With my final examination completed this afternoon, I am finally done with the Fall Semester, and the holiday for me officially begins. Let me tell you a little about the exam. It was a test of everything we have done in the Linguistics class, and it lasted an hour, forty minutes, even though I finished before the set time. The notable thing was that the professor allowed us to bring notes into the examination hall, as long as it was on only one side of a blank sheet, and handwritten. It was a way, I guess, to make sure that everyone has a chance to succeed.
Many other changes are taking place around the campus. It is thinning out, and in a few days, the once bubbling mini-town that is campus will become an almost ghost town. Chris, my housemate has already packed his bags and is heading home. Ben, the rugged one, will be here for a little while more, but he will also eventually leave, and I will have the whole apartment all to myself. I may have to go buy my own christmas tree… Audrey the French is leaving. Her academic exchange programme was supposed to last one semester, and is now over. We are organizing a party for her at the apartment on Friday, which should be fun. She was such a nice company, fun, adorable and lively, although I haven’t seen her for a while in the last three weeks because of the hectic nature of that time of the semester. Also leaving are other international students from France who came on the same programme as Audrey. They all added colour in some way to the semester.
My most memorable times with Audrey included a long walk around Chicago in November while we were trying to locate our hostel much without luck. Until then, I had never seen her cute Frenchie self so upset by anything. And even though we all tried to maintain a sense of balance as frustration grew on us and the maps refused to point us in the right direction, when we stood at the bridge across Michigan Avenue and thought of how to proceed, I thought I saw her really pissed off, especially since we didn’t seem to understand each other’s words and motives. Eventually, her phone came to the rescue and we found out that we had just walked past the HI Chicago building by just one block. I also remember one of the many discussions we had in Chicago about breastfeeding (she was thoroughly against it, believing that it is “disgusting” to have anything come out of her breasts for anyone to drink), religion (doesn’t believe in it, rationalizing that there is too much wickedness in the world to believe in a good and kind God), and homosexuality (doesn’t have anything against it, since humans all have the right to express whatever they are), and how opposed to Reham she was every time the conversations took place. “As soon as I have a baby,” Audrey always said, “I will spend all my nights in bed, sleeping while my husband will feed the baby whenever it cries. I carried the baby for nine months, after all, and I’m not about to lose my sleep for anybody.”
She was fun.
The semester was fun. I hope the next one is just as fantastic.
…for lack of a better title…
One day very soon, I am convinced, I will write a post on this blog that might begin with words like “tttoooeddydyy isssss teiehehe ffirissttt ddyofff snoeoow”, which would only mean that I was cold, freezing and shivering enough not to be able to edit simple sentences. I am convinced that that day is very, very soon. In fact sooner than I expect. Yesterday was my coldest night ever in Edwardsville and it reached -3degrees by my blog temperature meter, and 30degrees Fahrenheit. Even my bed now is too cold for comfort. Very soon I won’t have to go out to feel cold, and I am not looking forward to that.
Meanwhile, I’ve just returned from another day of feasting – probably my last of the Turkey Genocide season. This time, to the house of my “official” host family: the Indian father and the American mother. The special attraction was another visiting family from Chicago, who were originally from Nigeria. It had a father, let’s call him Dr. O, his wife, and two kids who would not speak Yoruba to me however I tried to make them. They were born in Nigeria but have lived in the States for a long time that they have become Americanized in dressing, speech and conviction in a way that could have been bad if it had hampered their cultural awareness. Apparently it hadn’t, and although they would rather not communicate in the language, they had a kind of cultural awareness that could only have resulted from good upbringing and appropriate socialization. To them, I must however have been a special kind of attraction as someone sent specifically from the home country to teach Americans the language. But if that was the case, I didn’t notice it. It was mostly a gathering of laughter, wine, food, and practical jokes. The first born of the Dr. Os is married to a beautiful American girl who was also present, and who I am discovering to be a masters student of my University as well.
In gatherings like this, I am almost always bringing back the topic of language and awareness, and here’s how Dr. A, my Indian host rationalized it from his reading in German, Indian, Irish, French, and African migrations to the United States: First generation immigrants usually speak and understand the language, being a product of the two cultural experiences, and usually try to pass it along to their children. Their children – the second generation with little connection to the cultural experience of the homeland beyond their parents’ teaching usually become rebellious and toss out the language and cultural ideas of their immigrant parents while opting for the American way of life. It is the third generation however – without any link whatsoever to their original culture and language, according to him – who make the most effort to reconnect with their grandparents’ cultural base. This, obviously, is because they are usually the ones without an anchor. They most experience the feeling of homelessness and limbo, and usually find themselves going back in research to connect with what they feel most deprived of. According to this theory, it is only a most natural process when children of first generation immigrants try to become “Americanized”. And everything made sense to me.
However, contrary to the seriousness of this last discussion which actually took place in the car drive back from his house, the atmosphere of the get-together was one more of conviviality, guitar playing, joking and generally fooling around. It was like one of those old times of my upbringing when I sat around my siblings on an idle night after a game of cards, just tossing around all the craziest ideas in the world, laughing, arguing and generally being silly. I bring it up here because now that I think about it, I suddenly miss those times when all that mattered was who had the silliest ideas, and we would stay up all night singing, scrawling on the wall, or decorating the house for Christmas with little coloured paper decorations cut out and sealed with pap syrup and stretched across the house ceiling sometimes with multicoloured Christmas lights. It is usually towards this time of the year as well when we begin to learn new Christmas songs or make a fool out of the old ones, all the time trying to be careful not to make too much noise that could get us the beating of our lives. Oh the times we had. Tonight, I’m convinced that we could never get back that memorable childhood in the same old form we enjoyed it, but I look forward to a grown-up future recreation of those experiences, this time along with nieces and nephews, and a bigger happier family. Some day soon folks…
The only reason I can give for the title of this post is a recurring thought I have when entering any structure that is higher than a leaping distance from the ground. Saturday was one of them, and you already know what I was thinking while looking down from 630 feet. A few months ago while flying from Lagos to London, similar thoughts entered my head at some point during the long flight, and from London to Boston. What are my chances of survival from this height of over 60,000 feet? There is a kind of surrender that inevitably accompanies a decision to take a plane flight. Our lives are in the hands of the pilot whom we never ever get to see.
Since I spent much of my time in Chicago last week either taking pictures or admiring the landscape and its contrasting colours, it is only fitting that I make a third, and maybe final post on what I saw while I was there. On the first night alone, I had already taken a few hundred photos of everything beautiful from road signs, shop signs, name tags to sign posts and street names. By the end of the weekend, there were already too many to choose from. Anyway, here are some of the rest, featuring the Willis Tower, a toy model of the city, the Navy Pier, Artworks on teh wall at Starbucks, the Fisher Building, the Buckingham fountain, the city at night, and a statue of President Lincoln at Grant Park. I hope you like them.