Month: March 2015

Me, my hair, and my bag are off to Colombia!

It was an arduous journey filled with tortuous deliberations. For the last few months, I traveled the entire world, twice or three times over. In my head, that is. As I continued to tie up lose ends of my sedentary life, finalizing the end of my 5-year job and making sure my mailbox at home wouldn’t explode in my absence, I also had to decide where I was actually going. South America was the first destination I decided upon. I could be learning Tango in Buenos Aires, or loosing sense of time in Parachi, Brazil, which looks like my kind of paradise according to google images. But I could also go hiking in Nepal or feel strange among a hippies in Goa. Meanwhile the weather was getting colder in Patagonia and the ski season nearing its end in the Northern Hemisphere. I seemed to have the open-buffet syndrome: standing before me was all the tastes of the world and I seemed to have only one small plate and a flimsy plastic fork. Which one would I …

Traveling Alone in Distant Lands. Afraid?

I can think up many a reasons for packing up my apartment and traveling to the other side of the world by myself. I want to learn new languages, understand other nations, see the rainforest, and climb strange mountains… But the real motivation for leaving home is to learn one thing: to be alone. I’ve always had this romantic notion that to be a true artist—whatever that truly means—one must have a personality that thrives on solitude. I imagine a painter locked up in a basement for days, weeks, months, working on her masterpiece. Or picture Virginia Wolf shooing away servers in her country retreat in Sussex, in self-imposed imprisonment, to think, to write, to be alone. After John Steinbeck finished college he was broke and needed to find a way to support himself that afforded him the time to write. The 24-year old aspiring writer accepted a job at a large estate in Lake Tahoe as its sole caretaker. “It required that I be snowed in for eight months every year. My nearest neighbor was four …

“The Road Not Taken”

Two days ago, on March 3, 2015, I watched Netanyahu’s controversial speech to the US Congress in which he tried to persuade America not to make a deal with Iran on its nuclear program.  Since I swore not to get into political discussions after last summer’s war with Hamas, I will criticize Netanyahu for only one thing: misquoting Robert Frost’s famous poem “The Road Not Taken.” “You don’t have to read Robert Frost to know, the difficult path is usually the one less traveled, but it will make all the difference for the future of my country,” Netanyahu said, having probably never read the poem in its entirety. Actually, it is usually recommended that one reads the text one wishes to use to make a case, before one quotes said text. He apparently skipped this important step, otherwise he would know that both paths Frost speaks of are “less traveled by,” and Frost does not refer to difficulty being a characteristic of either. In fact, both are the same: “And both that morning equally lay/ In leaves no step had trodden black.” …

Tongue-tied: On Native Lands and Foreign Tongues

I don’t have a native language. My mother tells me that as a two year-old, when my parents moved back to Istanbul from Tel Aviv where I was born, I spoke Turkish and sang in Hebrew. Soon after our return to Istanbul, the singing stopped and I spent a good 11 years as a monolingual child who only spoke Turkish. The second big migration of my life, one I actually do remember was to San Diego, CA as an 8th grader. Despite a couple of years of English classes under my belt–which put me at a far better position than my little sister who was thrown in elementary school without knowing a word of English–I was far from being bilingual. I spent the first few months of school saying “what?” after anyone said anything to me. I am sure many people I encountered back then thought I had a hearing problem considering the amount of times I had people repeat themselves. Eventually my favorite word fell out of use and I even began speaking to my …