Living the past

Berlin has always been around the top of my list of cities to visit. For many years its weird situation as a divided city fascinated me, but I had never before managed to pay a visit.

The Brandenburg Gate

The Reichstag

Christmas revelries on Unter den Linden

When I finally did I was surprised to see how much its tourist industry plays on World War II and its 40 year epilogue. Most of the postcards on sale and sights to see are about this period: the bombed out city, the burning Reichstag, Checkpoint Charlie and Hitler’s Bunker, for example.

Checkpoint Charlie

Perhaps this has been the catharsis that the country needed: the Germans I have met all seem to be forward looking and not outwardly hung up by a period in history that clearly could create some deep psychological issues.

Several places made a deep impression on me. The first was the Holocaust Memorial. Approaching this from a distance it looks like a small area of black stone slabs arranged in a grid pattern on a gentle knoll, but as you walk into the spaces between the slabs you find yourself disappearing down into a subterranean level where you cannot see out, people appear fleetingly and disappear ahead and beside you and the black stones lurch and lean intimidatingly. 

The Holocaust Memorial

I had not read anything about the place before, but I immediately felt a sense of panic as I slid into the cracks, disappearing from the world and not being able to see an easy way to escape.

The second was the Jewish Museum, housed in an astonishing building whose shape and internal layout has been designed to capture the dislocation and uncertainty of Jewish history through the centuries. I know that Britain is not free of anti-semitism, but I was relieved that my people were not directly involved in the terrible story that it told about Germany and other parts of mainland Europe in the 1930-1945 period. However, had we not been able to rely on the English Channel to save us in 1940 I’m not so sure that we would not have also joined in with what happened, so no self-satisfaction here.

It’s a fascinating, compelling but ultimately depressing exhibition, telling a vitally important story, but I left feeling that it did not deal at all with one of the Holocaust’s postscripts, the situation in Israel and Palestine. I guess I’m just hopelessly naïve about people and politics, but would it not have been so much better for the world if this terrible experience had led Israel to steer away from crushing the Palestinians and instead show real humanity in seeking to find ways of sustainable coexistence.

More uplifting was the East Side Gallery.

Lining the River Spree for several hundred metres on the east side of the city, this is the most complete remaining stretch of the old Berlin Wall and is celebrated by artists expressing in a variety of ways what the Wall signifies to them. Great fun.

Freedom means getting Kylie

The medium is still the message

I was lucky enough to spend a few days recently in Berlin at the Online EDUCA conference. This is the biggest conference in Europe looking at the whole subject of using technology to support learning, and I went thinking that I would be meeting some of the smartest people and listening to the biggest, newest ideas in my professional domain. I’d also been invited to make a presentation to a sub-group there, but came away reflecting on the words of Groucho Marx: to paraphrase, “I’d never want to go to a conference that wanted to have me as a speaker.”

Perhaps the subject of my own talk prejudiced me; that for all the exciting talk about the brave new world of computer and mobile device technology, there is still a woeful lack of application of basic educational principles in most technology-delivered learning.  

I was hopeful; I diligently read the synopses in the programme and went along to the sessions that promised to tell me lots of new things, but with one or two exceptions found that what people talked about was only vaguely related to their presentation title, that most people talked in only general terms about things they had done and what that might show, and that there just weren’t that many really new and interesting ideas.

I was also appalled by the general inability to communicate ideas: the PowerPoint slides crammed with indecipherable text or statistics, the lack of structure in delivery and the reluctance to look at the audience when talking. In my funny old way of looking at the world, learning relies on communication and an inability to do this to a roomful of consenting adults does not give me the confidence that it will be done effectively to a bunch of stressed, sceptical or cynical members of staff.

Although the audiences perhaps did not help. In every presentation I attended most people seemed to be dealing with e-mails or updating their Facebook pages on their laptops or tweeting or texting on (the mobile phone of choice) their iPhones. So while there was a whole lot of communicating going on, I’m not sure that many people were paying much attention to the moment.

Which took me back to good old Marshall McLuhan: who cares what you’re saying if you’re saying it on an iPhone?

Fear of flying, Hungarian style

Language is a problem when living in Hungary.

During the years of Russian domination only Hungarian and Russian were taught in schools and so now there is an acute shortage of teacher-aged people who can effectively teach English. So while young people are more likely to speak some English, the general ability level is low and is concentrated in the more tourist-oriented sectors of the economy.

Official EU statistics report that Hungary has one of the lowest levels of second language functionality in the whole of the Union. No prizes for guessing which other country lurks at the bottom. Joke: What do you call someone who speaks two languages? Bilingual. What do you call someone who speaks one language? English.

Hungarian is also completely unlike any other language in the world. Some linguists claim it is related to Finnish, but even Finns fail to see much similarity. So you can’t get any vague sense of what something means by relating it to a similar looking Romance or Anglo-Saxon word. It works by adding small words expressing simple ideas together to create more complex ideas, and to this word you then add endings that show such things as plurality, possession and any prepositional relationship. This means that Hungarian sentences consist of a small number of extremely long words. You therefore have to constantly think backwards when putting things into Hungarian, which is not easy when you’ve lost the number of brain cells that I have.

All this means that everyday transactions in shops, banks, post offices and official offices can be frustrating. Technological solutions exist: iPhone users can use an app that translates a typed English phrase into Hungarian, and one shopkeeper used Google Translate on his computer to translate his Hungarian into English for me. But such solutions often give ridiculous results due to the complexity of Hungarian grammar and word order, so they are not altogether satisfactory, and fail to help develop much empathy in such interactions.

Sometimes you think things are better than they are. When you call T-Mobile for help, for example, the instructions say “Press 2 for the English language service”. You then press buttons to work your way through the usual hierarchy of options until finally you get a ringing tone and a human being answers. “Beszélsz angolul?” (“Do you speak English?”) you ask. “Nem”, no, they reply.

So Helen and I are trying to learn the language. We’ve made small but significant progress and can now enter entrances and exit exits. We usually know how to avoid unusual parts of pigs on restaurant menus.

And Hungarians appreciate you making the effort. For that reason I decided the other evening when waiting at Budapest Airport with some Hungarian colleagues to impress them with a little local language. The information screen just flashed up that our flight was boarding so I walked back to them and announced enthusiastically, “Beszállás!”, boarding. They both looked at me astonished for a second then burst out laughing. “Do you know what we thought you just said? You told us that you had shit yourself!”

The two words for boarding and pooing one’s pants are beszállás and beszarás, but an untrained English tongue moves around the mouth in a way that makes ‘l’ and the Hungarian ‘r’ similar and loses the distinction between short and long a’s. The joys of language learning.

I shall take more care in future when describing my movements at Hungarian airports, but it won’t deter me from trying to get to grips with this unique but impenetrable language.

Same route, new perspectives

A friend visiting from UK last week asked me if I had stopped cycling to work as it had turned much colder. I, of course, laughed contemptuously, and explained that I cycled all through last winter and saw no reason to stop. Years of living in Sheffield had taught me the importance of avoiding being seen as 'nesh'.

But having said that, sometimes I choose to walk to work so that I can observe the world at a different scale. So last Friday I walked along my usual cycle route, the Danube footpath.

Parliament showing the British are coming

The first thing that I saw that I would have otherwise missed was the stirring sight of the Union Jack flying from the Parliament building. I assume that it was because of some visiting UK government dignitary, and so I started wondering who it might be. That morning I had been listening to Radio 4 on Internet radio and had heard how some Tory tosser had been railing against the 'fact' that the working classes were breeding more quickly than the other social groups because of (previous) government policies. I immediately switched into conspiracy theory mode and deduced that the aforementioned dignitary was in Hungary talking to its far right politicians to discuss how they wanted to deal with 'the Roma problem' (putting them in camps, and sending their children to separate schools have been mentioned). If the Tories propose this soon, you read it here first.

But I may be wrong.

My next new sight was the statue of Mihály Károlyi, who was briefly president of Hungary immediately after World War 1. I had noticed the previous evening that small group of people were gathering around his statue, clearly paying respects as on that Friday morning there were a few wreaths and bunches of flowers. People here do this a lot to politicians they particularly respect: I am not sure that we Brits do the same, and I cannot imagine groups of people gathering on cold winter evenings to lay flowers on the grave of the contemporaneous Stanley Baldwin.

But I may be wrong.

Margit Bridge looking towards Harmashatar Hegy

Anyway, after the Károlyi Memorial the path follows the river, and the view opened up to reveal a beautiful early morning pink-tinged frosty mistiness looking up to Harmashatar Hegy. Traffic was flowing freely over the newly-opened Margit Hid, and as usual my spirits lifted watching the river flow by.

On freedom of expression

Freedom. That’s a word that I’ve come to think about a lot in this last 11 months here in Budapest.

Not that I didn’t worry about it back in the UK, as we seemed to constantly hear about the need to protect ourselves against terrorists being used to justify ever more restrictions on our personal British freedoms. And yet, elsewhere things can be so much worse.

Here in Budapest I’ve read a lot about the history of the country over the last 50 years, about the Fascist period before WW2 and then the Communist era, each with their repression of free speech and dissent. Here it seems to have left its mark on the people of my generation and older; wary, suspicious of strangers and reluctant to express an emotional reaction.

I remember feeling moved standing on the Hungarian-Austrian border at the site of the Pan-European Picnic, where East Germans and Hungarians had come together and faced down the border guards and the regimes they represented back in 1989.

In Syria one person we spoke to told us that several members of their family had been imprisoned by the government for having non-official thoughts, and how gatherings of more than four people were illegal. Many people there live with a nagging worry about being picked up and being jailed on a whim.

Now I’m reading Mearsheimer and Walt’s book on the operation of the Israel lobby in the United States and how the lobby seeks to prevent a discussion of the Palestine situation from anything other than an Israeli perspective. Politicians trying to explore Arab perspectives find their campaign donations and other support drying up, academics are verbally attacked if they are thought to favour the Arab position in the Middle East, and so on. The lobby does this because it is trying to protect Israel’s position, but really, in the longer term can the aggression and unfairness that it condones and encourages be sustainable? How will this play out for the United States in the longer term? I can't see it being a great strategy as peak oil plays itself out.

It’s made me very grateful to have grown up and lived in a country where, for all its growing restrictions, free speech is pretty well tolerated, and I can see why oppressed people from different parts of the world try to find asylum in Britain. Not having freedom to express your thoughts is corrosive and ultimately destroys a society’s cohesiveness, so in the UK we need to put up with extremists from whatever direction expressing what we think are lies and ignorance: sooner or later they are exposed and they sink.

Passing the time in a taxi

One of the easiest and quickest ways of travelling around the middle east is in service taxis. These vehicles, either ordinary cars or small minibuses, follow fixed routes, starting when they are full and dropping people off and picking others up along the way.

For the outsider, they also provide a good opportunity to observe local people going about their lives. We took a service taxi from Petra to Aqaba, and enjoyed the opportunity to see this snapshot of cultural life.

Apart from five tourists, ourselves included, there were usually about 10 men and four women on board, which loosely reflects the visibility in public life of women. Throughout our stay we constantly remarked on the fact that travelling and walking about city streets you just do not see that many women: most commercial enterprises, shops etc, are run by men, all of the staff in our hotels were men, everyone sitting around in cafes were men. As might be expected, women were more visible in Damascus, but even so they remained very much a minority.

When we climbed into our taxi there were only a few people in it, and they were spread all over the place, but as local women appeared the men would spontaneously shuffle themselves around so that women would not have to sit next to a strange man. It might seem like a courtesy but is actually a social necessity.

The women themselves were interesting to observe. There was a mother and daughter pair, both covered from head to foot in styled black robes but with faces visible. While the mother wore no make-up, the perhaps 20-year-old daughter's face was covered with a most elaborate application of powders, shading from white to pink, blue and purple, heavy mascara and thick eyeliner. On her head she had a dramatically styled purple Louis Vuiton scarf raised up at the back; on entering the bus she looked regally around before lowering her eyes demurely as men swiftly moved seats to accomodate her and her mother. Another woman who climbed on halfway along was completely covered in black, including a veil and thin black gloves. What was interesting about her was that although only her eyes were visible she clearly had spent lots of time making them special, with eyeliner and extremely long fake eyelashes. Her robe sleeves were studded with sequins and jewlels. So while these two women were observing the social niceties of covering themselves, they were making sure that what was visible was as eye-catching as possible.

Meanwhile, everyone, especially the men, played with mobile phones. Arabic culture is very sociable, and people love spending time talking and sitting together, so mobile phones provide an ideal way of extending this interaction into times when they are unavoidably apart. All through the journey phones rang and people made calls. They constantly sent and receive text messages or otherwise played some game on their phone. One guy seemed to spend a lot of time playing around with different SIM cards. Apparently mobile phones were not allowed in Syria until 2001 but now it seems like everybody has one.

The two hours passed quickly as we watched people just being themselves in this confined space. What they made of us may be in some other blog...

Blogger on holiday

Blogger and habibi Helen finally managed to take their summer holiday at the end of October, and in a desire to find somewhere warm and sunny decided to go to the Middle East, Syria and Jordan specifically.

So it was that at 03:30 one Monday morning we arrived at Damascus airport. Crazy time, but for some reason that is when Middle Eastern airports operate. We took a taxi into the city to our booked hotel, through empty streets, nobody walking or driving except us, until we approached a roundabout near our hotel at which point another car lurched out from the right and stopped in front of us. Although our driver had plenty of time to react he decided to drive towards it at high speed and screech to a halt, just missing it. This gave him an excuse to wind his window down and shout abuse at the hapless driver.

He then reversed and accelerated around the back of the car, but to our alarm the other car sped after us and cut in front so that we had to stop. They proceeded to hurl abuse at each other for a minute or so, until, honour obviously assuaged all around, the other driver pulled away and left us with our own driver telling us, "These Syrian drivers are animals". Welcome to irony-free Syria.

In fact, after this early morning incident, despite travelling through many swirling, lane discipline-free high-speed rush-hour motorcades, we never saw or came close to a motoring incident. For which I say, "Al hamdu li Allah".

Inside the Ummayad Mosque

The Khan As'ad Pasha

We stayed for a few days in Damascus, adjusting to the very different culture, taking in some of its wonderful sights, such as the Ummayad Mosque and the Khan As'ad Pasha and eating in beautiful courtyard restaurants like Beit Jabri. We also managed to meet N, a daughter of one of Helen's old friends and her Syrian husband, who proved to be wonderful, kind hosts, offering us a couple of nights in their apartment as we passed in and out of the city.

From Damascus we took taxis into Jordan to end up at Petra, where we stayed for three nights at a 'Bedouin camp site' just outside the town.

Just one of the amazing corners in Petra

Unsustainable tourist spotted in Petra

It proved to be a very comfortable base from which to explore the amazing carved city, a place that I had wanted to visit ever since my father had told me about it and I had seen pictures in Look & Learn. It's an incredibly popular tourist site now (and its sustainability is under question), but it is relatively easy to get away from the crowds who stick very much to the main wadi. As keen hill walkers we were happy to climb the steps and rocky path up to the Place of High Sacrifice and then walk across the hills and wadis that feed into the main valley, discovering many more smaller tombs and caves in the hillside that most people never see.

Did I really walk along that ledge?

On our second day some (very expensive) guides showed us how to walk across the desert and into the mountains to approach Petra from the back, the Monastery.

After walking through the desert, the first sight of the Monastery was astounding

This was perhaps one of the highlights of the whole holiday, two hours of walking alone along mountain paths and ledges, looking out over a fantastic rocky landscape that just stretched into a distant nothingness.

TE Lawrence rides again

Aqaba on Sea

We then decided to push on down to the Red Sea and spend a few days in Aqaba. This is a corner of the Middle East where Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia share a few kilometres of coastline with Israel. By night the lights of Eilat shine out brightly across the water from Aqaba, and it was hard to realise that there was such a political crisis in existence between these nations.

Our one day in Aqaba was spent on a tourist boat, watching the coral reefs pass underneath its glass bottom, snorkelling and enjoying a fine lunch.

From Aqaba it was back doors to Damascus all in one day, staying overnight with N before continuing the next day to Palmyra.

The beautiful Tetrapylon

This is one of Syria's major tourist attractions, a ruined Roman city in the desert. The guidebooks say that sunrise and sunset are the best times, and although a minaret 25 yards away from our hotel room guaranteed our waking up before sunrise we decided on the sunset approach.
 

The Palmyra citadel

We therefore spent one day wandering around the ruins, slowly making our way towards the Citadel, high on a hill overlooking the city, and then sat on the ramparts as the sun slipped behind the far horizon, leaving its trail of magnificent colours.

Burial towers

Sunset tourists

From Palmyra we travelled on to Hama, a city famous for its norias, or water wheels. These date from the early years of AD, when the Romans constructed a network of aqueducts to service the city and built enormous water wheels to lift the water up to the aqueducts.

Many of them have been kept in service ever since, and while they do not always operate we were very lucky the evening we arrived, when several of them were rotating, creating a very distinctive groaning noise as they turned, which reminded me a little of Jimi Hendrix playing the 'Star Spangled Banner' at Woodstock.

Then it was back to Damascus, and a day of shopping before catching the 03:50 flight back to Budapest. Oh, the shock of it. Arriving in the cool, grey Budapest morning at about seven, taxi back to our apartment, a shower and then on my bicycle to work. Grim reality strikes.