This marvelous, Polish pastry is called “pączki.” Pączki is actually the plural form, but, let’s be honest.  No one eats just one.

On the same lines as Mardi Gras, Polish people have Pączki Day.  Traditionally it’s celebrated on “Fat Thursday” (the Thursday before Ash Wednesday).  But in America most Polish Americans or people who think they’re Polish whenever it’s convenient or involves a reason to gorge themselves on food celebrate it on Fat Tuesday.

In Chicago, there’s a large community of first and second generation Polish immigrants who celebrate on Fat Thursday.  I vividly remember celebrating both Fat Thursday and Fat Tuesday in the same year, and I see nothing wrong with embracing tradition and returning to my semi-Polish roots.

On a side note, in the spirit of trying to be a better Catholic, I’m doing a few things for Lent:

1. I’m giving up elevators. Yes. Elevators.  I’m a really persuasive person, but unfortunately that means I’m really good at convincing myself that taking the elevator is a great idea. No more!  Maybe I’ll have sweet calves at the end of the 40 days.
2. I’m taking five minutes a day where I do absolutely nothing.  I don’t work on stuff, I don’t move, I don’t think.  I do absolutely nothing (other than breathe, duh).  I have the bad habit of letting all the stupid little things clog up my life, and there are very few days when I just stop.
3. I’m going to try to go to church at least once a week.  There is a chapel literally 500 yards from my apartment.  I suck.
4. I’m going to try to eat healthy, natural, and organic foods.  This one is going to be tough, and there’s a good chance I won’t live up to it.  98% of my food budget comes in the form of a meal plan.  Sometimes I can’t tell if I’m eating chicken or tuna, let alone if it’s natural and organic.

Well.  There you have it.  Hopefully in 40 days I will be a better person, but judging by my past Lents, I’ll just wind up sitting in a pile of yarn and cheetos crying about how much I suck.

Last Saturday I went to the Hmong Market in St. Paul.  It was part of a project for my Intercultural Communications class, but as you can tell from my world traveling, I didn’t mind.  I think people forget that you don’t have to take a twelve hour flight to throw yourself into a completely different culture.  Even walking into an ethnic market can be an experience.

They don’t have a website, the shop owners don’t all speak English, and I’m not entirely sure what was in my spring rolls.  It was awesome.  How is this different from farmer’s markets?  Everything is different.  Except they both sell food.  I strolled around with a classmate and looked through things like beauty products, jewelry, traditional Hmong dresses, and overwhelmingly large displays of Hmong movies, or movies dubbed in Hmong.

What is Hmong, you ask?  It’s the culture shared by people in the Laos, Vietnam, Thailand, and certain parts of China.  There is a large Hmong community in the Twin Cities because this is where a lot of refugees from southern Asia came during the Vietnam War.  The Hmong community doesn’t have it’s own nation state, so adolescents often struggle with defining their identity.  I saw a lot of children’s books dealing with this struggle.  This one for example:

The struggle of personal identity was a common theme in many of the Hmong children's books

My favorite parts of the Hmong Market?

• The monkey fertility amulet
• The old man standing in the isle singing
• The food in a college student’s budget range
• The $2 earrings I bought
• Bartering
• The little kids running around
• The homeopathic remedies next to the Tylenol

To learn more about Hmong people and the Hmong culture, please visit the Hmong Cultural Center website.

My friends have been sending me memes.  What is a meme, you ask?

According to Wikipedia:

A meme (/ˈmiːm/^[1]), a relatively newly coined term, identifies ideas or beliefs that are transmitted from one person or group of people to another. The concept comes from an analogy: as genes transmit biological information, memes can be said to transmit idea and belief information.

Further meme explanation: http://knowyourmeme.com/

Example meme:

1. They played the Tokyo Drift theme song in the weights room
   

   Never enough me.

2. Reached muscle failure on every weights machine!  Such a champ!
   

   Buy one get one free!

3. MY INTERNSHIP GAVE ME A SECOND MONITOR IN MY CUBICLE
   

   BEST PICTURE EVER.

4. Flying home!
   

   I was the original character in the game. They couldn't afford me.

5. Helping my friend move into her grownup apartment
   

   Velour tracksuits do not need photoshopping.

6. MY FAVORITE BAND IS PLAYING IN MY HOMETOWN TOMORROW NIGHT
   

   LUDO!

7. Flying back to st paul
   

   Pretend it's in the opposite direction. KTHX!

8. Redhead date night!
   

   BACK OFF BRAH

I was supposed to see some friends I haven’t seen in a year and a half, too, but I just found out they’re not going to make it

But my weekend will be spectacular regardless!

I got my German textbook!  So now I can learn German!  Hopefully this goes better than my attempt to learn french.

So tempted.

This was my favorite review:

As a gay man and a gay Journalist I give this DVD 7 gay thumbs up. Most yoga videos are so bad its like picking corn out of a babys diaper with chopsticks. This however is possibly the best DVD of hot males doing yoga ever produced as tallied by my votes. Love, Doug Dannger – Gay man, Gay Journalist

They will look something like this:

I will have a twin.

Okay.  I love JT just as much as the next twenty-year-old girl, but this almost made me pee my pants:

The JT hair appreciation thread

I am, in fact, back from Turkey.  Unfortunately, the class was so intense that I didn’t have time to finish posting pictures and my immediate return to Minnesota was filled with thank-God-you’re-back-because-I’ve-needed-you-to-do-all-of-these-things-for-the-last-two-months moments.

BUT!

I will be posting the rest of my Turkey pictures probably some time this weekend.  Everything is beginning to calm down finally.

In the meantime, enjoy this lolcat:

Went to the Gaziantep Museum to see the “Gypsy Girl” mosaic fragment, had some really yummy eggplant stuffed with lamb (which a waiter had to cut up for me because I was eating it wrong hahahahaha) at Imam Cagdas (one of the most famous restaurants in Turkey),  visited a mosque where my professor once served as imam, wandered around the bazaar, and ended the day with a housecall at my professor’s good friend’s home.  CUTEST TURKISH KIDS EVER.

While in Urfa, which many historians and anthropologists believe to be Ur, we went to the birthplace of Abraham.

According to legend, King Nimrod sentenced Abraham to death by pyre, but God intervened and turned the fire into water and the wood into fish.  This sacred pool is still in existence, and legend has it that anyone who tries to fish the carp will go blind.

There is a park, a mosque, and madrasahs surrounding the birthplace of the prophet Abraham which is located in a small cave within the neighboring mountain.

Later that night, the receptionist at our hotel invited us to come have tea at his house and meet his family.  His daughters insisted on dressing someone in our group in their traditional clothes, and his sister gave gifts to my professors including a doll she handmade.  It was so cool!

His sister brought her family as well, and she offered to make us some food that normally men make.  After the food, she was talking to my professor about how important tradition is, asking if we as American college students found it difficult to retain our traditions in such a fast-paced progressive world.

I was eavesdropping and, playing the devil’s advocate, asked if she felt like she was breaking her own traditions because she had mentioned just getting her driver’s license and that she refuses to make her children go through arranged marriages.  She laughed and gave me a funny look for being so sassy, but then she went on to talk about the delicate balance between traditions and change.  I wish I could have recorded the eloquent way my professor translated her words to me.

In her eyes, getting her driver’s license isn’t going against tradition.  It’s a positive change that doesn’t corrupt her way of life.  She said that she protested her arranged marriage once before meeting her husband at the altar, and her mother slapped her.  As for her views on arranged marriage, she told me that had she known what she was getting herself into, she would have been slapped one hundred times more and that she would never make her children go through the same thing.

She explained that although it seems that the Muslim world’s traditions hold them back from progress, it doesn’t.  It gives them the leverage to make change where it is needed while allowing them to keep the traditions that serve as the foundation for their culture.

I told her how lucky she is to have tradition and such a rich culture flowing through and rooting her life.  Americans don’t realize what they’re missing.  Our culture encourages individualism to the point where some people set themselves so far apart that they’re lonely and try to fill the void with material things.  I think this stems from the huge influx of immigrants with the pick-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps and the come-to-America-for-a-chance-to-start-your-life mentalities of the early 1900’s.

Unfortunately, this era and its ideals also exterminated most of the traditions and cultures of the immigrants who wanted to be American.  Since then, immigrants have tried to learn English, lose their accents, and give into the American way of life so they could blend in.  This has led to a subconscious mourning generations later, a longing for a community with which we can share habits, foods, and life itself.  If you ask most Americans what they’re nationality is, you’ll get a response like “I’m 25% Polish, 25% Irish, and 50% Czech.”  This isn’t something most people from outside the US can understand.  I mentioned this to my friend in the Netherlands and she had a good laugh about it (not in a mean way, of course).  We’re an unanchored society, and we don’t even know it.  Most cultures have this unspoken sense of community and togetherness with unconditional care and support that even some families in America lack.

After being so welcomed and taken care of, not only in Turkey, but in all of the countries where families and friends have taken me in, I’m burning with jealousy.  If you were working in a hotel and heard that thirty college students were looking for a family to visit, would you have offered your home, food, and tea to them that same day?  The Turks have a saying, “Our homes are small, but our hearts are large.”  That saying has been reflected by every family that we’ve visited.  When I return to the States, I plan on taking that value with me.  As a nomad, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to, but I’ll try to instill the same sense of community in everyone I meet everywhere I go.

After our time as the mosque, we drove to Harran. In Harran is located the ruins of an Islamic mosque/university called Ulu Cami, where the number 0 was first used in mathematics and the distance from Earth to the moon was first accurately calculated.

Harran is also famous for its “beehive” houses. These houses look like beehives from the outside (duh) and the shape helps keep them really warm in the winter and really cool in the summer. They’re made of clay and mud, and the one we went into had 22 rooms. It was so cool.

Hope you enjoy the pictures

Islam requires that Muslims pray five times a day. On Friday, the Sabbath, it is especially required for men to come to the mosque to pray. For women, I believe, it is encouraged but not required.

My class had the opportunity to observe the Friday noon prayer service, which was quite the experience. All the girls had to cover their hair with scarves as a sign of respect. Then we got split up. The boys followed our tour guide to the men’s section, and the girls followed one of our professors to the women’s section. The women’s section of this particular mosque was in the basement, so we all walked down the stairs outside and stumbled around to get our shoes off before we stepped inside.

The women who were there for the service stared a little bit, not that I was surprised. Tourists hardly ever actually come in to observe prayer services. Also, we had no idea what we were doing. Our hair was sticking out of our scarves all over the place, and we weren’t sure if we were supposed to sit and stand when they did, so we awkwardly tried to follow along before giving up and trying to sit quietly without disturbing anyone. Some of the kids would run around during the prayers and stare at us until they realized we were staring back and smiling. I think the Muslim women liked that we were there though. One of the women even came up to us afterwards and gave us candy that she had also given to the well-behaved children hahahaha

After the service, we were all invited into the imam’s office (boys in one room, girls in the other) for tea, which is a huge gesture of acceptance and welcoming.

A cool note about the particular mosque we were at: There’s a small cave outside the mosque that is traditionally believed to be the cave that the Bible tells us Job stayed in.