The CELTA

I'm back in the United States, after a month of living in Istanbul and not blogging. Blame the CELTA: the Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults, which my wife and I earned in a four-week intensive course that left us little time to do anything else.

Now it's done, we're both significantly poorer but with much stronger resumes, and I have time to write much more. Excellent.

Everything blurs together and I get an odd bit of writer's block when I try to describe what the experience was like, so please see Jenna's account of how she took the course and earned a (provisional) Pass A. (Our classmate Pinar also published a good write-up of her experience.)

I myself did not earn a Pass A, but I am fairly satisfied to be included in the group which encompasses the bottom 70% of all accepted students.

Canadian, please

I'm an American citizen and I've only ever had an American passport, but long ago in the distant past, I used to be Canadian. I was born in Hamilton and spent much of my early childhood in New Brunswick.

I think I can still get myself a Canadian passport if I really want one. My fiance - wife from September of next year - thinks it would be cool if I got my slumbering Canadian citizenship validated. Shall I go for it, and become a citizen of all of North America north of the Rio Grande*?

* Except St. Pierre and Miquelon. Regrettably.

...and I'm back in the States

For trip details and photos written by me, see Bundaegi. For trip details and photos by Jenna, see LaoRenCha.

Big trip

On Saturday we leave on our jaunt from Taipei to Singapore to India (Karnataka and Kerala) to Egypt (Cairo and Luxor) to the USA and back to Taipei (on February 25). For the first time in my life I will have crossed every line of longitude.

In preparation for my first trip to India I have read up the remaining pieces of Indian fiction on our bookshelves. An Obedient Father by Akhil Sharma, the story of a corrupt low-level official in Delhi, is a difficult and often disgusting book to read. I've read short fiction with disgustingly unlikeable protagonists, but An Obedient Father is the first full-length novel I've read with such a unpleasant first-person narrator. Sharma makes it readable by making you feel pity for the main character, even though you'll never like him.

Like Rohinton Mistry and Manil Suri, Sharma's fiction depicts Indian society warts and all - particularly the warts. That's good for me. Helps me be prepared for what I'm likely to see. I've been to developing countries (Indonesia and the Philippines), but I've never seen the sort of large-scale poverty I've heard I should be prepared for.

Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala won the Booker Prize in 1975. It's about a British woman who comes to India to learn the story of a relative of hers who eloped with a local ruler back in the 1920s. Jhabvala married into Indian society rather than being born into it, so she can look at India with a knowledgable foreigner's eye.

In Beautiful Disguises by Rajeev Balasubraman is the story of a girl from a small town in Karnataka who travels to The City (never named, but I assume it's Mumbai) to seek her fame and fortune. I enjoyed this book quite a bit. The main character (whose name we never learn) is immensely likeable. Balasubraman felt the need to invent a cartoony female antagonist who seems an amalgam of every Disney villainess, from Snow White's Evil Stepmother to Cruella de Vil. At first this annoyed me a bit, but then I figured it fit the book's dreamy, we're-all-characters-in-the-movies tone.

As for the actual logistics of getting around India, I'm leaving that to Rough Guide and Jenna's knowledge of the place. Should be fun.

I'm more cultured than you

This weekend I watched a Chinese-style Taiwanese-language opera outdoors on Dihua St. in Taipei. The opera was directly inspired by the Nicholas Cage/John Travolta movie Face/Off and takes place during the Ming Dynasty.