nerdycellist @612 -- in lieu of dipping your truffles, could you roll them in cocoa or shaved chocolate (either white or dark)?
Cheryl @78-- thankfully, things have changed:
http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/cis/cis_1753.html
Michael Roberts - I'll second the recommendation for Lindsey Davis's M. Didius Falco series.
And not light reading, but very (very, very) satisfying - Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles. I liked that series much better than her Niccolò series, but YMMV.
abi @ 66. I know, and I agree. New waves of immigrants have often been treated badly. But at least the other, positive mindset is also there (multiple personality disorder?). In some countries newcomers are never truly accepted, no matter how long they live there, and despite attempts to integrate.
Larry @ 51 - It's important to remember that most Americans are not asses, and do recall where their roots are and what it means to become, and be, an American. If you think about all the parades and how people call themselves "X-American" you can see that.
I hope that's still true. I'm not naive, and I've seen how newcomers from, frex, Vietnam or Latin America have been treated, with suspicion or worse. And yet there was always the opposite, the welcoming and acceptance. I've always held fast to the belief that the US was one of the few countries where you could come from anywhere and still be viewed as a "real American", regardless of things like accent. America(n) as a state of mind, as it were. So many things have changed for the worse since I left, and it would be depressing to have to add this to the list.
As a long-term expat, I've seen the way people in other countries treat naturalized citizens -- basically, as only 'technically' a citizen, but not really. As abi mentioned above, there's nothing like being an expat to bring one's own feeling of nationality into focus (for good and ill, with very mixed feelings). Immutably American, you bet. Of the sort that applauds Mr. Keflezighi.
(Weird side note: for a long time, the US did not allow dual citizenship, but now it does. But the country I'm living in, Germany, does not. For various personal and familial reasons, I'm not willing to renounce my US citizenship, but I have inquired a couple of times if there was any hope of an exception being made. One lovely bureaucrat here asked me to my face if I was an accomplished athlete, implying but not quite saying that that might make a difference. Um, no.)
It's like an origami Möbius strip. Seriously cool.
Edinburgh. Oh, my. First encountered very early on a September morning in 1977. Me, a 19-year-old still-jetlagged student on a week's holiday before term started in London. Totally on my own, I decided to go to Edinburgh.
I came up the steps from the train station, and was accosted by a young man going down. "Would you like this ticket?" he asked. "I have to leave now, I can't use it." Yehudi Menuhin, playing the Festival.
I walked and walked and walked. Took buses to odd corners, saw chattering schoolchildren in their uniforms. To this day, the sharp smell of coal smoke on a brisk day will take me back to that corner, on that early busy morning.
Heard somewhere that the university was renting out dormitory rooms to tourists, so I left the dingy depressing youth hostel for the clean, cheerful campus just outside of the city. They had an extensive breakfast buffet (with porridge! and Kellogg's Snack Packs with the Royal Seal). I froze marginally less there, and dried my (waist-length) hair over a light bulb. Hiking around the hills I discovered the exact same view of Edinburgh from a scene in "Chariots of Fire".
I'd do it all again in a heartbeat.
Epacris @908 -- indeed. And which bit do you cut first and feed to your spouse?
Open threadiness: This hasn't appeared on CakeWrecks yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if it did....
Sometimes the invisibility thing shows up earlier in life. Secondary school starts in 5th grade here, and when my daughter was that age, we went to several open-houses. At one, she went into a math class where a demonstration was to be held. There were, as I recall, two girls and two or (at most) three boys. The teacher began his demonstration and asked questions. My daughter was the only one to raise her hand. The teacher not only didn't call on her, he didn't look at her or the other girl; he actually asked the boys if they had ideas about how to answer the question. Needless to say, we chose another school (and fortunately, she doesn't generally have problems getting people's attention).
Translation programs are probably more fun, but if you're looking for a more serious translation, there's one here -
homepage.mac.com/joel_huberman/JohnMaynard/TayEnglish.pdf
David Goldfarb @388 -- what a lovely quilt, thanks for sharing. And your choice of ML thread is appropriate, too: the pattern on one side of the quilt reminds me strongly of the coffering in the Pantheon's dome.
abi @341 -- I don't have any idea if this would work with an iPhone (I have an HP IPAQ), but I used Audacity to edit an mp3 file of Fleetwood Mac's "Gypsy" and grab the guitar riff at the end for a ringtone, also saved as an mp3.
Super-interesting thread, both the original topic and the direction it has taken. I've typed reams of replies, but not hit post yet :-)
A couple of thoughts: on cultural assumptions -- I think they're often like oxygen: we really don't realize they're there until they're missing or just different. And while a natural tendency is to view any difference with suspicion, not all differences are bad. People do what they do for reasons, often excellent ones, when the context is understood.
I would argue that a large number of intercultural difficulties stems from differing ideas about the identity of people as individuals (a very Western, esp. US'ian, thing) vs. their identity as members of a group -- ethnic, religious, whatever. Values such as 'conformity' can have widely varying, even antipodal, valences, depending on this very basic view of identity. I'd have to agree with abi that the longer I live outside my country of origin, the less absolutist I've become WRT whether a particular value is good or useful. I have no answers about how to divine universal values. The closest I can get is to suggest trying to be clear about your own priorities (as an individual or as a nation), and bringing a healthy portion of goodwill to the table when looking for common ground.
It can be tremendously different to reconcile values even within the "same" culture. Tomorrow, October 3, is Reunification Day in Germany. I was here when the Berlin Wall fell, and in the first months there were endless talk shows and discussions between West and East Germans. It was fascinating to observe. They all considered themselves Germans, but they'd been apart for 40 years -- two generations, more or less -- and there were indeed some big differences between the two halves.
What I found very interesting at the time was the tendency[1] of West Germans to treat East Germans as traumatized victims of an evil totalitarian culture. They viewed them as having been brainwashed all those years, and thus not completely competent to handle things in the Big Free World. And indeed solutions were hammered out quickly and without Easterners being full partners.[2] (Again, my very humble -truly- opinion.) And the repercussions of that, in terms of Germany being a completely reunited country, are still being felt 20 years on. There's still a lot of suspicion and resentment, on both sides.
[1]truly, my personal perception here.
[2]not much different, in fact, from the way some people approach the headscarf debate.
Drat. The Phelps group has won an appeal. I wonder if the Supreme Court will take this up?
Just consider the absolutely crucial role that socks play in the world!
Joel Polowin @825 & 828 -- I know you said you want to restore the egg, but would it have to be \as/ an egg? Could you use the pieces as the basis of a mosaic? Just a thought.
David @8: How can I change their minds if they won't engage? How can I learn from them if they won't explain?
In terms of identifying bullying behavior, bullying messages seem to convey the wish to only change others' minds, without any appearance of being willing to learn.(Like silverback gorillas asserting dominance.) And that type of behavior discourages people from engaging, which is the crux of the problem for promoting a conversation. As Fade Manley said, some people truly aren't interested in dialogue per se.
But if someone gets het up by a topic, starts crossing the line into disrespect, gets called on it, and then backs down -- great! Perfect. What more can you expect, really?
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