Americans discover Tunisia, cont’d

In response to this post, a reader writes:

I’ve been to several Muslim countries and have warm receptions in each. I found your site b/c I want to travel to Tunisia next. I do find it sad, and a bit weak that you have a ‘well practiced Canadian mode’ because I think it’s important to be proud of your nationality and by showing people that we Americans are not stereotypical jerks. By lying about where you are from, you are strengthing the stereotypes.

To an extent, my story was hyperbole, as so far in my travels and during my stints in Spain, I’ve never said I was from Canada and I’ve never been in a situation where I thought I might have to, and I think it’s quite possible that I never will.  Also, perhaps I should have qualified what I meant by “anti-american sentiment”.  I’m not referring to just negative attitudes or the sneer that might appear when someone finds out where I’m from (because that I’ve experienced).  I’m referring to the bellicose kind, any situation where I would actually feel that my safety was in jeopardy, especially if I were confronted with a group rather than just one person, and particularly since I am a woman.  (And quite small.)

Thanks to my mom for sending me this Bizarro edition!

As I don’t know the reader, I wonder if it wouldn’t boil down to a fundamental difference in views on pride, nationality, and patriotism.  While I love where I’m from and in some ways I feel I’m lucky to be from there, historically I’ve not been enthusiastically proud of my country (that has started to change since the 2008 election), nor have I tended to curse it for being a terrible place.  I’m not someone who has always felt closely tied to my American nationality, as so many of us came from somewhere else relatively recently — on my mom’s side I’m only the third generation born in the U.S. — and in many ways I believe that being American is more a way of life and a system of political beliefs rather than a nationality.  And I don’t think I can say that I’ve ever been a super-patriot.  Actually I’m an expatriate, which, while I wouldn’t agree with them, some Americans equate with being anti-American.  There are definitely situations in which I would be willing to die for my country, but more so because that implies many lives rather than caring specifically about American lives, and there are lots of others where I can tell you that I don’t love being an American so much that I wouldn’t pretend to be from somewhere else if it meant saving a life…  The fact that I’ve even seriously thought about my Canada idea — and the fact that I’m not the only American I know who has one — says much more than the idea itself.

I do believe it’s good, when abroad, to try to represent your country and your country’s people as best you can.  In fact, it’s my job.  My gig here with the Spanish government is twofold: to help the students and teachers learn English and to be a cultural ambassador.  And while I understand that my reader doesn’t like the idea of hiding one’s nationality, I have difficulty seeing how not showing pride in being American, if confronted with anti-American hostility, would perpetuate our stereotypes.  The worst of our  stereotypes say that we’re arrogant, gluttonous, uneducated imperialists, not spineless, self-loathing apologists.  I can’t say if a foreign America-hater would consider it weak or not, but I can’t imagine it playing worse than an American tourist displaying pride in his or her nationality when it would be dangerous or inappropriate to do so, or being aloof and boastful without regard to the environment. Indeed, I do not agree that it’s important to be proud of your nationality.  I think it’s ideal to be able to be proud of your nationality, but saying it’s important to be proud of it is presuming an inherent obligation to your nationality and country, and to a fault. 

Still, I’ve been pondering my reader’s comments and his/her words did sting.  There have been times, while contemplating lying about where I’m from, when I have felt the guilt of a  perfidious expat betraying who I am.  But I’m not convinced that lying about your country of birth can be likened to recanting your religious faith or something in which you fiercely believe in the face of persecution…  Am I wrong?  Right?  Thoughts?

Here — enjoy another one of my pictures from Tunisia! 

Recent creepy/amusing/intriguing searches

I was excited to discover upon switching my blog over here a while back that in Blog Stats you can see lists of search engine topics people enter that lead them to your blog.  Only recently, however, did I start paying any attention to them, and the amusement that has ensued has had me scouring the archives to see all the wacky and strange things that bring people to my site.  Of all the things I write about, so far among my most visited posts are ones that deal with popularity and mean girls, punishment, and fashion.  (Every day there are several if not dozens of searches for “mean girls” that bring people to my site.)  Here’s are some of the “best” searches so far, along with my guesses on who could be the searchers — and feel free to send me your guesses:

• “middle school sluts” (dirty old pervert; horny middle-school pervert; middle-school girl either considering becoming a slut or pondering her slutty schoolmates)
• “bad girls high school” (see above)
• “women getting sluttier” (see above above, except adults)
• “exposed girls” (obvious, and I’m not sure yet how I feel about these searches leading people to my blog…I’ll let you know when I decide)
• “overalls fashionable” (someone wanting to know if they are; someone who delights in oxymora; someone who delights in oxymora and is possibly a native Spanish-speaker)
• “dinosaurs+taping+thumbs” (surely someone who knows about this; someone I might want to be friends with)
• “social hierarchy posers tools” (trying to figure out where they are in the pyramid?)
• “legs pre teen girls” (dirty old pervert; pre-teen girl experiencing self-esteem issues)
• I’m not actually putting this one down but it was a URL and it led to a rape-fantasy site (yikes)
• “what was the name of the book chaza gave” (assuming they were referring to Chávez giving Obama a book, someone who should read more)
• “emo girl at hotel” (?)
• “ways of hanging out with the populars” (obvious; or someone doing research; the sad part is that I searched that to see what popped up and the first result was a forum where a girl was saying that her mom wanted her to be popular and tried to get her to hang out with the popular crowd…moms like that should be punched in the ovaries)
• “raped girls video free” (AAGGHH)

More as I get them.

¡Ni una sonrisa! Madrid’s police force is insane.

We went on a very strange field trip yesterday.

It got off to a rough start, after our administrators had told us to take our thirty-one kids to the busy plaza by our school to wait for the bus.  It was cold outside.  The kids are rowdy.  After about twenty minutes, we called the school, and the vice principal said she’d call us back.  A few minutes later the bus arrived, the driver saying he’d been waiting outside the front door of the school for half an hour.

Off we went to a police station on the outskirts of the city.  The main goal of the excursion was for the kids to learn about what the police to do help and protect them, a supplement to the educación vial sessions they had earlier in the year where cops came to the school and taught the kids about traffic lights and looking both ways.  Not as fun when you’re not in Safety Town and don’t have movies narrated by Jiminy Cricket.

The cop running the show seemed energetic and friendly.  We all filed into a cold, concrete room and our kids took up the first few rows, waiting for some kids from another school to arrive, and he explained that anyone who doesn’t want to listen to him could go wait on the bus.  Fair enough.  Establishing authority, discipline, and I don’t blame him because our kids need it.  But then the other students — interesting, new, different, fascinating children from another school — come in, something that will obviously catch the attention of a third-grader, and our kids turned their heads to examine the newcomers.  The cop, let’s call him Franco, goes into this whole spiel about how he doesn’t want to see a single kid turn their head around, not once.  And when he starts the PowerPoint presentation and does his narration, they are not to look at him while he talks, ONLY the screen, and NOTHING else and he doesn’t want to see ANY heads turning while the screen is on.  (And I can assure you that for all the technology that the Madrid police force touts, PowerPoint is not their strong suit and the kids would not have missed out on anything by just looking at the floor the whole time.)  

Americans discover Tunisia

I haven’t posted for a while, and there are lots of things I’ve been wanting to write about.  First up, Tunisia:

I just got back from a vacation in Tunisia, a trip I took with two other Americans and one Spaniard.  It was amazing and beautiful and the people were exceedingly kind and friendly, but the most important thing I want to talk about is the strange sensation of being American in a type of country (read: Muslim) and a part of the world to which many Americans don’t dare to trek, especially not for leisure.  In some cases, it is with good reason; I don’t see myself booking a vacation to Iraq any time soon.  Likewise, as since returning from our trip we’ve decided that we would like to explore more of North Africa and have therefore been doing a bit of research, if a trustworthy guide (like Rick Steves or Lonely Planet) warns that a place is very dangerous, in general or for tourists or for Americans specifically, I will likely imagine the worst and refrain from going there.

 

And in any foreign country, particularly when you’re from a nation that doesn’t have the best reputation in the world, you’ll do well to stay alert.  Obviously I didn’t walk around waving an American flag or boasting about my nationality, and had I, at any time, picked up any sort of anti-American sentiment, I would have kept my mouth shut and gone into my well-practiced I’m-from-Canada mode.