Education in the desert, part three

I like to wind up a course with a rap session amongst the students (and me) about what they expected a course to be like, what they would like to see more of, how they felt about the fact that someone with a submoronic IQ and a four-year-old's grasp of English is sitting next to them in class and will probably be sitting next to them next semester as well -- you know, that sort of thing.

One of the things they missed was literature. Ok, some of them missed literature, the other half wanted more grammar exercises and games (yes, you read that right). So we talked about what sort of cultural knowledge they thought they should have and how it would help them be better engineers and so forth. (I did have to point out to them that once they graduated from university they were unlikely to be locked in a room with a bunch of other people exactly like themselves.)

So we got onto the topic of the humanities in education -- art, literature, music, philosophy, and so forth -- and for some reason we paused on music. We paused because I asked them the following question:

How many of you have heard of Tchaikovsky?

One hand went up. One. Out of, oh, about 65. And that's only because the person that hand belonged to happened to be born in the same country as the above-mentioned composer. Well, perhaps Russian composers just aren't that popular in the mideast. So I tried again:

Mozart?

Beethoven?

Puccini?

Verdi?

Chopin?

No, no, no, no,and no. A few thought they'd heard of Puccini, but I suspect that may be due to the existence of some expensive handbag store that adopted the name to make it sound as if the Chinese rubbish for sale was made in Italy. The sad part is that all the bright students know that they don't know lots of things about the world.

The stupid ones just don't give a shit.

Cooking lessons

No, not the kind where you pay someone to teach you how to bake a cake, but the little ad hoc culinary tips one gets from rather unlikely sources while waiting at the butcher counter in Lulus. This week was no exception.

There I was, patiently waiting my turn so I could have some lamb ground up for kebabs (the general practice is that you pick your cut of beef/lamb/veal and ask the butcher to grind it for you), and I smiled nicely at the elderly gent in skullcap and dishdasha next to me. He seemed a little worried that I wasn't yet being attended to by the butchery folks, and decided to speed things up a bit by asking me what I needed. I told him -- ground lamb.

And then I said the magic words: For kebab.

When I say 'magic' I mean MAGIC. This brought forth a very detailed set of instructions and ingredients from the gent, starting with the advice that I should use a mixture of beef and lamb and ending with lots of finger-lip smacking gestures. In between, he decided that I needed help picking out a hunk of beast to be ground up and so examined all the per-kilo prices for me until he found a suitable one (the 40-Dhs-per-kilo-cut was quickly ruled out). Then came more ingredients that he had forgotten to list earlier -- onion and bqdwns. Yes, bqdwns (can someone buy these people a vowel please?). You know, greens. I think he must have sensed 1) that I didn't speak Arabic and 2) that there were, in fact, about 56 different types of greens available at the Lulus, so he decided it was time to take our carts together over to the herb section of the produce department and look for bqdwns together. I assumed it was coriander, but I was wrong, as he pointed to the coriander (cilantro, for you Yanks) and said "Not that one. Other one." Ok, got it. Parsley. I found the little parsley sign, complete with pictograph for the illiterati, and there was the Arabic translation:

بقدونس

You know -- bqdwns.

He seemed pretty impressed with my Arabic-reading ability, so decided it was time for another forgotten ingredient to be mentioned - 'small like onion, but not onion.' Oh great. Here we go again. It was like playing Password in the produce section. The first thing that came to mind was shallot, but I quickly remembered where I was. Yes, shallots are available at the French-owned Carrefour, at something like a million dirhams a kilo, but only the French actually buy them. So what else is 'small like onion but not onion'? It helped that he held up a finger to indicate how small 'small' was. It did not help that he kept saying 'thum', since I associated that with the finger and figured he just got confused about which one of the five was his thumb.

Then I got it.

Thum = garlic.

I spelled it out for him (tha - waw - mim, pronounced "thoom"), he confirmed my spelling, I thanked him for the help, and we returned to our solo grocery shopping tasks. The fat expats who were staring at us the entire time did the same.

I didn't really have the heart to tell him that I already knew how to make pretty damned good kebab, but I learned two words in Arabic that I'll probably never forget.

A close shave?

Here I am, back in the ether after a slightly longer hiatus than I expected over Christmas. No, it wasn't due to the fact that I was hanging tinsel on my gardenia shrub and wrapping the base of the Christmas palm tree in cheap garland --

I just couldn't log on to my blogger.com account.

Naturally, the first thing that ran through my mind was that Etisalat had found me. And not just Etisalat, but whatever secret organisation (Ministry of Truth, perhaps?) controls the ether. Just think -- that was before I posted the lollipop story.

Yes, I'll confess, after a week or so of hanging browsers, I was getting a little worried. But instead of packing my bags, I re-downloaded the latest version of Tor, configured Mozilla to use the proxy, and shazam! I was back online.

While I was offline, I drafted a little letter to the nice folks at Etisalat:

Dear Etisalat geniuses,

While I commend you on your efforts to limit internet access for the purposes of protecting the innocent citizens of the UAE (not to mention your own bank balance), I think you could try just a little harder. You see, even though you have succeeded in blocking Skype, anything including the Story of O, pictures of Socrates with young Meno, and a number of educational geographic sites (such as the ones that might inform my students that in the southern hemisphere January and December are summer months), you have more work to do. None of these blocks really amounts to anything until and unless you block access to all anonymising proxy servers. So why haven't you done that?

One possibility is that you aren't quite sure what an anonymising proxy server is. Easily understood, when one considers the probability of your average employee knowing what the words 'anonymising' and 'proxy' mean. Let's say it's something like 1/100 for each word, making the probability of knowing BOTH words far less (no, NOT 2/100). My recommendation is that you furnish each of your employees with a dictionary. While they're climbing that steep learning curve, rest happy knowing that every expat in Abu Dhabi is successfully Skyping their loved ones back home.

Except me. You still haven't hooked up my internet.

Kind regards,

Another Expat

Linguistic P*rn*gr*phy

Yes, I did in fact replace most of the vowels in the P-word with asterisks, which is why you are able to continue reading these little snippets. But there's nothing dirty about this post -- it's just another report on how much fun I'm having with a three-vowel language that tries to adopt words from a, well, more-vowel language.

Unfortunately, my story starts with me going to Starbucks. I know, I know, I said I would never go there. And I still wouldn't, except for the fact that I am now living in the land of highly caffeinated beverages and the only decaf joe I can get my hands on is Starbuck's 'Decaf House Blend.' So every couple of weeks I hold my nose, enter the nearest Starbucks (well, except for the filthy one on Hamdan Street), and purchase a bag or two of over-roasted beans that have had the caffeine sucked out of them. Oops, there I went and said "sucked." That'll probably be more than enough to get this site blocked, so read quickly.

Starbucks (for some mysterious reason) has lollipops for sale. They don't appear to be special lollies, just normal I-went-to-the-doctor-and-got-a-lollipop sorts of things. And for those who are unfamiliar with the concept of a sucker (there I go again!), there's a handy sign that identifies them as lollipops. It's also translated into Arabic, or at least transliterated. As

لولي بوب

Yes, that's right, my Arabic-literate friends, "looly boob."

Ok, ok, I can understand that the language doesn't have a /p/. But why the long 'oo' sound for the vowels in 'lolly' and 'pop'? I mean, they're NOT /o/ sounds -- they're /a/ sounds. Go ahead, say it out loud. I'm right, aren't I?

The thing is, Arabic has a perfectly good /a/ sound in its inventory. It's the first effing letter of the Arabic alphabet, alif. So why on earth hasn't someone figured out that they could write


لالي باب

You'd think that a country with such a morbid fear of the boob would work a little harder trying to avoid using that word to describe a suckable piece of candy.

Rich language, poor language

I'm not saying Arabic isn't a rich language. It's probably just as rich as Sindhi, or Igbo, or English, or Korean. But not to the people who speak it natively. To them it's linguistic wealth is endlessly referred to in conversation. Since this wealth appears to be such a given, I have a suggestion:

Use some of that wealth to purchase a few more letters of the alphabet.

(I'm not going to get into technical details about the difference between letters and sounds, mostly because I'm probably one of three people living in the UAE who would be able to do that and I don't really relish increasing the likelihood ratio of you being able to figure out who I am and what I do for a living. So I'll just talk about letters.)

One of my new pastimes, now that I can sort of read Arabic script, is walking around town with my husband reading signs. He doesn't read the signs -- he just laughs out loud while I'm doing so. It's kind of like a scene out of Rain Man, except in Arabic.

This morning's adventure took us from one end of the island to the other, so there was plenty of raw material for me to practise on. For example, a well-known fast-food chain.

(Burger) كنج

That's k-n-j, unfortunately, so we have something like "Burger Kinge" (would you eat there?). And although the speed of my husband's turkebak prevented me from seeing the first word, I'm pretty sure it was something like:

برجر

In other words, "burdger." And a quick check on the chain's UAE website confirms my suspicion:

We've already been over the problem's that arise from the lack of a /p/ sound (Peter --> Beater, for example), so I won't elaborate further on that here, except for the fact that I personally know three Peters in Abu Dhabi and they all have business cards that say "Beater."

Some of you, particularly if you happen to be an expert in some useless field like linguistics, are thinking that I'm insane. Of course Arabic doesn't need to have a soft /g/ sound and a /p/ -- it's not bloody English, it's ARABIC. And you would be right.

But as long as they're going to import words from other languages, I suggest they buy a few more consonants.

Liquor license sur-prizes

After going through all that trouble to get my liquor license -- from the salary certificate from my employer to driving in circles around the desert trying to find the bloody Khalifa City A Police Station -- I had the idea that it would at least be taken seriously by the liquor store people. And it is, at least its existence is. But all that nonsense about the monthly limit (some percentage of my salary, which seems to be arbitrarily calculated) is another story. Let me give you a little example:

There we are, at some liquor outlet (name deleted at suggestion of my husband the lawyer) in Khalidiyah (hey - I can write that in Arabic!) stocking up on a bit of wine and hard stuff. Ok, so we bought about four cases of wine. Or so. We went over to the checkout, I proudly handed over my liquor license, and...

I was over the monthly limit.

I don't know how much over I was -- probably about eight million dirhams or so, judging by the number of bottles we had in the cart -- I was too busy working out my apologetic idiot explanation to the clerk's expected "Sorry madame, you cannot buy this much hooch in one month. Now the liquor police are going to take you out to the desert late at night and beat you to a pulp for making such a stupid mistake."

But that's not what happened.

What the clerk actually said was this:

"Oh, madame! You have spent over X dirhams this month! To honour you and thank you for your patronage we are now going to give you a special prize! Would you like a free bottle of whisky or would you prefer a free case of beer?"

The whisky was shite, so we took the beer.

Education in the desert, part two

Over the past few months I've learned a lot -- unfortunately much of what I've learned is a sort of 'negative knowledge'. By that I mean that I've gained knowledge about what people don't know. I'm going to share (don't you love that word?) some of this with you now, but be warned -- it's a sad story. So if you're already feeling a little blue about the future of the world, save this one for a brighter day.

Even though I don't teach literature, geography, history, or really much of anything else that folks consider useful, references to these fundamentals crop up every so often in my classes. Partly because I'm a generalist to the point of suffering from a serious attention-span problem, partly because there's just no getting away from stuff about the world we live in. Here's some of the negative knowledge I've acquired from my students since teaching in the UAE:

1. None has ever heard of George Orwell. Although a few of them remember reading Animal Farm, they didn't seem to make the connection between Snowball/Napoleon and Lenin/Stalin. Some of them aren't quite sure who Lenin and Stalin actually are.

2. One of them does not have any English language books in his home.

3. The majority of them do not know where the Abu Dhabi Cultural Foundation is. In fact some are a little iffy on the whole geography of Abu Dhabi island.

4. All of them think that Hawai'i is either in the Indian Ocean or in South America.

5. No one has heard of the Holocaust. I mean the event, not the vocabulary word.

6. About 3% are familiar with Charles Dickens. One third of those can actually name a book by him.

7. Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov are unfamiliar names, despite the fact that all of the students are studying science.

8. My cleverest student has not heard of St. Petersburg/Leningrad. Or any city in Russia other than Moscow.

9. A few of them haven't quite wrapped their heads around the fact that I can find their submitted work on at least ten different internet sites.

10. A majority really does believe that dogs eat feces on a regular basis. Now I ask you, have you EVER seen a dog eating poo? If so, and if this is a regular occurrence where you live, please do drop me a line.