Friday Commotion

The door opens and a man hands me the broken pieces of a car mirror, "A bus just hit your car," he states simply, "Bus number 16. I was sitting at the café downstairs and saw it happen." My boss and I head down to see the damage. Indeed, it is a sorry looking sight, as the mangled mirror hangs attached only by a black cord on our company car.

"It was bus number 16," a lady tells me in English on the sidewalk as my boss attempts to remove what he can of the remaining pieces, "about fifteen minutes ago." I thank her, and as we are about to return to the office another lady calls to us and hands us a note paper with the offending vehicle's license plate number, time of accident and the location, "I was driving behind him, and saw what happened," she tells us helpfully.

Not ten minutes later, after I have remarked with surprise about how helpful people are around here in reporting accidents (in Ecuador such a thing would never happen, they'd have probably even taken the other mirror for sale on the black market!), the doorbell rings and a gentleman with baguettes in his shopping bag enters. "I came to report an accident, in case no one else has yet," he says. After a few moments of thanking him and assuring him that we have received such news, I wonder out loud to him about the helpful attitude people have. "It's because they're fed up with the way buses and metros think they own the streets," he explains.

Hah, I smile. It's the vendetta of the masses! Nonetheless, it helps us out, especially since the bus driver claims he didn't notice doing any damage to any car!

In Nature's Hem

There is nothing like the softness of hair washed in the lake, or the taste of liquorice candy melted on the sauna stove! And what kind of exclamation is this, you may wonder. It is the result of a few lazy wonderful days spent at the summer cottage with my relatives! A few of my favorite moments:

I sit in the sauna and I tell my twin cousins riddles that they try to figure out by asking yes/no questions: A man with a backpack approaches the edge of a field, death inevitably follows. Why? They figure this one out quickly between swims in the lake, and the next one takes them much longer: A man works on the tenth floor. Every day, he takes the elevator to the third floor, and walks the rest of the flights of stairs. But when it rains, he goes to the seventh floor by elevator, and walks the rest. How come?

I wake up earlier than everyone else, and go out for a run (which reveals to me what happens when one has not been consistent with exercise) in the sunny morning along dirt roads. I return and cool off in the lake. Still, no one else is awake, and I try to quietly make coffee. I enjoy my muesli and yogurt on the dock with my cousins' friendly dog comfortably settled by my side. The sun makes pearls appear on the lake surface as the wind briskly nudges the tall reeds by the shore.

We play cards late into the night, and I teach my cousin Anna to draw a woman's face, as her sister Henna concentrates on drawing a horse. I am reminded how just a short while ago, I was the kid with the playful energy and budding drawing skills. It is interesting to find myself in the role of adult, when all my memories of the summer cottage are of me-the-child: learning to paint, picking flowers and meadow strawberries, sleepwalking, brushing teeth outside, swimming across the lake, making up water ballets with my sister, and so on. I am making new memories.

We make rounds to swat all the mosquitos inside the main cabin before we go to bed, but somehow, to no avail. It is a great frustration to try to fall asleep to the whine of mosquitos in your ear, because you know they're just looking for a juicy spot of exposed skin...this morning's welts testify to their successful night and my sleeplessness! But, even the mosquitos do not diminish my enthusiasm to return. It's all part of the summer!

Discovery

According to the daily pape, the sun rises at 3:55 and sets at 22:46. My daytime hours are spent inside at work and then in the throes of Arabic homework followed by 2.5 hours of class. Thus, I am able to enjoy being outside before 8:00 and after 19:30. This schedule will change at the end of this week, but recently with the warm weather it has been increasingly enticing to be outdoors!

So, one evening my cousin Sarai and I initiated a bike ride around 21:15, perhaps just because the summer evening whispered that it had been waiting for us all day. Riding by the lake we stumbled upon on a house-converted-into-a-museum, which had once been the residence of the Finnish writer Juhani Aho and his wife and kids. Situated on the top of a boulder that slopes into the lake, this enormous house is somewhat like my dream house; not only because of its location next to water, surrounded by trees and shrubbery, and in the direct glow of the evening sun, but also because it is made of thick wooden beams and boasts a floor to roof window on one side, as well as an adjacent sauna on the shore. The wood is blackened by age and smells delicious--like forest and earth and time mixed together. Both ends of the house have porches and stone stairs to reach the doors. Somehow such a place sets my imagination racing to potentially endless hide-n-seek games that children play on rainy days, its interesting owners in the last century, and even the trolls and fairies that most certainly have taken up a bold existence in the absence of human inhabitants!

Sarai and I sat on the spacious boulder by the waterline, surrounded by tiny mosquitos and small ripples on the lake surface. A gypsy girl in a long black skirt fished nearby and caught two perches in the short amount of time we were there, which she proudly showed to her parents who I don't think caught anything. We leisurely left via a tour of the garden, continuing our ride at 22:00, as the cooling air of the evening gave us the cue to return home.

{An Anonymous Evening}

The light fades at the edge of the horizon, clinging to the expanse of
sky as if it does not want to leave. Soft hues bathe my vision, as
my mind swings in a peaceful hammock, rocked by the last
rays of the day; may calm and ease be yours this night,
the birch leaves quietly whisper as they strike up the
evening lullaby. The wind disrobes my heavy
thoughts, and wipes them away along with
the worries I have worn like wrinkled
garments. Now, on this tender
summer night I may at last
lay my tired head and
heavy heart to rest,
as the blanket of
sky gently
covers
me.

Keys in my Pocket

صباح الخير

And that would be a good morning to you in Arabic, minus all the vowel markings. Transliterated in the Classical Arabic, it sounds like: sabāhu-l-khayri.
In case you were wondering, I am at best in the midst of a short intensive Arabic course, getting my feet wet so that the dive into the depths of university courses this fall will not come as such a shock! After merely a few days of lessons, I am already swamped with homework, but I certainly know more now than I did when I began! That is always the payoff of language classes: you leave with more knowledge in your pocket!

It is exciting to learn a new language, as if a whole new world is suddenly before you--the language being the key that unlocks that door to new perspectives, customs, books, people, and experiences that until now have been impossible to communicate clearly in the original version! Of course, I am aware that this learning will take years, but bring it on, I say! Bring on the endless exercises, the bad pronunciation, the frustration of new concepts, the mistakes, the broken conversations in my head, the repetition--which will all one day hopefully result in a competent level of fluency!