The Free Jewish School--Now Really Free

After a while, a person can only take so many "Who is a Jew?" stories. Especially if that person is one of those likely to be affected by the whole question, and especially since so many of them these days seem to involve some right-wing cleric somewhere who doesn't understand that he does not represent or speak for a Jewish community that is increasingly diverse, and that that diversity is a strength, not a weakness. So it was with great relish today that I stumbled upon this story in the New York Times regarding a court fracas over one school's definition of "Who is a Jew?"

Britain, unlike America, apparently allows state funding for religious schools reflecting persuasions from the Church of England to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and everything in between. Most of the time, it seems, schools accepting this funding cannot use religious criteria in selecting students for admission, but when there are more applicants than slots, denominations can favor their own members. Such has been the case at the Free Jewish School, a Jewish high school in London. Faced with more applicants than slots, the school decided to invoke an Orthodox definition of Jewishness to deny admission to a boy known only in the article, and in the court case, as "M". M's mother bad converted before his birth, but her conversion was overseen by a Progressive rabbi (Progressive being the British equivalent of Reform), and the school chose to follow the dictates of Britain's Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks--which is to say, it only considers Orthodox conversions valid. Hence, in the eyes of the school, neither M's mother nor M is considered Jewish.

The matter might have ended there, but M's family chose to sue the school, charging discrimination. And a court in Britain has agreed, ruling that whether the "traditional" definition of a Jew is "benign or malignant, theological or supremacist," the school cannot enforce it in light of Britain's Race Relations Act.

On the one hand, it's easy to look at this, from the other side of the Pond, and abhor the decision as a violation of the principle of separation of church and state, as it is understood and applied in America. Public funding for religious schools does not and cannot exist in America, and a similar case on our side of the Atlantic would doubtless result in a declaration that such funding is unconstitutional. There are also good reasons for Jews not to get the secular courts involved in what are purely internal Jewish affairs; it causes nothing but rancor and only further divides a divided community.

On the other hand, it's hard not to be supremely happy about a ruling that will, hopefully, make certain parts of the Jewish community grow up on "who is a Jew" issues. Far too many Jewish institutions allow the Orthodox to force exclusionary practices upon them. It is high time the rest of the community started forcing the Orthodox to distinguish between Orthodox space and communal space--and our Jewish schools are as good a place to start as any.

I am also heartened that this rulings means that the 1,900 or so students at London's Free Jewish School will be forced to meet an actual patrilineal child and start to deal with patrilineality as something other than an abstraction. In their hearts, I've discovered, the majority of Jews comprehend that, to paraphrase Forrest Gump, Jewish is as Jewish does. If a patrilineal child is allowed to sit down and study Torah and Mishnah alongside Orthodox Jews, the latter will find it more and more difficult to deny his Jewishness. For too long, people who don't fit into a narrow, Orthodox definition of "who is a Jew" have ended up in a double bind when it comes to Jewish education--first being denied that education on the grounds that they "aren't Jewish," and then, hypocritically, having it held against them that they didn't receive it.

Even in America, policies of this kind exist. The Solomon Schechter schools, the day schools of the Conservative Movement, denied children of non-Jewish mothers admission their classrooms for many years. I recall seeing a responsa on the Movement's website at one point describing what a school should do if it was ever forced to merge with a Reform or community day school, which might have patrilineal children in it. The responsa made clear that patrilineal children must be kept out of leadership roles in Conservative services, but that there should "be no segregation of any kind."

Translation: the school should practice segregation. It just shouldn't call it that.

This is the kind of nonsense the British court said "no" to in its ruling. And this is the kind of nonsense the liberal (and Liberal) majority of Jews here, in England, and in Israel should be saying no to as well. The Orthodox community needs to be put on notice that its narrow definition of "who is a Jew" is just that--the Orthodox community's definition, not the whole community's definition. The Orthodox can do whatever they like in their own shuls.

But everywhere else--in our community's schools, in our institutional charities, and in the policies of the Israeli government--we are going to be inclusive.

Strike Two

For the past week, Philadelphia has been in the midst of a transit strike. Workers at SEPTA (the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority) walked off the job in the early morning on November 3rd, over a wide range of grievances but primarily over issues pertaining to their pension and health benefits. All city bus service is suspended, as is service on the city's two subway lines and the "Subway-Surface" lines that connect West Philadelphia to our downtown, Center City. Regional rail, however, is running. From what I gather, Philadelphia is really in a snarl.

I say, "from what I gather," because I've been fortunate to have little need to move about the city. I live only a block from the edge of Penn's campus, and a scant four blocks from the Graduate School of Education building. I am able to accomplish all of my shopping and dining in the immediate neighborhood as well. So for me personally, the strike might as well be happening in Paris.

Nonetheless, like most of the city, I have little sympathy for the strikers. The average wage of a SEPTA employee is $52,000 a year. While this doesn't go as far in Philadelphia as it would in, say, the middle of Iowa, it's hardly a starvation wage--and let's remember that a lot of SEPTA workers earn a lot more, since this is only an average. Workers pay only 1% of wages toward their health care and have a pretty generous pension package.

This is not my first experience living through a major transit strike. In December 2005, New York was crippled by a three-day strike that forced me to stay home from work as there was no viable means of getting from where I lived in Brooklyn to where I worked in Rockefeller Center. A friend of mine who then lived in Queens but worked at a school in Brooklyn spent the first night of the strike with me. She had intended to stay until the strike ended, but after getting horribly lost on her walk to school the first morning, decided to go home for the duration. I can't recall whether she went in to work after that or not, but given her lack of transit options, I suspect she didn't.

When the transit strike hit New York, it galled me that the transit union could hold the whole city hostage in this way, with the complicity of the law. It turned out that the law was, in fact, not complicit in the strike; under New York's Taylor Law, public workers are given access to binding arbitration, supposedly in exchange for giving up the right to strike. The law fines public-employee unions that strike a million dollars a day. Apparently, the transit workers' union in NewYork somehow ponied up the fine.

The biggest difference I see between this strike and the New York transit strike of four years ago is the degree of reliance on the system. In New York, virtually everyone takes the subway at least some of the time, and over sixty percent use it for their daily commute to work. Even billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg is a straphanger. Philadelphians, however, are able to use their cars much more. Only one in three Philadelphians relies on SEPTA to get to work every day.

These Philadelphians are disproprotionately the poor. I realized this the other day when I walked into a Boston Market in our neighborhood to grab lunch. A sign in the window indicated that the store was opening on a delayed schedule because of the SEPTA strike. No doubt the restaurant's employees--many of whom likely earn minimum wage or not much more--cannot get to work on time during the strike. Workers earning an hourly wage are doubtless losing a lot of pay in this strike.

The strike's effect on Philadelphia's poor came home to me even more later in the week, when I called my new boss to discuss my work schedule. I will be starting work soon in the community relations department of a local charter school. Though located in Center City, the school's mostly black and mostly poor students commute in from all over Philadelphia. My boss told me that, for the duration of the strike, the school has managed to remain open but is operating on an 11-6 schedule. It strikes me as crazy that high school students should have to endure a three-hour-plus commute to school, remain at school until six o'clock in the evening, and then endure a three-hour-plus commute home.

Over the past few days, Pennsylvania Governor and former Philadelphia Mayor Ed Rendell has gotten involved in the strike negotiations. He quickly gave up in response to the union's recalcitrance, which he described as something he had not seen the likes of in his 32-year political career. Personally, I think the best thing he could do would be to call out the state national guard to run the trains and buses until the union comes to its senses.

Perhaps then Philadelphia's transit workers would realize how much their workers' campaign is hurting other working people in the city.

St. Michael Jackson of Topeka and Brooklyn

For the past few weeks, I've had a running joke with my mother about getting a Michael Jackson statue put up in front of Kansas's state capitol building in Topeka. My mother was briefly considering running for the state legislature, though she has now decided against it. One day when she was starved for something to write about on a political blog, I recommended that she write about what she as a state legislator would do about the death of Michael Jackson. She shot back that she would have a gold-plated statue of him erected in front of the statehouse.

All summer long, it seemed there was no escaping Michael Jackson. He was on the cover of endless magazines and took over what passes for programming on the TV Guide channel. But now it seems he may be about to take over a subway station in Brooklyn I remember well from my days as a straphanger.

The New York Times reported today that an offhand remark by one city official to a reporter "on a slow newsday" has spawned petitions to rename Hoyt-Schermerhorn Station in Brooklyn Michael Jackson Station and to put up some kind of plaque or memorial therein. Apparently, the now-deceased King of Pop filmed one of his music videos there, and some locals think that honoring Jackson in some way there might boost tourism to the area.

Now, I've been at this particular station countless times switching from the A/C to the G train. I know the surroundings well, and I honestly don't see how an ugly statue of Michael Jackson would do anything to improve either the station's looks or the prospect of tourists flocking into the immediate vicinity. The area around Hoyt-Schermerhorn is Fulton Street in Downtown Brooklyn--a decidedly run-down shopping area that seems to sell nothing except pirate DVDs and polyester hair extensions. Already the third-largest shopping district in metro New York (after Midtown and Lower Manhattan), Fulton Street is already heavily crowded and the Hoyt-Schermerhorn stop even more so, as it houses a vital link between the F and A/C lines. The last thing it needs are people coming to gawk at an ugly statue.

Why do I assume the statue would be ugly? Because I've seen other examples of what the MTA considers subway "art." While I was at Columbia, my subway stop was 116th Street, on the 1/9 line. Frequently, when I went downtown from there, I sat on a hideous monstrosity called the "subway rider's throne". This was, literally, a giant throne someone had put next to the downtown benches, with a plaque on the wall. I knew of nobody who respected the throne's pretentions of being "art".

Moreover, I'm not really keen on the idea of New York doing anything to honor an artist who did nothing to further the life of the city except to film a music video there. In my view, art should honor people who've made a substantial contribution to the life of the city, in some way. Michael Jackson doesn't remotely fall into this category. And of course, there were all those creepy incidents involving small children.

On the other hand, the article raises the possibility of some group or other donating large amounts of money to refurbish the station as well as place Jackson-themed art in the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station. Hoyt-Schermerhorn could definitely use the makeover--so much so that I'd even be happy to have Ty Pennington come in and supervise it (and there are certainly New Yorkers for whom this would constitute an "Extreme Makeover" of their home).

So what am I to do when two deeply held desires--not to see New York honor someone who was likely a child molester, and to see Hoyt-Schermerhorn turn into someplace halfway pleasant to be--collide?

What position would you take?

Bus Lanes

Despite my relocation to Philadelphia, I still occasionally take a few moments to glance at the New York Times web page. New York doesn't seem so far or so long ago, and I continue to have an interest in the affairs of the city where so many of my friends live, and where I may return some day.

This morning, the Times features a piece about efforts by the MTA's new chief to make the city's bus lanes into...well, real bus lanes, as opposed to the traffic-clogged strips on the right-hand side of the street they usually are now. Every driver in the city seems to think the words "bus lanes" don't mean anything. As the Times notes, Londoners similarly regarded their own bus lanes this way until cameras started to be installed at intersections and fines for violations were raised substantially. The new MTA chief wants to try a similar approach but is hampered from doing so by the need to get Albany to allow intersection cameras.

All New Yorkers know that the City That Never Sleeps often doubles as the City That Never Moves, and buses are decidedly the worst part of New York's transit system. The Times article notes that the proportion of bus riders to subway riders in New York is the exact flip of what it is in London. In London, it seems, the buses have higher total ridership than the Underground; in New York, the subway has the upper hand.

Some of this, I suspect, may have to do with the layouts and age of the respective systems. Never having been to London, I can't speak for the layout of its system, but in New York there are so many subway stops (at least, everywhere except the far parts of the Outer Boroughs) that you don't have to go very far to get to the subway. London's system may not be quite so convenient.

But the problems the new head of the MTA is facing are very real. Bus service in New York doesn't just border on atrocious; it crossed the line a long time ago. Most lines stop every couple of blocks (much more frequently than transit experts say is ideal for the smooth operating of a bus system) and are snarled in traffic when they are in motion. For distances under 20 blocks, you are often better off walking; for greater distances, you're usually better off taking the subway. I tended only to take the bus when there was a lack of good alternatives (something that occurred frequently when I depended on the G train) or on lazy Sunday afternoons, when I didn't really care how long I took to get somewhere.

The failure of drivers to observe bus lane rules contributes to the problem. And it's been hard not to notice that the vehicles that violate these rules seem to fall into the categories I call the Two Ys:

1) Yellow cabs--though to be fair, yellow cab drivers seem to think most of New York's traffic regulations don't apply to them; maybe the city should make fare increases conditional on increased observance of the regulations.

2) Yuppies. I can't tell you the number of times I've watched a Lincoln Navigator weave into a bus lane, directly in front of a bus I was riding on, to make its turn that fraction of a second faster. I sometimes think New York would benefit tremendously from simply banning Lincoln Navigators from its streets.

But even here in Philadelphia, I notice a substantial number of drivers acting as if the words "Bus Lane" don't mean anything. There aren't as many of these lanes here as there are in New York, but they do exist. I think all of this bus-lane violation is indicative of a wider problem in our society--that substantial numbers of people think "the rules," whatever they are, somehow don't apply to them, and that the rest of us do nothing to disabuse them of this notion.

So I am all in favor of New York cracking down on bus-lane violation. The majority of New Yorkers who rely on the buses and subways shouldn't be inconvenienced this way by the wealthy few who can take cabs to work or drive their Lincoln Navigators in from Long Island.

I would also favor adopting, on a permanent basis, the regulations instituted during the transit strike prohibiting private vehicles with fewer than 4 occupants south of 96th Street in Manhattan, but one has to stick within the realm of the achievable.

A Clarification

In my last post, when I mentioned my hesitation about telling my students "the unvarnished truth" about American sexual practices, I was referring specifically to our attitudes toward fornication--or, in more modern, less theological language, premarital sex. On the one hand, these students have to live here for a while (some have been here for over a year already) and will need to understand what American mores are, even if they make other choices because of their religious convictions. On the other hand, I don't really want these students to go back to Turkey or Saudi Arabia with the impression that all (or even most) Americans have no sense of sexual morality.

I was not referring specifically to Roman Polanski's horrifying rape of a 13-year-old girl in the 1970s. These students seemed sensible enough to know that such terrible crimes happen in every country and that Polanski's crime does not reflect anything about the character of the American people.

Given thes conflicting goals I described above, I told my students that while premarital sex has become more common in America in the last 40 years, not everyone engages in it or approves of it, and that the Christian churches (about which they had expressed some curiosity) varied in their opinions on the issue.

Love, Saudi Style

As part of my course in Discursive Approaches to Intercultural Communication, I am required to engage in a service learning project. For those of my readers who aren't currently enrolled in an academic institution, a service learning project is a project in which you go out and perform some type of community service or engagement and report your findings to your instructor, your classmates, or both. My service learning project is to run biweekly conversation hours as part of Penn's English Language Program (ELP). The ELP brings students from all over the world (though mainly not from Europe, which tends to send its English Language Learners to Britain) to the United States to learn English in eight-to-sixteen week courses. Students in this program often complain that they don't get enough opportunity to meet and interact with native students. To remedy this situation, the program has created a system of partnered exchanges with native English speakers who want to learn one or another of the ELP students' languages. Some students cannot find a partner, however, because they speak a langauge that isn't in high demand (I gather not many Penn students are jumping to learn Turkish) or because there are just too many of their nationality in the program (currently, I'm told, the situation with ever-popular Mandarin). And so I and a classmate come to fill in this gap by running conversation hours with a native speaker for those students unable to find a conversation partner.

Last Thursday, I had a somewhat inauspicious beginning to my conversation hours. The time for the hours turned out to be inconvenient, and I ended up hosting them later in the day than I had originally planned. Despite this concession, only three students, all from Turkey, turned up. Today worked out a bit better: about eight students came, and we went off in search of a good conversation spot. This search proved more difficult than I had expected; two or three of my students didn't want to go into Starbucks "because it supports the war against Palestine" (a charge I had never heard before). We eventually ended up at the main Penn library and were able to find one of the rooms there reserved for large study groups.

My first conversation hour having been a fairly basic, getting-to-know-you hour, I decided we should have a more concrete topic today. So I brought up the recent arrest of Roman Polanski (more on my feelings about this later). Most of my students had not heard of Roman Polanski, so I got to flesh out the sordid tale of his acto f rape, conviction, flight, and now arrest in Switzerland, in the process defining such crucial words as convict and trial. As there has been some brouhaha in Europe about Polanski's arrest on a thirty-year-old crime, I mentioned this fact, as well as his victim's decision to forgive him. I then turned the discussion over to them, asking what they made of the case.

My students today hailed from two countries: Turkey and Saudi Arabia. While there was no disagreement between the natives of these two countries about what should be done with Mr. Polanski--they all agreed he should return to the United States and face punishment for his crime--they had some remarkably different questions about the circumstances of what happened. The Saudi students were particularly interested in whether the girl had consented to the act. I explained that in the American legal system, a 13-year-old girl is not capable of giving consent to sex, and any sex act between an adult man and a 13-year-old girl is considered a crime, however willing the girl.

Shar'iah (Islamic religious) law, I soon discovered, has quite a different point of view. Under Shar'iah law, at least as it is interpreted and practiced in Saudi Arabia, a girl this age can be considered an adult for the charge of fornication, though she would not likely receive as severe a punishment at this tender age as an older woman committing the same offense. Usually, however, fornication goes unpunished, because the Shar'iah requiresr four witnesses to the act to convict; as one of my students put it, the main thing is for people "not to do it in the street". Without four witnesses, fornication is considered a sin, but the matter is left to God's justice, not society's.

In Turkey's more secular society, however, matters stand closer to where they do in the States. Turkey considers people to be adults at the age of eighteen. Fornication is not a crime punishable under Turkish law, though it is widely frowned upon and regarded as a serious sin.

My students asked me what Americans thought about these kinds of things. This was a bit of an awkward moment (even more awkward than having to explain the difference between adultery and fornication a moment before). It's hard to know at such times whether to tell the unvarnished truth, and risk giving your students a highly negative view of the country, or to fudge a bit, and have them come away with an incorrect though more positive view. In the end, I half-fudged; I told them that various Christian groups had differing views about the sinfulness of fornication, but that the law did not generally attempt to punish it.

Naked Girls and Their Naked Mothers

It's hard to believe orientation at Penn was only two weeks ago. Life is starting to gell into some kind of routine, though I imagine the gell won't completely set until after Yom Kippur next Monday. My class schedule is finally complete, and I can begin looking for some kind of work-study job to bring in some needed spare cash. But for the time being, I see only calm waters on the horizon.

As I've noted before, my classmates in Intercultural Communication are approximately twenty, mostly Asian women. These mostly Asian women are mostly Chinese nationals who will likely return to the Middle Kingdom once they have completed their studies. But in the meantime, I expect I'll get to witness a lot of people struggling to make sense of a new culture.

My first opportunity to witness this struggle came at the first meeting of one of our required courses. All students in the Intercultural Communication program are required to take a class called Discursive Approaches to Intercultural Communication, which focuses on analysis of discourse, both in individuals' interactions and at the level of institutions. At the first class meeting, one of the Chinese students started talking about an event she had witnessed the previous weekend, in which an environmental group of one kind of another decided to raise awareness for its cause by bicycling nude through the streets of Philadelphia.

Now, even before this class, I would have imagined that nude bicyclists would attract just as much attention in China as in America. And I would have imagined right, because my fellow student used this nude bike ride to draw attention to Chinese-American cultural differences, as she saw them. She found it fascinating that so many young people had chosen to participate in such a ride, because in China, parents would be shocked and outraged if their children went through the streets naked. She was utterly amazed that American parents apparently took this display of nudity so nonchalantly.

As an act of intercultural misinterpretation, I think this pretty much takes the cake. I explained as gently as I could that almost all American parents would be shocked and outraged if their children went around in public naked. To which this woman replied, with real astonishment, "Really?"

Although the moment was one of great hilarity, I think it raises a few questions:

1) What kinds of pre-conceived stereotypes and misconceptions did this woman have of Americans that led her to believe Americans would be sanguine about their children's being naked in public? I can't really speak with any authority about Chinese stereotypes of Americans, but there were definitely some stereotypes of Taiwanese people I had before I had my misadventure in Tao Yuan.

2) Are we more likely to understand a particular culture's norms and values in the breach than in the observance? I tend to think the answer is yes, at least with respect to the kinds of norms we call "etiquette". I think most people have had the experience of not realizing a particular rule of etiquette even existed until they saw someone violate it. For instance, when you turn to a stranger at a bus stop and say, "Can you tell me what time it is?", you do not expect this person to respond, "Yes, I can." You expect him to say something like, "it's four-thirty." If someone actually did respond, "Yes, I can," this response might come across as quite rude. But most of us would not be able to formulate a rule of this kind of interaction until we had actually seen the rule violated.

3) Did this woman actually have a point? A lot of commentators, both on the left and the right, have noted how guilt and shame have come to be less and less effective motivators in American society over the past century. I half-suspect that what this woman was trying to express was that Chinese students would be unwilling to participate in a bike ride like this because their parents would die of shame, yet these American students apparently did not consider their parents' shame a reason not to participate. So there may be something real to what this woman perceived as a cultural difference, given the traditional Chinese emphasis on filial piety.

4) A couple weeks before I left home, I recall seeing a rerun of Roseanne, an American sitcom about a blue-collar, Midwestern family. In this episode, the title character was sitting in her husband's motorcycle shop, looking through magazines for bikers that, apparently, featured naked women, since she said:

"You know, every one of these girls has a mother out there somewhere who's dying of shame."

Then, three seconds later, she said:

"I stand corrected--here's one with a naked girl and her naked mother in the sidecar!"

In light of my fellow students' comments, and somewhat in light of this one-liner on Roseanne, I'm forced to wonder if shame has any meaning in American cultural these days. I cannot recall one instance of someone saying he decided not to do something he wanted to do because of how someone important in his life would be shamed by his actions. Kind of weird that it took someone from China to make me realize this.

Orientation and Disorientation

Orientation at GSE (the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, where I will be studying for the forseeable future) was held yesterday, in the conference and ball rooms of West Philadelphia's glamorous Inn and Penn hotel.

Now, I've only been to two school orientations in my life--this one and my undergraduate one, ten years ago, at Columbia. What I mostly remember about my undergraduate orientation at Columbia was dancing back-to-back with total strangers on the lawn outside Butler Library and having to listen to Dean Austin Quigley give what I could tell, even as a naive freshman and newcomer to New York City, was the same canned speech he gave every year.

Let's just say that, despite some amusing technical glitches, compared favorably.

For starters, it was only one day--not the week or more universities sometimes spend on orientation programs. A speech was given by the dean and by the head of admissions. Neither said anything controversial, but neither said anything useless, either. I half-suspected, however, that someone was paying the dean to do his best Lena Lamont impersonation, because he kept swaying his head side to side as talked, never seeming to get his words into the microphone. I was seated close enough to the front that I could hear him, but I doubt anyone at the back of the room understood a word he said.

The real verbal pyrotechnics, however, started when the head librarian came to the microphone. About midway through her speech, gremlins got at the audio equipment, and her voice kept going in and out, but rather than ask one of the technicians in the room to come up and fix the thing, she kept going on and on about rather technical things that sounded better suited to a library tour than a half-hour speech and PowerPoint presentation.

Thereafter, we took a break for a spot of lunch. I got to meet a lot of students, in various programs at GSE, both new and returning. It was interesting to find out that a lot of the returning students had changed paths within the school, and that's not uncommon for people to end up graduating in a different program or getting a different degree than they originally intended when they first came here.

Late in the day, I finally got to meet all of the other people in my specific program, which is called Intercultural Communication. Here, orientation gave way to disorientation as I found myself the only man in a group of twenty, mostly Asian women. Graduate education programs tend to have lopsided gender imbalances in favor of women, but I had not expected to be literally the only man in my program. It's not really an issue for me, but it will be an interesting experience.

Yesterday, I Went to the Furniture Store, And...

One of my fondest memories of teaching EFL in Russia is of doing what I call a chain-chant with my class of Tajik ladies (whom a good friend and fellow teacher irreverently called my "Tajiki babes"). A chain-chant works as follows.

You start with a simple sentence in your target language. With my Tajik ladies, I started with:

Yesterday, I went to the furniture store.

Your students say this, first in chorus, than as invididuals.

Then you go around and have each student add something into the sentence. So your first student might say:

Yesterday, I went to the furniture store, and I bought a bed.

The class goes around the room practicing this sentence. Then the third student adds something in, so that you might get:

Yesterday, I went to the furniture store, and I bought a bed and a lamp.

This process repeats itself until you are either out of students, your students make it clear they're tired of the exercise, or everyone is so hoarse they can hardly speak. In the end you can end up with something like:

Yesterday, I went to the furniture store, and I bought a bed and a lamp and a DVD player and a television and a sofa and a chair and a refrigerator and a desk and a table and now I don't have any money!

The idea here to make students recall the relevant vocabulary, to practice using it, and gain the confidence that comes with being able to say even very long sentences in English.

I thought about this exercise today while surfing the IKEA website, especially the part about and now I don't have any money! When I awoke this morning, one of my feet was so sore that I decided it would be best to avoid going any long distances--especially after yesterday, when I ended up walking 15 very long blocks down Christopher Columbus Boulevard because I was mistaken about where the IKEA store actually was.

Now, I've seen some bad websites in my time, but I really have to marvel at IKEA's. About half of what IKEA "sells" on its website, it turns out, is only available in stores. And, it turns out that while IKEA charges only a finger or two to deliver your purchases if you buy them in the store ($70 for up to 500 pounds of merchandise), they demand not just an arm and a leg but all of your appendanges if you try to order anything for home delivery through the website. Sigh!

So I decided to look at some of IKEA's competitors, like Target, Amazon, and Home Decorators. I ended up buying a desk, a bookcase, and a banker's chair from Home Decorator's. There are still a couple of items I want from IKEA, but I can wait a bit until my leg feels better and I'm able to get out the store and beg someone there to help me get the items off the shelf and into a cart.

I also got to learn the hard way just why mattresses become so cheap around Labor Day. The answer, it turns out, is that they can't deliver them to you on time. As I was expecting delivery of a mattress for today (Friday), I called the store to see what the delivery time frame would be. The woman on the phone told me that I had scheduled the mattress . I told her as gently as I could that, no, I had definitely scheduled it for Friday--that as I had come into the store an hour after the cut-off time for next-day delivery, and as the last 10 of the mattress I wanted had just been purchased by what sounded like a group of frat boys, the manager had assured me I could take delivery on Friday. The woman told me she would have to check with her boss and call me back.

When she said this, of course, I expected I would never hear from her again. But amazingly, 15 minutes later, she actually did call me back--with a profuse apology. She said the trucks were already full for Friday's deliveries, but promised me I could have the mattress on Monday--and agreed to knock $50 off my purchase price for the trouble. Wow--it turns out customer service isn't dead. It's just been waiting for a really bad recession to reappear.

The Lower West Side Minyan

I haven't written on this blog in some time. After starting La Lingua Frankly, I was unsure whether the Far East Side Minyan would continue, and if so, in what form. But as the possibility of sometimes having news not related to learning Portuguese has crossed my mind, I feel it's only right that the Far East Side Minyan should continue, at least for now.

Well, I am finally home. Yesterday, I moved into my new apartment, a stone's throw from the main drag at the University of Pennsylvania, known as Locust Walk. The apartment makes your average shoe box look positively garangtuan. But after a year spent sharing a Moscow flat with a man whose idea of amusement was coming home at 3:00 in the morning, thoroughly soused, and shouting insults at me through my bedroom door, I at least can revel in its being mine, all mine. I can also say that, in sharp contrast to my last apartment hunt in Brooklyn, I did an excellent job of remembering the Three Ls in looking for this place. And I wasn't disappointed. Within an easy walk (less than 5 minutes) of me are my bank, a 24-hour supermarket, a decent used bookstore, a cinema (albeit one that only seems to show schlocky Blockbusters), and more restaurants than you can shake the proverbial stick at.

Because of the excellent location, I was able to accomplish a lot my first afternoon in Philly. After obtaining my keys and leaving off my belongings, I managed to set up a bank account, buy a couple items I needed at the Penn student bookstore, and find my way to a mattress store. A mattress is being delivered on Friday, and I can get off of the Aero bed my parents lent me for these first few days. This will be a major event, since I haven't slept on a comfortable mattress since before leaving for Taiwan.

I am only barely beginning to find my way around the Penn campus. By complete accident tonight, I was able to find an open computer lab in one of the undergraduate dorms and hence was able to check e-mail and blog.

Tomorrow, my main goals are to purchase furniture and a new computer. IKEA and Best Buy here I come!

Julie and Julia and J.R.

To all of my regular readers, an apology. I have been home with my family in Kansas for about two weeks now. Other than being in the midst of getting my financing together for graduate school, I have had little on my plate, and little worth blogging about. But aside from feeling that an update was in order, I decided to write tonight to announce a new project I hope to work on in the coming year or two.

Today, my family and I met up with some old friends to see Julie & Julia, a new film about one woman's quest to cook her way through Julia Childs' Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year. Played to perfection by versatile actress Amy Adams, Julie Powell sets off on this quest after a horror of a reunion with frenemies from her college days. Julie is stuck in a job I can only describe as the tenth circle of hell--handling complaints from 9/11 families in the aftermath of that great tragedy. Once upon a time, Julie had dreams of being a writer, but she gave it up after half-completing a novel that, needless to say, never came close to being published. When one of her frenemies, a central-casting workaholic yuppie type, announces that she is now writing a blog about her work in the heady world of New York real estate, Julie decides to write one of her own about her own favorite topic, cooking. She settles on trying to cook her way through Julia Child's cookbook because she fears she has never completed anything she has started and needs to give herself deadlines.

As you might expect from the title, Julie & Julia deals equally with the lives of Julie Powell and of Mrs. Childs herself (expertly portrayed by Meryl Streep). The film's portrays the period in Julia Childs' life from her arrival in France with her husband, an American diplomat stationed in Paris, to the publication of her aforementioned 1961 bestselling cookbook. It turns out that Julie and Julia share a number of things in common. Both women embark on major projects when they find themselves needing a project to fill their lives. Both have to staunch the snarks of friends and relatives who cannot understand why on earth they have chosen these projects. And both, in the end, not only beat the tests they have set for themselves but proving to others the value of being absolutely fearless.

In many ways, I find myself in a similar situation to these ladies. I have been casting about forever for some project to occupy my life. Although I am entering Penn in the fall, I know that my studies there will not consume all of my time; moreover, I am still a little uncertain in what direction I hope my studies may lead me. My original plan with this program, as my regular readers know, was to become a foreign students' advisor in a university, but I have also given some thought to using my degree to go on into applied linguistics--briefly, the branch of linguistics concerned with enhancing standards of language teaching.

Which leads me, at last, to the substance of my project. Having recently decided to take up studying Portuguese (more on my motivation for this later), I am settling myself a goal of achieving a reasonable fluency in the language within 18 months. I have yet to work out exactly what standards I will set for assessing this fluency; most likely I will base my assessment on the criteria set by the Common European Framework for Languages, a project of the European Union. As I work my way through Portuguese, I will try to write frequently--weekly, if time permits--about my project in this regard, on a new blog, the link to which will be sent to you as soon as I settle on a name for it.

More to follow swiftly.

Black as Peach

Four days spent in Georgia's largest city have me wondering which city is more confusing: Moscow or Atlanta. Moscow was intensely difficult to find my way around in, especially at first. But at least Moscow did not show the total lack of creativity with which Atlanta invests its street names. For those of my readers who are not American, an old joke has it that in Atlanta, all directions start "First, go to Peachtree." I can now say from personal experience that this joke is firmly based in fact.

The first and most important Peachtree in Atlanta is called, simply, Peachtree Street. Strangely, since Georgia is the Peach State, the street is not named for any particular peach tree that played a role in Atlanta's history. Rather, the story goes, it was a trail named after the locally plentiful pitch tree by the Native Americans who lived in the area before white settlers arrived in the 1830s, but because the settlers didn't like the idea of a street named for such a foul-smelling tree, they changed it to Peachtree. Peachtree Street has become what Broadway is to New York or Market Street is to Philadelphia--the main spine around which the body of the city finds its structure. The street has also given its name to dozens of other thoroughfares in the city.

A block west of Peachtree is, not surprisingly, West Peachtree. Far to the north, near a wealthy district Buckhead, the original Peachtree Street becomes Peachtree Road. To the south, it becomes Peachtree Boulevard. Somewhere along the way, Peachstree Street crosses Peachtree Avenue. The map my hostel gave me also showed a Peachtree Creek, a Peachtree Battle, and a Peachtree Terrace. The Atlanta visitor's center, located close to the original Peachtree near the Underground Atlanta mall, has an intersection road sign with a good twenty Peachtrees.

I got to see a lot of the main Peachtree Street during my stay in Atlanta. My first day, I walked north along it, in 80 degree heat (maybe 25 Celsius, for my British readers), to the Margaret Mitchell House. Later in the day, I took a bus and did a lot more walking to reach The Temple. No, not the original temple in Jerusalem, built by Solomon, rebuilt by Herod, and levelled by the Romans, but Atlanta's main Reform temple, which bears that name. I was eager to go there for a Friday night service because of the Temple's role in the Civil Rights Movement. As portrayed in the film Driving Miss Daisy, the Temple was bombed in 1958 because its rabbi at the time was an active proponent of integration.

The following two days found me back on Peachtree as I searched for the Atlanta Civic Center, where I went to see an exhibit on "the African-American experience"--so called, I gathered, because its organizers wanted to emphasize not merely African-American history but the African-American contribution to America. As you might imagine, Atlanta is chock full of black history. It is also chock full of black people; at one point, a few years ago, two-thirds of Atlanta's citizens were black. This percentage has declined slightly as formerly fleeing whites have returned from the suburbs and whites from other parts of the country have come to share in the city's flourishing economy.

Nonetheless, walking through Atlanta, it is easy to forget that you live in a country where whites, not blacks, are the majority. When I visited Underground Atlanta, a downtown mall fashioned from some streets covered over by railroad viaducts and later rediscovered, I was the only non-black face in sight. Even the mall's Chinese restaurant was staffed by black people. Visiting the African-American exhibit described above, I had the same experience.

When I lived in Brooklyn, I made my home on the border between two neighborhoods, Clinton Hill and Bedford-Stuyvesant. Frequently portrayed in Spike Lee films, "Do or die" Bed-Stuy has been an important African-American community since before the Civil War, when it was one of the few areas in then-independent Brooklyn where black people could own land. Though situated between Bed-Stuy and the predominantly African-American neighborhood of Fort Greene, Clinton Hill was more racially mixed, mostly because Pratt Institute, a major school for the arts, was located there and thus brought in a more diverse community. So it is not as though I have no experience being in largely black areas.

Nonetheless, my visit to Atlanta was the first time I can recall being the only white person in large crowds of black people. Although I was, naturally, around a lot of black people when I took the busses in my neighborhood or when I went shopping in Downtown Brooklyn, I cannot recall having ever previously been in places in America where there were literally no white people present.

I guess this is a privilege white Americans have and don't usually realize: we are almost never in situations where we are the only one who looks like us. I imagine that, for non-whites, this experience must come more often and at times be much more frightening than my forays through Atlanta were for me.

Moving Africans (and Others) Rapidly Through Atlanta

I am staying in Atlanta's own International Hostel, having arrived yesterday evening after a day of airline travel. I had hoped to avoid the airlines on my trip across the East Coast, but to get to Atlanta I found there simply was no practical alternative. The bus from Washington would have taken somewhere in the neighborhood of sixteen hours; Amtrak's Crescent service was similar. I would have preferred to take the Crescent, but it was, believe it or not, sold out. Maybe the romance of the rails is making a comeback in America. So in the end, I hopped on a plane.

**

Down south, they quip that if you want to go to heaven, you have to change planes in Atlanta. The city's massive Hartsfield Airport is one of the main hubs in America's hub-and-spoke system of airline travel, and it does seem at times as though everything passes through Atlanta on the way somewhere else. The exception to this appears to be trips actually to Atlanta, for to get to the city of Margaret Mitchell and Martin Luther King, I was forced to go by way of O'Hare in Chicago.

**

I touched down in Atlanta at 7:30 last night, grabbed my bags, and headed to my hostel. Although Atlanta has a reputation as a driving city, I was easily able to reach my hostel on MARTA, Atlanta's subway and bus system. Since the 1970s, Atlanta has been what in America is known as a majority-minority city--meaning that a majority of its residents are now people of color. MARTA is underfunded, some suspect because its users are overwhelmingly African-African. A local joke has it that MARTA, which actually stands for Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority, stands for Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta.

**

Oddly, then, on my trip in, I noticed that the other passengers were a diverse racial mix. I sat next to a couple of men from India, and there were several white passengers in my car. I guess I'll have to take more trips on MARTA to see if the joke really reflects reality.

**

I don't know how much use I'll make of MARTA, though, since my hostel is conveniently located within an easy walk of most of the major attractions in Atlanta. So far, I am more pleased with this hostel than the others I've had the pleasure of staying at, for the simple reason that my room is on the first floor and I was not forced to drag my gargantuan suitcase up three flights of stairs to my room.

**

Today, I am off to the Varsity, to the sacred site where Margaret Mitchell's mind first conceived Scarlett O'Hara, and eventually the Temple, the synagogue bombed in 1958 due to is involvement in the Civil Rights Movement.

**

More on Atlanta later.

Good Evening, Baltimore

I can't recall just why, when I cogitated plans for this trip, I felt compelled to come to Baltimore. I suppose because Boston and Baltimore were the two cities in the Bos-Wash (Boston to Washington) corridor I had never visited, and because I had illusions that Baltimore's harbor would prove quaint and charming, as people always imagine harbors will. Nonetheless, the city has turned out to be remarkably dull.

Baltimore's famed inner harbor is pleasant enough, but what's around it is, essentially, another d****d mall, meant to serve businessmen attending the local convention center. I had a chance to wander through Federal Hill, a neighborhood I was told was filled with charming, 18th-century row houses. Charming enough it is, though not really worth a long visit. Mostly, it reminded me of Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill in Brooklyn--a gentrifying (perhaps gentrified) neighborhood trying too hard to imagine that it's something more interesting than what it is. On the other hand, I did manage to find a used bookstore where I was able to trade my book about the Evelyn Nesbit tragedy for a cheap copy of Anne Tyler's Accidental Tourist. Having seen the movie version of it on iTunes, I had wanted for some time to read the actual novel, and as it's set mainly in Baltimore, I figured this was as appropriate a time--and place--to begin.

For lunch my first day here, I managed to make it up to Baltimore's Lexington Market. I had expected to find something similar in conception to Quincy Market in Boston or Reading Terminal in Philadelphia--a well-executed food court made out of a historic-looking venue. What I found instead was very downmarket. At Reading Terminal, virtually all of the stalls were selling meals and food. At Lexington Market, I would guess that at least half the vendors were offering uncooked meat and other staples. Seating was inadequate. I eventually managed to buy a meatball sub and an iced tea, but was not, sadly, able to find any local specialties. Baltimore is famous for its seafood, and online guides had told me I had to experience a coddie (a kind of cod-and-potato cake) and something called pit beef while I was here. Neither was I able to find at Lexington Market.

Yesterday, I went to the local library to make my onward travel plans. My plan had been to take Amtrak down to Savannah, but I found out quickly that the hostel I had intended to stay in down there was closed for repairs, and today I finally made other travel plans. I will instead be going to Washington for three days--but not tomorrow, as I had hoped, but on Tuesday--there being no hostel vacancies in Washington for Monday night. So I will have another full day in Baltimore, with nothing in particular to fill it.

Don't get me wrong. Baltimore is pleasant enough, and I could imagine living and working here if the opportunity arose; it's just very light on real attractions. Nonetheless, I look forward to Tuesday, when I can finally say, "Good Evening, Baltimore."

The Harvard Hoar House

My apologies for not blogging sooner, but I've rarely had access to a computer since my return to the States. I shall devote this post to Boston. The next will be devoted to Baltimore and to the change in travel plans I have been forced to take.

My stay in Boston was not everything I had hoped it would be. I arrived in Boston on a Sunday night, after 7 hours on Greyhound, and got a cab to my hostel. This hostel proved to be only a stone's throw from Commonwealth Avenue and Newbury Street, the main streets of Boston's fabled Back Bay. Planned as Boston's Champs Elysee, Commonwealth Avenue is indeed quite pretty, though not so grand as I imagine the Champs Elysee to be. Newbury Street had quite a nice selection of restaurants, and I eventually settled down for an Indian meal of chicken tikka masala, nan, and iced tea, before heading back to the hostel for a good night's sleep.

The first day I went on Boston's famous Freedom Trail. Briefly, the Freedom Trail is a network of 14 famous sites involved mostly in the Revolutionary War (though a couple are linked more to the abolitionist movement and the Civil War). To take the trail, you start out in Boston's famous Boston Common and follow a red brick line that eventually takes you through the winding and narrow streets of Boston's downtown all the way to the Bunker Hill Monument across the harbor in Charlestown.

I spent almost a full day on the trail, stopping off at Quincy Market for lunch and at the Paul Revere house for a tour. Quincy Market is a prime example of a 30-odd-year trend in America of taking unused historic or "historic" sites in central business districts and turning them into--you guessed it--upscale shopping venues. The market at Quincy Market, located just behind Boston's famous Fanueil Hall, has functioned as a market in one way or another for over 150 years. In its current incarnation, it houses a food court and is surrounded by such stores as Ann Taylor and Sunglass Hut.

Paul Revere's house was interesting less for the site itself than for what I was able to learn about his life. The man had no fewer than sixteen children, by two different wives. Even by the standards of the 18th century, this was quite a prodigious amount of offspring. I was also surprised to learn that, in addition to his work as a silversmith, Paul River was known for his printing and engraving.

My second day in Boston, I decided to venture up to Harvard. The weather was a tourist's worst nightmare--pounding rain. Wandering into Harvard Yard from the Cambridge T stop, I managed to hook onto the tail end of a campus tour. I got to see the famous statue of John Harvard--who, it turns out, did not actually found the university but merely bequeathed it a shipload of money early in its history. I was surprised to learn that the statue is not a genuine likeness of John Harvard, all images of the man having been destroyed in a 1730s fire. No one knows exactly who served as the model for this statue, but rumor has it that the statue is a likeness of a Harvard president by the name of Hoar. At the time Hoar served as Harvard's president, the campus was expanding, and a tradition had developed of naming new undergraduate houses after retiring presidents. For understandable reasons, the story goes, Harvard was none too keen about having a Hoar House (whorehouse...get it...get it) on its campus, and so they agreed to honor President Hoard by making this statue in a likeness either of him or of his nephew, depending on which version of the story you believe.

Sadly, I was unable to get the full tour of Harvard. The tour guide was kind enough to tell me where to go to get the start of the tour, but as I was walking there, the rain, which had temporarily abated, started to come down so fast and furious that I was forced to seek refuge in the Harvard Co-op, the main bookstore for Harvard. Started as an independent store, the Co-op now so thoroughly resembles a Barnes & Noble that it even serves Tazo Chai tea lattes. By the time I ventured out again into the rain and over to where the tour began, the last one of the day had already ended.

The third day, the weather improved enough that I decided to venture out to Salem and see what I could of sites relating to the famous witch trials. I shouldn't have bothered. Salem is a classic tourist trap. Were it not for the history of the 1690s witch hysteria, Salem would be a perfectly ordinary bedroom community for Boston. I saw three witch-realted museums. The first turned out to be almost entirely child-oriented, with a light-and-tableaux show giving the general history of the witch trials. The second, in the basement of a store on Salem's pedestrian mall (what is with America's fascination with pedestrian malls?), took me down into a basement to see more lights and tableaux.

The third museum, the famous Witch House, belonged to one of the judges in the witch trials. While it was pleasant enough to see a restored 17th-century home, I didn't really feel I knew any more about the witch hysteria after touring it than I had before.

There is quite a lot more to see in Boston, and I hope to go back and see it at some point during my time at Penn, but I felt oddly compelled to move on to Baltimore after three days. As my next post will reveal, I needn't have.

Boston or Bus

Despite all of the hoopla Philadelphia attempts to generate surrounding its Independence Day celebrations--the official website of which is called "America's Birthday"--I ended up having a rather lackluster Fourth. As the day was Shabbat, I went to synagogue in the morning and was pleased to be able to find a Conservative/Reconstructionist shul in Society Hill I had remembered visiting a few years back when I had a job interview in Philly. The job didn't pan out, but I had liked the congregation and wanted to make sure to come back there if I was ever in town.

Following synagogue, I came back to my hostel, to find that my alarm clock, which I had not used since leaving Russia, was broken in such a way that the battery kept coming out. As I needed to go up to Boston the following day, I was forced to go out in search of a new battery (the old one having apparently rolled into some crevice in the floor my oh-so-nimble hands couldn't find) and some masking tape, to keep the new battery in.

The actual evening of the Fourth, I walked down (up? west?) to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway with some other hostel guests to see the concert and fireworks. I wanted to go the concert because Sheryl Crow was the advertised headliner. It took more than an hour for them to bring her on; by the time her face flashed across the jumbotrons on the Parkway, it was past ten. Knowing that I had to get up and travel in the morning--my bus was to leave at 11:00 AM, but I wanted to get there early as I knew crowds were likely on a holiday weekend--I decided to walk back to the hostel before the fireworks began. I did manage to see a couple of fireworks flashes as I passed City Hall, roughly the center of Center City.

When I booked my bus ticket on Thursday night, I had carefully weighed all the options for coming up by train and bus. By train, of course, there was really only one option: Amtrak. The only remotely affordable trains between Philadelphia and Boston left at ridiculous hours of the morning, so I chose to abandon my plans of taking the train up and instead resorted to the bus. Through a site called busjunction.com, it is now possible to compare the various choices for bus travel in what has become a highly competitive market on the East Coast.

For those of my readers who do not have the good fortune of living on the East Coast of the United States, the bus situation at present is this: about 10 years ago, your choices in bus service were limited to Greyhound and various regional operators that had ties to Greyhound. Then, suddenly, a lot of busses running between Chinatowns of various East Coast cities started to appear. These "Chinatown buses" are able to undercut Greyhound's prices because they do not use central bus stations (except in Boston, where they are now forced to by a law heavily lobbied for by--you guessed it--Greyhound). Even more recently, Greyhound and some of the established bus services have started fighting fire with fire, offering streetside pickups and drop-offs on newly branded buses called Bolt and MegaBus. These new services are currently runnings deals for as little as one dollar--yes, you read that right, one dollar--between New York and Philadelphia (though to get the dollar fare you have to book pretty far in advance).

Busjunction.com and some other websites now allow East Coast bus passengers to compare available bus options and find the best fare and time of day for their travels. My search for a ticket to Boston yielded an interesting result. I ended up paying $14.00 for a Philadelphia-New York trip and $20.00 for New York to Boston--so a total of $34.00--to ride on Greyhound and Peter Pan (a smaller, regional bus company affiliated with and partly owned by Greyhound). This compared to $66.00 to book a full through-ticket from Philly to Boston, even though a through-ticket would likewise have involved a transfer at the Port Authority in Manhattan. Go figure.

On reaching the Greyhound counter in Philadelphia, I was issued a ticket for Philadelphia to New York but not a ticket from New York to Boston. I was told I had selected an e-ticket from New York and would have to print the ticket at a Kinko's when I got there. Ah, the wonders of Greyhound customer service.

The ride up to New York from Philly was short (less than two hours) and pleasant. I was pleased to be riding in one of Greyhound's newer buses, which the company advertises as having more leg room. On reaching New York, I ended up having to scramble to get to a Burger King (yes, a Burger King) where I could print my ticket to Boston. But I somehow managed to find said Burger King, print the ticket, return to the Port Authority, grab a sandwich, and find out which gate my Boston bus was leaving from, all in under an hour. I had scheduled a two-hour layover just in case there were problems on the road up from Philly. Not knowing what to do with my second hour, I went to where my bus was eventually to leave and fortuitously found out that, as there were open seats on the Boston bus just then leaving, I could travel an hour sooner. And so I did.

Though long (over hour hours), the trip to Boston was also quite pleasant. The day was sunny, and I was able to pass the ride reading a book about the Harry Thaw-Stanford White murder at the turn of the century (more on this later). The ride was "direct", meaning there were to be no stops. So at one point I got the thrill of trying to go to the bathroom as the bus rounded a curve at 65 miles an hour.

Finally arriving at Boston's South Station a little after 6:30, I got a taxi to my hostel, deposited my bags, and went for a walk in the immediate neighborhood, an upscale area known as the Back Bay. I eventually went as far as the southern edge of Boston's Public Garden before heading back to the hostel.

Tomorrow, I'm returning to the Public Garden to ride the famous swan boats before heading off on the Freedom Trail. But first, off to bed.

Gone in a Phlash

Having secured an apartment very near the Penn campus yesterday--the ideal little studio I mentioned in my last post--I spent a little time today exploring Philadelphia further. I started out the day by walking to Reading Terminal Market, a giant food court inside the old Philadelphia terminus of the Reading Railroad (yes, the one of Monopoly fame). Reading Terminal Market really is something to see. Food of every nationality and description is on offer, in addition to such sundries as Amish crafts and cookbooks (yes, there's a whole stall devoted to nothing but cookbooks). After wandering up and down the aisle, I decided to have a turkey dinner at a place that sold nothing but gobblers. Having missed Thanksgiving two years running, I can say the tender turkey on sale there all but brought tears to my eyes.

Once I had sated myself on turkey, I set off along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. A giant city beautification project of the 1920s and 1930s, Benjamin Franklin Parkway aspires to be Philadelphia's Champs Elysees. It goes in a diagonal from near City Hall to the Philadelphia Zoo. Festooned along either side of it, I discovered, are flags of many nations. The flags fly either from flagpoles or from strings suspended over the roadway, but are in either case marked out so that viewers know which country's flag they are looking at. I was delighted to spot the flags of both Russia and Ukraine along the Parkway.

One site reachable from the Parkway is the central branch of the Free Public Library in Philadelphia. The building easily rivals the central branch of the New York Public Library in beauty and grandiosity--though it has no lions out front to guard the books. I went in just long enough to use the Internet and book onward bus and hostel reservations for my trip to Boston on Sunday. But I got to go up the library's giant main staircase on the way to the computers, which was quite a treat.

During the warmer months, Philadelphia runs a system of tourist buses called Phlash Buses. These only go up and down Market Street--one of the main axes of the city, the other being Broad Street--and the Parkway. After leaving the library, I took a Phlash bus to one of its ends--a riverside walk called Penn's Landing--and back up to the Philadelphia Art Museum and the Fairmount Waterworks. Built in the early 19th century to supply the water needs of the growing city, the Waterworks are a neoclassical masterpiece and, during their years of operation, were a major tourist destination in the city. Though closed for their original purpose for a full century, the Waterworks now house a museum devoted to how water and sewage system in general, and Philadelphia's in particular, work. I could tell the museum was geared mainly to schoolchildren, but it was nevertheless interesting to walk around in it and see some of the 19th-century gearing on display.

You might say today has gone in a Phlash. I can't wait to see how tomorrow goes.

The Philadelphia Story

It's been a while since I've posted, so for those of my regular readers who don't know, I am back safe and sound, in the United States.

I arrived in America a week ago after a relatively uneventful flight home. Before I left, I had expected some hassles leaving the country, since I had lost my declaration form over the course of my stay, but oddly I was quickly waved through by the Russian bureaucrat at customs. On my flight, I had the good fortune to sit next to a man from Kiev who claimed he had never flown before. I quickly offered him my window seat so that he could see the ground below.

On reaching Washington, I had to go through American customs, which proved simple enough. In line, I overheard a flight attendant trying to ask one of my fellow passengers whether she had any liquids or other materials that might keep her from entering the country. The flight attendant had the mistaken impression this woman spoke Spanish. I chimed in in my halting Russian and managed to explain to this woman what she could and could not bring into the United States.

After five days in New York getting reaquainted with, well, old acquaintances (and several very good friends), I came down to Philadelphia on Sunday. I will admit I've had little chance to scope out the city, having spent the bulk of my time near Penn looking at apartments and reading in the Penn bookstore (man, how I missed Barnes & Noble when I was in Russia). But here is what I can report about Philadelphia so far:

1) The housing market is much saner than in New York, by orders of magnitude. By this I mean not only that housing is more abundant and cheaper, but that the process of obtaining it is infinitely saner. I have not spoken to a single broker but have been dealing directly with landlords who have apartments in and around Penn. I may have found the perfect one today, not enormous but barely a stone's throw from campus, from a cinema, and from a grocery store. But all of the small studios I've sen have been lovely and infinitely liveable. What's more, all of the landlords I've spoken to are only too happy to rent to a future Penn student and seem uninterested in my income statement, by credit score, or in having me sign over my firstborn child.

2) Transportation is also pretty good. The subway system is not nearly as extensive as in New York or Moscow, consisting of only two lines, plus a "subway-surface" line that is a vestige of Philadelphia's formerly extensive streetcar network, but it's nonetheless quick and reliable. I've found a bus that takes me directly into the Penn area from the hostel where I'm currently staying. The bus is reasonably quick and not terribly crowded. I have yet to encounter anything that resembles a major traffic jam.

3) People seem much more chill here than in New York. A case in point: tonight, as I was getting on a bus, I realized I didn't have any singles to pay for my ride (the bus costs $2.00). I asked if anyone had change for a ten. The driver suggested I go into a nearby restaurant and get change there. I figured that by the time I did this, he would have driven off. But no. He actually kept the bus waiting for me. And no one on the bus complained about it.

4) Philadelphia is also a reasonable "walking city". I haven't been to the Liberty Bell or any of the major tourist destinations yet, as this is not the main purpose of my trip, and as I've seen them on previous visits. But they're all an easy walking distance from my hostel.

Free the Shively Volvo

Jews aren't really big on Satan. Actually, since nobody is really big on Satan, let me rephrase that. Satan does not loom large in the Jewish consciousness. In the Hebrew Bible (what Christians call the Old Testament), Satan is actually called HaSatan (rhymes with Anne) and is usually seen as something akin to a district attorney who lays out the charges against you before God, not as the horned man with a pitchfork of later Christian imagination. Many Jews, myself included, really don't believe in Satan at all, seeing him largely as an allegorical figure.

I tend to be pretty staunch in that theological position except at times like today when my computer suddenly goes on the fritz. Then I feel compelled to believe it must be the work of demonic spirits or even of Ole Lucifer himself. How else can I explain my computer's propensity to encounter these problems at such amazingly bad times?

Or is it amazingly good times? I'm returning to America in two days, after all, which means I won't need to repeat the scene I described in a December post (see: http://fareastsideminyan.blogspot.com/2008/12/remont-strating.html). As luck has it, I'll be staying at the home of a couple of very close friends, one of whom, I suspect, would run her own computer repair shop if God had not called on her to run a non-profit assisting the Jews of Uganda (yes, Virginia, there are Jews in Uganda). I can probably get her to take a look at it and at least tell me what is wrong.

On the other hand, since I turned in my company-provided cell phone a couple days ago, and the phone in our flat is not working, I am temporarily completely incommunicado. If anyone needs to reach me over the next couple of days, do send an e-mail: I will be checking my e-mail at my school starting Monday. Until then, there's nothing I can really do.

More to the point, as readers of my December post will recall, this is not the first computer-related drama I've had in Russia. I've bought a total of not one, not two, but FOUR power cords since I've been here. Two of them spontaneously died--one after it fried the insides of my machine. The third worked fine but had a socket attachment that eventually started to wobble and wiggle and generally refuse to stay in place. After that, I was forced to go back to the incompetent computer chain that sold me the first two, wrong power cords and buy my fourth one, which I suspect has something to do with this latest computer "issue".

All of this started last night, when my computer started rebooting itself for no apparent reason. At first I thought I had hit something somewhere, but after the second or third time it happened I got messages telling me to run some kind of automatic screening system before loading Windows. Then today, it wouldn't come on properly at all--similar to what happened when my processor got fried the last time.

Dealing with computer repairs--or car repairs, or any other kind of repair--tends to make most people feel incompetent and helpless even when they're in their own country and can communicate about repairs in their own language. Doing it abroad tends to triple or quadruple the chances of being fleeced, flim-flammed, or being just-plain-wrong advice. I'm glad I'm not going to have to go through this one more time.

It's sort of fitting that this is happening to me just as I'm gearing up to go home and am starting to think of various things--necessities and otherwise--I intend to purchase once I'm back. Close to the top of my list is Designing Women, which is finally being released in DVD season-sets after years of apparently ugly wrangling over music rights. In one memorable episode, I recall the Sugarbaker gals deciding, after seeing the sweatshop where their curtains are sewn by women paid by the piece, to strike a blow for all women everywhere by picketing the garage where Mary Jo Shively's car is being held hostage by price-gouging mechanics. As the lights fade out and the ending credits appear onscreen, we hear the women screaming, "Free the Shively Volvo! Free the Shively Volvo!"

Will someone please free my Volvo?

We Shall Overcome

Two days ago, I had my last class ever at my school. This was with the group I usually refer to as "My Tajik Ladies"--a group of twentysomething and thirtysomething women from Tajikistan I had been teaching since January. It was a sweeter occasion than I had expected. All of these women professed that they would miss me and said it was "very bad" that they were to have another teacher when they liked me so much.

This is quite a change from the situation I had with these ladies after our first class together. My Tajik ladies are a somewhat unusual group in that they straddle a fence that exists in the way my school (and most other language schools) handle instruction. Our school usually divides teachers and students into two groups: school-based and in-company. School-based classes usually consist of students who pay for their own lessons and attend them in a classroom at the language school. In-company groups, on the other hand, usually consist of students whose lessons are paid for by their employer and take place at their worksite. My Tajik ladies were unusual because, though they were classified as an "in-company" group, their lessons took place at our school's central branch.

Before my first lesson with them, I was told that these women were the wives of executives at some sort of investment company. I was told that the class would be Elementary (usually the first level of EFL instruction, though some schools offer Beginner or Starter courses for those rare students who come in without a knowledge of the English alphabet or phonemic symbols) but that I should give them our standard written and speaking tests anyhow, because some might be what are known in our trade as "false beginners" (students who claim not to know any English but have in fact studied a little bit of it at some point and forgotten it).

Standard procedure with new classes is to start with a shorter "test lesson" where students have a short conversation with the teacher, followed by the written and speaking tests. A typical lesson is usually 90 minutes to 2 hours and 15 minutes long. Test lessons are under an hour. With higher-level groups, this can be explained fairly simply, but as my Tajik ladies proved, with only one exception, to be near-total beginners, I was unable to get them to understand why the lesson was shorter. Apparently, they afterward went and complained, demanding a new teacher. My administrative director must have done some pretty fancy footwork to get them to accept me as their teacher, but somehow she did. But she also warned me to tread carefully with them.

Somehow, despite this rocky start, I managed to win over these ladies. While I never felt I was especially great and teaching Elementary level English, I did get to have some fun with them, and in the process even learn a little bit about Tajikistan.

And also, a little about myself and about the teaching of English.

Our final lesson was a case in point. The central grammar point of this lesson was the going to future for plans and intentions, and the theme was vacation. Our textbook built this lesson around a fake reality TV program in which two couples each choose a vacation but are then forced to go on the vacation chosen by the other couple. By way of leading into the topic, I asked my students to interview each other about their last vacations.

Most of the students who take English lessons with our school are quite privileged. I've gotten used to students telling me about exotic vacation in the Bahamas and the Swiss Alps, and I expected the same from these ladies. Instead, one student told me that she had never taken a vacation. Two others described vacations a couple of years back to visit relations in Tajikistan. On these vacations, the women had stayed not in five-star accomodations but with relatives who, it was clear, didn't have much room to accomodate them: in a previous lesson, when I asked these ladies to draw their family trees, I was told in all earnestness that this would be very difficult, because they all came from families with more than ten siblings, had parents with more than ten siblings, and had brothers and sisters whose own families were shaping up to be of similar size. I doubt that any of these women's relatives have a spare room for out-of-town guests.

I am amazed at what these women seem to have overcome to be where they are today. Tajikistan, I gather, is still a very conservative country. Except in the capital, women are generally expected to wear hijab (traditional Muslim head coverings for women). More than one of these women said they had come to Moscow at least in part because they did not want to abide by this custom. All seem to have escaped the traditional women's lot of being constantly pregnant; some of these women had no children at all, and the others had only one or two.

There are two things, I've found, that can lead an EFL teacher to doubt the value of what he does. The first is the sense that, since his students are generally pretty wealthy people, he is just in the business of helping rich people get even richer. The second is the nagging worry that he is an agent of cultural imperialism and globalization. When a teacher, such as your roving reporter, has eaten at McDonalds on three continents and seen signs in English directing him to the toilets of three continents' airports, it's hard for him not to wonder if he isn't a small water drop in the seemingly unstoppable tsunami of American cultural dominance.

My Tajik ladies have turned that idea on its head. English isn't making them less Tajik. It's opening up the world for them--literally. I know that eventually, all of these ladies will use English, whether in business or on their travels, to speak to people from all over the world. That point was reinforced for me at the end of my lesson, when I had my students work in pairs to plan their dream vacations. Two of my students decided to plan a pilgrimage to Mecca. I can easily see these women, dressed in the plain white clothing required of hajji (pilgrims to Mecca), conversing with fellow believers from every corner of the globe--in English they learned from me.

But EFL teachers provide their students with so much more than the opportunity to make chit-chat on holidays abroad. I realized this last night, as I sat watching a documentary on my computer. Through the magic of the Internet, I've managed to find Eyes on the Prize, a landmark PBS documentary about the Civil Rights Movement. I've been working my way through the long (14 hours) series, and last night I got to the final hour, which deals with the lasting legacy of the movement. At one point, footage is shown of Chinese protesters in Tianamen Square, holding up makeshift banners with words that once echoed from every mound and molehill of Mississippi:

We shall overcome.

And, I realized, those words didn't get on that banner by magic. No. Some intrepid adventurer went off to China to teach English, and taught those words to whoever made that banner. And in the process, he taught them so much more.

Your Steady Boy Says Ship Ahoy

Okay, maybe it's a tad premature for that title, though I'm unable to think of a better one. With less than two weeks until I leave, I suppose this is the point at which I am supposed to start summing up my time in Moscow and delve into the great insights I now have into Russia her people after having lived here for over a year.

I suppose the greatest insight I can offer is how much the Russians seem just like us. I recall, about a year ago, noting that Russians shared with Americans a haziness about geography, a fascination with Paris (the one with the sex tape, not the one on the Seine), and political apathy (ah, how quickly some observations date). At the time, this was a joke. But after a year here, I have seen that Russian people are like us in other, more meaningful ways. They want good government--even if they don't know how to get it. They want to build wealth and acquire real estate, even if there is as yet no "Russian Dream" to correspond to the American Dream. And they share our concern as the world's economy continues to crumble.

In other ways, being here has made me appreciate how good Americans have it--in many ways. Having to live without an American-style washer, capable of handling a week's worth of whites, colors, or delicates at a go, may have been my first inkling of this. But I came to realize it in more profound ways as well. We Americans are fortunate to have a government we can trust most of the time--and, when we can't, can work to change. Our economy may need an overhaul, but our nation's prosperity does not rest solely on the price of a single asset, however much some people may bitch and moan about what they pay at the pump.

Most of all, we still have a banking system we can rely on. This fact really came home to me the other night, when I was watching a 60 Minutes segment online about the FDIC's takeover of a small bank that had finally failed. It turns out that, these days, FDIC bank takeovers are a surgical operation. The FDIC never comes in during regular bank hours, when apprehensive customers might start a bank run. Instead, they come after the bank has closed and the customers have gone home. When the bank reopens under FDIC management, of course, bank customers have the option of removing their money from the bank (subject to the $250,000 ceiling of FDIC protection). Almost none do, because they are given quick--and accurate--assurances that their money is safe.

Spending a year in a country that has had so much economic upheaval not just in the past year, but for the past twenty years, has made my own country's problems seem minor. I really have no more patience for the people on Wall Street and the "fears of inflation" that seem to be wreaking havoc on the stock market at present--the fear being that inflation may go from almost nothing to almost nothing plus three percent. Not once in living memory has the United States had to devalue its currency, let alone issue a completely new one. Russia has done both, more than once, since the fall of Communism.

Gratitude for what America has--that's what Russia has given me. Now let's see how long I can keep it.

Carrie Bradshaw in Paris

For the moment, things are quiet here in Moscow. No, scratch that. Things have been quiet for quite a while for me. But with only twenty days to go until I board an airplane for New York, I am definitely in wind-down mode.

A couple of weeks ago, I had to say goodbye--or rather, didn't get a chance to say goodbye--to Gulia, my banker student. I had known for some time that she would be going on maternity leave and thus ending her lessons, but her actual cancellation of them was rather abrupt. At our last meeting, she brought me up to her office, then proceeded to leave me there while she went off to attend the birthday party of someone I gathered was a bigwig in her bank. Forty-five minutes into what would have been an hour-and-a-half lesson, I figured she wasn't likely to return and that, even if she did, there wasn't much I could teach her in so little time. So I left her a polite note saying that I was going home.

The day of what would have been our next lesson, I got a text message from my school's office that she had cancelled her remaining lessons with me, because of her maternity leave. I really can't blame her for doing so--I'm sure a bank executive must have a million things to do in the week before she goes on a maternity leave--but I do wish I'd had a real chance to say goodbye. It may sound bitter to say so, but after having worked with her for over four months, I felt I deserved at least that much.

The whole episode has made me realize something about my inillustrious (unillustrious?) career to date. And that is, namely, how typical this is of what I've done--or more aptly, not done--again and again in my working life. If I had to compare the situation to anything I've read or seen in films or on television, the closest thing I could compare it to is the finale of the show I love to hate.

Yes, I would be forced to compare myself to Carrie Bradshaw. There, I said it. And now, having said it, I can go vomit into my toilet at the thought that I am anything like this woman.

For those of you who have not (yet) suffered through six seasons of Sarah Jessica Parker and the schnoz that ate Staten Island, what happens in the finale of Sex and the City is this:

Having fallen in love with a Russian artist (played by Mikhail Baryshnikov, of all people), Carrie Bradshaw decides to accept his offer to go and live with him in Paris. Not surprisingly, Little Miss Charge Card expects her life there to be a perfect fairy tale. Instead, it becomes a perfect nightmare at her "perfect" boyfriend turns into a perfect heel, leaving her alone in hotel rooms while he goes out and hobnobs with his art crowd and, in one instance, takes her with him to some kind of gala opening only to deposit her on a sofa near the entrance and promptly forget about her.

Again and again in six years of what has passed for my professional life, I have found myself in just this kind of situation, and I've never known what to do about it. In both of my stints as a legal assistant, I worked for people who couldn't quite figure out what to do with me and so just left me to dangle. I've had more than my share of prospective employers who did the same thing, post-interview. And then here in Russia there have been the business client students here in Russia who, almost without exception, have done the same thing at one time or another. Even the ones I've liked, and who seemed to like me, have at times left me alone for half an hour or more while they attended to early-morning phone calls and e-mails, walked out of class early because of an urgent incoming text message, or interrupted our lesson to talk to their wife.

Whatever else comes of this program at the University of Pennsylvania, I at least hope it will get me off of that sofa and into the gala of life.