Korean Food in Dushanbe; and Other 2010 Superlatives

Best (and worst) of 2010

Best book I read: The best new book was Zeitoun, Dave Eggers' novel-like account of one man's decency and resilience during hurricane Katrina. I also hugely enjoyed a book I was assigned for class last fall, North and South.  Elizabeth Gaskell had Austen's gift for character, and Dicken's eye for social injustice.

Best movie I saw: new: A Single Man; old: Two BBC miniseries from the '80s: Traffik, the clearest depiction I've seen of the folly of the war on drugs, and First Among Equals, which follows the careers of four politicians vyying to become Prime Minister - not a masterpiece, but I really enjoyed it.

Best song of the year: Neither are new, but I spent the year obsessively listening on repeat to Sodom, South Georgia (here) by Iron and Wine and The Loneliness of the Middle-Distance Runner(here) by Belle and Sebastian.

Worst song of the year: I spent three hours in a Tajik taxi whose driver only owned one song, and, just my luck, it had to be Moscow Never Sleeps (here, if you really want to subject yourself to it).

Best restaurant: While I love Bologna's Osteria dell’Orsa, the most unexpectedly wonderful place was the Korean Restaurant on Rudaki Avenue in Dushanbe. It is also conveniently across the street from the Uzbek embassy, and served as a peaceful, air-conditioned refuge to refuel on jasmine tea before facing the bureaucracy. 

Best meal: fish stew, cuttlefish risotto and a sorbet trio at a small italian restaurant in Bled, Slovenia.

Best thing I ate: Tajik fruit – Ishkashim grapes, Shahristan pears, Khorog cherries, Vrang plums.

Worst thing I ate: Tajik ice cream. Comes in many neon colors but has only one flavor: plastic.

Hangumar displaying the bread dough

Best educational experience: bread baking in Tavildara.

Best museum: tie between the British Museum, which feels like it was designed for archeologists and adventurous children, and where all mysterious objects are labeled as "origin not yet known", and the Fra Angelico cells at the Chiesa San Marco in Florence.

Worst museum: the Hulbook, a questionably reconstructed ancient fort in southern Tajikistan; interesting from a propaganda perspective, but would make an archeologist weep.

Best church: Basilica di San Antonio, Padova. I loved its blue-grey domes and the combination of frescos from the 1300s and 1930s. 

Best beach: the endless public beaches of Latvia - where the beach cafes also win the competition for best borscht. The "anti-imperialist" Tajik borscht doesn't use beets, though, so its not a fair competition.

Best hotel: Muminjon’s guest house in Bukhara, in a seemingly-unchanged 18th century merchant's house, with a shade tree, harbuza melon and a friendly cat.

Lonely Planet in action

Best Guidebook: The Lonely Planet guide to Central Asia. Pretty useless for Tajikistan, but we followed it religiously in Uzbekistan with good results. Plus it served as toilet paper, a fire-starter, and a useful child-distractor while interviewing harried mothers.

Most useful thing I brought: my Naot "Scandinavian" sandals - suitable for the Italian riviera or a Tajik village, and didn't give me a blister in 3 months of constant wear, not even when I hiked in them.

Least useful thing I brought: the ankle brace my mother made me take - but I never sprained my ankle, so maybe it was preventative. 

Best bargain: Couch Surfing; also, though I couldn't have predicted it, the extra $50 to fly home from Gatwick, which saved me getting stuck in the Heathrow weather cancellations.

Worst not-a-bargain: £100 train from Edinburgh to London cost more than all the Ryanair flights put together - but the view of the rainbow over the North Sea might have been worth it.

me sketching in Bukhara

Best tourist cities: Bukhara and Ljubljana - beautiful and accessible without being crowded or kitschy.

Worst tourist cities: Kulob or Florence - Strange comparison, I know, but Kulob, Tajikistan may have never seen a tourist in its life, while Florence has seen far too many. It doesn't stop either from being good places to visit, but finding the best stuff takes more work.

Most unexpectedly wonderful thing: Ieva, Rob, Nazira, Mehri Niso, Hangumar, Laura, Shanbe, Matine, Nikita, Uri, Lola, Feli, Veronyka and all the other new friends who I don't have space to list.

Plus the Wakhan corridor (see above). 

Obvious thing totally not worth it: the Registan in Bukhara was bombed by the Red Army in the '20s - there's not much left of the Emir's palace.

Obvious things totally worth it: punting on the Cam, climbing Bologna’s tower, Edinburgh castle, the reclining Buddha at the National Museum of Tajikistan, Venice.

The Two Towers

"Its snowing in Forli," my roommate said, with some surprise. We were standing in our kitchen making lunch, with the tv news on in the background. Forli is about forty minutes from here, farther south and closer to the Adriatic. If it was snowing there, surely it wouldn't be long before the storm reached Bologna.

I'd just finished the last of my exams. The wonderful but nerve-wracking thing about Italian oral exams is that the professor "verbalizes" the grade - i.e. tells you what it is immediately. "26 [of 30]. No wait, if you can tell me how Liszt is related to programmatic music, I'll give 27," to quote my music professor. The point being, I already knew I'd passed everything. I had four days left in Italy, and I didn't have to spend them in my room drinking gallons (liters?) of tea and trying to memorize the entire history of Latin America. What could I do with my freedom?

Washing up, I glanced out the window. Snow. Absolutely no doubt about it. Snow!  "Giulia, sta nevicando! [its snowing]" "Grazie, Anna," my roommate laughed at me, but I didn't care. I wanted to immediately run outside, like a five year old, and spin around in circles in the courtyard.

By the time I'd found my gloves and got outside, though, the sun was back out. But there was just the fainted coating of snow on the cars in the street. I decided there couldn't be a better moment to do the most touristy thing Bologna had to offer. Though I've been here three and a half months, I still hadn't climbed the tower. Le Due Torri, or the two towers, are at the heart of Bologna, and I walked past them almost everyday, but I had never been to the top.

the Torre strung with Christmas Lights

There is a superstition that if a student climbs to the top before they have finished their studies, they won't graduate. Now, I don't usually believe in this kind of thing - I'm pretty sure I stepped on all the "stones one is never supposed to step on" at Yale in the first week of class, before I knew any better (though if I somehow flunk out in my senior year, we'll know why). Nonetheless, I had waited, but now that I was finished with the exams, there was nothing to hold me back.

I'm actually so glad I chose today. Not only did the city look breathtaking with the snow on the roofs, the view was better with familiarity. I could pick out all the streets and buildings I walk by, and even see the smoke rising from the chimney of my palazzo. It was a perfect way to realize just how much I have come to know the city, at the same time that I couldn't believe I'd never seen it from this vantage before. It was truly saving the best for last.

ancient wooden stairs, going up, and up, and up...

Shadow of the tower, and the snow clouds heading north

Piazza Maggiore and San Luca on the hilltop

Bologna la Rossa

Patriotism and Pronouns

Warning: this post may be overly influenced by having read too many essays about constructivism and discourse analysis on too few hours of sleep.

Today I survived the first in a series of end-of-term ordeals: an oral presentation, in front of my entire class, in Italian. Though my attempt to produce an analysis of the European Security and Defense Policy was dogged by many errors of grammar and phrasing, the biggest problem wasn't on account of the language barrier. Actually, I found myself hesitating about how describe Americans - specifically, with which pronoun.

It drove home the point that I was a foreigner, the only non-European in a class on European international relations. Normally I would have said "we provide leadership in NATO" without a second thought, but in this context, there was no "we", only "me" (alone, being judged....cue the gibbering). I certainly wouldn't want to imply personally responsibility for the actions of my government by saying "we", particularly when talking about policies I don't necessarily support. I don't accept it when non-Americans tell me, "you invaded Iraq". No, I didn't: I was 13 at the time, not that it stopped me from protesting angrily.

All the same, it felt wrong to say "they", like it was somehow disloyal, as well as dishonest, to turn my own nation into the Other. What a complicated thing patriotism is! In the end I ducked the tricky questions of collective responsibility by just saying "America" and "it". With that distance in my pronouns I could position myself in a neutral space, belonging to no nation. That's how I feel a lot of the time in Italy - like a citizen of the world, neither native nor foreign. Yet at the same time I never feel so American as when I am abroad. I love and appreciate America more when confronted with the alternatives, but that doesn't mean that all of the comparisons are favorable. I don't wish to be held to account for the actions of my country, perhaps because I already hold myself responsible for everything I would like my country to be. It is the part of me that reflexively wants to say "we". That sense of duty, more than any sense of superiority, tells me that I am a patriot. 

 I've got two more oral exams left, and one written one, but I'm going to celebrate my Americanness by procrastinating and watching How I Met Your Mother. 

Creative Protests

This is one of the best posters I've seen from the anti-Gelmini protests (see my previous post). At the top it says, "We attack the profits/ we gain (our) rights." Then below: "There is money for the University... guess who has it?" The answer, clearly, is Berlusconi and his friends, who are constantly under attack for corruption and cronyism. I love the image of the little fish banding together to eat the big one. It's a classic leftist argument - that there isn't actually a crisis of public funding that requires cuts to services, but the misuse of public funds by mogul-politicians who encourage businesses to avoid paying taxes. Italy does have a growing debt crisis, and does desperately need reform - but that doesn't stop this kind of populism from also being true.

This is a photo I took of another demonstration in Bologna. These protesters are wearing placards made to look like the traditional Italian death announcements, but that read "RIP the Public University".

My absolute favorite banner, though, is this one, protesting Gelmini's cuts to research funding. I saw this online, so I'm not sure what city its from. The banner tells the balding Prime Minister:

BERLUSCONI

If you have any hair

Its only thanks to the research

"Stay on the barricades for a real education"

Taking to the streets, Via Zamboni

I was sitting in class when I first heard the shouts from the courtyard below. A young man with dreadlocks and a bullhorn strode into the lecture hall, opened a window and shouted down "Come up." Within moments, the room had been taken over by more than one hundred student protesters. My professor made no fuss, simply gathered up his notes and sat down in the front row to see what would happen next. The dreadlocked student went up to the microphone. "Prodi thinks he'll be speaking here," he said, referring to the former Italian Prime Minister, scheduled to deliver a lecture from that podium later in the day, "That's what he thinks, but he's not going to be able to do it now." The occupation of the university had begun.

I wrote about the Gelmini reform (named for the sponsoring minister, one of Berlusconi's beautiful young hench-women) in my post on the strike at the beginning of October. On November 30th, the legislation passed in parliament, and in the days leading up to and now following the vote, the educational system went into revolt. Students occupied the Colleseum and the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and high schoolers went on strike and took to the streets. The clashes with the police at one protest in Bologna even made the cover of the New York Times (which itself was reported as news on Italian tv). In the political science department, the front gates are drapped with banners, and a desk has been pulled across the entry. Graffiti read, "Stay on the barricades for a real education". Inside its mostly quiet - a few classes still go on, though with fewer students - and the rigged-up speaker system was playing "What If God Were One of Us?", not the most raucous protest anthem. Nonetheless, my classroom that was taken over on Tuesday is still full of sleeping students, and the professor didn't even try to hold lessons for the rest of the week.

My Italian friends are mostly taking a passive role in all of this, but they accept it as normal and legitimate. As an American, though, I can't quite wrap my head around it. I've tried to explain to my friends that we just don't have protests like this. But then how do you make it known when you don't like something, they ask. How do you protest if you don't take to the streets? That's the response I've gotten from everyone, even my friend who just finished his service in the police. When I stop to think about it, its a perfectly reasonable question. Why don't Americans, and American students in particular, ever protest? In the 60s and 70s, American students occupied their universities just like their compatriots in Europe did. Why does it seem so inconceivable now?

One of my professors tried to explain the disparity by reference to the Turner Thesis, (bringing back my memories of cramming for the AP US History exam). Turner argued that the western frontier, and later the idea of mobility that it created in the American imagination, served as an escape valve for social tensions. Unions are weaker in America than in many European countries, my professor proposed, precisely because there is often the sense that rather than staying and fighting to improve conditions, one can always move on and try one's luck elsewhere. Its a classic example of Hirschman's exit/voice correlation - in Italy, the relative lack of class mobility means that its easier to organize collective action around class-based issues. The lack of alternatives to the public university system means that students are willing to fight to preserve its functioning and affordability.

All this makes me wonder if the American perception of opportunity and mobility at times holds us back from seeking real change. I wouldn't want to give it up: the persistence of the American Dream allows our country to continue to reinvent itself; neither do I mean to say that class conflict is a good thing. There's a trade-off between quality and equality, and a reason that the top American universities surpass most European ones. Yet in Italy, university is nearly free: with fees, it might cost at most 1,000 Euros a year, while Yale charges $53,000 and even public universities costs are in the tens of thousands. After Gelmini, Italian universities will be a little poorer, a little less accessible, a little less able to compete globally. But they will still cost much, much less than American ones.

My mother had another explanation for why her generation was willing to protest against the Vietnam war, while my generation hasn't mobilized against Iraq and Afghanistan: the draft. Today, without the threat to make us feel personally involved, its hard to get worked up. Its also been said that young people today aren't apathetic, but post-partisan, that our support for Obama showed that we are more interested in cooperation than confrontation. However, Obama's struggles have shown some of the limits of this type of approach. Access to higher education is an issue of immediate importance to college students. Maybe we should take a little inspiration from our European friends - we don't have to take to the streets, but we could at least speak up to defend our own interests.

And on the 25th day of November, I slip into a food coma and die happy

Normal Italy is good (or bad) enough, but a day that combines Thanksgiving with a city-wide chocolate festival? That should be illegal. On Thursday Piazza Maggiore was crowded with rows of artiginal chocolate shops from all over Italy. There was even one from Belgium. I  saw shoes and scissors and teacups made of chocolate, chocolate "salami" and "cheese"and "kebabs", even a three-foot-long chocolate crocodile. The only thing missing was a good cup of hot chocolate (cioccolatto caldo is more like pudding). I ate the world's biggest truffle - honestly, it was the size of a baseball, and was on a skewer.

The whole day was really like having my holidays backwards: Valentine's Day followed by Christmas and Thanksgiving. This week also marked the beginning of the Christmas season, as the lights started to go up on the shopping streets, and the large church next to the Poli Sci building opened a street fair selling nougat and ornaments and scarves. In America, I hate the consumerism that makes the holiday season start earlier and earlier each year, but without malls or endless repetitions of "Santa Baby", I'm starting to remember how nice it can be.

Thanksgiving of course isn't an Italian holiday, but my program nicely organized dinner in a restaurant for us and our Italian roommates. The Italians may have been more excited than the Americans - like cheerleaders and football, Thanksgiving is one of the things that American movies and TV have shown to the world, but no one quite believes exists in reality. As might be expected, once the Italians got behind the idea, the trattoria managed to cook the best, juiciest turkey I've ever eaten. It wasn't an authentic meal - no cranberries, no mashed potatoes, no pumpkin pie - and the first course was pasta, but it was delicious, and we ate ourselves into a respectable tryptophan-induced stupor.

It was strange to celebrate Thanksgiving away from home for the first time, but this weekend it truly sunk in that I only have three weeks left in Italy, and then this extended adventure will be over. I'll be home in Maine for Christmas, but until then, I can walk home in Bologna, with the snow turning to slush on the cobble stones and the Due Torre covered in strings of golden lights. I'm sad to leave and happy to go -but that's the way its supposed to be.

The professors go on strike; I go to Slovenia

This is being posted a bit late, but Rob kindly produced the necessary photo accompaniment!

Here's a reason to be grateful for the Italian budget crisis. With half the faculty at the University of Bologna on strike to protest a controversial law that would slash funding for the universities, I found myself at the beginning of October with no classes to go to, and an unexpected last week of extended summer vacation. I had been getting itchy feet from staying in one place, and this was the perfect opportunity to take a longer trip. Slovenia was less of a random choice than it might appear. The only surprise is that more people don't go: its easily accesible by train from Italy, yet has a completely different  language, a beautiful landscape and an intriguing culture.

My friend Rob and I started with an afternoon train to Trieste. The upper part of the Adriatic is so tranquil that the clear blue water meets the edge of the land without any barrier. Its possible to sit in the main piazza with the Baroque town hall behind you, and dangle your feet in the ocean a mere step down.  A few minutes walk from our hostel, Castello Miramare, built as a honeymoon getaway for the Hapsburg emperor, is now a charming, slightly overgrown, public park. I felt like I had wandered into a Maxfield Parish Painting, or maybe just Enchanted April.

 There is no direct connection from Trieste to Slovenia, so the plan was to take Italian trains as far as Gorizia, cross into Slovenia, and then pick up another train that would take us into the Julian Alps. The divided town of Gorizia/Nova Gorica was a Cold War frontier (Winston Churchill famously said that the Iron Curtain stretched across Europe, "from Danzig to Trieste"), as well as the site of one of the most brutal battles of World War I. There are few things that give me more hope for progress, considering that history, than crossing today's border. With Slovenia's ascension to the European Union, all that divides the nations is unobtrusive line on the pavement - no guards, no fence, not even a sign. It's more noticeable when you cross from Maine into New Hampshire, and I can't help thinking that somewhere, Kant is smiling. 

The train journey was the most beautiful trip I have ever taken, maybe even surpassing driving over the Himalayas. The sun was shining on the sea, we stopped at idyllic towns with tiny old stations, mountains shaped like gum drops and a turquoise-green river winding alongside. Arriving in Lake Bled, I picked an apple right off the tree as we walked to our campsite by the lakeshore. I was glad to be staying in Bled at the end of the season, since we got all the conveniences of the small resort town, without any of the crowds.

In the morning, mists hid the mountains and the swans gliding on the glass-like surface of the lake. We bought still-warm cheese pastries from a bakery, and climbed to the cliff-top castle for a view of the surrounding valleys as the sun come out. In the afternoon we took row boat out to the picturesque church on the little island in the middle of the lake. In my third boating adventure of the summer, I'm proud to say I rowed more successfully than I punted in Cambridge (and certainly in a more trustworthy boat than the inflatable lotka that almost sank in the middle of Lake Varzob in Tajikistan). 

A three hour bus ride got us to Ljubljana. Our lodging in the capital was Celica, a former jail converted into a hip hostel, where the rooms are "cells" that still have bars. Celica is in the middle of Metalkova, a bizarre alternative-living compound. After independence and the fall of the communist regime, a bunch of artists moved in to the area and transformed the Soviet-style buildings into graffiti masterpieces and a variety of semi-secret clubs and bars.

Ljubljana has a compact old center, with cafes lining both sides of the river, and a castle on a hill in the middle of town. We had a lovely time exploring the side streets, drinking coffee and eating Sacher torte, and visiting the underground market. We found lunch at a Bosnian restaurant; an old house filled with Balkan knickknacks, where the only thing on the menu was sausage with butter and raw onion and delicious bread. In the afternoon, another three hour bus ride got us to Piran, the prettiest town on Slovenia's sliver of a coastline. I climbed to the church with my watercolors and tried to paint the view over the red roofs to the sail boats on the blue-gray sea. In the morning I ignored the damp weather, and went swimming. I have a reputation to uphold after all - for someone used to Maine, the Mediterranean is warm even in October.

As we were informed in Ljubljana, there are two Latvian beers, and they are both made by the same brewery. Whether you prefer Lasko or Union is a matter of some consequence, apparently, but having tried both, I'm a firmly in the Lasko camp. It goes perfectly with a basket of fried calamari, while we had a late lunch and watched a scuba diving lesson.

Unfortunately, our lunch was a bit too late, and caused us to miss the local Piran shuttle bus.  In a "for the want of a nail..." scenario, that meant we lost the regional bus, so that we missed our third connection into Italy. After an extra hour and a half waiting in Trieste, and a bizarre 10 PM to midnight jaunt through Venice, we finally caught the night train to Bologna, arriving at 3 AM, exhausted, but immensely pleased with ourselves, and still completely in love with Slovenia.