My replies to Web 2.0 critic Andrew Keen at FB (facebook ruins friendships on WSJ, becomes ghosttown in NYT) AUG 31 09: bleh, and bleh to the one about FB becoming a ghost town. i kinda like FB these days, and that's after a year on Twitter, which i prefer. different crowd, different use. funny to hear ppl complain that misusing the tech makes it harmful, or a waste of time -- two of the noisiest arguments against FB and Twitter, respectively.
Speaking Of Western Women With Eastern Mates
When I’m in China, I tend to turn a lot of heads, especially in the countryside — and that’s not just because I’m a foreigner. It’s because I’m often seen holding hands with my Chinese husband," writes Jocelyn Eikenburg in "On the Rarity of Foreign Women and Chinese Boyfriends/Chinese Husbands" at her blog Speaking Of China. "It’s true — the sight of a foreign woman and Chinese boyfriend or Chinese husband is much rarer than its counterpart, the foreign man and Chinese woman," she writes.
I am so happy to find this blog discussing issues I never had anyone to talk to about in the past, especially when I was living in Asia.
My response:
I grew up in a progressive American town with traditional Asian male role models (my judo instructors). That makes me unusual, I know.
However, I cannot think of a combination more prone to heartache than a typical Western woman and a traditional Eastern man.
You note how hard it is for the Easterners to accept the Western woman. It’s also a real trial for the Western woman to *become acceptable* in the eyes of her Asian mate, and often goes against the grain of everything she’s been taught about her independence.
I spent 6 years with a man of Chinese origin, five of those years in Asia. Hardest thing I ever did. But many of the lessons I learned have helped me meld with my Eurasian (Turkish) husband’s culture and family.
Twitter's High Barrier To Entry Makes It Worthless For People Who Don't Figure Out How Best To Use It
On a travel and lifestyle site I described Twitter this way: Twitter has a high barrier to entry and if you don't put in the time to figure out how best to use it, it just might be worthless.
For me it's a revelation and has absolutely changed my life in the year I've been using it for mindcasting. I'm now the #3 Twitterer in Istanbul!
I've virtually attended conferences around the world, gone to business school, gotten up to speed on my industry, and find *invaluable* the opportunity to connect trending thought across a slew of fields, learning and engaging alongside the top thinkers in innovation, healing, social media, sustainability, you name it.
If you're an intellectual Twitter is fabulous.
Cyberwarfare = Blocked Access To Cake Recipes
I’m on vacation/in post-TED Global recovery this August. Taking social networking easy as well, I posted a chocolate cake recipe on Facebook. You can whip up the quickie soufflé-like treat in a coffee mug with the help of a microwave. The indulgent little formula emailed by my Sacramento sister comes from a world I haven’t lived in for years.
Microwave cooking. White sugar and vegetable oil. It’s so mainstream retro — and a crowd pleaser.
The instant mug cake drew twenty times more reaction than an ultra-topical link to TED Fellow Evgeny Morozov’s explanation of the Russian state-sponsored censorship of a Georgian blogger which caused massive outages at Facebook and Twitter last week. Morozov, a Belorussian Internet scientist I met in Oxford, studies how the online world influences global affairs. He might have had better luck framing the issue this way: cyberwarfare trend = blocked access to future cake recipes.
Even so, the spontaneous manifestation of cupcake-community activism was cheering. Friends from Alaska to Florida, Malaysia to India to Germany engaged and collaborated. They experimented and shared results from pudding and “the perfect soufflé” to admitting a skimped-on-the-oil need “to compensate by eating it with some vanilla ice cream”. Others predicted child-friendliness or posted the instructions to their own walls.
Dog days of summer may not be the best time to come together to solve the world’s weighty problems but apparently it’s a good time to master soufflé-for-one.
Ever experience a heavy-to-soufflé moment that shifts your sync point?
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P.S.. I know you want it:
4 tablespoons flour
4 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons cocoa
1 egg
3 tablespoons milk
3 tablespoons oil
3 tablespoons chocolate chips (optional)
A small splash of vanilla extract
1 large coffee mug (Microwave safe)
Add dry ingredients to mug, and mix well.
Add the egg and mix thoroughly.
Pour in the milk and oil and mix well.
Add the chocolate chips and vanilla extract, and mix again.
Put mug in microwave and cook for 3 minutes at 1000 watts.
The cake will rise over the top of the mug, but don’t be alarmed!
Allow to cool a little, and tip out onto a plate if desired.
From The Mailbag: Expat Says Her Own Situations Now Described
"I just read your book. Thank you for compiling the stories of expat women in Turkey. I am one too. I really laughed and cried along as I went, so many situations for which I had no words now eloquently described for me. I will be passing the recommendation along to my other bemused expat girlfriends in Turkey."
When & How Political And Nationalistic Issues Become Personal
There’s a few things about living in Turkey that I don’t like; the habit of ‘turkifying’ names being one of them," writes Catherine Yigit at her blog The Skaian Gates. She's one of the expat women writers featured in the Expat Harem anthology, and a contributor to the expat+HAREM blog. "So Catherine is sometimes changed to Kadriye, a completely different name. I don’t understand why anyone would want to change a perfectly good name to another one, isn’t changing countries/cultures/languages enough?" she asks.
My response to her post:
That's poignant, Catherine, and a good example of how political and nationalistic issues become personal.
When my father-in-law Suleyman went to London to work, they insisted on calling him "Sully", which he thought was amusing. Like many immigrant American families, our name was changed at Ellis Island. Names come to us in so many ways -- from the people before us, the land around us, the language on our tongues.
However, the fact of the matter is that what you're called is not inconsequential to who you think you are -- and being designated a new name by a group for their own convenience is often a power play.
If You Follow People Who Use Twitter Well, You'll Be Wowed
My comments in A Small World (a private international travel and lifestyle community) thread about Twitter: Best practices on Twitter seem to be 1) post items of value 2) grow your network organically -- no schemes, no mass following whoever 3) engage with others and react to the material they share. (Be selective and honest about your interests.)
Use Tweetdeck or Seesmic to better organize the feeds you subscribe to, group them meaningfully, and actually build a series of networks that relate to who you are, where you are, what you do, what you want to do, where you want to go, and if you like, where you came from. I add to that all the lives and pursuits I didn't choose but I am nevertheless still interested in. We *can* live vicariously!
I hear what detractors are saying but all their points are disproven on Twitter every day.
It's not the same (or less than) a status post on a FB wall for a slew of reasons -- public search being just one of them. It's untrue you can't say anything impactful in 140 characters, but I agree it takes some getting used to. Tiny urls and succinct introductions are a way to bring substantial value to a Tweet.
If you follow people who use Twitter well, you'll be wowed. And if you use Twitter well, you'll be surprised on a regular basis at who and what it brings into your life.
BTW, I was just at TEDGlobal this week and by using Twitter I not only connected with a ton of attendees I might have missed, convening from all corners of the world, but I also got a richer view of the conference through their tweets --- including how and what they heard the speakers say on stage in real time. TED events are info-overload, and Twitter made it that much more accessible.
Reading Travelers: Find Your Historical Context
"Can you share a travel secret?" asked an online travel site for women prepping its annual feature of tips from women writers worldwide. "Read the women who went before us," I replied. "Or, read about them."
For this expat/ archaeologist/ writer/ traveler, cultural wisdom pools at the intersection of women and travel. The romance and grit of historical travelogue connects me to the land -- and reminds me of travel's transformative force in the lives of women. Reputation-risking. Life-threatening. Culturally redeeming. Personally empowering. (My post about a related controversial history.)
Adventurous Women in Southeast Asia (Oxford-in-Asia), a selection of traveler sketches by historian John Gullick, gave my own struggling expatriate experience new meaning when I was sweating it out for 5 years in the Malaysian jungle. Playing an attitudinal extra aristocrat on the 1860s filmset of "Anna and The King" with Jodie Foster and Chow Yun Fat in 1999 (next to a pig farm during a swine flu outbreak, but that's another post!), I appreciated learning about the dark side of the iconic governess to the Siamese court. Foster may have played Anna Leonowens prim, proper and principled but actually the lady was a scrappy mixed-blood mistress of reinvention. There was hope for me!
If you plan a trip to Turkey maybe Cultures in Dialogue holds similar promise for you. The print-on-demand series resurrects antique writings by American and British women about their travels in Turkey (1880s to 1940s), along with surprisingly political writing by women of the Ottoman empire. Contempo analysis by spunky scholars Reina Lewis and Teresa Heffernan refreshes the context of a region in transition.
Any favorite antique travel reads? What draws you to by-gone reports? +++++ Check out some of expat+HAREM’s favorite hybrid life reads here.
Discussing Life At The Crossroads On Satellite TV With Martin Anthony
Talking about foreign women in modern Turkey, the making of Expat Harem the book, and other cultural crossroads, in a live television interview with Turkey's 6 News.
Expat Harem coeditors Jennifer Gokmen and I appear in THE CROSSROADS, an English-language TV talk show broadcast out of Istanbul via satellite -- from Ireland to Mongolia! The channel broadcasts programs in Turkish, English and Russian, which is why the news crawl appears in Russian.
Click on the photo to view Expat Harem on the Crossroads at YouTube. ⇒
Canadian host and personality Martin Anthony kept us on the hot seat for an hour in this lively session...we may be sitting next to a refreshing-looking pool in the city's breezy Etiler district, but can you tell it's the muggiest day of the year? Ooof, July 10, 2009.
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Great (Avatar) Expectations: Who Decides Our Best Look?
A longtime friend messaged me on Facebook to alert me I need to change my profile photo to a more flattering one. I snapped it in my sunny Istanbul kitchen on my iPhone. I’d just had my hair done -- and a facial, so not a stitch of makeup. I look somewhat natural, and somewhat my age of almost 45. I liked the image for that reason. An actual unvarnished look rather than the airbrushed Turkish portraits in my book publicity materials, my playful Photoshop-manipulated avatars on social media sites, or the pound-of-make-up glamour shot from my Today Show TV appearance in 2008.
The pic is not the only way I can look, and I’m not cementing it as my favorite of all time. There are some surprising wrinkles, but also a touch of grey in my eyes I'd forgotten. The image makes sense at the moment, relates to creative work I am doing to be my authentic self, and I am proud of who I am in it. I’m using it across the web.
When my Facebook friend and I first met (before she rushed me to the hospital with a high fever), she looked me over in my sick bed and told me all I needed was "a little eyeliner".
For two decades I’ve cherished that line as her special brand of caustic Southern comedy. She was raised in places where American women have been known to sleep in their makeup – just in case. Even if I enjoy a little maquillage and lighting magic too, I’m from a rather stripped down area in Northern California. It's only natural at our core we have different sensibilities about female presentation.
Delivered with love and true concern, yesterday's message was a reminder to me.
Only we can determine what our best self looks like.
What do portraits (and self-portraits) demand of us? Which version of yourself do you want to show the world today, and why?
Disposable Liaisons Of The Traveling Class
It's that time of year -- for what's euphemistically called "Romance on the Road." Getting your groove back in foreign zipcodes. Shirley Valentine’s Day. In 2006 I reviewed for Perceptive Travel a somewhat academic book about the controversial practice of "sex pilgrimage", traveling for the purpose of sexual adventure. I'm no proponent of behavior that often falls outside the bounds of a traveler's own culture as well as severely straining mores at international destinations. I warned the assigning editor he probably had more optimistic reviewers in his stable of cutting-edge travel writers. But he couldn't find anyone who wanted to be associated with the dense “history & how-to cum memoir” ROMANCE ON THE ROAD. Shipping it from Nashville, Tennessee to Istanbul was his best option.
Viewing the situation from the sex-toured Near East and my five years in South East Asia, it’s clear that one forgettable fling has the power to affect systems far larger than the person, family, village or region which witnessed and absorbed the behavior.
Plus, the environment of sexual predation many Western women face overseas is bound to be heightened by the wanton choices of sex pilgrims. Travelers and expatriates like me strive to modulate our behavior to find social acceptance with native friends, families and colleagues, aware we must differentiate ourselves from sexual opportunists who don't have to lie in the messy bed they've made.
Which cultural product are sex tourists exporting? Is the practice of hot-and-bothered globetrotters empirical evidence that Western culture is morally corrupt?
+++ Here's my full review from Perceptive Travel:
Romance on the Road Traveling Women Who Love Foreign Men
By Jeannette Belliveau (reviewed by Anastasia M. Ashman)
Jeannette Belliveau was a "sex pilgrim" for 12 years and now the 51 year old former erotic adventuress reveals all in this dense volume of travel sex history and how-to cum memoir.The author got her groove back after a divorce by sleeping with men in Greece, the Virgin Islands, the Bahamas and Brazil. Of French Canadian descent, she is currently married to a younger man of color she fantasizes looks like a 'pharaoh'. In ROMANCE ON THE ROAD she attempts to place her actions into wider context.
As an American expatriate living in Turkey, this reviewer senses a motive of authorial self-preservation: to normalize controversial sexual behavior which not only falls outside the bounds of her own culture but severely strains mores at international destinations.
Creating what she calls a geography of sex and love, the newspaperwoman from blue-collar Maryland examines a social phenomenon that may have involved more than 600,000 Western women in the past 25 years: travelers who engage in flings or long term affairs with foreign men, vaulting over cultural boundaries. While intercultural love and marriages are a subtheme, the book's focus is hedonistic sex with virile strangers."Travel sex by women is revolutionary," Belliveau declares, a rebellion barred from polite conversation and insufficiently chronicled by social scientists even if its roots are deep in Victorian travel.
The Western world might not deem it noteworthy but the buzz is growing in remote Central American fishing villages, sandy strips of West Africa, and the tiniest towns in the Himalayas. The author suggests that today's feminine voyagers are "stumbling into a major life experience without a map."
Does Romance on the Road provide a compass for the heartbroken (or hot-and-bothered) globetrotter looking for a distant cure? It can get a gal started.
Prurient interest will be dampened however by the charts, graphs, survey results, and Modern Language Association-style citations of more than 800 bibliographic sources from Henry James' Daisy Miller to a British newspaper feature entitled "My Toyboy Tours".
There's a global chronology of the trend, a summary of related books and movies, and basic ethics and etiquette ("remember the man is real, not an actor in your fantasy"; and "do not use him as a sperm donor").
She has done an admirable job of combining veteran intelligence on each locality with a profile of an adventurous Western woman and a timeline of foreign female exploits in the region. Much like the book itself, these geographic chapters are not all fun and games. In Latin America, "sex is a parallel universe of magic" yet gigolos may sport "a breezy attitude toward the truth". A sex pilgrim profiled has a bleak history, found murdered on the side of a Mexican road, "presumably left by a cruel pickup".
Clearly an optimist, Belliveau argues that despite obvious risks the lustful practice can be psychologically healing, fulfill a woman's urge for sexual connoisseurship, or address situations like involuntary celibacy.It can also be a road to discovery.
Erotic adventure may not be on the agenda but can be inspired by the act of travel itself. Wandering women have the opportunity to "reclaim pagan freedoms lost since the advent of civilization" Belliveau waxes, since they exist in a liminal zone, a reality unconnected to their usual existence. A traveler may view the people around her as social equals, think of herself as anonymous, feel unburdened by expectations of social propriety, be more playful and suggestive. Novelist Rebecca Brown is quoted discovering her sexuality on a trip abroad: "Like Stein, Toklas, and other women who have traveled away from home, it took leaving my native land to realize I was a lesbian."
Even so, it is difficult to approach Romance on the Road, or know who would, besides social scientists who might wallow in its surfeit of statistics or old hands who will identify with the insider dope, and buoyant we-can-all-get-it-on (and perhaps heal the world by having international children) conclusions. It's hardly pleasure reading nor something to openly peruse on a crowded subway. Some may not want to get caught reading it at all. This reviewer's Turkish husband handed it over saying "You got a trashy book in the mail."
It's unfortunate that Belliveau's concentration on ecstasy abroad overwhelms her scholarship on ethical and economic questions as well as cultural and social ramifications in sex-host cultures.
The few harmful consequences she includes are female tourists being perceived as "man-stealers" by native women in the Mediterranean, the Caribbean and Africa; the new role of hustler that thousands of foreign men have adopted; and a rise in STDs and incidents of harassment and assault. Soon enough she is making the case for positives like liberated Scandinavian women spurring sexual revolutions for their sisters in Spain, Greece and Mexico.
Belliveau doesn't seem concerned with the cultural factor freespirited sensualists export.
Writing from the sex-toured Near East, this reviewer suggests the damaging potential of each disposable liaison is empirical evidence that Western culture is morally corrupt. One forgettable fling has the power to affect systems far larger than the person, family, village or region which witnessed and absorbed the behavior.
The environment of sexual predation many Western women face overseas is also bound to be heightened by the wanton and culturally inappropriate choices of sex pilgrims. Travelers and expatriates striving to modulate their behavior to find social acceptance with native friends, families and colleagues must struggle to differentiate themselves from sexual opportunists who don't have to lie in the messy bed they've made.
Without apology Belliveau admits this detrimental byproduct of her Shirley Valentine amusement (or was it healing?): "At first I was appalled at the smothering level of harassment I encountered in Athens. Then I succumbed to these temptations, with the likelihood that my sex partners became further convinced about the ease of seducing any lone Western female tourists to later cross their paths."
On behalf of thousands of traveling women hoping to explore the world unmolested -- thanks for nothing.
Reacting To Taboo: How Avoidance Can Make Us Complicit
I'm looking forward to attending TEDGlobal in Oxford especially since the 2009 conference's theme is "The Substance of Things Not Seen". Invisibility, hiddenness, misapprehension -- all are threaded through my own work. Consider Expat Harem's anachronistic, titillating concept. It taps into robust yet erroneous Western stereotypes about Asia Minor and the entire Muslim world: a forbidden world of cloistered women. When infused with a modern and virtual positivity -- the Expat Harem as peer-filled refuge and natural source of foreign female wisdom -- a masked reality emerges: the harem as a female powerbase. This is an Eastern feminist continuum little known in the Western world.
"Help people talk about what they're most afraid of," is a mantra I've been hearing a lot from thoughtful personalities in my life. But first we have to surmount our own resistance to the topics.
I'm discovering with my latest book project, a forensic memoir of friendship, that taboo has an unintended cloaking effect. Societal taboos may be meant to protect us from harmful practices yet banishing from our thoughts the most unimaginable and unspeakable human acts only makes us blind to them happening in our midst.
By finding it so unthinkable, we make possible for taboo behavior to continue in our communities.
Name a taboo from your life. When you hear it mentioned, what’s your reaction?
Guest Hosting #LitChat On Twitter On Topic Of Expatriate Literature
On May 29 at EST 4pm, I will guest host #litchat, an open discussion series founded by a fellow author (@litchat), on the topic of expatriate literature. (#litchat is an hour-long open discussion on a topic, three times a week. You can follow it in Twitter search or on www.Tweetchat.com using the term “litchat”.)
I’ll be guiding the hour-long live discussion, soliciting opinions and offering my own based on this view:
Expatriate literature may be stocked in the travel section, but does it deserve a shelf of its own?
Living for extended periods in foreign locales, expatriates struggle to reestablish themselves and find meaningful access to their new home.
Travelers passing through often have the luxury to avoid the very issues of assimilation and identity that dominate the expat psyche.
We’ll talk about the unique depths this can bring to expat lit’s combination of outsider-view-from-the-inside and journey of self-realization.
See litchat.wordpress.com for more info.
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See the transcripts of my expat #litchat event here.
Talking To Expat Entrepreneurs About How Facebook & LinkedIn Don't Touch Twitter
My comments from a discussion thread at the private forum for expat entrepreneurs run by Karen Armstrong: You can find me on Facebook (which I'm using increasingly more as a place to share what I'm reading, thinking, what I'm doing, etc -- and created recently an Expat Harem page which still needs a lot more love), Linked-In (which I've begun to join in forum discussions here and there) and Twitter.
I'm most active on Twitter because it works so well for me as a writer, as an expat, as a trafficker of ideas.
With Twitter I'm back in school (taking business courses, marketing and media affairs), I'm at summer camp, I've rejoined the publishing industry, and making new filmmaker friends, and following peripheral interests through the lives of people more devoted, taking part in live discussions about literature, editing, branding, virtually attending conferences and events like yesterday's brown bag luncheon thrown by Random House on the topic of digital publishing.
The other two sites have their purposes but nothing touches Twitter.
Uncool: A Hitchhiking Tale
I don’t hitch-hike for recreation or travel and never will.
Perhaps this is a strange position for me, a child of the radical university town of Berkeley, growing up across the bay from hippie-yippie San Francisco in the ‘70s.
But my big city New York and Chicago parents were more paranoid than many of our patchouli-scented neighbors.
“Who knows what they’re on?” my father would ask, when we passed a row of hitch-hiker desperadoes. Men in Army surplus jackets, bell-bottoms, scraggly beards and aviator glasses. Bra-less long-haired girls with guitars. People with bandana-wearing dogs and kids.
“What a dummy, that woman standing out here at night,” my mother would agree.
These were unpopular views in a time and place when it seemed like everyone was hitch-hiking.
Freeway on-ramps were lined with young and old, thumbs out, brandishing cardboard signs inked in capital letters with their destination.
“EL-A.”
“Vacaville.”
“SOUTH”.
It was a competitive scene. Some people tried to be funny with their cardboards, using popular song lyrics like the Dionne Warwick hit, “Do you know the way to ♪SAN JOSE♪?”
As a car game, my middle-school sisters and I read the signs people held up on the University Avenue ramp to the Bayshore Freeway, a stretch of road said to be the busiest in the entire state of California.
Sitting in traffic along that stretch, we relished spotting the new driftwood sculptures that popped up overnight along the Emeryville mudflats. Illegal art made from refuse, by who knows who.
Hitch-hikers were just another strange thing to watch from the back of the bus.
Cars would slow to pick up spontaneous passengers.
“Right on, man,” the hitch-hiker would seem to say, ducking to grab a rucksack.
I could see the driver rewarded with the hitcher’s burst of gratitude in the front seat, the toss of the bag into the back. Two voyagers united, conserving resources and saving the planet, like-minded kin identifying each other. Jocularity.
We got the finger.
Sometimes curses. Especially when we passed hitch-hikers on hot dusty roads heading to the Sierras, or a rainy winter day at the intersection of Shattuck and University when hopefuls looked -- and probably smelled -- like wet dogs.
Our car made things worse.The family’s white 1969 Volkswagen bus sent the wrong message about who we were and how we lived.
It was always being broken into and ransacked for non-existent drugs. Like that parent-teacher night in 1974, parked outside my fourth grade classroom.
When hitch-hikers spied our VW they must have calculated we were good for the ride -- unlike late model American cars, probably driven by uptight Republicans. Our noisy, white elephant of a car telegraphed we weren’t squares. We were communal folk -- even the German name “Volks-wagen” declared it. My bearded father in a black turtleneck at the big, horizontal wheel would not have dispelled this impression.
Then when we putt-putted past like we didn’t even see them with their “Get me back to BESERKELEY!” sign, suddenly we were responsible for all that wasn’t right in the universe.
We weren’t cool because our family didn’t believe in the hitch-hiking compact. Not in this screwed up world.
The disastrous potential for a hitch-hiker seemed clear to me from a young age. How many stories did we hear about children being lured by a stranger with candy and then abducted in a car? Voluntarily getting into an unknown vehicle didn’t compute. How could these hitchers ignore the reports of bodies found in the hills? The Bay Area’s Zodiac Killer. The Hillside Strangler down in Los Angeles. Hitch-hiking was the stuff of serial killer lore, a campfire staple.
As I hit puberty, classmates without hitch-hiking hang-ups quickly drifted out of my life and toward wherever those risky rides took them.
One afternoon in eighth grade I was sitting in an over-warm social studies classroom at West Campus. Bored. Sure something more exciting was going on outside.
At that same moment, around the corner and half a mile down University, a 15-year old Las Vegas runaway stuck out her thumb.
I read about Mary Vincent in the San Francisco Chronicle later, and saw her on talk shows, fitted with prosthetic arms, warning kids not to hitch-hike.
Lawrence Singleton, the middle-aged driver of a blue American van was described by his neighbors as completely benign.
He was convicted of Vincent’s 1978 kidnap, rape and mutilation. After he amputated her forearms with a hatchet he left the girl for dead. She wandered naked all night holding up her bleeding stumps.
Talk about a campfire horror story. Thirty years later, the image is still burned into my brain. The thought too: if I were cooler that could have been me.
#1 Thing To Do In Istanbul: Get Out On The Water
In Istanbul, get out on the water...for the freshness of the sea air, the unimaginably glassy blue surfaces, and to get the proper perspective on this ancient imperial capital.
The Bosphorus was the main drag for centuries and it’s still the best way to appreciate the sprawling, hilly city.
It’s also the only way to truly enjoy the Ottoman grandeur of the mansions built along its banks.
Bypass expensive (and noisy) group tour boats and surrender instead to local color and rhythm.
Try an ultra-cheap commuter ferry at one of many docks and spend a day lazily hopping from village to village, crisscrossing the Strait, and back again over steaming tea and sesame-covered bread in the shape of a life-preserver.
Ferries heading to the bustling Asian town of Kadikoy afford priceless views of Topkapi Palace, the Haghia Sophia, the Blue Mosque and the historic district.
Or take a quieter one-hour upper Bosphorus tour that embarks from the artisan street market and tea garden district of Ortakoy, and for less than five dollars drift past Mehmet the Conqueror’s 15th century fortress festooned with wisteria.
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These tips appeared in Journeywoman newsletter and various other travel publications.
Expat Personal Branding For Career Success Abroad
In a two-part interview with Career by Choice, a blog run by expat career coach Megan Fitzgerald in Rome, this week I talk about the lessons of Expat Harem in forging my expat writing life. Answering questions about personal branding and career success abroad, I explain how writing about my life overseas and editing Expat Harem connected me to a worldwide band of peers, and gave my career and conflicted expat mindset a new cultural context. Part one Part two
Three Word Goals for 2009, a la Chris Brogan: Project. Realize. Live.
Chris Brogan asks what our three word goals are for the year ahead. Mine: PROJECT - project myself into my communities, raise awareness for the work I do, foster meaningful connection to others
REALIZE - a combination of 'execute' and 'achieve excellent results', materialize dreams
LIVE - breathe deeply, take chances, do new things I might love and old things I still love, get rid of stuff that slows me down or doesn't reflect who I want to be, embrace my health and opportunities
Thoughts On A Spark Summit
Brainstorming with a friend about a connection- and gathering-based global community we want to build for ourselves.... An intimate yearly salon of thought-leaders, change makers, cultural creatives, and humanists for sustained conversations with other globally-mobile progressives.
From The Mailbag: Writer Notes Expat Harem Offshoots Of Community & Education
Thanks for your message Monika Jones! "As a writer with experience in both project management and book publishing, I'm captivated with Expat Harem and the exciting offshoots of the book. What gorgeous intersection of literary works, community engagement, and education."
And thanks too, for your review of the book:
"After an intense experience living in Istanbul for three months, I sojourned back to the U.S. to catch up with family and friends. One afternoon on my way to a bookstore to buy a copy of Expat Harem (which I'd been meaning to read when I was in Turkey after meeting one of the editors) I met my cousin for coffee. Immediately, he handed me a book. The book: Expat Harem! I was thrilled. His mother-in-law had read it with her reading group and wanted me to have it. It was so serendipitous! I started reading and the stories spoke to my experiences as a foreign woman in Turkey - right down to the smells, awkward interactions with pseudo-relatives, and observations on popular culture. Since I've lent it to friends and family, and found it is a way to share my experiences with them in an accessible format. What I appreciated the most is the lyrical, lovely writing and honesty of the works."