufficient variety to allow for extensive chit chat, we desperately cling to weekends and holidays.

“And your last holiday?” we ask hopefully.

“I sat with my uncles”. Little changes but the tense. 

I kept at it. Until one day a guy stopped me as I was forming the word “how”. “Was” never came out.

 “Please”, he said. “Don’t ask me about my weekend again. When I do something I’ll tell you.” 

He hasn’t yet been in touch. 

 

 

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