| Humor |
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Digital Camera For Sale:
A friend of mine is in the hospital and will be in there for a while. He doesn't need this camera and could use the cash to pay bills. Attached is the last picture taken with the camera so that you can see the quality.
Thanks,
John
Click Here to See Picture
New "Hands Free" Cell Phone Law:
I don't know if you've heard, but starting Jan 1, 2004 you will no longer be able to use a cell phone while driving unless you have a "hands free" adapter. I went to Circuit City and they wanted $50 for a headset with a boom microphone for my cell phone. Having a friend in the cell phone business, I talked with him and was able to come up with an alternative, working through Office Depot.
These kits are compatible with any mobile phone and one size fits all. I paid $0.08 each because I bought in quantity. I'm selling them for only $1.00. I tried them out on Erickson, Motorola, Nokia phones and they worked perfectly.
Click Here to take a look at the photo and let me know if you want one.
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| Notes From The Field |
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Walter Bibikow - Excerpt from "Keilbasa Nova"
One of our intrepid photographers, Walter Bibikow, is always in search of Internet cafés, wherever he can find them. This story comes from his recent travels through Eastern Europe.
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Dien Dobry to all!
I have to say that Poland is an amazingly surprising and beautiful place. I have seen a good bit after this week and the cities
astound with their reconstructed Old Towns, the countryside is lovely, and the food, despite sticking to the traditional Slavic staples of Bread, Potatoes, and Meat, wonderfully varied! Gdansk's town square was bombed during the war and it was beautiful restored and rebuilt over 25 years. A visual knockout!!!! Ditto for Poznan, Torun and Warsaw.
Speaking of Warsaw I arrived on Saturday and after rooming in very nice
modern hotels made a reservation at an "Orbis" hotel. This place, The
Evropaiesky, should be left as- is despite the renovations to the rest of the city as it could be a theme park for hotel visiting "Commie-style". It brings back all the warm fuzzy feelings for my stays many years ago in Kiev and Moscow. The place is huge, something like 800 rooms and comes with hot and even hotter lounging hookers ("Hey boychik, new in town?") The rooms are small with mattresses made of recycled marshmallows and while the old and huge coal powered Cosmos TV (Amazing 2 inch screen comrades! and it gets two stations!) has been updated to a Sony, the bathroom still has an olive drab contraption that is a combination hair dryer and snorkel, so times haven't changed that much! The city of Warsaw is a bit like Moscow on Prozac. Part of it is beautiful ( the parks and the Old Town) & part horrid ( the
old Soviet styled center).
In the very beautiful and moving category I visited the neglected old Jewish cemetary today. This is honestly one of the most incredible places I have ever seen. The cemetary is huge with over 100,000 headstones but since all of the Jews disappeared during the war,
nobody has cared for it for the last 60 years. It has become a forest of stones and memorials some going back to the early 1800's. It is as poignant and beautiful a reminder of remembrance as I have ever seen. The people have all gone but their memory remains!
In the poignant category I have to say I have never been as touched by a monument as yesterday while I went to visit the site of the WW2 death camp in Treblinka. This was the second camp of its kind during the war. It was razed to the ground in 1943 by the Nazis. Nothing stands, there is only a forest that you walk through to a huge clearing, the site of the camp, on that clearing are 17,000 stones representing a "good day" of the camp's elimination. (May the person or persons who thought so be subject to a thousand painful eternities!) The stones are rough and of all sizes, some large and gray with occasional names of places, some tiny pink and blue, no smaller than a little ball. Just one day, 17,000 gone and so many stones...You walk the field and realize that nearly a million people perished on this very spot. Seeing all the films, reading all the literature just doesn't quite prepare you for this...
...A true weird story... I am walking around Warsaw's old town, yesterday, and find tons of vendors selling everything from panties in Polish colors to Madonna CDs when I find a guy selling carved Jews! I am stunned and surprised after my experience in Treblinka but here is an entire selection of miniature Shtetl life. I didn't see any "Uncle Toms" for sale in Georgia, so I am somewhat taken aback at seeing something like this here in Poland, so I figure I'll find out what Jews are selling for. They are very rare says the guy, almost all our Jews are gone ( right, Sherlock!) So I have a weird Schindler-like negotiation for the last of the miniatures. He says one price, we dicker, I pay. I now own the last two little Jewish miniatures in
Warsaw. Must be the new market economy, but they are still selling Jews
here!
Poland's symbol is the the double headed eagle traditionally looking to the east and to the west. I say it looks to the absurdity of the past and the coming absurdities yet to come! Onwards to Kracow!
Dovidzhenye!
Walter
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Melissa Park-Yemeni Wedding
This excerpt is from one of our photographers who went to Yemen for six months where she was studying at an Arabic foreign language school. Throughout the many tales she wrote us during her time there, this cultural opportunity she had stood out the most for us!
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Last night, I had the chance to be invited to a Yemeni wedding – the wedding of the cousin of a friend of a friend of a friend of Ana Sofia, the girl who works in the office and lives in the same house we do and is married to the director of the school. Ana Sofia said “wear the dressiest thing you have, and don’t worry, you will still be severely underdressed”. We left at 5pm and drove through an infinity of little crooked streets to her friend’s house where we picked up 5 black shapes. Ana Sofia introduced us, but they all looked the same to me - I have not yet developed the ability to recognize women by the way they move and the expression in their eyes. We again drove through little streets and found a quiet cul-the-sac where a sign said “Weddings” in both Arabic and English. Waves of black fabric, holding hands by two or three flowed into the building. We joined the flow and started up steep stairs. Ana Sofia’s friend was in front of me. While talking, laughing and climbing the stairs, she began to remove her head and face veils and finally her balta (the long cloak). By the time we got to the door, all 5 black shapes had metamorphosed into brightly colored women, and beautiful too.
There was a large carpeted room with no windows. In the middle, there was a dance floor in front of what looked like a stage with a throne on it. There were red pillow seats placed all around the walls and in disorganized rows around the dance floor. After two weeks without seeing a woman, I had a shock. The room was packed. Every seat was taken. There was color everywhere. The bride was half Ethiopian, half Yemeni, and both Arab and African influences could be seen in the incredible dresses. Most of the women wore brightly colored and completely transparent dresses over a bra and short skirt of assorted colors. The dresses themselves were long, made of thin natural silk fabric, which flowed gracefully about as they danced and walked. Others wore tight western style dresses with no straps, like the kind we’d wear for New Years. And the younger girls wore tight pants and cropped tops in a Britney Spears fashion. The older women wore the brightest colors. Sun-yellow and fire truck-red seemed to be big favorites. I finally could see how Yemeni women looked like, and some half Ethiopian too, and some all Ethiopian. They were not as beautiful as I had imagined from the eyes I see in the street, but then again, most had striking dark eyes, by far their best features.
They were playing beautiful folk Ethiopian music, with a lot of drum and a wild rhythm. The dance floor was packed. Women of all ages danced shoulder to shoulder and moved gracefully without seeming to move at all. Most of the dance seemed to be a shoulder-shaking-movement that flowed down to the rest of their body with the music. In the two separate rooms, middle-aged women smoked shisha and chewed qat.
The music switched to an entrancing Egyptian belly dance, and the crowd on the dance floor changed from middle-aged Ethiopians to young Yemenis. The loose colorful dresses had a built-in belt that could be dropped to the hip for a true Egyptian dance, and the Britney Spears of the bunch improvised belly-dancing skirts with bright scarves. I can see why men are not allowed in these, they probably could not handle the heat. All over the room, even in the sections where they smoked and chewed, women became seductress, sensuous and voluptuous. Oh, how I wished I had my camera. Of course it was completely not allowed, even the Yemeni women had to leave their cameras at the door. And as for the men, not even little boys were allowed in the room. All around there were loud speakers used to let the women know when their brother, father or husband had arrived to picked them up. Names were called and immediately one or two women metamorphosed themselves back into shapeless colorless ghosts and discretely vanished down the stairs. It was all a bit unreal. I tried my best to fill my eyes with it all, but I know I will forget, or transform, or idealize, because the reality was just too unbelievable.
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