Google Revolutionizes Cheating In High School Spanish Class

Holy crap. Google, please me merciful to me when you take over the world- just remember, I was an early supporter.

Today, unwilling to spend the time in an internet cafe it would take to translate an Arabic article I was interested in, I lazily ran that article through Google Translate, expecting to at least get a good chortle out of the pitiful attempt at making sense of Arabic that was to follow. Two minutes later, I began preparing myself for the human race's imminent demise. 

DAMASCUS (Reuters) - Said Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on Wednesday that peace talks with Israel stalled because Israel is not interested in achieving peace.

He said Assad, who was speaking at a joint news conference after talks with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Damascus that Israel's demand for negotiations without preconditions means that they want to "destroy" the peace process.

"What we discussed today is how to get the peace process impasse it has reached, which we believe to be caused by the main ... the absence of serious Israeli partner who really sought to achieve peace in the Middle East."

Wait... is that... legible? Wasn't it only a year ago when I would try to do something similar with a much simpler language, Spanish, and the program would pull up something that looked less like a professionally written article and more like a Facebook post sprawled on your wall by Eric Dreir at 5:00 in the morning after an especially "thirsty" Thursday?

Truthfully, I'm not sure I want to live in a world where a free-online-translation tool can translate any article in any language, as well or better than a translator, whilst completely avoiding the butchery of the English tongue. (Although on the upside, whoever bears responsibility for the prose of the Twilight books officially just ran out of excuses.) In particular, this new development puts a nail in the coffin of my plan to try to get a job in translation when I return to the States, whenever that fateful day might be. Now that I see what I'm up against, I can only concede defeat. The golden age of humanity is over; the dawn of the machines is on.

(Sorry, Jose, but that means we don't need you anymore.)

Finally, as a reference and a desperate comfort-seeking measure, I tried the same thing with the only other online translation tool I could find that would translate Arabic to English for free. The results eased my mind:

Damascus (Reuters) - Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on Wednesday that peace talks with Israel deadlocked since Israel is interested in peace. He added al-Assad, who was speaking at a joint press conference after talks with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Damascus that Israel's demand for negotiations without conditions mean that it wanted \ "هدم\" of the peace process. He said \ "Today we discussed how to get the peace process of the impasse in which we believe to be caused by statute... The absence of the Israeli partner serious, which seeks to achieve peace in the Middle East."

Is there anything quite like a visit from an old friend?

---

In another tidbit, which I'm not even going to pretend is even tangentially related to the above, I feel I should warn anyone who plans on ever using a Syrian treadmill: don't ever use a Syrian treadmill. Or at the very least, don't turn it on while standing on it, in the expectation that it will be like it's Western counterpart and start at 0 mph, allowing you to increase the pace at your own rate. You see, apparantly, Syrian manufacturers saw fit to save us treadmill users that time and effort by simply starting the mph meter at full blast, the instant you press that little red button. What's a few hundred treadmill-related deaths a day in the name of efficiency?

And the West thinks it has a stranglehold on ingenuity... Fools.

Yassir, the (Probably) Rapist Kurd

Everyday, a little, old 5-foot Kurdish man walks up and down Old Damascus' main artery, Straight Street, in search of tourist blood. Upon sight of a white face, he hones onto his target and goes into a salesman-like spiel, desperately attempting to get them to come back to his place so he can, ostensibly, "play them some music". Why this man is so desperate for tourists to come back to his place so he can "play them some music", no one knows. They only know that the locals advise not to take him up on his strange offer. And that his Brad-Childress-like-mustache makes him look like a rapist.

For most people, that's where the curiosity ends. But not me. Thus, today, I had the distinct pleasure of spending an hour with the man my roommate and I had come to affectionately know as "Yassir, the rapist Kurd".

In the past month, I've been greeted by Yassir about ten times. Each time, his greeting was the same: "Hello, where are you from?" Because I quickly realized that Yassir had the memory of a drunken 85 year old and seemed to be incapable of remembering that we had this conversation about twice a week, my nationality changed everytime. What didn't change was my answer to his proposition.

No, I'd prefer to not get anally violated today, thanks. Though I worded it differently.

Finally today, knowing that my time in Syria is waning and having been slowly and systematically warn down by Yassir, Andy from The Office style, I took the persistent little man up on his offer. What can I say? I kinda did want to hear some Kurdish music. And more importantly, I wanted to see firsthand what kind of villainy was lurking behind that stache'.

And oh yeah, did I mention that Yassir is 5 feet tall? That may have played into my willingness to go along too.

After becoming reacquainted for the 11th time, we eventually got to Yassir's pad, a tiny little hole in the wall. I would have felt sorry for him, if I hadn't been living in an even tinier hole in the wall for the last few months. And then, Yassir pulled out his instrument.

(Cue misleading dramatic pause...)

(Hold on, I want to draw this out a little bit longer...)

(Okay, that's good...)

Yassir's instrument, fortunately, was a small, handmade Kurdish guitar-like contraption with six strings. He called it a bizzuka. I pointed out to him that, in Arabic, bizzuka translates as your boobs, a little nugget of wisdom taught me by my sometimes Arabic teacher (who by the way hasn't been seen in weeks and could very well be dead). Yassir, and his mustache, stared at me vacantly. Apparantly, I thought, Kurdish rapists don't exactly have the best sense of humor.

For the next 30 minutes, he and I jammed out on the bizzuka and two other instruments, an old Arabic flute-thingy and a one-stringed Arabic violin-majig that was called, if I remember correctly, an urab. They weren't exactly the most complex, technically difficult instruments to play- even when he played the six-stringed bizzuka, he only moved his left hand on one string the entire time, leaving the rest open- but the music coming out of them definitely had it's own appeal. I would compare music created with traditional Arabic and Kurdish instruments to movies shot in grainy old-fashioned black and white; yeah, the quality is infinitely worse than what you can get out of more typically modern instrumentation, but the end result very capably conjures a particular time and place. In the right hands, that effect alone can produce something powerful.

(Admittedly, those hands weren't my own; when I attempted to play the one-stringer, it sounded like a combination between nails on a chalk board and the sound of something slowly and painfully dying.)

Finally, he pulled out two cups of chai, something I had been waiting for him to do. I grew apprehensive; if ever there were a tried-and-true technique that could work for a 5-foot rapist, it would be the "slip a lil' sumthin'-sumthin' in the chai, wait two minutes, then go to town"; the classic of classics. I debated switching cups with him as he turned his back, but ultimately decided instead that if I felt even a little bit dizzy, I would grab his little Kurd-guitar and use it to go "tee-ball" on his face.

A couple minutes later, happily, I was still standing, with a renewed trust in little, old Kurdish men with suspicious motives and even more suspicious facial hair. I told Yassir I had to go, offering him a dollar with the explanation "Here, for the chai". Meanwhile, in my head I thought "Here, for not date-raping me."

But perhaps I had changed my mind about Yassir too soon. As I walked out the door, he called after me, requesting that I bring him my "young female European friends". I asked him if "old, fat, balding non-European dudes" would do. I can't say he seemed particularly interested.

The lesson, as always: the rapist stache' never lies.

"Habeeeeeeeebiiiiiiiiii!"

Everyday I become more and more impressed with the Islamic community as a whole. That said, I have to admit that two of the greatest travesties of this century and the last fall squarely at the feet of señor Muhammad and the religion he founded:

Modern Islamic extremist terrorism and traditional Islamic vocal warbling.

If you don't what I'm talking about when I say Islamic vocal warbling, just spend a single day anywhere in the Middle East and you will. Oh, you will.

For those of you who have, sing it with me:

"Allaa-aa-aaa-aaa-aaah akbaaa-aa-aaa-aaaaaaaaaar..."

To be honest, I'm not sure which of the two above Qu'ran-inspired evils is worst. Granted, Islamic terrorism leads to kidnapping and torturing of innocents, which is no doubt a horrible, horrible, horrible thing; it's just that the torture being inflicted on my ears by The Warble might be worse. Honestly, given the choice between curing cancer and ridding the world of the Arabic warble, I'd probably cure cancer- but it'd be close.

So with that in mind, I fully expected that 112% of Arabic music would be irredeemable poop.  What I didn't expect was that I would became an Arabic pop fiend.

I don't really know how it happened. At first I couldn't stand the stuff- it was like someone had taken Akon, taught him The Warble, and then forced him to sign a legal contract stating that if he were ever to go three words without wailing the word "Habee-eee-eee-bii-iiiii!" (my love), he would be killed on sight.

But happen it did, largely because I study in a cafe nearly every day where the employees have great taste in music and are happy to let me know the artists behind the captivating tunes being played (and by happy to let me know, I mean that they visibly roll their eyes everytime I approach them- oh well, the results are the same). In particular, I've found myself lovin' Egyptian-born crooner extraordinaire Tamar Hosni (طمر حسني)'s new CD, featuring a song or two where I'd go so far as to say he manages to out-Legend John Legend himself, making the latter look in comparison likeJustin Timberlake- that is to say, like a pre-pubescent girl pretending to be a popstar.

And then there's a few other songs, where Tamer Hosni sounds a lot more like the Juanes of the Mid East. But hey, I'll take it; afterall, finding endurable Warble-free music in Syria is like finding an oasis in, well, Syria.

If nothing else, the dude's better at looking cool on CD covers than, say, this guy:

 Perhaps unsurprisingly, this disk did not turn out to be the prize of my Middle Eastern collection.

The Warble isn't the only thing afflicting Arabic culture, however. Possibly even worse, if you can imagine such a thing, is the fact that this adorable lil' feller here...

...is the star of every single Egyptian comedy movie ever made. I'd tell you that his movies are terrible, but after posting the above picture I feel like that would probably be redundant. He's like the Shia-LaBeauf-meets-Nickelback-meets-Adam-Sandler of the Arabic world; only uglier.

Choice cuts off Hosni's new CD are forthcoming. It's okay to druel.

5 Days In Iraq and 67 in Syria Later...

...and ya boy back with a fresh blog post.

First of all, let me apologize for that last sentance; I blame black people. Secondly, let me apologize for that last sentance; I actually love black people. Thirdly, and most importantly, let me see if I can't come up with an adequate explanation for why it took me over 2 months to update this blog with an actual original post (the kind that doesn't just rot on my iPod for months before I get around to finishing and putting it up):

Umm... I'm lazy and crapping out solid blog posts is hard work?

So what's new? Well, for one thing, it appears that the trip, in some mutilated form at least, is back on. A few days ago I found out that Alex has randomly- and shockingly I might add- surfaced in Cambodia, with Beddor trailing shortly behind. I'm probably not gonna get a chance to meet up with him before he heads back home, but I'm inspired by his dedication all the same. And even more so by his mustache:

I shall never again doubt that 'stache.

Meanwhile, I've been working my ass off attempting to scale the mount everest* of tough languages- Arabic. And man, let me tell you, does it suck. Not long ago I was flipping through TV channels at a hotel when I stumbled across a French news broadcast and mistook a few of the news headings at the bottom of the screen for English. Then I realized that I could be learning that language instead of Arabic. Then I fired the remote, which is lucky I throw like a girl, across the room.

(*No offense, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Russian. I'm sure you all suck too.)

I've also made the mistake of attempting to read the Koran in Arabic multiple times. Let me put it this way- if I had been forced to sacrifice a virgin to Allah every time I completely butchered the meaning of a Koran verse, Syria would be a land inhabited only by wives and whores by now.

But- and this is one gigantic butt- it's also been unbelivably rewarding- and enlightening- to take on a behemoth of a task and to give it everything I've got. I can honestly say that I've spent more hours studying some weeks here in Damascus than I did some whole semesters at Marquette. Which is, admittedly, incredibly, incredibly sad.

And then there are the fleeting moments where all that sweat and toil pays off, even if the peaks that I dream of reaching are still months, even years, away. Three weeks ago I bought an Arabic edition of Newsweek and attempted to read an article by Fareed Zakaria, translated into Arabic. I say attempted, because I would have placed my comprehension of the article somewhere between 1 and 3%.

Impressive, I know; it's like I was born speaking Arabic.

I finally revisited that article a few days ago, however, and somewhere in inbetween that first attempted reading and this latest, I apparantly learned a lot- I knew about 75% of the words in the article; I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that that's not bad after a month and a half of study.

The only way I can think of to describe the utter elation I felt upon reaching the end of that article is to say that it must have been a lot like what the guy dancing in this music video with Shakira felt when he found out that he was the guy who got to dance in that music video with Shakira.

Of course, immediately afterwards, I turned the page to a different article and felt like I was staring at a brick wall. But I'll take "hit and miss" over "miss, miss, and more miss" any day of the week.

Oh yeah, and I can finally read the first two words on the book cover I posted in my first Iraq post!

The first is "Saddam". The second (I'm pretty sure) is "biography"*. Exhilirating stuff.

*EDIT: Nope, it's "life".

Bombs Dropping In Damascus

"And then there were two," read Beddor's E-mail.

"Of course I was right about Luke and Alex", read my dad's.

That was a few days ago. This was Beddor's E-mail yesterday:

"And then there was one".

Completely, thouroughly, unarguably defeated.

And just like that, the best laid plans of four wide-eyed and ambitious Minnesota boys have been torn asunder and defecated on; our merry band of wannabe nomads strewn- mind, body, and soul- across oceans and valleys and mental and emotional chasms:

Luke, back at home, safe and secure, in the warm (figuratively) grasp of Minnesota and the comfortable presence of friends and family, after making the sudden, game-altering decision to catch the first flight back home from Israel.

Alex, in limbo as he visits his girlfriend in the States and left to ponder his next move, after catching the second.

Byado, left with the lonesome and unenviable task of carrying the torch across the remains of the route we had all planned together.

Me...

A few days ago, even with Luke and Alex back in the states, I was determined to carry on. I'd spent all day looking for the road out of Damascus southward, to Jordan, trying to find someone to hitchhike with. Finally, I'd found a nice guy driving towards a city south of Damascus, on the road directly to Amman, willing to drop me on the highway out the city where it would probably take mere minutes to catch another ride. I was seated comfortably in his passenger seat. And I was deep in thought.

We approached a fork in the highway- one ramp directed towards the city I'd been trying so hard all day to leave, the other towards the country I'd been planning all along to enter after a week or two in Syria. I'd told Beddor that I would spend a few days in Jordan, maybe a few in Israel, and about a week in Egypt, before meeting up with him in India. The trip was still on.

Meanwhile, I'd been thinking all day about all the interesting people I had met in Damascus: Americans, Brits, and Russians studying Arabic for the semester; Syrians who had offered to personally teach me if I ever returned with any intention of learning their language. I also thought about the city itself- a strange mix of modernity and history, the exotic and the universal. I decided that it would be an amazing thing if, someday, I could return to Damascus, study Arabic, and really immerse myself in this incredibly different, yet in so many ways incredibly comforting and familiar world.

For some reason it wasn't until that moment, as the driver prepared to fork right towards my intended destination, that the revelation struck me. To my driver's surprise, I thanked him for the short ride, got out of the car, walked over to the other ramp, and stuck out my thumb.

There was no reason that today couldn't be that day.

A few hours later, I sent out the E-mail to Beddor and started talking to my Syrian contacts about becoming a student at the University of Damascus.

Looking back, it's hard to believe that I spent so many hours coming up with the route and the budget that would get our crew from Istanbul to Beijing. Every last detail was examined from every possible angle; every possible angle was analyzed down to every last detail. And yet... in the end, it obviously wasn't enough. The plan has turned out to be a failure of epic proportions. As a group, we couldn't even make it through the very first region on our itinerary. Hell, I set the precedent, abandoning the group after five days in Istanbul.

And yet, as much as I miss the homeboys and feel bad for leaving Beddor stranded, somehow I think I'll be okay when I wake up tomorrow in one of the most historic cities in the world, with the opportunity of a lifetime, surrounded by friendly faces. Maybe I should scrap the plan more often.

Some pics in honor of my comrades, both fallen and yet persevering onward:

(Insert your own melodramatic Celine Dion/Enya ballad here)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Land Of Falafels And Jihads At Last

A future jihadist setting his sights on the Ummayad Mosque

It's been an interesting 30 days.

I've lived the life of a Turkish college student for a full week, at the same time witnessing a kind of hospitality that I didn't know was possible in a Westernized city like Istanbul; I've been officially incorporated into "the family" in a small Istanbul hostel that has earned the number one rating on Hostelworld among Istanbul hostels, not for the excellency of it's facilities or even it's ultra-low price, but rather for the consistency with which it seems to draw amazing people; I've barreled my way through one of the most contested regions in the world, only to discover a country that I didn't know existed; I've rode shotgun as my new friend Roman and I hitchhiked our way across three countries, with a wallet full of air.

And about 7 days ago, exactly a month after I landed in Istanbul via London, I stumbled- finally- upon that giant basin of sand and strife we call the Middle East.

Pictaresque, dusty, sunsoaked desert villages, manifested in an all-beige pallet like something straight out of a movie; ancient bazaars, with their own rhyme and reason that only appears to border on anarchy, where you can buy anything and everything for a twentieth of what you would pay in London; pre-Walmart-era capitalism, in the form of entire sidestreets of mom-and-pop shops all selling the same basic commodity, be it yarn or tires or banana smoothies; an all new people, the Arabs- too lightskinned to be Kurd, too unibrow-less to be Turk- eager to do everything in their power to contradict every negative thing you've ever heard about them or their country; isolated pockets of Christians and other minorities, somehow managing to coexist with the majority without any of the palpable tension that you seem to find everywhere else on Earth.

Welcome to the axis of evil. A bastion of cruelty. A playground for terrorists.

Or, if you prefer, as half the people I talk to tell me, usually in a boisterously joyful tone, after I reluctantly admit that I'm an American: "Welcome to Syria!"

The border was actually a lot faster than the Iraqi one, though that extra efficiency certainly wasn't thanks to the border checkpoints, which were actually far slower than their Iraqi counterparts; rather, it was a result of the emptiness of the crossing, with about 5% of the traffic we found in Iraq. Considering that 99% of the Iraqi traffic was made up of Turkish truck drivers crossing the border for cheap oil, it appears that Syria would prefer to not give away it's chief resource for dollars-to-donuts prices; either that, or they don't have one.

The only real memorable moment while crossing the border came when the health inspector that all foreignors had to visit looked at me, dead serious, and told me to drop my pants. I looked at him suspiciously, only to find an unblinking and impatient man staring back at me.

"You do what you gotta do," I thought, and started to reluctantly undo my belt. Suddenly I heard hysterical laughing, from my suddenly jolly doctor.

"No, no! I joke!"

Later, in line to get my passport okayed, I heard a Canadian guy telling the exact same story. Considering that the actual health inspection consisted of doctor jolly briefly checking one of my ears for infection and then giving me a paper to sign saying that I had no allergies, I have to wonder whether the Syrian government keeps this guy employed just to remind westerners of their place in this country- basically, I'm Bashar Al-Asad's bitch for a week.

It could just be that border towns suck (they do) or that in many ways I'm ashamed to be a citizen of the country that once included Syria in the infamous "axis" (I am), but I did feel a familiar uncomfort in my first Syrian city. With the inescapable sense that I was being examined with distrust by everyone around me, it was like Zakho in Iraqi Kurdistan all over again.

As in that case, I ultimately found it was all in my head. The locals were nothing but friendly, in the end, repeating the soon-to-be very familiar country mantra, "welcome", as if they had been trained to do so in school. (Maybe they had.) Then again, as with Iraq and Turkey before, the friendliness was taken to another level as soon as I escaped the border town.

And I have to say, after all the preaching of my last post, a message that I will stand behind 'til the day I die, it did feel good to have a nice thick wallet in Aleppo, if only because that meant that I could gorge myself on street food 'til my gut hurt but my soul was satiated.

It also felt nice to be back in a big city. There's something comfortable about dissapearing amidst the bustle of any big city at night and just taking in the vibrancy of it all, and Aleppo was no exception. In fact, it was a lot cooler city than I expected- not only was it full of life, but it was surprisingly attractive as well, with old, worn-down, gravity-defying buildings that somehow caught my eye sitting next to largewell-kept parks. And a very impressive citadel, where an event took place that I'll write about it in another post.

For a city that's outlived a thousand great empires, Damascus, meanwhile, doesn't really feel so different than Milwaukee, a city that's outlived maybe two. And I mean that as a complement, believe it or not, for those of you who are aware of my feelings towards Milwaukee. It didn't immediately capture my attention like Aleppo did, but then it hadn't been 3 days since I showered or had a decent meal when I arrived in Damascus either. What did capture my attention is that Damascus is a very modern, very comfortable city. I've met a lot of international students studying here for the semester and I can see why- it feels like a place that would be very easy to live in; even more so than Istanbul, which was almost too big. Damascus feels like a place that you could make your own personal playground.

Which brings me to another point- there are a lot of foreignors here in Damascus. Even Americans, despite the gigantic barrier to entry for our kind. And with them, of course, is the tourist machine. On my first day in Damascus, as I looked for hotel, a Syrian man in a souq approached me:

"You look lost. Are you looking for backgammon?"

Why yes, how did you know? Was it the look of yearning in my eyes, the one that could only possibly be explained by an unsatisfied need for a good game of backgammon? Go get me a backgammon table and an opponent, dammit! I got the shakes!

(The fact that some tourists actually apparantly do come to Syria and play backgammon should save me the trouble of discussing Syrian night life. This ain't Amsterdam, ladies and gentlemen.)

And then there's the man who assaults me with a chorus of "Hotel? Restaurant? Taxi?" everytime I walk past. One time I actually stopped to explain that I didn't need any of those things, but I did need an ATM. He nodded understandingly and kindly guided me about 30 feet down the road, pointing at the spot where I could find an ATM. Five minutes later I walked past him again on the way back from the ATM, only to have him shout at me:

"Monsieur, you need hotel? Restaurant?"

"Dude, I just talked to you. You pointed me to an ATM? I told you I didn't any of those things."

He stared at me blankly.

"Taxi? I get you taxi, monsieur."

I've now spent 2 nights entrenched in the chaos of Halep (Aleppo), made a pitstop in nice but unspectacular Homs to stay at the guesthouse of the sugar refinery that my dad helped build a few years ago, conquered the famous Crusader castle Qual'at al Hosn (Crac Des Chevaliers), taken in the many sides of Damascus during an all-too-brief 2 night stay, and finally found peace and solitude- if not God- in the secluded mountaintop monastery of Mar Musa. I've even mastered the Arabic alphabet, not nearly as treacherously difficult as it first seemed.

And with that last annecdote about "Taxi" man as my witness, I'll say this: maybe Syria's not such a profoundly different place either.