Postcards from America: NYC

Despite my best efforts, I did not manage to find Tina Fey in NYC... Disappointment of the year! I swear I could have convinced her to come to Canada and be my personal comedian.

Anyway, NYC overall does not disappoint: people drive like maniacs and honk their horns with abandon; the food is everything from delicious Korean BBQ to questionable street hot dogs (which Rob enjoyed frequently); and the people are as angry, friendly and quirky as every TV show makes them out to be!

Love it!

Postcards from America: The Rock

I am interrupting the reflections on Saudi once again to post travel updates.... I am on the road making my way across America. First stop, the actual Plymouth rock... I kid you not!

Trypanosomes, Caverns and Lambananas

That's right, I'm in Liverpool!  But of course that was easy to figure out from the title right?  Allow me to expound...

Trypanosomes are parasites, and quite pretty ones too.  Well they're pretty under the microscope, but not so pretty if you have them swimming through your bloodstream or working their way into your CNS, where they can really wreck havoc.  They are, of course, the little buggers that cause African Sleeping Sickness, and they relate to Liverpool because it's here, at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine that I glimpsed them under a microscope.  I'm here for the Tropical Nursing course which has been three weeks of non-stop information on every little critter that can take up unwelcome residence in the human body; plus sessions on everything from mental health in the developing world to humanitarian responses in crisis.  Needless to say it has been fascinating, inspiring and incredibly tiring.

As the course ended on Friday, and I have no burning desire to rush to London to celebrate the Queen's Diamond Jubilee (rock on Liz!) I have spent the weekend enjoying the intermittent English sunshine and all that Liverpool has to offer.  Friday saw the Olympic torch come through town - I watched it go by on my way to the pub (how perfectly British), then pub by pub a group of school mates and I eventually made our way to the infamous Cavern Club - the not-so-original site of the Beatles 292 performances!

The following wealth of Beatles history and trivia has been gathered tirelessly from the signage around town (and a bit from Wikipedia).

The Cavern Club, on equally famous Mathew Street, first opened as a jazz club.  When Lennon's first band, The Quarry Men Skiffle Group played in 1957 they were, I've heard, told to "cut out the rock" by the club's owner.  Needless to say he later retracted that statement as The Cavern Club became ground zero for Beatlemania.

Now the club is obviously a mecca for Beatles fans the world over, not to mention fans of The Who and Queen and various other groups that have graced its stage throughout the years.  The club obliges these seekers of rock history by having live bands every night playing old school rock so the girls can dance the night away just like in the swinging 60's - which we obviously did!  My ears were ringing for two days after that night!

Other famous Beatles sights abound throughout Liverpool waiting to take the dedicated fan on a Magical Mystery Tour all their own (or courtesy of the multitude of tour buses or Fab Four Taxis).  I chose the bipedal route and found myself walking 20 kilometres in search of history....

That's right it's Strawberry Field!  The area was owned by the Salvation Army (possibly still is, I don't know) and was a field John used to play in.  The gates here today are replicas of the original.  You can order your own replicas by calling the number off a sign just behind the gates - kind of kills the magic if you ask me.  Also the intense graffiti and frequent tour buses stopping is a bit of a buzz kill.

Next stop - St. Peter's Church where John and Paul first met!  Not very photo worthy as it is just your everyday church.  But in the graveyard beside it...  the grave of the Rigby family including Mrs. Eleanor Rigby.  Paul says if he took the name from there it was a subconscious act (he thought he was combining the names of a girlfriend and some store in Liverpool). Still, it is pretty cool.

And of course, what Magical Mystery Tour would be complete without a stop at Penny Lane... where the barber's selling photographs of every head he's had the pleasure to know!  Tony Slavin's barber shop is there, although I think Tony is long since gone.  And the shelter in the middle of the round-about was turned into a cafe in the 80's, subsequently abandoned, and currently sits in a state of disrepair.  But still, it's magical!

Penny Lane is actually named after James Penny who was an 18th century slave-ship owner in Liverpool.  Recently a city councillor proposed changing all the street names associated with the slave trade (there area apparently quite a few in Liverpool as this was a large shipping port during the period of triangular trade) however for obvious reasons, Penny Lane has been spared.

Okay, enough Beatles trivia and on to a much more pressing topic - the mystery of the Lambanana.  They are everywhere in Liverpool.... large sculptures painted on the street like the cows found in Calgary.  Of course cows and Calgary makes sense (sort of), but the connection between Liverpool, lambs and bananas seemed, to me, strained at best.  Plus what is a Lambanana anyway?

This is a Lambanana - pretty straightforward.  It is half lamb, half banana and obviously all Liverpool!  The story is, Liverpool was looking for something to put it on the map (you know, other than those four guys who sang some stuff), something emblematic of the city that really captured it's history.  So they held a contest and this was the winning design; it represents Liverpool's long standing shipping history (without all that shady slave trading business).  For years Liverpool's chief export was, you guessed it, lambs!  And their chief import was... bananas!  Lambanana, brilliant!


From reading all of this, one might conclude that I have learned more about The Beatles and Northern England shipping history than about tropical diseases and global health.  Nothing could be farther from the truth, it's just that me getting on a soapbox to talk about schistosomiasis or maternal health doesn't make for very interesting reading (and the pictures aren't very exciting either).  But if you think you have a Guinea worm, or you're not too sure about the ins and outs of that pesky Yellow Fever vaccine, I am still your go-to girl.

Tomorrow I'm Heathrow-bound, on my way to Canada for the first time in 15 months!  I couldn't be more excited!  Look out Tim Horton's!

Surviving the Sandbox: On the Procurement of Sustenance

On of my favourite things about being in a new place, is checking out the local supermarkets.  I love the fact that such an everyday sort of activity can actually become an adventure, or a complicated and frustrating affair.  Riyadh, in this way, does not disappoint.

Grocery shopping in Riyadh is a family affair - couples come together along with all of their children and more than likely, their nanny.  Which means the grocery store is frequently no less than utter chaos!  Add to this the fact that the shopping carts aren't unidirectional and people don't have a problem pushing you out of the way to get what they want and you have complete pandemonium!

The best way to avoid this uncomfortable shopping experience is to expertly time your shopping to coincide with prayer time.  Saudi Arabia is (I think) unique in the middle east in that they actually enforce store closures during salat (the five prayer times throughout the day).  Now although prayer really only takes 5-10min the stores often close for more than 45 min.  Often you can see the store workers (who are likely expats and just as likely, not muslim) chatting at the tills while the store is closed - infuriating if you just want to get your Starbucks and go about your business.

But back to grocery shopping... if you can time it exactly right you can get into the grocery store just as they are closing for prayer and then do your shopping during the relative calm of salat.  The trick is getting in right on time and having a long enough list to sufficiently occupy yourself for the 45min (because no cashiers will take you until salat is finished).

If you get trapped in the store when you only wanted to grab milk, too bad!  But no worries, you can always entertain yourself with your camera phone...

For example:  Want to get your thobes their whitest and your abaayas their blackest?  New abaaya and thobe wash!

Or this one:  Culturally appropriate breakfast cereal!

As far as what you can buy in Riyadh there really isn't much difference from home.  Many Saudi's have lived in America, Canada or Great Britain at some point and come to appreciate brands from these places.  Also the large number of Western Expats in Saudi means that there is a market for most Western brands.  Tamimi (which is owned by Safeway) will import anything that Safeway carries overseas (I never actually put this to the test but I hear it's true).  Lulu prided itself on it's large number of imports and the manager often stalked us in the aisles to ask us if there were any products we would like him to start importing.  Case in point: before Christmas I was looking for molasses, the stock boy, after offering me cane syrup and bean paste (I don't think he really knew what molasses was) sadly told me they did not have it.  Two weeks later (after Christmas) I found a whole shelf of molasses marked with a large sign, "Just in from UK"!  

Surviving the Sandbox

I am not, it turns out, a very consistent blogger.  I alway knew this, but the last year seems to have thrown that into stark focus.  My efforts to blog about my time in the Middle East were quickly cut short by a most surprising revelation - I became paranoid about internet censorship.  Coming of course from Canada where we take for granted our ability to simply say what we think when we think it (at least before Stephen Harper became the grand poo-bah), I had never really considered what it would be like to be censored.  But then I arrived in Saudi Arabia and internet censorship was obvious and I started to think about what I was saying.  Then I realized that my blog was being read inside the kingdom and I started to become mildly paranoid.  And without much warning I found myself completely unable to write anything for fear that it might insult or incriminate.

Now safely out of the kingdom, I feel like I want to write about what that year was like from my perspective and about the things I learned as I lived, worked and traveled.  I'll admit that the paranoia was probably an overreaction (I'm probably not on anybody's radar) but it was nevertheless an interesting consequence of plunking myself down in such an extremely foreign culture.  So without promising a consistent, concise or even chronological blog, I am hereby undertaking to start chronicling my time in Saudi Arabia - semi-affectionately dubbed "The Sandbox".

Hopefully you will enjoy my musings!

Christina and I at a Saudi festival during our first month in Riyadh... I just like this picture, I think we look like we are conspiring (as roommate Amy pointed out, I often look like I am conspiring).

Boston is all in!

I arrived in Boston a little over a week ago, and from the moment I landed it became obvious - this is a city on the move. Running is a not just an activity here, it is a lifestyle and a mode of transport and a full out obsession. I arrived just in time for Marathon Weekend too which meant the whole city was buzzing with marathon madness... naturally I had to join in!

Just kidding! I am by no means a marathoner! I did however run the 5k race the day before the marathon and finished with a personal best time of 30:06! Definitely not world class but I was thrilled nonetheless. They even gave me a t-shirt and a finishers' medal - I was like a kid at Christmas!

The marathon itself was a great day too. It was literally 26.2 miles of street partying - people came out in droves to cheer on those crazy enough to run in the blistering heat (30 degrees Celsius at midday!) Boston really was all in. The sense of community was wonderfully conspicuous - people were cheering like mad for strangers, holding up signs of encouragement and making all kinds of noise as each wave of runners came by. I watched as two little sisters (reminding me of little Jessie and Kelsey) stood by the side of the road tenaciously holding out orange slices for the runners. When one runner finally took a slice from the older sister she literally squealed with excitement! There were also people who live along the marathon route who set up their own sprinklers next to the road so the runners could run through some refreshing cold water. I also heard that runners running for charity raised over $150 000 000 for various charities this year! Just wonderful!

We joined in all the excitement down the street from our house at mile 23. Standing among all that reverie, strawberry daiquiri in hand, I couldn't help but think of all the things going on that Saudi Arabia would deem "haram"; the alcohol being drunk, the pork being cooked up on the barbecues, the women in shorts and tank-tops, the fraternizing between men and women; and I loved it all! I am so glad and so thankful to be back!

Ma'salama Habibiti

This is it! No more says until I leave! Goodbye to the sandbox! Goodbye to abaayas! Leaving in just a few hours!