Cyndi Brandenburg on America

The excellent Dr. Cyndi Brandenburg on America in preparation for the Trip of Excellence.

Pre-Trip Fun

The time is flying by before leaving for Oklahoma on Wednesday morning.  Last night the Brandenburg/Vespas came over for Super Nachodic (doesn't this work like tornadic?) splendor.  Somehow a piece of pie blew up shrapnel-like in Joey's hands, coating him over his half his body. It was pretty spectacular. Tonight I have an invitation for a cookout at the Noonan/Wehmeyers.  How did I get so lucky to have so many amazing friends?  I know that Sandy is also invited so maybe this will allow for further planning for the Trip of Excellence.  I'm also going to try and get in a bike ride and also price a Flip camera.  Oh, and somewhere along the way I need to think about getting packed.

Mainly I think I justed wanted to try out the Blogger app I just downloaded.

The Quest

Of all the strange twists and turns that my life has taken over the last couple years I may be getting ready to embark on the strangest one. Next week I'm heading off to Guymon, Oklahoma with my great friend Sanford Zale. I teach with Sandy at Champlain and he is the founding member of the Gentlemen of Excellence. For the last couple years I've been hearing him lament the fact that he's visited 47 of the lower 48 states, having only, somehow, missed Oklahoma. Every year there is a new plan to somehow (insh'allah) make it to Oklahoma, but something always happens to delay/destroy the plans. Finally, I decided to take matters into my own hands and told Sandy that I would get him to Oklahoma, even if I had to drive the whole way.

As with most of my plans, what started out a simple and even whimsical idea has taken on a life of its own. With the help of my excellent friends Andy and Heidi, we now have our own blog (http://okexcellence.wordpress.com) and twitter account (@OKexcellence) to recount the adventures. I'm sure I'll be posting material from the trip onto this blog, but the trip is too epic to be constrained by the narrow borders of the On the Way Home blog.

We're taking off Wednesday and driving to Long Island to see Sandy's parents and drop off his cat Bacon (named after Sir Francis Bacon). Then we're off to Washington, DC so that Sandy can attend his college reunion, and I'll take the opportunity to spend a few days with my friend Debi and her family. After that we're going to head west on US 50 into the heart of darkness. Along the way we plan on spending a couple days in Cincinnati with my best friend David Kelley, and then hopefully on into Indiana to see my Dad.

The big mystery has been the final destination of the trip. That was revealed last night during a planning session at the St. John's Club (athough I left before the karoake part of the contingency planning). We're headed to Guymon, Oklahoma. Yes, another trip to Guymon, Oklahoma. Why Guymon? Well, if you go to the Guymon website it proudly points out that "As the largest, most centrally located city in the panhandle, Guymon is the business and retail center of the region." Sandy chose Guymon because "it's the city with the boldest print on the map of any city in the panhandle." I, of course, could not argue with that logic. I wanted to take US 50 because it goes through the Natti, so it has a certain romantic appeal to me. My understanding of the directions is that we just head west on US 50 and when we're half-way across the country we take a left.

I was recently explaining to my friend David my scheme of spending next Christmas in Samarkand, Uzbekistan and my next birthday in Sanaa, Yemen. He thought the Oklahoma trip sounded more dangerous and certainly more worthy of a David Lynch film.

My Imbecility

I came across this picture the other day that my friend Marcie (one of the great folks from the CIEE Silk Road trip) sent me. I suppose I might be posting it because it reminds me of the thousand and one incredible meals we had in China, and, well, truthfully, that is part of it. However, I think I'm probably posting it because it is a reminder of how inept I am at all things (probably being re-enforced by my clumsy battles with Arabic). We used chop sticks during every meal in China, and it's not as if I had never used them before that point, but during one of our last meals a student turned to me and asked if this was the first time I had ever tried them. I could only smile.

Synaptic Plasticity: Learning Arabic (Clumsily)

One of the things that I am most embarrassed about - and, let's face it, there are many of them - is that I don't speak a foreign language. And this is even more hard to believe when you factor in that I created an international educational network. I suppose there are lots of "reasons" why I don't, ranging from the fact that I grew up in the intellectual wilderness of southern Indiana (and learning another language or travelling overseas was considered to be such an east coast thing) or that in high school I took two years of Latin, a year of French and a year of Spanish (which meant that my guidance counselor was absolutely inept or that my parents had already completed checked out of active parenting [and, to be fair, there were three other little ones behind me to take up their time]) or that Franklin College, where I did my undergraduate, was such a lame school that it didn't require foreign language. That said, in the end it's entirely my fault for not knowing another language, and it's something I seriously regret. For graduate school my two languages were French and Russian, and I did receive official credit for both (which should be explored in depth on shows that specialize on inexplicable mysteries such as Easter Island or the chupacabra [I can see my friend Steve Wehmeyer commenting upon it now). I think for French I read a book called Reading French in the Arts and Sciences and it gave me enough foundation to pass the Princeton exam in French, and I took a year of Russian and the requirement was waived. Over the last several years as I've done a lot of travelling I've been thinking about forcing myself to learn one, but the Global Module network covers dozens of countries so I could always make the argument to myself, which I found eminently believable, that it would be impossible to choose one language. However, even then I began to think that Arabic would be the best choice, mainly because my dream from the very beginning was to establish a network based in the Middle East (to allow American students to actually talk to Arabic students). Plus, it's a part of the world that I've come to love, and it is a fascinating (if brutal to learn) language. Now, my great friend Cyndi Brandenburg would opine that one of the best ways to fight off the mental decline that age brings - and facilitate synaptic plasticity or something like that - is to learn a foreign language. All of this is prologue to my decision to, finally, learn Arabic. Ironically, one of the things that is making this possible is my decision to step down as Assistant Dean for Global Engagement, which, while reducing my travel, is also freeing up time for projects such as this. I used the last third of my professional development funds (the other two-thirds going for books for my epics project) to buy the complete Arabic set from Rosetta Stone. I'm about two months into the adventure, which I'm actually enjoying quite a bit (even if it makes my head hurt and just re-enforces what a dolt I am). I envy folk like my friend Wes Donehower who have a natural facility with languages; I simply don't. I can usually begin to grunt my way through reading another language, but hearing and speaking it are more of a challenge (although I suspect that's true of most folks). I'm enjoying the Rosetta Stone experience, which features a series of CDs featuring total immersion - by this I mean that at no point is someone in English saying something like "and now we're going to talk about pronouns." Instead, it takes a bit of detective work, wherein you might find yourself thinking, "hmmm, I think this might be about pronouns." The goal is to get you to learn a foreign language like you learned English - by listening to it being spoken and associating new words with images (as compared to translating the Arabic word into English in your mind and then continuing). One of the biggest challenges is, not surprisingly, the Arabic script. Not only is it completely different, but it is written right to left. Plus it has these fascinating/maddening little peculiarities like the vowels appearing as signs above or below the consonents. All Arabic consonents naturally have a long a, but if there is a little dash above the consonent the long a becomes a short a, and a little dash below the consonent turns the long a into an i, and a little loop above the consonent turns the long a into a u. And, actually, I find this wrinkle really cool, although in regular Arabic they then turn around and don't include the marks, assuming that you already recognize the word. So, a real challenge, but I actually like reading and writing the script very much. Another interesting/agonizing wrinkle is that there are a couple different ways to create plurals, and one of them is internal. So, you'd replace a short a in the middle of a word with a long a, and this makes it plural. Sometimes this is really simple. For example, bintu (one girl) becomes banaatu (many girls). Other times, however, the difference is much more subtle: sayaaratu (car) becomes sayaaraatu (many cars). When it is written it's much more obvious because the long a stands alone and the t is rendered differently, but hearing and especially saying the difference is a lot tougher (at least now). Oh, and there's also a form where the plural relates to just two people - so two girls would be bintaani - but that looks different and it's easier to figure out. I'm easily amused so I'll make these little discoveries and be quite pleased with myself, and bore all my friends by sharing the stories. Last week I learned six new words for colors, all of which started with an a (which is sometimes dropped and sometimes stays depending upon what word it is linked with), which had me frustrated. And then I realized that asfaru (yellow) contained the foundation consonents s-f-r that you could see leading to saffron, which was introduced to Europe by the Arabic word - or that azraku (blue) probably related to azure. So, baby steps. I've been swapping countless emails with my friend Trish who is going to be spending the next year on a Fulbright at the University of Jordan, and who is also embarking on the Rosetta Stone Arabic experience. This allows us to trade horror stories. I have a slight lead on her now, but she'll be passing me by in a blink of an eye, not only because she's twice as smart as me, but also because she knows Swahili and they share a lot of similarities. I don't know if my brain is actually working any better, but I am enjoying the challenge.

A Remarkably Inappropriate Picture

And who thought this was a good idea? Here's another picture from the rediscovered treasure trove of pictures that I stumbled across on the school drive (I'm probably posting so many of them now because I'll eventually have to delete them to free up space on the drive, and thus receive less threatening emails from the system). This is a picture of my very good friend Peter Straube and me on my first trip to the UAE. We were out in the desert on a touristy "safari" - the same one which has produced a couple other blog posts as well. What's amazing about this picture is how completely natural Peter looks as a sheik. He's a great guy to travel with, and I wish I had some pictures of this epic four hour shopping adventure that we had in downtown Mumbai on another trip. He bought out this store, and Raj and I just sat back in amazement.

Chili on a Rainy Sunday

Today was one of those rainy Sundays, and it seems that we've had an endless stream of them lately, where you just end up puttering around the house doing a lot of nothing - and for the most part enjoying every moment of it. This is an acquired skill for me because I've always had trouble doing nothing, mainly because I was raised to believe that I was the laziest human being in the world. It is actually something I've "worked on" over the last few years - just letting myself be without feeling that I had to be accomplishing something every day. That said, I did end up doing several things, although, beyond devoting my usual hour to studying Arabic, it didn't have much to do with work. Like the rest of the country it seems that we're suffering through an endless string of rainy days. So, today I couldn't get outside for a bike ride (nor, apparently, will I for the next week), and instead spent the day alternating reading, working on Arabic (Unit 1, Lesson 3, Grammar), watching baseball (and thanks again to my son for convincing me to invest in MLB.TV), watching movies (giving a second chance to Sin City, mainly to make my son happy, a film noire movie called Where the Sidewalk Ends [featuring Andrews and Tierney, probably trying to recapture Laura magic], and later a few episodes of Archer with my friend False Mike Kelly), and whipping up a big bowl of Cincinnati style chili. While I cook chili quite a bit, and usually serve it Cincinnati style (that is, ladled over pasta or on top of hotdogs), I had never actually tired to cook it as it would taste back in the Natti. It's definitely an acquired taste, but anyone who grew up in Cincinnati knows exactly wat I'm talking about. If you are unfamiliar with it then - much like my good friend Bob Mayer - you would not like it. I did a little research on the net and came up with several recipes, and eventually settled on one as an experimet (detailed below). It actually turned out a lot better than I would have thought, and was a big hit with Mike who came up for dinner. Of course, I suppose if you put just about anything on top of paste or a hotdog, complete with cheddar cheese, then you'll probably be OK. Normally I would make it very spicy, but this is close enough to the real thing that I think I'm going to continue tinkering.

Here's the recipe I found online:

8 ounces spaghetti (for slathering under chili and cheese - hotdogs optional)
1 tablespoon olive oil (for marinating the onion, optional)
1 pound of hamburger
1 onion chopped
1 tablespooon minced garlic
1 cup tomato sauce (although I think I used more than two)
1 cup water
1 large can diced tomato
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
2 tablespoons chili powder
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon paprika
1/2 teaspoon ground all-spice
1 tablespoon light brown sugar
1 tablespoon unsweetened cocoa powder
1 teaspoon hot pepper sauce
1 cup kidney beans
1 cup shredded cheddar cheese

It was pretty painless. I just fried up the hamburger and onion together, then threw the meat and onion and the rest of the ingredients into a crockpot and cooked it on high for four hours. I wish I had had the opportunity to invite my friends Original Mike Lange and Andy Burkhardt over (but they were both out of town). They've eaten Cincinnati chili at my place before, but that was Skyline Chili that I had brought back from the Natti. Mike has Ohio roots and he was very happy.