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.
30 September 2009
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.
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.
22 September 2009
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.
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.
10 September 2009
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.
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.
04 September 2009
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.
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.
03 September 2009
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!
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!
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