Some cool stuff going on

In just a few short days, the 56th Presidential Inaugural will be fully underway.

This will be an inauguration for all Americans, and we have an exciting list of events planned, even if you won't be in Washington, D.C. I wanted to send you an update about some of the items on the agenda:

Sunday, January 18th

We Are One: The Obama Inaugural Celebration at the Lincoln Memorial, free, live broadcast on HBO -- At 2:30 p.m. EST, HBO will offer a free nationwide broadcast of the We Are One concert featuring Bono, Bruce Springsteen, John Legend and more. Check your local listings to find out where you can watch the free HBO broadcast.

Monday, January 19th

Renew America Together: National Day of Service -- The Obama and Biden families will be participating in volunteer service in the Washington, D.C. area, and would like you to take part in your community. Join any one of more than 10,000 service events already scheduled across America, or host your own:

http://www.USAservice.org/calltoservice

Kids' Inaugural: We Are The Future -- After being part of the day of service, Michelle Obama and Jill Biden will host a free Kids' Inaugural concert for the children of military families. Performances by Miley Cyrus, the Jonas Brothers, Bow Wow and others will be broadcast on the Disney Channel and Disney Radio beginning at 8:00 p.m. EST.

Tuesday, January 20th

The Neighborhood Ball -- On the night of the Inauguration, the newly sworn-in President and the First Lady will attend the first-ever Neighborhood Inaugural Ball. Join the celebration by hosting or attending a Neighborhood Ball in your own community:

http://www.pic2009.org/ball

ABC will broadcast the Washington, D.C. Neighborhood Ball, and the Presidential Inaugural Committee will be live blogging from the ballroom.

These are just a few of the events planned in the coming days. Visit www.pic2009.org to find out more. And to make sure you get up-to-the-minute updates about these and other Inaugural events, text OPEN to 56333.
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Travel memories

I went to Istanbul for nearly a week last November, and decided I needed a month just to see a fraction of the city, so I'll have to go back some time. Tom (an English guy I met in Bulgaria) and I went down there and wandered the streets rather aimlessly, which is the best way to visit a place in my opinion. Tom's one of those people who makes no real plans for a day, and the biggest decisions are whether to go right down a street because it looks interesting or left because it is colorful and you can hear music from it. When we needed food, we ducked into whatever place was near. When we needed beer, we sat down and had some Efes at whichever bar we came across.

On the first day we met this American kid who was studying the Byzantine era at a university in Greece, and he was the tour book kind of tourist, but he was justified because there were things he needed to see for his studies. He was quite knowledgeable and very interesting to follow around on the first day, but I more enjoyed our wanderings later in the week. On Jacob's last day we led him around in our style of touring, and he rather liked it. At least we could teach him a thing or two about traveling.

Tom was kind of looking for a job and once we saw a big school on a hilltop and he decided to ask about teaching English, so we made this mammoth climb through what was probably not a great part of town, judging from the crumbling buildings and people living in what looked like bombed out apartments with only three walls. We got to the school and pressed a bell and a buzz let us through a gate without ever having a word spoken, so we began climbing the stairs and we looked through some holes in the walls and realize that there must have been some kind of palace or something underneath and that's when I realized how amazing just the dirt on the ground of that city really was - I mean, just think of all of the stuff under there, all of the artifacts and relics from the time when Istanbul was the center of the world. We swore we were looking at some kind of dungeon through the cement walls of the stairway, but it was more likely just the product of our imaginations. At the top of the stairway we discovered we were standing on a cement football field,and a man emerged from the school and spoke Turkish to us with an apprehensive smile. Naturally, none of us knew what he was saying, so Jacob tried to speak to him in broken Greek, which is sort of like speaking Hebrew in Mecca, but it was fine, because as it turned out, it was a Greek school for children of those who worked for the Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church situated somewhere down the hill. Jacob's Greek wasn't good enough, and though the three of us had six languages between us, it took us a good five minutes to communicate that Tom was looking for an English teaching position. No luck, but it was fun. That was my favorite day of the whole trip.

I did, however, have some gender issues in a couple of the neighborhoods we visited and was glad Tom was there to wander with me, because I don't think I would have enjoyed the city as much alone. In one neighborhood, every woman was clad in a black burqa. I and my uncovered head were the recipients of some spit from one of these creatures. Then there was harassment in some other quarters, but that's really no different than what you find in Italy.

I enjoyed eating fresh mackerel sandwiches along the Bosporus and perusing the pickings at the spice bazaar more than anything, I think. Oh, and there was an old aqueduct somewhere north in the city near an old mosque that was not frequented by tourists, and the three of us climbed to the top on hands and knees for what has to be the best view of Istanbul. I think I could have sat up there all day staring out at what seemed to be an infinite city, where there was no horizon, only endless tracts of stacked buildings and minarets and the occasional sound of the muezzins calling the inhabitants to prayer.

I was rather disappointed by the Ottoman palace. It felt more like an amusement park rather than the "White House" of its time. Plus, I don't consider anything that was built after the United States was an independent country as "old." I looked at some of the "treasures" found in the palace - such objects as plates and jewelry - and thought they were rather crudely constructed given that the industrial revolution was already a century underway when they were created. Factories were already mass producing the same kind of china that they found so precious. It's no wonder the empire crumbled - they refused to modernize.

Unfortunately, it was near the end of my trip, and I had to pick and choose which places to go in since most of the tourist sites cost around $10 to enter - the dhimmi tax, we called it, because the mosques were free to enter but any Christian site charged an entrance fee. I suppose I'm just spoiled having lived so long in DC, where most of the museums are free, but it was rather suspicious.

There are pictures of my trip on my blog Bulgariarox.
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Get off my lawn!

A discussion on a baseball blog about the new MLB Network and the fact that I might actually have to buy a television and get cable to watch it started another discussion about how withdrawn Americans are from their society. The gist of the discussion was how Americans (and this is becoming a global problem) retreat to the confines of their homes to watch television after long days of work and forgo interaction with the communities that surround them. This is what I wrote:

When I was six years old, my parents divorced and my mother, my two sisters, and I moved in with my grandparents for almost two years. I can still name every one of the immediate neighbors around my grandparents’ house (they were in their late forties at that time). Eileen, the next door neighbor, cut my grandmother’s hair. Bud and Burkie Dunham lived two doors down. The Huffords and the Miningers lived across the street. The Joneses – the one black family in the neighborhood – lived a few doors down. Their oldest son played whiffle ball with us on occasion. (Sadly, Mr. Jones passed last year.) We had block parties that people looked forward to. People hung their Christmas decorations together and didn’t compete with each other for gaudiest house on the street. There was barely even cable, Atari still ruled, computers had green screens, and VCRs cost $800.

That was 25 years ago. Now, people not only do not know their neighbors’ names, they don’t even say hi to them. They grumble about them. People mow their yards at 8am on a Saturday morning with no thought that they may be disturbing their neighbors. They crank up their music and expect someone to come around and tell them if it is too loud rather than just having the courtesy to play it at a normal level. They don’t give a damn if their dogs bark all night long (and everyone has to have a dog) or if their car alarm goes off any time something gets within five feet of it (because someone’s going to steal their precious SUV!)

There are exceptions, of course. In DC, I lived by a tuba player in the National Symphony Orchestra, Steve. He introduced himself when he moved in and was very careful never to start practice before nine (ten on the weekends) or finish after nine pm. I once watched his house for him while he was auditioning for the Philly Symphony. He often grilled and since I was always outside, he would hand me plates of whatever he had grilled over the fence between our backyards. At another place I lived in DC, except for saying hi to the next door neighbors because we got home from work at the same time, I didn’t know anyone. Well, except for the people across the street who came to introduce themselves only because they wanted to tell us not to park our cars in front of their house since they have small children (who were ages 7 and 9) and he didn’t want them to have to walk very far (lazy) to get to the house.

The withdrawal is a symptom of the selfishness that has been brought on by the babyboomers and generation x as well as the ever increasing paranoia Americans have about everything (omg! there’s a ped on every corner! them muslins gonna get us!) It has resulted in the isolationism from which American society suffers. This has given rise to such things as exburbs and evangelicalism and television.

Life is better when you aren’t afraid of strangers, when you make strangers your friends. When the guy next door knows you have two small children, he is going to be more reluctant to start his lawnmower at dawn. When the woman across the street knows you love pie, she might bring one to you every now and then. When you all know each other, you might get together for drinks at a neighbor’s house rather than all holing yourselves up in your individual homes in front of the idiot box. Life is fuller, more enriched, when you are in the company of friends and not the shadows of strangers.

Those high school and college students are going to be shocked when they discover they are going to have to perform community service to receive government money for school under the Obama plan. Ew…community? Yucky!
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