Blogging’s Cure for the Expat Blues: Summary

On the whole, the text deals with the advantages and disadvantages of blogs for expats. Among the list of uses of blogs, the author mentions a list of roles that a blog has, from a journal of everyday life abroad to a tool of communication and a means of therapy for those lonely expats who sometimes find it difficult to adapt to the new culture and difficulties they have to deal with in the new world.
Those expats who are desperately lonely in the foreign country and find it difficult to adapt to the new ways of life, find some consolation in ‘getting all the blues down’, typing their dissatisfactions and sending them to their friends and family from home. Sometimes, their confessions and troubles to adapt reach some other expat’s eyes and blogging in such a case evokes a correspondence with another expat. Thus, one disadvantage of blogging is that expats might overuse it as a form of therapy, isolating themselves from the real world. Experts point out that blogging should not replace blending in with the new culture and meeting ‘real’ people.
The author shows that the number of blogs and their readers are expanding throughout the world and that they are especially popular in the U.S. Expats even say that it is not important whether or not they can make money by offering their blogs to readers, because writing them is “an emotional necessity”. In addition, blogs represent a therapy for their troubles in s foreign country as well as they enable making friends with other expats that are in the same situation.

Final thoughts on JWI

I absolutely hate this book. ("Jaywalking With the Irish") Need I say more? I guess you want to know why.

Ok, then. I will dedicate this post to my negative criticism of JWI.

In the beginning, I thought "Let's give this one a try. I might be surprised by how good it will turn out." So, as you can see, even though I disliked it in the very beginning, I gave it a shot.

But, it turned out even worse than I had expected.

What were the things I disliked? Everything. But let's start with the story. So many people are expats. So many expats write about their experience - some have a more exciting story than the others. David Monan's was definitely one of the latter. Perhaps his experience was exciting in general but he did not manage to give it across as such. At some point he says that one of the reasons he likes Ireland so much is that people are natural poets. They are great story-tellers and very interesting conversation companions. And that he would like to excercise that trait in him as well. Unfortunately, his story is told in a sort of monotonous way. And he uses too many adjectives - I guess he wanted his story to be told in a very rich language, but the result of this wish was a languege packed with too many adjectives and the narrative just simply doesn't flow. You get stuck a lot while reading.

Anyway, I did not like the book. ANd that's the end of it.

The African train-ride

Painting by Nyanda

Never had I encountered life threatening dangers while on my expeditions, but traveling in Africa changed that fact. The following event did not only make me value life more, but it also made me wonder about the world’s mysterious ways and how everything in life eventually works out well.

The afternoon heat made everything fuzzy while we were waiting to get on the night train in Mombasa, Kenya. Our tickets were first class so we were waiting in front of the first two wagons. The conductor didn’t want to take our tickets for some reason – there seemed to be some sort of complications with reservations and since we didn’t really care what wagon we traveled in, we didn’t complicate things more and just let him take us to the compartment that was still free. Finally, we entered the fourth wagon at the very end of the train and traveled with the African natives. As the train finally took off at five o’clock, we stacked our luggage and our photography equipment underneath the beds and lay down. I stared out of the window, totally overwhelmed by the beautiful African landscape flashing by my eyes. Never had I seen a more beautiful sight. The setting sun made the sky look as if it was burning, the fire kissing the land beneath it as if they were lovers.

As it turned pitch black, I closed my eyes and drifted off into ‘never-never land’. Rain drops falling on the roof woke me up several hours later and made me want to pee. It wasn’t until I got up and looked out of the window that I saw it was pouring down rain. I went to the toilet and lay down again. The rest of my crew was fast asleep, so I made myself busy daydreaming about the future expeditions in beautiful Africa, reading stories my father had written when he was in Africa.

All of a sudden, the train stopped forcefully. All of us fell off our beds, holding to whatever we could, our hearts beating fast and furious. I could hear the water running outside. I figured it must have been a river raging somewhere nearby. A lot of people were screaming and the wheels underneath us were squeaking like thunder until, finally, the train stopped completely. Still, people were screaming and crying. We opened the door of our four-bed compartment to see what was going on, but the night was pitch dark and it was still raining pretty hard, so we couldn’t see anything. All we could hear was people screaming and water running furiously as if we were in the middle of a waterfall.

The clock turned one in the morning and we were still waiting in the train. Not knowing what was going on made me extremely nervous, especially because we knew something bad had happened. Some of the cries became more distant. On and on we waited for hours for the sky to get brighter and it wasn’t until four that it got bright enough for us to go out and see what was going on. There, in the middle of what seemed to be a never ending prairie, we walked to the tip of the long train, and saw the first two wagons had been swallowed by the river. Apparently, the bridge over the flooded river broke loose as the train tried to cross it. Some people were still alive in the wagons screaming for help, but none of us could save them because they were too deep down there for us to reach them. Besides, we had no equipment suitable to rescue them and the river was still raging. All we could do was stand there and watch the crying children and women dying. Dead bodies were piling up down there, hungry crocodiles waiting their turn to fill their stomachs. Standing there helplessly made me want to scream my guts out. There was absolutely nothing we could do to rescue the unfortunate souls who were drowning.

A man with a radio called for help, but the helicopters would not be coming for another four hours. We took our luggage and started walking towards Nairobi. None of us could speak. It wasn’t until we reached Nairobi and reported to the police what had happened that it struck me that we too should have been us among the two hundred people that died in the first two wagons that night.

What happened in the African prairie that night is something that seems like a distant nightmare – a nightmare which will always remind me of how valuable life is and that we should not take it for granted but be grateful to have it and cherish it day by day.

(This was written for my language-learning class; it is now my story, but it really did happen to some one else )

Here on Earth: a summary of the interview with David Monagan

Jean Ferraca’s “Here on Earth” interview with David Monagan discusses many facets of Irish culture, ranging from language, history, and politics to the present modernized Ireland. All of these issues are discussed through the views of the interviewer Jean Feraca herself, the author of ‘Jaywalking with the Irish’ and an American expat living in Ireland, and Tom McCarthy, an Irish poet and a native to Cork.

The interview begins with David Monagan’s descriptions of his life in the Irish-American part of Connecticut prior to becoming an expat in Ireland. In America, Monagan was surrounded by images of Irish culture, especially reading Joyce, Yates and his favorite Flann O’Brian, whose surrealistic, humorous and at the same time moving style represents Irish life for David. Love of Irish literature sparked his decision to study in Dublin in the early 1970s, after which he has been to Ireland on many occasions before moving there permanently with his family.

As a writer, Monagan finds it very stimulating to live in Ireland because he is constantly surrounded by poetic language. He enjoys the fact that even the most trivial conversations can flower with imagery. He believes that the Irish haven’t developed the gift of gab because of the oppression by the Brits in the past, as is believed by Jean Feraca, but that the poetic imagery of the Irish language has been around for millennia, possibly because of the romantic, misty, and rainy landscape.

Monagan can’t speak Gaelic, but he claims that the Irish language is very poetic. McCarthy agrees with him on that matter and further explains that there is great variation in the Irish language and that it varies from county to county. As an example, a song is played, called ‘Langer’, which is a typical Cork word. It is an insulting word but can be also used with affection. The Irish name the phenomenon where an insulting slang word is used with affection, "slagging".

The Irish culture has changed drastically in the past decade. The former secular country’s social life was highly dominated by the old tradition and the Catholic Church up to the 1970s, when Ireland was still fighting with poverty. Shortly afterwards Ireland started changing. Its population increased, it reached economic prosperity, and became modernized in the short time of only a decade. The Irish population has been coping with this rapid change with some difficulty, since the transformation from a rather poor condition to the economic boom and modernization had no ‘in between’ stage of industrialization.

Even though it’s become a modernized country, Ireland keeps many traditions such as several Catholic holidays and the country’s favorite sport, hurling. Two matches a year are of great importance to the Irish, almost equivalent to the American Super Bowl.

This interview gives listeners a good insight into the old and the new Ireland and its culture.

New words for today

That thing with learning 5 new words a day hasn't worked out yet. Oh, man! Sometimes it looks as if I am a chronic procrastinator, but believe me, I am not! There is just sooooo much to do this semester. I know it's my own problem to have 32 hours of classes a week...and a job...and I commute everyday from Slovenia to Graz...which takes about 4 hours of my time...No more moaning...I am learning words this very moment....so here we go....I need to refresh the old ones though. Activating new words in ones vocabulary is not as easy as I thought it would be....

The little kid didn't know what he was doing. He just couldn't discern right from wrong.
I used to live in the back of beyond, so when I finally came to a big city, I thought I was reborn in a world that was actually living.

Lucrative - Syn. fruitful, productive, gainful; profitable; juicy, remunerative; e.g.: Although it is very exciting it is not as easy and as lucrative as it may seem.

Learning new words and giving them home in my active vocabulary :-)

The only way I can think of learning new words is by trying to use them in as many sentences as I can. I will do that every day (I hope I can manage). Over a period of time, I will try to repeat all of them by using them in even more sentences. I always try to learn a new word by collocating it to others. I think there's no point in learning a word on its own, because there is a danger of collocating it with wrong words. That is why I only use dictionaries that have lots of examples.

So, here we go...the 5 words for today are:

• We went to Egypt for the summer holidays and were shocked by the abysmal living conditions.
• After his mother died, he was in abysmal misery.
• Ignored by authorities and communities, the gypsies in Romania lived in abysmal poverty.
• I did not enjoy it. It was an abysmal performance.
• The weather was abysmal.

I like the way the word atrocity sounds. But I have no idea what it means. Let's check it out.

• The invading army committed many atrocities.
• Hitler not only committed and act of atrocious cruelty, but committed crimes against all humanity.
• Americans were behaving atrociously in the Vietnam war. Just watch The Apocalypse Now by Coppola. It is a very vivid example of how atrocious the behavior of people can get when they think they are God.

I don't like the way the word sound anymore. It's meaning ruins it!

• What we wanted this summer was going away from crowded cities and beaches. What we wanted was a quiet little place in the back of beyond.
• We fell for the commercial of the gorgeous little cottage on the edge of the town, but in the end we found that it was in the back of beyond. It took us 2 hours to get to the nearest shop.

• I get very annoyed if I am on a train, trying to read a kick ass novel, and some hectic woman starts to cackle.
• He seemed like an interesting fellow, but every now and then he cackled like a madman, which shocked me every time.
• I prefer giggling to cackling, because the latter makes me fall into a shock.

So far, I've go abysmal, atrocity and cackle. I will try to make a sentence out of all three.
The army devastated the land, behaving atrociously towards the hostages left behind. One of the soldiers cackled like a madman every time a hostage tried to escape but couldn't.

Oh, dear. All of these words are so depressing. I don't think it is even possible to use them in a more positive meaning, because of their negative connotation, except maybe the word cackle. Although, I can't imagine anyone not being annoyed by it....Let's move on to some more positive words this time.

• We discerned a sail on the horizon.
• She is incapable of discerning right from wrong.
• Walking for miles on end without a living soul, we finally discerned twinkly lights and a few houses in the distance.
• Tina finally discerned a figure approaching through the fog and we were rescued.
• Walking through the kitchen we discerned a strange odor. (we can discern with other senses than the eyes as well!)
• We had no clue why he did it. We were unable to discern his motives.

I can already tell that this is going to be a tough one to remember - or to use in my active vocab. I need to come back to that one...I hope I will discern the word through the huge chunk of other words:-)

• That was a nifty joke! You have a clever mind.
• He's always full of nifty ideas.
• I bought a nifty dress for my prom.
• Luckily, I sold my car for a nifty price.

On learning idioms

I’ve come across some very useful vocabulary in the past few weeks. Well, it should be useful; the only problem is that I can't find any use for some of it. I guess this is due to the fact that I do not really understand the meaning of, or the idea behind, certain phrases, words or idioms; otherwise I am sure I would be deliriously happy about the fact that I am enriching my vocabulary as well as my imagination.

It is not easy to speak a foreign language well. Every nation has shaped its language psyche according to their specific customs and distinct cultures, and sometimes, these customs were and still are extremely different from nation to nation. I guess that’s why, being a non-native speaker of English, I sometimes can’t find a logical explanation to English idioms.

I’ve always found it amusing to compare the idioms of different nations. In my language, which is Slovenian by the way, when someone is very healthy we say that they are healthy as a fish. In Spain they are healthy as bulls, in France as horses and in Germany they are not healthy as animals at all.

The first time someone told me I was pulling their leg, I thought that meant I was offending them and not that they thought I was fooling them. What does pulling a leg have to do with fooling someone? I thought that the way idioms were created was that there was some sort of an everyday thing exaggerated but that there is always at least a little bit of a literal meaning in it... Anyway, I thought they were pulling my leg when they told me what that idiom meant. What a silly idiom, I thought. But then it occurred to me that in my language we pull each other’s noses, which is even sillier!

And then there are those big differences in using nouns and prepositions in idioms. In my language I usually ‘remember things on mind’. Nobody would understand me in English if I tried to explain that they had to remember something utterly important ‘on mind’. They take things far more seriously than that. They remember things ‘by heart’, which is one of the central organs mythically, romantically and of course physically for human beings.

Some idioms can, luckily, be interpreted logically, for example, ‘to vent the spleen’. We have the verb ‘to vent’, which means ‘to release’, or ‘to give expression to’. Then we have the noun ‘spleen’, which is ‘anger’, ‘melancholy’, or ‘bad spirit’. So, basically, I do not have any spleen to vent now because this idiom is so easy to crack. It means to express the anger or bad spirits; or to get all that troubles you out of your system. Hey, that’s another idiom. This idiom business is actually duck soup for me. I am a genius. Now I am just tooting my own horn.

Anyway, there are some idioms that do not give away their meaning simply by a translation of the individual words. Rather, one has to grasp the idea behind them, for example, ‘to beat a dead horse’. We know what ‘to beat’ means, and we know what ‘a horse’ is. But why would someone beat a horse that is already dead? (Why would anyone beat any horse!?) Precisely in that question lies the answer. It is ridiculous to try to do something all over again when it is already done. Therefore, someone who is beating a dead horse is doing something, or saying something that has already been done or discussed and there is no need to say or do it again. There is no need to bore others by saying or doing it again.

However logical or easy some idioms are to interpret, there are more complex ones that are not so easy to crack. Sometimes they are impossible to understand, and in a lot of cases, one cannot find an alternative for them in one's own language or culture. One example is ‘to have an axe to grind’. On first glance you might think it means ’to sharpen the axe’. An axe is a tool which is used for chopping or cutting and is sharp. If we need to sharpen a tool, symbolically, this would mean that we need to be more decisive or sharp in our actions or decisions. But that is not what this idiom means at all. To be honest, I do not understand it. And I feel now as if my ‘idiomatic’ communication in English will never progress. I have surely reached the end of my tether.

Blog entry about trying to become friends with JWI

I've already discovered that reading JWI is not one of those books you can read lying down on the sofa or being spread out in a shade under a tree somewhere. It's the sort of book that requires a lot of reading-breaks during which dictionaries need to be used. AND QUITE FREQUENTLY! In fact, so frequently that had JWI not been assigned for class, I'd long close it and throw it on a pile among those books I label with "Never going to read that one!"It is not just the hours of vocabulary learning that will need to be jotted down into my everyday schedule - that is the good part! What my problem with JWI is is that it just doesn't light the spark of interest in me. I guess expat literature is just not really my kind of literature, or maybe it is, but I just haven't run into an expat book I'd really like yet. Besides, there is a sea of books out there to read and an ocean of good ones. That is why I generally never force myself to read the whole book just because I should finish what I started. If I don't like the book, I endure reading it for just a little bit longer, because I might be suprised...but if I am not, I just move on to the next book I might or might not like. Thus, reading JWI will be a pain in the a**, but I have to do it, there is no other option, so why not making the best of it and just read it from a very critical point of view, as someone who doesn't like expat lit.

Maybe what I will really have to do is to go out to the woods and hug trees to get some inspiration (isn't that the latest method for getting a lot of positive energy?). Or maybe, I can just trust our professors who chose the book on there being a high level of practicality involved in reading JWI and be content with that. Whatever it is, I need to take the bull by the horns and do my best.

Who knows, I might end up making a David Monagan fan club, although I sincerely doubt it. I am the sort of reader who's got extremely high criteria when it comes to the style of writing. If I am not impressed by the style of writing itself, I hardly ever go into the story. However, that is not always the case. Hemingway, for example, has a kind of "dry" style of writing - on the surface. What I mean by claiming that is that his sentences are short; he hardly uses adjectives; and the meaning of sentences is very clear, and yet the matter of the messages he poses in his works is very complex and cunningly hidden beyond all the simplicity and this "dryness" in style of writing I am talking about.

Now, Monagan, well, he is everything that Hemingway is not. JWI seems to be an inch away from exploding with adjectives. Almost every noun has an adjective (and most of them are news to me). Sometimes, Monagan's language doesn't even sound English. I mean, what is "great clots of people thronged the main thoroughfare, yakking with a blithe animation?" From time to time, as in this case, his writing seems to be unnatural, as if he's trying too hard to be the great Irish story teller. However, I am impressed by the rich use of vocabulary, which Monagan is really the master of. I am very stimulated to learn a few words myself after reading only one chapter. I only hope I won't go berserk after reading a few more...because, I'm telling you, it piles up until you just don't know "what, where, who, when" anymore.

So, let's see how this goes as I go along.

Ciao.