All posts by estelter

The Most Honorable Gesture

Interview

An interview with Renata Rivkin Haag, Coordinator of Wellesley College’s English Language Resource Center

Renata Rivkin Haag and I met on a Monday night in a small, plain study room on the fourth floor of Wellesley College’s Clapp Library.  Amid the dull hum of library air conditioning, she told me she’d just come from soccer practice.  (Whose soccer practice was unclear—with Renata in sneakers and sweats, and with her curly hair pulled back in a ponytail, it could have been her children’s or her own.)  Under normal circumstances we might have run into each other downstairs, in the more elegant Sanger Room, where Renata works as the coordinator of Wellesley’s English Language Resource Center (ELRC), an offshoot of the Pforzheimer Learning and Teaching Center, focused on English language teaching.

Renata spoke to me about her work as an English teacher, both in the ELRC and at the Showa Boston Institute for Language and Culture, a Japanese women’s college in Jamaica Plain.  Renata’s teaching method, she says, is very “intuitive.”  She teaches pronunciation, for instance, by paying attention to her own speech, and telling her students to pay attention to theirs.  In telling me about this more technical side of her work, Renata revealed her personal teaching philosophy.  She’s committed to developing a good relationship with her students, based on understanding and reciprocity.  “Even if it’s just basic,” she says, “taking the time to learn something from another culture shows a lot of respect.  When you say hello to someone in their own language, people get so excited.  Even if you don’t know anything about it, you’re saying, ‘I’m open to learning about your culture.’  Meaning, ‘I’m open to learning about you.’  It’s one of the most honorable gestures.”

Renata feels conflicted about the use of English as a lingua franca.  When non-native speakers use English to communicate with each other, she says, there is a loss of cross-cultural understanding.  She gives the example of a business contract between a German speaker and a Chinese speaker, both of whom are using English: “The Chinese person hasn’t learned that Germans start almost every negotiation by saying ‘no.’  They’re not really saying ‘no’; they’re saying, ‘Convince me why I should say yes.’  Even though these negotiators are saying words everyone theoretically understands, they don’t have the same meaning.”  In other words, even if there’s no lexical miscommunication, cultural understanding—a key component of the negotiation—gets lost in translation.

For Renata, the issue is more than purely theoretical. She’s familiar with it from personal experience.  After studying Spanish in high school and college, Renata moved to Germany to teach English, where “for the first time in my life I was illiterate.  I realized that this is what a person experiences if they’re learning English when they come to the States for the first time.  So when I teach, it’s something I carry with me.”  These experiences include the kind of linguistic mishaps that elicit empathy for one’s students.  Renata frequently shares stories of her own howlers in the classroom.  One memorable exchange occurred during her time in Germany, where she and her husband lived on the fifth floor of an apartment building: “I came down to get something from my father-in-law and went to run back up the stairs.  He asked me, ‘Why aren’t you using the elevator?’  I said, ‘Oh, this is good for your butt muscles; I want to make my muscles tighter.’  But what I said in German was, ‘I want to make my butt tighter.’  Which doesn’t refer to your muscles, but rather is something that gay men say…  Later a gay male friend heard me say this and said, ‘No, no, don’t say that, sweetie.’”  A mistake, Renata says, she hasn’t made since.

It’s clear that for Renata, foreign language teaching goes beyond checking grammar and pronunciation.  Genuinely connecting with her students is what makes all the difference.  In other words:  to err is human.  To teach a foreign language is to make your errors useful.

 

Edited Transcript

Emma Stelter:  I’d like to ask you first about the English Language Resource Center.  When you’re working in the ELRC, what kind of problems do people come in with, and how do you address them?  What are some of the techniques you use to help them out?

Renata Rivkin Haag:  I would say 85% is going over papers and editing with students.  A smaller percentage of students want help with pronunciation or building their vocabulary, and in that case we just speak.  When I hear a sound that they’re making incorrectly, it’s just really helping them to get the position of their tongue and teeth right.  I have students put their hands on their throat, to feel the vibrations or to hear where the sound is coming from.

ES:  It sounds very technical.

RR:  There’s a lot of technical things about it—there are many technical things people do—but for me it’s actually more intuitive.  You can teach it more naturally if you listen to how you speak.

ES:  In that intuitive teaching style, are there certain things that are more challenging to explain?

RR:  Spelling makes no sense whatsoever.  Explaining spelling rules…you need not do it.  There’s also a lot of spoken English, a lot of idioms and expressions.  Like, “I’m going to follow up with you tomorrow.”  It’s hard to explain why it’s “follow-up with you” and not “follow through with you,” or “follow with you”…  Grammar rules are easier to explain.  There’s a concrete rule; either the student gets it or they don’t.  If they don’t get it, it’s a nice challenge for me to figure out a way for them to get it and to remember how to use it.

ES:  Are these the same kinds of things you do at Showa?

RR:  Yes.  At Showa I use the same tools, except I work with only Japanese speakers, which is more challenging, because then they rely on speaking their native language in class for understanding and clarification.  When they don’t understand me they just ask the person next to them.  Whereas when you’re in a mixed group, the person next to you may not speak your language.  Then even if you’re asking a student, you have to rely on an English explanation.

ES:  Obviously teaching in front of a classroom and working one-on-one with students are different regardless of subject matter, but in general, do you find that there’s a lot of cultural exchange between you and your students?

RR:  Absolutely.  So, I’ll talk about Showa first.  When I’m teaching students from all the same background, I might ask something like, “How would you say this in Japanese?”  When you understand that there’s no male or female pronouns in Japanese, you understand why when Japanese students speak English, they often mix up “he” and “she.”  I can ask my students to teach me words in Japanese, and I mess those words up a million times.  I tell them a story about when I were traveling, or about when I learned another language and how I made mistakes.  They tell me stories about how they made mistakes in their English classes, and it really opens up a dialogue.

ES:  Would you say giving examples of your linguistic mishaps to your students facilitates teaching?

RR:  Yes.  It builds trust.  When I tell them about how I made mistakes, they know it’s safe for them to make a mistake.  I’m not gonna yell at them.  They’re not gonna get a bad grade.

ES:  How are things different in the ELRC?

RR:  I really like the ELRC because it’s one-on-one.  Even if I’m correcting someone’s basic grammar mistakes, here students’ speaking and understanding is often at a much higher level, and that’s really nice.  After my session ends, I can talk with them about their culture, where they’re from, why they came to Wellesley…  You build a relationship a lot faster, because here you’re working very closely with the students and judging their work.  Students may not internalize it so much, but when you ask somebody to read your paper, in essence you’re exposing your weakness, which might be, “My English is not the greatest,” or “my ideas are not the greatest.”  It’s a very interesting, powerful kind of bond, even if you never see them again.

ES:  Can you speak a little bit about your own language learning and how it has influenced your teaching?

RR:  Well, I spent four years in high school attempting to learn Spanish, and another two years in college re-learning what I hadn’t learned.  But then I moved to San Diego, where I was close to Tijuana.  There you often have a need and, in my case, a desire to speak Spanish with people in the community.  Then I moved to Germany, and for the first time in my life I was illiterate.  That was a very important experience for my teaching.  I realized that this is what a person experiences if they’re learning English when they come to the States for the first time.  I had this fear of being misunderstood or that people would presume I was dumb because I couldn’t speak the language.  So when I teach, it’s something I carry with me.  I tell my students the most embarrassing mistakes I’ve made speaking other languages, and we laugh, because they’re funny stories.  But—again with the trust—it’s good to know that your teacher also made mistakes while learning a language.

ES:  Could you share one of the stories that you tell your students?  If you’re willing, that is.

RR:  Well, they’re not that embarrassing.  So, here’s one I tell my students.  I went down to Mexico with two friends who were fluent in Spanish—I wasn’t.  We stayed with this family who lived in a small village.  There was a mother, a father, two little kids, and some chickens that would run in and out the door.  I can’t remember what I did, but I told the mother, “Soy embarazada, lo siento, soy embarazada.  I’m really sorry; I’m so embarrassed.” And the woman’s just looking me like, “No.  No, no, no, no, no.”  My friend Eric comes in the door and hears part of this conversation, and says, “Renata, you just told her you’re pregnant.”  Now I’m really embarrassed.  But now I’ll never say “soy embarazada” again, unless I really am.  In Germany, I made a slightly different mistake.  We lived on the fifth floor of an apartment building with an elevator.  I came down to get something from my father-in-law and went to run back up the stairs.  He asked me, “Why aren’t you using the elevator?”  And I said, “Oh, this is good for your butt muscles; I want to make my muscles tighter.”  But what I said in German was, “I want to make my butt tighter.”  Which doesn’t refer to your muscles, but rather is something that gay men say…  Later a gay male friend heard me say this and said, “No, no, don’t say that, sweetie.”  I was like, “Oh my God, I just said that to my father-in-law last week; I am so embarrassed.”  But I did not say “soy embarazada.”

ES:  Slightly broader topic.  What are your thoughts about foreign language education for native speakers of English in the US?

RR:  I personally think learning a second language, no matter who you are or where you are, is very important.  One, it’s important for just communicating with other people.  Two, you never learn another language without learning about the culture too, even if you’re just in a classroom.  Three, learning another language helps you understand your own language.  I never understood English—the grammar—as well as I did until I started learning German.  You really start to think about language and how it’s used.  But I really think that even if it’s just basic, taking the time to learn something from another culture shows a lot of respect.  When you say hello to someone in their own language, people get so excited.  Even if you don’t know anything about it, you’re saying, “I’m open to learning about your culture.”  Meaning, “I’m open to learning about you.”  It’s one of the most honorable gestures.  I think Americans are at a great disadvantage as a society.  Yes, there are many Americans who speak a second language, but there are so many who don’t speak more than one language, or if they do learn a language they start in ninth grade versus starting in first grade.  To wait that long is a disservice.

ES:  Thinking about learning another language as a gesture of respect, do you feel that the fact that the predominance of American English in particular might be a problem in global interactions?

RR:  So…yes, it does.  Here’s an example:  I’ve worked with Germans, teaching them English, so they can go to China and communicate with Chinese people…who had to be taught English.  So now you have two non-native speakers, negotiating contracts in a language that is not their first.  There are different power dynamics if one person has better control over the language than the other, but overall there are all sorts of miscommunication.  Just the style of the word “no,” for instance.  Having learned English and not German, the Chinese person hasn’t learned that Germans start almost every negotiation by saying “no.”  They’re not really saying “no”; they’re really saying, “Convince me why I should say yes.”  And when the German is learning English, they’re not learning the culture of the Chinese speaker.  Everyone is speaking through an English lens.  So even though these negotiators are saying words everyone theoretically understands, they don’t have the same meaning.

ES:  There’s kind of a degree of separation.

RR:  Exactly.  At least if the German person learns Chinese and speaks it poorly, and the Chinese person learns German and speaks it poorly, they’re learning each other’s cultures.  I mean, I get it; you can’t learn every language.  You need some kind of lingua franca.  You do lose something, but it is a smaller world and you have to make compromises.

ES:  I have one last question.  What do you enjoy most about your work?

RR:  Hands down, I enjoy the people.  I would love to go to every single country in the entire world, and that is not possible.  Teaching English is the one job where people of the world come to me.  Especially here at Wellesley, I meet people from all walks of life, from all age groups, cultures, social backgrounds…I get to meet them and talk to them.  It’s the most amazing job.  I wouldn’t change it for the world.

Bless Me, Professor, for I Have Studied Abroad

Letter to the editor

Re “Study Abroad’s Seven Deadly Sins” (The New York Times, Opinion, April 10, 2016):

Peter Coclanis’s article points out what he calls the “Seven Deadly Sins” of study abroad.  These “sins,” he says, allow “immature” students to treat foreign countries as their playground.  He ignores the fact that many of these “sins” are committed in the U.S.  He also premises his argument on the notion that most, if not many, students are easily led into temptation (and ruin).

Mr. Coclanis argues that readily available “suds” make American students abroad more inclined to spend their time drinking than studying.  But students abroad who show up to their 9 a.m. classes hungover are probably doing the same thing back home.  Mr. Coclanis disregards the many study abroad students who are less apt to partake in party cultures, or are simply more capable of balancing their social and academic lives.

He derides “slide courses”—classes taught in English that are not up to par with American university standards—as a study abroad phenomenon, again ignoring that they exist in the U.S. as well.  Of course, just as not all students abroad indulge in “suds,” not all classes abroad can be pegged as “slide courses.”  At the same time, if the classroom experience is the be-all and end-all of study abroad, then students might as well “stay at State U,” where Mr. Coclanis implies classes are superior.  Education abroad, on the other hand, might take place in more unconventional settings, such as at a cooking workshop, or in a discussion with one’s host family.

From his perch in academia, Mr. Coclanis has pinpointed a handful of actions he finds objectionable and attributed them to the study abroad experiences of immature students.  What he demonstrates, however, is the seventh deadly sin of armchair criticism:  stereotyping.

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Photo by Megan Locatis

Ida: Judge Not, Lest You Be Judged

Film review

Paweł Pawlikowski’s 2013 film Ida does not give watchers much in the way of viewing instructions.  The opening scenes offer no clues about the story, none of the familiar road signs at the beginning of historical films to frame the temporal setting.  (“Poland. 1962. A convent.”)  There is no music to set the tone, no shots panning over postwar Poland, nothing overtly telling viewers how to feel about the convent, the characters, the Communist government.  This lack of information is the film’s greatest strength.

The story takes place well after the establishment of Communist rule in Poland, with the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust silently, oppressively extant throughout everyday life.  Ida, the title character, is a young, novice nun.  The Mother Superior of the convent sends Ida to meet her estranged aunt and only living relative, Wanda.  When they first meet, Wanda informs Ida that she is really Jewish and her family was killed during the war.  Wanda takes Ida with her to find the graves of Ida’s parents and cousin, Wanda’s son.

The film offers no judgments about its main characters, who are polar opposites:  Wanda opinionated, outspoken, and unafraid to take what she wants, and Ida reserved, quiet, and chaste.  Pawlikowski does not push viewers to favor either woman, and both have less-than-upstanding moments.  In one scene, Wanda returns to Ida’s and her hotel room drunk.  She cannot help but taunt Ida for her discomfort with Wanda’s inebriation and reluctance to join the party downstairs:  “Of course.  I’m a slut and you’re a little saint.  This Jesus of yours adored people like me…”  But despite her mocking words, throughout the film Wanda’s excesses—drinking, one-night stands, breaking and entering—are framed in the context of her suffering.  A judge for the Communist government, at one point in the film she refers to herself as “Red Wanda,” proudly telling Ida about her days as a state prosecutor, having earned her nickname for the many people she had had executed.  Agata Kulesza beautifully portrays Wanda’s rage and hopelessness about her family’s violent deaths:  she is a woman on a mission to literally unearth the past.  Nothing will stop her.  If she is sometimes out-of-control, her anger and disillusionment help viewers understand why.

As for Ida, her reticence may primarily be a product of Agata Trzebuchowska’s inexperience (Ida was her acting debut), but the film still succeeds in portraying her discomfort with Wanda and her newfound family history.  In the hotel room, when inebriated Wanda picks up Ida’s Bible to “have a read,” Ida grabs the book out of Wanda’s hands, packs it away, and leaves the room, slamming the door behind her.  Wanda’s response:  “What a beast came out.”  The “beast” is Ida’s knee-jerk defense of her identity as a nun.  Wanda’s challenge reveals the shaky ground on which Ida’s faith is built.  Although Ida is committed to finding her parents’ grave, in a way Wanda threatens her sense of self.  It is only after Wanda’s suicide that Ida opens up to her aunt’s way of life.  She briefly imitates Wanda, putting on an evening dress and heels, getting drunk, and sleeping with a man.

The viewer’s experience is to be torn between the two women:  Ida, whose sheltered, Catholic upbringing makes the revelations about her family history particularly hard to process, and Wanda, who has both delivered harsh punishment and suffered horrific loss.  Both deserve better.

Even minor characters are presented without clear judgment.  Not even Feliks, the man who murdered Ida’s parents and cousin and the one character who probably most deserves our judgment, is presented as a clear-cut villain.  Toward the end of the film, having been continually harassed by Wanda, Feliks cuts a deal with Ida:  he will show Wanda and Ida their family’s burial site, if afterward they agree to leave him alone.  Feliks brings them to the woods, and digs up the bones of their family from an unmarked grave.  He admits to the murders with great regret.  He is shown sitting in the empty grave, with his knees tucked to his chest—almost in the fetal position—as if by digging the grave of his former neighbors, he has dug his own.  He is pitiable:  a Pole who killed his fellow Poles, who must live with his troubled history, just as Poland as a country must live with the memory of the Holocaust.  As with Ida and Wanda, viewers are left to make of Feliks what they will.

Pawlikowski’s sound and visual techniques also allow viewers to make their own judgments about the characters in Ida.  The film’s sound is almost exclusively diegetic:  footsteps, clucking chickens, scraping spoons.  The only music we hear is either produced by the characters or Wanda’s car radio.  Without external musical cues, viewers are free to decide for themselves what is really going on in each scene, and in the characters’ minds.  The fact that nearly all the action is framed in the bottom third of the screen makes every scene seem as if it is being perceived at eye-level.  This gives viewers a sense of being silent observers, drawing out their sympathy.  When Wanda crouches at her family’s grave, viewers feel as if they are physically beside her, watching her cradle her son’s skull in the crook of her arm, sharing in her grief.  This compression of the action in each shot also gives viewers a sense of incredible pressure on the characters:  a visual suggestion that at the time, Poland was being crushed by its silence about the Holocaust and the war.

Ultimately, the film’s lack of judgment is effective.  Ida achieves something many historical narratives do not:  it presents a story about horrific, suppressed trauma, and yet does not push viewers to accept a politicized message.  It is easy, especially in films about the Holocaust and the Second World War, to make monsters of those who committed atrocities.  It is difficult to confront their humanity.  Ida has no monsters.  It only has people trying to reconcile their mistakes and live with their choices.

Feliks

Harry Potter and the Blunders of J.K. Rowling

Op-Ed, ,

“I am told that people have been twittering on my behalf, so I thought a brief visit was in order just to prevent any more confusion!”

This was the inaugural tweet of J.K. Rowling, author of the acclaimed Harry Potter book series. Since then (September 2009), Rowling has cultivated a reputation as an author ready and willing to personally respond to her fans’ questions. In recent years, she has fielded much online criticism for expanding the Harry Potter world beyond the initial series, in somewhat tone-deaf attempts to make her characters’ world more diverse.

Rowling has two strategies for making Harry Potter more multicultural: Twitter interactions with curious fans, who often want to know if their identities are present in Harry Potter, and pseudo-encyclopedic entries about character backstory and world-building published on Pottermore, the interactive Harry Potter fan website. In Rowling’s tweets, her assurance of fans that they are, in fact, represented in her world, feel more like surface-level tokenism than meaningful reflections on her work. On Pottermore, Rowling’s essays about magical communities outside of the U.K. reveal her inexpert knowledge of other cultures and histories.

In early March, Rowling published on Pottermore a four-part “History of Magic in North America,” which provided a stereotypical portrayal of Native American cultures. Several Native American groups have spoken out, saying Rowling’s depiction of indigenous people as practitioners of “animal and plant magic” plays into historical representations of Native Americans as noble savages. These groups, as well as individual fans, also object to Rowling’s blanket use of the term “Native American community.” If she can bother to differentiate between the cultures of different houses at Hogwarts (Britain’s top wizarding school and the original books’ main setting), surely, they say, she can differentiate between tribes.

One of the most inflammatory aspects of “History of Magic in North America” is Rowling’s description of “skin-walkers,” people with the ability to transform into or disguise themselves as animals. This is a concept lifted from Navajo religious beliefs, which Rowling attributed to all Native Americans as an example of nature magic. On March 8, Rowling responded to a fan’s request for an explanation about skin-walkers with the following tweet: “In my wizarding world, there were no skin-walkers. The legend was created by No-Majes [non-magical people] to demonise wizards.” This statement upset members of the Navajo Nation because skin-walkers, considered evil and dangerous creatures, are an important aspect of their religion. Rowling’s attribution of skin-walkers to her fictional world plays into a long history of calling Native American beliefs magical, making it easy to dismiss their cultural importance. Adrienne Keene, a post-doctoral fellow in Native American Studies at Brown University and a member of the Cherokee Nation, describes Rowling’s blunder in a blog post: “If Indigenous spirituality becomes conflated with fantasy ‘magic’—how can we expect lawmakers and the public to be allies in the protection of these [sacred Native American] spaces?”

Skin-walkers in “History of Magic in North America” is only Rowling’s most recent misstep in expanding diversity in Harry Potter. In December 2014, Rowling answered a tweet asking about Jewish wizards at Hogwarts with the following: “Anthony Goldstein, Ravenclaw, Jewish wizard.” Although Rowling probably meant to use Goldstein as an example of Jewish wizards at Hogwarts, rather than singling him out as the only one, her reply comes across as flippant. Fans were also quick to point out that Goldstein is a very minor character in Harry Potter, which barely evokes his personality, much less his Judaism. (And how many Jewish couples would name their child after a Catholic saint?) Rowling was similarly called out for her revelation in late 2007 of Albus Dumbledore’s homosexuality, since the original books don’t mention of this aspect of his character. Put simply, Rowling’s after-the-fact pronouncements about her characters’ diverse identities are too little too late. They feel inadequate and even opportunistic.

Rowling has not yet responded to recent complaints made about skin-walkers and “History of Magic in North America.” Her silence is unusual; perhaps she is taking her time to come up with the right response. In the meantime, she should remember how the original Harry Potter books gained the recognition they did. Rowling earned her fans’ respect for her nuanced usage of European mythology in her writing. Much of the magic in Harry Potter comes from her detailed knowledge of British culture and history. But her sloppy treatment of Native American cultures is clearly not up to par with her past work. Ultimately, if Rowling plans to continue expanding the world of Harry Potter, she should make sure the quality of her world-building matches that of the original series.

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The Coldest Time of the Year

Feature article

February 13, 2016 takes the record for the coldest day I’ve experienced at college.  Even as someone who generally prefers excessive cold to excessive heat, I’ve come to the conclusion that my tolerance for outdoor activity stops at anything below zero degrees Fahrenheit.  Any temperature that requires me to wrap a scarf around my face because the outside air stings my skin is simply too low.

At the end of that particularly frigid Saturday, I was relieved to find myself indoors.  I stood outside Tishman Commons, on the ground floor of the campus center, at the far end of a line that stretched down the hall and extended up the stairwell.  (I had arrived fifteen minutes early.)  At ten after the hour, the line began to move.  It wound around to the far end of Tishman through an adjacent common room.  The narrow hallway was bedecked with blue lanterns, paper snowflakes, fairy lights, and finally, the name of the event in large bubble letters:  Yuki Matsuri.

Yuki Matsuri is Japanese for “winter festival.”  I knew this already because Wellesley’s Japan Club had been advertising the event for weeks.  My decision to attend was more spur-of-the-moment than anything else.  For me, that Saturday was frigid in more ways than one.  While friends and classmates of mine were set to spend the long weekend off-campus or with significant others, I was dateless and had slated for Valentine’s Day a long stint in the library with my textbooks.  Like me, the crowd must have been drawn in by the cold.

Standing in line, longing for the pile of blankets in which I would bury myself later that night, I wasn’t sure how I felt about the idea of a winter festival.  Winter doesn’t generally have much appeal for me.  Beyond the novelty of the first snow—and, by extension, the first snow days—winter is something to be endured, something we have to survive in order to appreciate spring.  I wasn’t sure what to expect of Yuki Matsuri because I didn’t know what there was to celebrate.  Then again, who was I to make assumptions?  I can’t claim to have any strong understanding of Japanese culture, and I don’t have any real experience being part of a group on campus analogous to Japan Club.  I’ve consistently found myself more of a spectator, and less of an active participant, in my own cultural heritage.

I showed my student ID to the two organizers at the festival entrance and was ushered inside.  Immediately, I was struck by the scale of the event.  The accordion wall between Tishman and the common room had been folded out of the way, and the space was taken up by two long rows of tables arranged end-to-end, laden with buffet-style platters of food.  Of course.  Free food:  the easiest way to draw a crowd.  Volunteers in light blue T-shirts served bite-sized pieces of each dish:  one piece of sushi, one piece of mochi, a couple of pieces of edamame, a chunk of fried tofu.

Tishman itself was arranged so that most of the floor space was clear, except for a small stage and the booths lining the edges of the room.  I claimed a seat on the floor among the already-growing crowd, and marked it with my backpack.  Soon it would be difficult to walk back and forth to my spot without tiptoeing around other people.

While I waited for the festival’s performances to start, I wandered from booth to booth.  Food was available at over half of them—which more than made up for the tiny buffet servings.  I tried kakigori (shaved ice with syrup, condensed milk, and red bean paste), a frozen chocolate-covered banana (apparently this is actually a thing in Japan), and okonomiyaki, a savory pancake made with shredded cabbage and a strip of bacon.  While a quick Google search told me not all of these are necessarily winter festival foods—shaved ice seems to be more of a summertime thing—they were all delicious.  I also visited booths where volunteers were guiding visitors in making paper crafts.  I painted a phrase—admittedly in Chinese and not Japanese, one I’d recently learned in my Chinese class—on a piece of calligraphy paper.  I spent a pleasant ten minutes learning how to make an origami turtle.

At each booth I visited, I asked when planning had started for Yuki Matsuri.  I found out Japan Club had been recruiting people to work the festival since December.  This is one of the most striking aspects of the event:  it is largely volunteer-run.  Many different groups have to coordinate.  The performances alone featured music from Wellesley’s taiko drum ensemble, dances by Wellesley’s and Tufts’ Japan Clubs, and songs from a Japanese music choir, which—I later found out—was also entirely composed of volunteers.  And these were just the performances from the first part of the festival.  At the halfway mark, overwhelmed by the size of the crowd, I made my way back to my dorm.

If I’m being honest with myself, the particular significance of most of the aspects of Yuki Matsuri—the dances, the crafts, the food—were lost on me.  I did not come away with a greater cultural understanding.  To achieve that, I think it would have taken a lot more time and effort than it did to show up at the campus center on a cold Saturday night.  But I didn’t leave hungry.  And I brought some pieces of the festival home with me.  A tiny origami turtle now sits on my bookshelf.  The calligraphy page I painted—a symbol of my own accomplishments, if not of my understanding of Japan—hangs on the wall next to my desk.  I came away from the festival energized by the dances and inspired by the fierce taiko drumming.

Winter is a low-energy season, and February is a hard month.  It’s the coldest time of the year, the month when students drag themselves back from winter break to the stress of their academic lives.  And while Americans have customs that are particular to winter—drinking tea curled up indoors by a roaring fire, engaging in the odd snowball fight—we really don’t celebrate winter just for the sake of it.  At least, not on the same scale as Yuki Matsuri.  I can’t say I understand every aspect of the festival, but what I can say is that it takes one of the most difficult times of the year and gives everyone something fun to do, something energizing.  We need things like that.  More than we realize.

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Exact Change

Blog Post

I was the one who wanted to go to Prague. My friend and spring break travel buddy, Mel, had chosen the other locations—she had managed to convince me about Vilnius, and we had agreed on Krakow.  Prague was not high on her list of priorities.  Despite having done hardly any research on the city, I worked hard to convince her that we needed to see it before the end of the semester.  I had a very particular image in my head.  The Prague I expected was small, quiet, and quaintly beautiful.  The Prague I encountered defied expectations:  large, commercial, and crowded:  a tourist city.  At first blush, I was a little disappointed.

But, as one does when abroad, Mel and I adapted.  With a few days of travel already under our belts, we learned a handful of useful Czech expressions and set off to discover the Prague that lay outside our imaginations.  We visited the Museum of Communism, whose small theater looped video footage of 1989 protests in Wenceslas Square, and whose gift shop—particularly the coaster set depicting a fanged, leering matryoshka doll—was a blatant “fuck you” to the former Soviet Union.  We wandered around the elaborate Prague Castle gardens, taking pictures of the noisy resident peacocks.  We escaped an afternoon of freezing rain by holing up in a smoky pub, drinking cheap, enormous pints.

Then there was the Metro.  Mel and I spent ages jammed in with tourists and commuters, riding long, slow-moving escalators down to the train platforms, gawking at indecipherable ads and stark signs naming each stop in Soviet Bloc reds and yellows.

The most important thing to know about the Prague Metro is this:  it operates on an honor system.  There are no turnstiles.  You buy a ticket that’s good for a certain amount of time—twenty minutes, forty minutes, an hour and a half—and timestamp it before entering the platform.  The only way to pay for tickets is with exact change, in coins.

Mel and I were unprepared for this on the morning of our last day in Prague. We had planned to leave our backpacks in a locker for the day, before taking an overnight train to Krakow.  As we descended into the nearest metro station, we realized that neither of us had change.  We stood before the bright yellow ticket dispenser, trying to decide whether we should venture back up to look for an ATM.  Meanwhile, all around us, suit-clad commuters were striding past into the metro, without so much as a glance at the ticket dispenser.  Maybe they all had annual passes.  Then again, maybe they didn’t.

It would be unfair to say Mel and I were equally at fault.  I remember saying something like, “It’ll be fine; don’t worry,” and starting off toward the escalator.  It was mostly fine.  It might have been completely fine if we had gotten off at another stop.  But as we stepped off the train and set foot on the platform, it was clear that we were already caught.  Two stout, stern-looking Metro police officers stood at the bottom of the stairwell, asking for tickets in English.  We probably could have avoided the encounter altogether by jumping back on the train and getting off at the next stop.  But in that moment, something—probably an overactive sense of honesty—propelled me forward.

With our colorful backpacks and ratty sneakers, Mel and I were obvious tourists, and obvious targets.  The officers approached us almost immediately:  “Tickets.  Hey!  Tickets!”  After a few futile moments of pretending I hadn’t heard them, I pulled out what I knew was an old, expired ticket from the other day.  I guess I preferred they think me stupid rather than dishonest.  Mel, more dignified, or maybe just more resigned, admitted freely that she didn’t have one.  The officer examining my ticket—he was barely taller than me, but that made him no less intimidating—asked where we were from.  I owned up to my American-ness, thinking I could easily keep playing the role of Dumb Tourist Who Doesn’t Understand Public Transit.   Immediately after that, the officer asked for our passports.  “This is it,” I thought, “I’m going to Czech prison.”

Taking our passports with them, the officers led us upstairs to a sign near the platform entrance, pointing out—again in English—the price we would be paying for my error in judgment.  In a few embarrassing minutes, Mel and I were each poorer by 800 Czech crowns (about 30€).  As we slunk away to the lockers, the short officer called us back:  “Girls!  Girls!”  We returned—what could he possibly want now?  He gave us a look I couldn’t read; I caught my breath.  Then he handed us each a blank, 90-minute Metro ticket.

The day improved, but only after Mel and I left the train station and took a self-pity break.  We sat in a tiny café with a pastel color scheme, consuming overpriced tea and pastries, trying to shrug off the shame and the blow to our wallets.  We settled on the following line of thought:  every trip needs a mishap budget for things like this; we had just spent ours.  That night on the way to Krakow we had a good laugh about it.  And for the remainder of the trip, neither of us set foot near a train, tram, or bus without a ticket in hand.

Prague is different from what I had I expected.  But it didn’t mess around.  Neither should you.

A Prague Metro Stop