The Final Trip- The Return Home 2

Newgrange Neolithic Barrow

We met up with Roy and Inez and spent time with them catching up on family histories and events since their visit to us in Manukau just before we headed off on our Middle East adventures.

They took us to NewGrange Neolithic barrow to experience more of Ireland's ancient history. The tour was very informative and especially moving when the guide demonstrated the effect of the dawn sun coming through the entrance on the winter solstice. One could almost sense the awe our neolithic ancestors must have experienced as they huddled in the central cavern waiting for the dawn on a cold winter morning as the light edged its way along the entrance tunnel to finally settle in the centre of the room and then disappear as the sun moved above the barrow and away from the narrow window built to channel its light into the mound.

Joy at Newgrange

We left the Grange and headed off to County Fermanaugh to visit Sylvia and Kate in Enniskillen.

Kate, Joy & Sylvia at Enniskillen

We had last visited them back in 1998 when Joy and I had  made a flying trip to Ireland on our first sojourn in the UK. With this visit we added more detail to our shared family history and, from Sylvia's stock of photographs, added to the album and information we will share when, in January next year, we have a Bates family reunion in Wanganui which would mark off 90 years since my Grandparents bought the family to New Zealand.

A newspaper name to be proud of!

Enniskillen sits on a island between Upper and lower Lough Erne and is a Northern Ireland tourist centre. The town is dominated by the 15th century Enniskillen Castle with its museums for both the county and the Inniskilling Regiments. The town is also noted for the past pupils of Portora Royal School (1618) - Samuel Beckett and Oscar Wilde. We were told, with some glee, that when Wilde had been sentenced for homosexuality his name had been removed from the school honours board but then in more recent times been re-enstated. The brighter gold of the new lettering serving to accentuate his name and notoriety!

Joy and I explored the town and visited Castle Coole, a magnificent Neo-Classical house originally built as a summer residence for the first Earl of Belmore in the late 1790s. Apparently the building almost bankrupted him but, after his death, his son was able to both rescue the family finances and complete the house in the 1820s. In the 19th and early 20th centuries the house and property would have been bustling with servants and activity generated by vistors and tradesmen. Now, part of the estate is still the home of the Belmores while the bulk is administered by the National Trust and the bustle is generated by the tourists and locals picnicking and walking through the surrounding parklands.

Back in 1998 Joy and I had driven around the lough and visited Belleek, Boa Island and Devenish Island where St Molaise had established a monastry in the 6th century so, this time, we contented ourselves with exploring the town before moving on to Raphoe and Carnowen to both catch up with John and Joan Fulton and to add to our photograph collection of both family and the village where Mum had been born.

Carnowen School where Mum had once been a pupil.

The Final Trip... the return home. Part 1.

The Final Trip - the return home.

Departure

With the contract finishing in the UAE Joy and I, along with our colleagues, began to pack up and ship our furniture and possessions home. Joy got really enthusiastic so that every time I came home there would be more and more of our stuff bubble wrapped and stacked ready for the packers to box up and ship off back to NZ.

While Joy & I were preparing to return home several of our friends got enthusiastic over a contract as advisors in Khasakstan. The initial contract was to be four months with possibilities of extension for two to three years which was very attractive to those who applied and were accepted. Now, once they're back home, the contracts appear to have been held up, altered and somewhat vague and the initial four month time cut back to three months. For us the process of settling back home has begun as we wait for the tenants to move out and we can redecorate the place before moving our furniture back in.

Anyway, before coming home Joy and I decided that we should take the opportunity to do a tour of Eire, England and northern Italy as a sort of swan song to our Middle East experiences. There were good reasons for the tour, apart from the tourist thing, as I wanted to add more information to the Bates side of our genealogy as well as building up a file of family photographs that would illustrate the Irish side of the history.

With all our worldly goods dispatched to New Zealand we were basically camping in our apartment until the last day of the contract so quitting Abu Dhabi was easy. We simply closed the door, left the key for Cognition to access the flat and headed off to Dubai for the evening to be ready for a 3.00am start and the flight to Dublin.

We had booked a room in an hotel close to shops, restaurants and the airportso we wouldn't have too many hassles for our early morning start. Unfortunately, we had booked into The Royal Falcon Hotel which looked OK from the website and had had reasonable reviews on the booking site but now had started the decline towards an inevitable restructuring and possible disappearance. ( The link gives reviews from Trip Advisor which weren't on the booking site for obvious reasons.) On arrival we discovered that our room wasn't ready but a temporary room was available as a transit until "our room" woud be ready. Fat chance!!

Despite several requests and promises of a better room than Room 210 with its solid hard wood mattress nothing happened. Joy and I decided to make the best of it - after all we were leaving at 3.00am the next day - so we went looking for a meal at the restaurant advertised on the hotel website and reception board only to be told that it had been transformed into a Bollywood nightclub and no longer served meals. We weren't told that it was directly below room 210 and would begin its throbbing at 9.00pm and would not stop its beating until 3.00am.

A later review of the hotel we read on Trip Advisor said:
"The Royal Falcon Hotel is a two star Dubai Hotel which has obviously seen better days in the Dubai sun. The Restaurant no longer trades, except as room service, and appears to have been converted to a Bollywood nightclub.
Why anyone would choose to stay here would be a decision based on a masochistic desire to be deprived of sleep on a bed as solid as a bed of marble while being subject to torture by cacophony of what passes for music from the nightclub on the mezzanine floor.
The nightclub throb and crash began at 9.00 pm and ended in a crash of cymbals at 3.00am with crescendos of desperate drumming every hour between which, if one has an early morning flight and wants a modicum of sleep before heading to the airport, doesn't make for a restful night.
The plumbing in the bathroom was a prime example of botching to ensure the pipes remained in place and smelt as well and the room lacked any accessible electrical plugs to recharge phones and computers.
The only advantage to a traveller is that it is on the metro green- red lines to the airport and across the road from the Reef Shopping Mall otherwise avoid this hotel. There are better and more comfortable two star hotels in the area." 

 Needless to say we won't ever be booking into the Royal Falcon again!!!

 Still shaking from our experience Joy and I quit the hotel, found a taxi and headed for the airport where we could find breakfast and some quiet before our flight to Dublin.

EIRE & ENGLAND:

 When Joy and I first went to Ireland, 15 years ago, the days were overcast and distinctly damp, at least that's what our photographs of the trip show. This trip was at the height of the Northern Hemisphere summer so we expected to experience some sunshine. However, the adage that while the Bible called 40 days and nights of rain a disaster the Northern Hemisphere merely shrugs and declares it to be a summer shower proved to be true. Although we did discover that there could be sunny spells breaking out in occasional protests.

We had booked into a B&B in central Dublin for three nights which allowed us to explore the city and discover a bit more of Ireland's history. 

James Joyce statue

The B&B was well run and very comfortable and in walking distance to the central city and good local pubs. I was able to visit the places mentioned in my favourite high school reading - "The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" and "The Dubliners" as the James Joyce museum was just around the corner.

 
We discovered the National Museum of Ireland and spent a morning exploring Ireland's past - from the neolithic bog people, the Druids and Celts through to the invasions of the Vikings and, later, the English. 

The displays allowed us to see many of the objects I had only seen in old black & white textbook photographs. 

Preserved bog man -

Gold Torcs

Gold Votive boat

The Dublina museum also had recreations of life under the Vikings and English. This re-enactor Silversmith gave us a very personal account of how coins and silver were worked in Viking Dublin.

From the museums we headed for Trinity College to see The Book of Kells and the Long Room of the Library. Here we joined a queue to enter the Library and the display explaining the illustrations and relevance of the texts. The queue stood and chatted quietly as it drifted towards the doors apart from a trio of American women who involved the courtyard in their conversation. 

They informed the queue that they were all school teachers and that the main talker was a history specialist. Her specialist subject being English history. She expounded loudly on her qualifications and knowledge about England and Ireland to her companions and how this trip was giving her he chance to see all the places and events she taught back in "Kansas." 

In the Library shop, waiting for the tickets for the exhibition, there was a video clip being played showing Queen Elizabeth shaking hands with Martin McGuiness in an act of reconciliation between England and Eire. Immediately on seeing this the loud English history specialist turned her companions declared to all who could hear her: "Look, look, there's Queen Victoria on her diamond jubilee celebrating with her visits to parts of the United Kingdom!" 

Her companions nodded sagely and opined that that Victoria's jubilee was a great event for them to witness.  I was a trifle slow on the uptake - as I said to Joy later - I should've turned to the voice and asked, ever so politely, if that lovely President, Mr Abraham Lincoln was still taking an active role in the promoting equality in the Union and helping the Confederacy come to terms with the world? But then I doubt if any of the women would have understood irony.

We realised this when we told the story to friends we were told of an exchange that took place when they were visiting Stonehenge in which an American tourist proclaimed that  "Stonehenge was impressive but it definitely couldn't match Disneyland." Later the impression was given greater support when , while at the Bushmill's distillery, we were accosted by an irate elderly American who had just visited the Giant's Causeway and couldn't see any reason why the tour company had taken them all to see a bunch of rocks.

While in Dublin we met up with relations, Roy and Inez Cooper, and began to add more detail to the Bates Family tree.

 

Final Days in Abu Dhabi

The End of the Middle East Adventure.

What was originally going to be a seven month adventure in Qatar at the end of 2008 has ended up with us completing our work in Abu Dhabi on the 12th July 2012.

During this time I worked in two schools in Qatar, in a Teachers Training Centre in Oman and in a Boys Preparatory school in Abu Dhabi while Joy immersed herself with her painting, producing musical shows for the Qatar end of year dinners and “mall trawling” with, initially, The Doha Darlings and, in Abu Dhabi, with her friend from Doha, Priscilla Ellis.

Now Joy has been busy packing, bubble wrapping everything, including me, as we prepare to exit the UAE and return to New Zealand carrying with us souvenirs, photographs, friendships and many memories of an adventure we have no regrets embarking on.

Mind you , returning to New Zealand and rain, wind, earthquakes and temperatures in single digits is not something to contemplate with pleasure!

Immediate Plans:

Joy and I leave Abu Dhabi on the 13th July to head off on a tour of Eire, England and Northern Italy that will bring us back to Abu Dhabi around the 13th August and then the long haul home.

Our Eire and UK trip will take us to visit the Irish relatives and give me a chance to add more information on the Bates family tree, perhaps answer questions about personal names, gather photographs of ancestors and present relations and the places, villages and towns Mum’s family came from so, when we are back in New Zealand, and the Bates family meets for a reunion in January next year we can share memories, information and add to our shared histories. I’m praying that I’ll get fewer rain greyed photographs of places than I did 15 years ago when Joy and I last visited Ireland.

The Tuscany trip should, with luck, give Joy the chance to collect a file of photographs that will provide inspiration for her painting once we’re resettled at home. I can already see that I’ll be kept busy at every stop on our tour as we pass from one photogenic village to the next.

Reviewing the past 18 months in Abu Dhabi

The Team 2011-12.

Colin, Saeed, Self, Shane, Lynne, Dave, Gavin

I have spent the lat 18 months working with the teachers of English in a Boys Preparatory school in central Abu Dhabi guiding them through the demands of the Australian English curriculum as adapted to the UAE.

The entrance to the school

The first six months were with nine teachers who had already gone through one trial with an American provider, using an American scheme and syllabus, only to be told that the American trial was over and they were to revert to the old MoE curriculum then, a trimester or so into the year, to change to the new adapted Australian curriculum. Needless to say there was some opposition to the arrival of a new team of advisors coming into the school to demonstrate and advise on yet another curriculum change.

Once we got over the teething troubles we got down to work attempting to develop an understanding of the pedagogy behind the curriculum, design unit and lesson plans around the very limited resources available in the school, create assessment tasks that were both understandable to the teachers and able to be completed by the students and also resource the Inquiry Based Learning modules that make up over 80% of the course. This would not be a major task in a NZ or Australian English Department as one could easily draw on readily accessible resource banks and a ready supply of reading texts that would support the thematic units of work supported by colleagues who have a good idea about Unit and Lesson planning that addresses both the needs of the students and directs the learning according to the demands of the curriculum. However, here it was not so easy  as the resource base at the school was non-existent, the data on student readiness to cope with the curriculum was sketchy, coloured by teacher beliefs and often artificially inflated to meet parental expectations of continuous success. Add in the limited experience with inquiry based learning - summed up in the often heard statement from teachers “ I know what a research is.” - and a paucity of familiarity with rubric based assessment processes and one can see that our advisory role was to be an on going challenge.

We spent much of the first six months coming to terms with the curriculum and attempting to build up a basic resource base on which to build the unit and lesson plans only to lose six of the teachers at the end of the year as the Education Council moved its supply of English speaking Arab teachers from the secondary schools into the preparatory schools as they replaced the Arab teachers with native English speakers imported from the USA, UK, Australasia, South Africa and Canada.

So this academic year started with four new teachers appearing in the English Department, all from the secondary schools and with different levels of understanding of the curriculum. It was not quite start again but it did mean that much of the first trimester was one of reviewing where teachers were in terms of understanding and, because I had, over the last half of the last trimester, reworked the curriculum to provide a clear school syllabus reworking the the few resources we had access to into reasonable units of work.

This exercise was going well until I realised that one of the teachers, whose name translated to Mr. Right, had not understood the work we’d been doing or that there actually was a curriculum that he had to engage with and prepare units and lessons to address. Every time I tried working with him, tried to explain the terminology and the pedagogy that the curriculum demanded of him he began to cry and then revert to screaming that he knew how to teach but he couldn’t teach unless he was given a proper curriculum textbook .  His final attempt to dodge any PD, to dodge out of coping with the curriculum changes and planning, which resulted in him being given a severe dressing down by the Principal, was to refuse to teach his classes if I was observing and advising in his classroom. 

The other teachers (the English translations of their names being ) , Mr’s: Winner, Selected, Builder, Double Maturity, Algebra, Opening, in the department shrugged and got on with the jobs of preparation and making do with limited resources as they worked their way to coming to solid grips with the curriculum. An attitude for which I was eternally grateful for they would be the ones who would ensure that all our work was going to be sustained and developed once we headed for different jobs in different parts of the world at the end of the contract.

After my experiences in Qatar where we succeeded in developing and cementing in inter school debating and using class newspapers / magazines as part of the English language development programme in the school I was working in I embarked on a programme, aided by Mr Jabr, that would demonstrate to the teachers that the boys were capable of doing a lot more than they were often given credit for so we set up an English Club which was able to produce a school newspaper each trimester, engage in an inter-school debate and finally write, produce and edit a 10 minute film on how to succeed at school.

The film makers in action

When I look over the  records of the newspapers, the debates and the film and compare the work with that I’d seen at home from Years 9 & 10 the boys exceeded themselves as their work was of high quality in presentation and language use. Our plan, using Mr Mustaffa's contacts in a neighbouring school to run another debate got stymed when the dates of the external exams got moved forward by a little over a week thus cutting down the time for preparation, organisation and delivery during the trimester to an impossible time frame. 

The hope is that the boys will take their experiences on to the next grade level at the school or will take their skills to the secondary school and, in both cases, persuade their teachers that they can use them in the classroom and, perhaps, the teacher will plan for and include the skills in their lessons and thus develop their language acquisition.

At the Grade 6 level we introduced a guided reading programme based on the New Zealand produced Rainbow Readers which proved to be just as interesting as the Newspapers, debating and film making programmes as the boys responded with the sort of enthusiasm I see and hear regularly from our grandchildren whose exposure to books and reading for pleasure is well developed. My argument for the introduction of the programme was based on a conversation I had had with a young Omani who had proudly informed me that she was “reading English” but who, on being asked what book, story, novel, was she reading looked blankly at me and then simply replied that she was “reading the grammar textbook.” She was surprised to discover that there was more to reading than simply “reading” the textbook and that she could improve her knowledge of English and get some pleasure from it.

There is, I think, nothing more pleasurable than going into a classroom to be greeted with a chorus of “Are we reading today
 Mr Alan? “ and then having a queue of boys, with varying degrees of reading confidence, all waiting to have their turn to read a page or two of their book to the class.

For their teacher, Mr. Ammar, the reaction to the reading programme was evidence that the boys would read and could read. That what was needed was a greater supply of reading material in the classrooms and, ultimately, the exposure to reading benefitted the boys in their acquisition of English as a means of communication and not just a language whose rules needed to be learnt as an exercise.

As well one feels rewarded when a teacher from Qatar emails and says:

 How are you Mr.Alan? i hope you are fine . Thank very much for the treasure you sent me from Radio New Zeland . I downloaded some stories especially the Mountain who wanted to live in a house.It is fantastic. I will make use of all of them in the next school year. I'm travelling to Egypt on 18th July and I will be back on 2nd Sept as the school year for teachers starts on 5 th Sept and on 9th for students. I'm looking forward to drinking more of your knowledge and experience river.
It’s then that you know that you have made and are making a difference.

Now, with the end of the contract in sight, many of my colleagues are looking for work elsewhere in the world. For some the steppes of Khazakstan look promising while for others the lights of Singapore, Australia and the UK have more appeal as they find employment and chance to continue the work we’ve been doing in the ME.

For Joy and I it is a return home to regroup and catch up with family again while I look to finding a job somewhere around Auckland or, perhaps, some short term contracts somewhere around the world.

Final Days in Lebanon

Lebanon Final Days

On Day 4 of our tour we opted out of driving through to the Valley of the Saints and the Cedars to take our guide’s invitation to spend the day exploring the area of the skifields of Faraya and Faqra where the remains of a Greek temple, tombs and columns dedicated to Adonis and later Roman ruins stood deep in the snow drifts.

The views were spectacular as we drove through 15 metre snowdrifts, sheer cliffs and bluffs with waterfalls and a natural 38 metre arched stone bridge spanning between two rocky bluffs.

The ski fields were doing brisk business with several thousand people riding the six chair lifts up to the different fields around the township. We rode a lift up to the 2450 metre summit for views over the valleys then headed back down the mountain to sit, snow burnt and relaxed to watch the passing parade of skiers and tourists and drink coffee at the Austria cafe and ski shop.

Walid then drove us into town where we visited his parents in their home nestled amid  huddle of houses amid the maples and remains of snow drifts of Faraya. We were treated to home made cider, coffee, home-baked biscuits and orchard stored apples as we chatted, through Walid, about families and their different lives before heading down through Faqra to Jouneih.

With Walid's family

The next day we headed back to Beirut for three days of self directed tourism - museum visiting, checking out the shops of the rebuilt “Beirut Souq” which is a high end shopping complex created in the central town from the ruins left from the Civil War. We discovered that on a Sunday the locals spend the day strolling the Corniche or dallying over a long lunch at the numerous restaurants that line the St George Marina. With the soft warmth of the Mediterranean washing over us and the sheen of the snow covered Lebanon mountains in the distance made this choice of life style very, very attractive!

 

 

The museum and the area around it bears testament to the ravages of the Civil War which had had its 15km long front line running down the Green Line - now the main road to Damascus. The area is dotted with buildings with their frontages bullet chipped and shell stripped some of which are, apparently, being retained as a reminder of the horrors and futility of war.

The museum has some of the best artifacts from the different civilisations that have passed through Lebanon over the millennia. The displays of sarcophagii, votive offerings and jewelry demonstrated the ways people had adapted and intertwined their beliefs and arts to make their own idiosyncratic culture. The most striking were two sacrophogii made of marble modelled on Egyptian ones but with the faces carved in realistic Hellenic style.
  

We tried to make sense of the Civil War but gave up after wading through several pages of Wikipedia describing the machinations of the different sides along with the activities of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation and the Israelis as they manipulated the factions to suit their different agendas. Instead we marvelled at the way the Lebanese have worked to heal the rifts and damage of the war and rebuild Beirut.

We left Lebanon promising ourselves that we would return as our all too brief a visit had offered us the promise of other places to see and explore.

Lebanon March- April 2012. Day 3

Lebanon - Day 3: Dog River, Harissa and Byblos.

Byblos Souq - Lebanon

Lebanon Day 3

After the impressive ruins of Baalbeck our visit to Dog River, Harissa and Byblos could have been anti-climatic but, like so much of Lebanon, this was yet another great day.

Pigeon Rocks - Beirut

We started the day with a tour of Beirut from the Pigeon Rocks, which are the icons for the city, to the central square- Place d'Etoile and the newly rebuilt area of the city. Here we visited the Greek Orthodox church of St George, the Maronite Church with its tall bell tower standing beside the new Mohammed Al-Amin mosque. All of the churches are close to the "Green Line" that marked the killing zone and boundary between the warring Christian and Muslim factions during the civil war (1975-96) which leads down past the tomb of the assissinated prime minister, Rafiq Hariri,  to the Martyrs' Square and the much shot up statue of the Lebanese martyrs executed there by the Turks in 1916.

The Martyrs' statue

The Dog River, Nahr el Kalb, has been a natural barrier to the different invaders entering the country. The Egyptians, in the 14th century, had declared the river to be the boundary between the Egyptian empire and the Hittites while, in later centuries, the river gorge was the point where different conquerers left their marks, carving monuments and stele along the gorge to commemorate their presence and victories. There are markers left by Rameses II, Nebuchadnezzar, Marcus Aurelius and modern French, Australian and British forces in the 20th century.

Stele marking the Roman invasion

Roman Bridge on Dog River

A narrow Roman bridge a little way up the gorge is the reminder of the only way invaders had managed to cross the river and continue their invasions.

The Lady of Lebanon

Across the river the city of Jouneih marks the point to visit Harissa and the statue of the Lady of Lebanon and the Maronite cathedral of Lebanon which towers over the city. We opted not to ride the cable car up the 650 metre hillside and drove up the hill to the summit. After enjoying the view over the bay we headed off to explore Byblos.


Byblos was once a Crusader harbour and is now a quiet fishing harbour. Historically the city is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. Apparently it has been inhabited for over 7 millenia and has been the centre for pottery and trade since Phoenecian times and gave the world the alphabetic script we use, in varying forms, even now.


Like Baalbeck, Byblos has seen its far share of invaders - Greek, Roman, Byzantine, arab, Crusaders and Ottoman - and is dominated by the Crusader Castle built in the 12th century using stones stripped from the earlier Roman and Byzantine buildings that dot the site.


Around the castle the ruins of a Roman theatre, Phoenecian tombs and the remains of neolithic and chalcolithic housing provide ample grounds for speculation about the history of the area.

The Byblos souq is yet another place which would reward the avid bargain hunter with its numerous shops including the interesting Memoire du Temps which specialises in fossils of ancient fish preserved in the limestone of the local hillsides.

Temple to Jupiter - Byblos

We lunched at a local sea food restaurant, Ode Mer, where we enjoyed a magnificent meal that left us feeling full and extremely well satisfied before spending the rest of the afternoon exploring the old town of Jouneih.