Melantrys’ Page

I’ve been doing some bi-lingual googling tonight, and now I am wondering…

Why is the general populace so badly informed on first aid measures concerning seizures?

The first thing anyone seems to know is that you have to put something into the patient’s mouth to prevent him/her biting off his/her tongue.
A colleague even named a piece of wood the recommended item.
Well, I hope in contrast a soft woven belt is harmless enough….

Turns out you’re not supposed to put anything into the patient’s mouth cos the risk of getting bitten or damaging the patient’s teeth is higher than the risk of any damage caused by the patient’s actually biting his/her tongue or cheek being truly serious.

Another oldie but goodie seems to be the advice to reach into the patient’s mouth and pull the tongue to the front, so that the patient cannot swollow it.
Apparently only recently this helpful “fact” got aired on Turkish tv for Germany.

One: The whole swallowing one’s tongue thing is a complete myth.
Two: Yeah, pull the tongue to the front, so that the patient surely cannot fail to bite on it.
Three: Hey, who needs fingers anyway; they’re way overrated.

It took me five seconds to google a comprehensive list of first aid measures, including what not to do.
Then why is the public knowledge (at least apparently in Germany and Turkey) on the level of the last century or so?

Witnessing a seizure is a scary, scary experience.
I’d be helpful if one at least had a real clue of what (not) to do.

So, it snowed again today.

After spending some time cussing (with good reason…) and shovelling the snow off the driveway, I grabbed my cam and took a few pics.

Enjoy:

the neighbours’ fence

snow supported on hibiscus seed pods

snow invading the partially roofed backyard

Path?

What path?

the greenhouse

paw prints…

… from the neighbours’ tom

snowy blanket covering every pot, shrub and barrel

*ducks and runs back into cover before getting stoned by everyone*

The Swiss were asked today to vote on a referendum that was mainly brought in by the nationalist Swiss People’s Party (SVP) concerning whether the building of minarets should be forbidden and this ban added to the constitution.

Early polls showed a 37% minority in favour of the referendum.

All other political parties called upon the Swiss people to vote against the referendum.

Today 57.5% voted in favour of the minaret ban.

The four (!) minarets that are already in existence (and don’t broadcast the call to prayer outside of the mosque, mind you) are allowed to stay, but there will be no new ones.
This goes against the Swiss constitution (freedom of religion, human rights anyone?), but the will of the Swiss people as expressed in a referendum carries more weight than even the constitution, someone explained on tv today.

The only hope for a reversal of this decision would be if the Swiss supreme court or the European Court of Human Rights ruled this illegal.

If not, this will be used by anti-Islamic groups all over Europe (I could name a few here….) to further their cause.

The vague fear of the Islamisation of the western world that’s been flowing through Europe has borne the first ugly political fruit.

This is a very sad day for Switzerland, and it will have repercussions in the whole of Europe.

I am saddened, shocked and appalled.

A blessed Eid al Adha / bayram to all my Muslim friends!!!

As it seems, I have been mistaken all those years about my political orientation.
Now that I have been informed of this error in (self) judgement, I am afraid I will have to stop talking to all of my Iraqi friends.

Sorry, guys, was a nice time with you.

Oh, in case you’re wondering what this is all about…

Oh, and you Dutchies can piss off too.

And the Turks.

And that Libyan dude.

And…

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edit:

P.S.: Actually I have to thank Joan from Glastonbury for her quick temper.

I was wondering how she had come to my blog and checked the referrals on Site Meter. Apparently she had been googling for “hijab”, come across my crossed-out hijab pic from that ear pain post, seen the post title “Of Turks, Arabs, Muslims and ham” and decided to grace me with her opinion without reading another word.

So far, so insulting.

But.

For some reason that also made me google “hijab”.
And my pic didn’t only come up for my blog but also for another one.
Now, that one is full of anti-Obama stuff (including new “proof” for something being wrong with “the first Muslim US president”’s birth certificate after all) and anti-Muslim filth.

Well, at least the author knows copyright laws (if not much else), apologized and immediately removed the photo after receiving my email.

I can’t flag him cos Google in its wisdom only allows members to do that, but after reading what they’d do if they decided the flag was deserved, it doesn’t really matter either way.
They’d merely “unlist” him, and maybe include a warning message for people accessing the blog, but that’d be that.

Pf.

And a final disgusted “Yikes!!” at having seen my own self staring at me from a racist page.

Last year the boss suggested having a Christmas dinner. That never happened, mainly due to the boss looking for a cheap solution.¹

This year, some colleagues suddenly said: “Hey, what about us having a Christmas dinner of our own this year?!”
Everyone agreed, and soon we had also agreed on going to a Chinese restaurant in the vicinity.
As I often eat there, I was more or less solely elected by our colleague Ma. to “take care of things”.

Almost all had already agreed on a date when the last person I asked - of course - had prior plans. But she was free the week after, so I had to ask the others all over again.

By that time Ma. had asked the boss if he wanted to join us.²

He had said no, but she didn’t want to give up quite yet, so we agreed that she’d ask him one last time when we had settled on a final date and that would be that, no matter what his answer would be.

Everyone had time on the new date, so I charged Ma. with posing her final question at the beginning of next week and let me know his answer.
Meanwhile I’d call the restaurant and reserve a table for the number of colleagues plus maybe two more people (boss and girlfriend) to make sure we weren’t too late - after all, pre-Christmas time’s a busy season for restaurants.
Then, on Monday - Tuesday at the latest - I’d call them again and give them the exact number of people.

I was off on a last vacation week then, and had to haul my ass over there cos no one had called.
My colleague A. told me that the boss’s answer was still no.
So I called the restaurant and told them it’d be seven people.

When I returned to work this Monday A. greeted me with the news that Ma. had pleaded again with the boss at the end of the week, and that he had given in.
But Chinese food apparently is poison, and we’d have to eat somewhere else instead because the boss would rather have steak or something.
An “international” restaurant (read: a restaurant with mainly German cuisine³ - plus probably chevapcici - owned by a guy from the former Yugoslavia) had been suggested, and everyone seemed to be happy with the choice.
I was already pissqued at the time, but called the restaurant to ask about vegan food. The resulting conversation confirmed my experiences with German cuisine so far: German - and Balkan - restaurants simply don’t do vegan, and whatever they kindly offer to serve you does rarely deserve the name restaurant quality.
So I told A. that I didn’t care; I’d cancel the reservation and someone else could book a table at the other restaurant, sans me.
A. told me in no uncertain terms that he’d rather forego the company of the boss than mine and that I should not cancel my reservation.
Quite apart from being royally pissqued by then, I certainly did not wish to occur the wrath of the boss by probably being the reason that all colleagues - except for one - would vote for the Chinese restaurant over the one the boss could go to. Neither did I want the whole affair to endlessly drag on, with me probably being forced to cancel the reservation anyway, but way too late and thus also annoying the restaurant people.

A. was very persistent though and said he’d go and play dumb and tell the boss he had heard that had he said yes after all and try to sound things out.
Another colleague told me she didn’t care where we were going; she was sick of one person managing to spoil it for everyone else - again - and that she was out.
The boss was sick at the beginning of the week, so time trickled by.

By the time A. had finally talked to him, I had seen Ma. twice, and not once did she inform me⁴ of the change in plans. Nor had she asked A. to inform me by the way…

A. told me that the boss didn’t really want to go with us and only had agreed because of her endless nagging. Furthermore he’d feel obliged to pay for the food and drinks if he joined us, which he also didn’t really want to do, so he was even considering picking up the tab but in return not paying out any “Christmas money”.

Not quite trusting A.’s word either as he was in such an “I don’t care” mood earlier on about the boss joining us, I went and talked to the boss myself yesterday.

What he told me was this:
1. He had wanted to keep out of the whole thing in the first place cos he had considered the whole idea of company Christmas dinners done with after last year.
2. He is indeed wary of Chinese food, but the other restaurant being called international had made him sceptical as well, so that one was out of the question too⁵.
3. No, he would not be offended in any way if we went to the Chinese restaurant without him; on the contrary, he hadn’t heard much about the back and fro concerning the dinner, but he was already fed up with the little he had heard, and thus not really interested.

Today I told Ma. that I had to pick a bone with her. I had talked to the boss, and he was not really interested in joining us, and things would stay the way they had originally been planned. I made sure to mention that according to what we had agreed upon I had of course also already reserved the table.

“Yes, I know, I know! But A. kept asking me if the boss had said yes or no, cos he so much wanted the boss to come with us. He even said we could pay the dinner for the boss - which I found a bit over the top.”

Right. And I am the Queen of Saba.

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1. Loooooooooong story cut short. [back]
2. Wtf? [back]
3. *cough, cough* [back]
4. or anyone else, except for A. [back]
5. Good thing I was too pissqued to book a table for the others there already… [back]

Don’t you all think it has been too long since the last anecdote from work? Yeah, me too.

Have two.

Last week this tall Syrian dude came into the store with a young man I didn’t know.
M. and my Turkish colleague A. were working in the isle right behind the entrance.
Shortly after the two men had entered I heard M. exclaim that Egypt was a place she definitely had to go to on holiday one day. Later questions posed to A. confirmed my assumption that this was due to the men mentioning that the new dude was from Egypt.

A while later M. came over and informed me that there were two “fellow-countrymen” of A.’s in the store, and that one was having two vouchers from the social welfare office, and asked me technical questions about how I was going to ring that up.
She also told me that the new dude spoke hardly any German at all and that he sure was glad for A. being there and merrily chatting to him and the other dude.

“Urrrr, M., are you sure the two guys aren’t talking Arabic amongst themselves?”
“Well, how would I know the difference?!”

Well… How shall I put it…? Logical thinking?

For one thing, our colleague is Turkish. That the one regular customer is Syrian is not common knowledge, granted, but the new guy did say he was from Egypt.
Which language do the people speak there….?
Furthermore, the later questioning of A. revealed that apart from an “As-salaam alaykum” / “Alaykum salaam” (or - I suspect - “As-salaam alaykum” (Arabic) / “Alayküm salaam” (Turkified pronunciation)) at the beginning the rest of the merry chat was conducted in German (between A. and the Syrian guy) and a bit of Arabic (between the Syrian and the Egyptian guy) of course.

Still, I can’t help but imagine them babbling incomprehensible stuff in Arabic and Turkish respectively at each other…

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Yesterday we could give away ham that was a good week past its sell-by date.

Anyway, as I was about to throw the “for free due to sell by date” sign into the box and place it in front of the noses of our customers, M. exclaimed:
“Wait! A. and me want some too!”
“A. does not want any ham.”
“Of course he’ll want some”
*picks up ham*
“Ingredients: pork….”
*confused look*
“Well, A. does eat pork.”
“No, A. certainly does not eat pork.”
“What does he eat then?!”
“Beef, sheep, fowl…”
(*customer who wandered in on conversation quietly smirks*)

*wonders if M. will decline all food except salad at the next bbq A. throws for all colleagues*

(And happy bayram…)

Ok, as I already said in my Amman travel log, this is the next day, which means post-holiday, so the rest of the journey home will be part of the epilogue.

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Saturday, June 16th, 2007

Customs held a nice surprise in the form of some weird customs tax that people leaving the country have to pay.
If I recall correctly that was 200SP¹, which of course wasn’t a high amount for me, but that wasn’t the problem.
I had given all the money I had left over to Caesar, so that he wouldn’t have to pay for the long and expensive ride back into the city all by himself. After all, he’d only made the long journey to the airport because of me.
Plus, I didn’t need any SPs anymore, did I?

You know, it would really have been nice if the people from the Syrian embassy in Germany had mentioned this to me.
Or someone at the airport when I arrived.
Well, luckily I do tend to keep some local money as a souvenir, so when the lady refused to take Euros instead I unhappily dug out a 200 note and handed it over.

Then I installed myself at the gate and waited.
At one point some airport employee came and chatted me up a bit; if I was travelling to Turkey then, where I was from, etc.
Before he left he gave me a tiny package of hazelnuts because at this time of night I must surely have been starving. Well, I was indeed starving a bit, so thank you.

The flight to Istanbul was uneventful, as was the plane switching…. as such.
My flight from Istanbul back to Germany got cancelled though and thrown together with another flight. The plane for this “double flight” was bigger and left about half an hour later than the original one would have.

So when the plane touched down in Düsseldorf, I was already late.
I claimed my luggage² and trundled over to customs.
First a young man stopped me and enquired after souvenirs and the monetary value of them, but when I started throwing out prices in SP, converting them to Euros and adding them out loud, he soon lost interest. The overall value of my souvenirs apparently was way below the amount of what is permissable.

So I staggered on, vaguely bemused by the labelling of the exits, and when I was just about to leave, another young man stopped me.
He leafed through my passport and asked if I was travelling alone³.
Then he asked me over to a sort of desk/bench and started going through my bags. First my carry-on luggage and the plastic bag stuffed full of souvenirs, then the big travelling bag.
When he was done un- and repacking all of my clothes - all the while keeping up a chat on the purpose of my trip - he suddenly remembered the camera he had seen in my carry-on luggage and asked, no, stated: “That’s a digital camera, isn’t it? You wouldn’t mind if I looked through your photos, would you?⁴ I mean, it’s not as if you have anything to hide, right?”
I told him; yup; sure, go ahead; and indeed, not.

Guess it’s a good thing he didn’t start at the back where he would soon have been confronted with a bearded, grumpy Arab but at the beginning with photo over boring photo of the house. I guess it is not very surprising that he soon lost interest and re-packed the camera.
It seems that my boring, non-terrorist-camp pictures made him lose all interest in me, as he didn’t even go through the last side pocket of my big bag, which was probably just as well as I am still not 100% clear if it was ok to bring the spices and the garlic, lol.

By now I was about an hour late though and wondering if my sister who was going to pick me up again had already chewed her nails down to the quick, fretting for me.
I needn’t have worried.
When I switched on my cell phone, the first thing I got was an oldish message from her, informing me that she was stuck in a traffic jam. Two further messages and traffic jams later she finally arrived.

Not that I cared much one way or the other by that time.
I was sitting in the main hall, my feet propped up on my luggage, reading one of the numerous books I had bought and flying high on having been awake for more than 24 hours by then.
That’s a real odd state to be in, seriously.

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Concluding remarks:

As I already said in my prologue I am not too fond of the political system in place in Syria, and seeing some of the workings up close and in person sure did nothing to change that point of view.

Only recently, when he saw the drafts for my last postings, Caesar told me that I had it wrong about the situation at the bus station.
He said that at the time Syrian authorities were rather keen on hunting down Iraqis with expired residence permits.
So the people at the office inside the bus station were kind of torn. They should have notified the authorities that they had an Iraqi there who had no papers to prove he had permission to stay in the country.
On the other hand that Iraqi was with a European tourist (who was obviously already pretty pissed), and the image Syria presents to foreign countries is important to the authorities as well.

If Caesar really is right in claiming that I (or rather my presence) saved him that day, I suppose it’s just as well I wasn’t quite aware of that, or I may have looked too worried instead of annoyed and angry.

But nevertheless it is a beautiful country, stuffed chock-full of really, really ancient history, and I definitely want to visit it again (that time including places like Palmyra, and that is not a dig at you, Caesar, it was not your fault things went wrong).
Hell, just seeing the Old City again would be worth a trip.
I loved it there.

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1. € 2.94 or $ 4.00 [back]
2. which had not got lost unlike at my return journey from Amman… [back]
3. a bad combination, coming from Syria, having been in Jordan the year before and travelling all alone, it seemed [back]
4. Of course I’d bloody well mind, Mr Customs Officer; photos are kind of… private?! [back]