The Quest for Pişmaniye

Pişmaniye, what is it exactly? More or less how can I describe it? In general it's cottony candy, but not the same cotton candy that one can find at the fair/carnival that comes in either pink or blue. Pişmaniye (if one of the characters has trouble showing up, pishmaniye) is white (so far I've only seen white) and topped with pistachio nuts. Unlike sugary sweet candy floss pişmaniye in my opinion has more of a floury texture to it. For anyone who has tried Persian or Chinese sweets, they're close to pashmak and dragon's beard respectively (so says wikipedia).

So how did I come across this? It all started on a trip to the east end of Ottawa in Orleans where one of the shopping trips was to this new specialty store called Asian Supercentre* which sold mostly Oriental snacks and grocery items but also sold halal meat, middle eastern stuff (called West or Western Asian, I forget which), and some South Asian stuff. At this specialty store there were some Turkish products which mostly came in the form of snacks like Ülker products.

I eventually told my Turkish penpal/skype buddy about these product and of a Turkish grocery store here in Ottawa (Istanbul Market/Istanbul Gourmet food, whatever the store is called). Since the store was not too far from where my lola (that's tagalog for grandma) lives I decided to ask him to recommend me something to try and he said pişmaniye. I recall seeing it in the Asian Supercenter but I wasn't sure what it was at the time, thinking it was just regular cotton candy. Anyway so after dropping off my lola it's off to the Turkish grocery store. What was odd about the people who run the store was they had no clue what pişmaniye was (they had the ülker products and loukum though).

Fast forward to today and lo and behold Middle Eastern food store called Sultan Supermarket carried the product. I already had had 2 pieces of pişmaniye and I like it. I just got to control myself around it as it's not cheap ($4.25 CAD) and I think only 12 pieces come in a pack. I recommend you try this out if you come across it.

*edit July 15, 2012: I was looking for news on this supermarket as a couple days ago went to the store to see it closed for renovations. It turns out that they're changing their name according to an ad for a job fair on kijiji

My Undergrad in Textbooks (the summer semester to my final (5th) year)

Top: books I used in Russia
Bottom: book I bought in Russia

The Russian department at MUN has a program which runs every other year (well, when I was there it did) in which we could go to St. Petersburg, Russia in the summer and earn course credits at the same time. Out of people who signed up for the summer courses there were only 6 people who signed up for actually going overseas and doing stuff there. Our instructor (from MUN) gave us some reading to do beforehand and it was from the book on the top right (St. Petersburg by Arthur L. George). That book was not easy to obtain as it was no longer published in North America but somehow one of they guys on the trip managed to find a copy in Dom Knigi. I had to get the book online through the rare and used collection and luckily it arrived before the postal strike. I hated how I had to summarize the book as one of my assignments but I did learn a lot of interesting things about Russian history centered around St. Petersburg (Peter the Great liked Dutch things and shipbuilding, the city was named after St. Peter). The top left book was the workbook used for the Russian language classes given to us for free (though I'm sure it was included in the cost of the course). Not only it teaches grammar and vocab but if I purchased the disk it might have helped me with the pronunciation and intonation sections. The book with the robot on it is meant for beginners in Russian but the reason I got it was of the pictures explaining things as well as for practice and review.

film text books and sociology
course textbook

My fifth year I didn't spend too much on textbooks as each semester I had three courses. The fall semester I took a course in Russian film, historical linguistics, and anthropology-sociology course on media and mass communication. I have never taken a film course before and a lot of the work in that course, besides discussing the films themselves, involved discussing elements of film like mise-en-scene and the significance of long takes hence the David Bordwell book on film. Film analysis isn't really my cup of tea but after taking that course almost every film I see I seem to do analyses of my own (if anyone sees the movie Limitless, take note of how the lighting changes when Bradley Cooper is on the drug and when he is not). Historical lingustics (the continuation of the 3rd year course now at the 4th year level) reused the same red textbook at times but most of the material was from photocopies and notes the instructor made many years ago. The fall semester was also my introduction to the world of sociology courses (even though I just took the one). The reason I took that course was out of curiosity as well as having something to balance out my schedule (films for my Russian film course were on Fridays from 3-5, the sociology course was on Mondays and Wednesdays around the same time). Not sure how much I've read of the book (but reading it helped in understanding class discussions) but it opened me up to how mass media works.

English Grammar and phonetics textbooks

The winter semester I took a course in phonetics, phonology, and English grammar. Phonology mostly involved signing out books from put on reserve in the library as the instructor provided sheets for us to print off. The English textbook has an interesting cover (it's orange) but I didn't like the book that much (didn't read much of it either). The book was published in 1999 and mentions English as "on its way to becoming the official language of the European Union" and MS-DOS in one of its examples ("The new MS-DOS is incredibly fast (predicative adjective)"). Even though standard English hasn't changed much at least make a revised edition of the book that uses examples that are more attuned to modern times and a younger generation. The phonetics textbook is a great one that I'll treasure. The reason I like this textbook is it gives instructions on how to make the sounds not found in English as well as how human speech is produced.

That's all for my textbooks and it has been quite the journey. At least I made it out alive.

My Undergrad in Textbooks (second half of 3rd year to my 4th year)

"Crime & Punishment"
"Eugene Onegin"
"Fathers and Sons"
"Gogol Short Stories"

Continuing from where I left off . . .
The latter half of my 3rd year was filled mainly with Russian course (3 of them) while the other two were Latin (continuing from the fall semester) and another
Linguistics course (which was basically course notes again). There was a textbook for my Russian language course, Golosa 2, but my instructor for the course again does not like the Golosa books so he made that optional. As for the other two Russian courses I took that semester one was a literature course and the other was a special course that looked at vocabulary building. The only new book I got for that course was the book of Gogol short stories. My uncle did lend me some of his book (another anthology of Gogol short stories and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina) but the reason I got the book from the bookstore had to do with stories being covered in the course. In the end I ended up using both books when I had to do an essay comparing the works of Gogol with Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. I was able to pass the course only having read Onegin, some of Gogol's stories, Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, and a little bit of Crime and Punishment
   

A book on Russian culture
used for vocab building

        For the vocabulary building course there was one textbook (the black one with the bird-like creature on it). The book wasn't used much but what from I've seen of it, it's mostly on Russian culture and the things you would find in Russia and at the same time it would build your vocabulary (there's a page where it names parts of the body as well as a small section on swearing). I still have this book and when I have the time and patience would like to look through it again.

3 Russian textbooks, 2 linguistics text-
books, and a history textbook.

My fourth year was the beginning of the linguistics heavy stuff. The intro to language acquisition was the only course that did not have a textbook as the instructor just e-mailed everyone the notes. I didn't like the history course I took that much, and textbook usage was pretty much "read on your own time and we'll discuss the topic next class". This was also the year that the Russian textbooks changed. The main one was a book that I believe was made in the Soviet Era as the photos seem to be dated and the stories seems to revolve around Russian kids in America. The other books that were for the course were mostly reference/practice materials. The only textbooks that were of use were the phonology and syntax books as I can pick up random words from random languages.

Semantics, Morphology,
Historical Linguistics,
Old Church Slavonic

The second half of my 4th year I somewhat stopped taking Russian language courses because there was none offered that semester. (Technically I challenged that course for credit so there was no set textbook, just whatever materials I had with me). On the other hand I took a course in Old Church Slavonic which happens to be like the grandfather (maybe even great grandfather) to languages Russian, Polish, Belarussian, Ukranian, Slovenian, Czech-Slovak, Macedonian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, Sorbian . . . and I may be missing one or two but you know what I mean. The textbook was chosen on a basis that more than half the class were not linguistics students (since this was listed as a 4th year level linguistics course) and the book was small and cheap (can't remember the cost though). What sucked about the book was the font used was really small and hard to read the Cyrillic and there were some grammatical errors in the examples (in which I remember the instructor pointing things out). I also had that same instructor for historical linguistics which is basically the change of language over time. I'm not sure if I liked that textbook or not, but maybe if I look through it again I might find something that I like. The morphology book is not bad but I hated using it in the course, mainly because we had to look at the morphology of the language featured at the end of each chapter: Kujamaat Joola. I don't seem to have any interest in Niger-Congo languages could be the reason why and if I had change something about the course, is to do a morphology project on a language of choice. The semantics book is quite perplexing. The course description calls for an "introduction to the study of linguistic meaning" but instead the course had to do with logic stuff (the statement is true if x and y =1) as well as some lambda calculus (don't make me go there!). I'd say that the book is somewhat interesting, minus all the math parts.

And there's more to cover. Up next: my summer course and final year

My Undergrad in Textbooks (1st year to half of my 3rd year)

Greetings you who happened to stumble upon my blog post. It's almost official. I'm done my undergrad. The reason I say almost as I still have that pending status next to my application form. Anyway it took me 5 years, yes 5 years, to get here and if anyone hasn't picked it up, I switched from a bachelor of science to a bachelor of arts degree hence the amount of time spent there.

My first year I took the 3 core science courses (chemistry, physics, biology), calculus, and English in the fall semester and in the winter I traded biology for French.

English textbook, French text-
book, Russian textbook

The majority of my first year textbooks were sold as when I took courses the next year there were better books that came along. I also remember buying the majority of them new as the textbooks that were used that year were new editions or new course texts and in order to follow along my way of thinking was I should get the new books. One book I didn't really have to get was my first year English textbook for the fall semester as the instructor for that course only used like 2 or 3 short stories and poems out of there while the rest was from some other books he had. I pretty much kept this book for the stories and poems in case I feel like I want to read some of them one day.

My second year since I fulfilled my English requirement I decided to fill that slot with Russian. I did continue on with chemistry and French, redid a math course, and for a little while did some more physics (I eventually dropped the physics course). That year I bought two of my textbooks used from the student union run used book sale (even for used books they were not cheap as there was a commission added to the asking price of the seller plus tax) and one thing I noticed about science textbooks is the more advance the course the thicker and heavier the books become. I think I remember trying to sell my French textbook but I don't think anyone bought it (maybe there wasn't an instructor that used the book at the time I was selling it). It does have nice colourful pictures and if I want to review/expand my French I guess I could always go back to it. As for the Russian textbook, I kept that until a new textbook was required for the second half of the second year level Russian course. I remember my instructor (which I had for every Russian course I took except the film one) calling this book "crapola" at one point and saying that the book is meant for those who have some rudimentary knowledge of Russian along the lines of "enough to communicate with your Russian-speaking relative." This was also the year I took my first steps into linguistics. The course I took (introduction to phonetics and phonology) did not come with a textbook but instead a course notes package.

Linguistics textbook (on the English
language), Latin textbook, Irish-English
dictionary

My third year at university was when I switched over to linguistics. I didn't take very many linguistics courses that year since I was sort of starting anew (technically the Irish language course was offered by the department of linguistics of overall I took 3 linguistics courses, 1 Russian and 1 classics). Since arts degrees required a minor (a subject of secondary concentration) I chose Russian as I did very well in the 1st year level courses. I could've made Russian my major but linguistics seems to have more career options so I went along with that. Textbooks that were used/reused were for my Russian and two of my linguistics courses. The red textbook pictured was kind of interesting not in the terms of content but that it had pages missing. They weren't torn out but something went wrong during the printing of this particular textbook. The Latin textbook was bought new and is also a keeper because I enjoyed learning it and maybe one day might want to re-educate myself. Also the textbook has some interesting fun facts and mentions Monty Python at one point. The Irish course I only took it in the Fall semester as in the winter I'd wanted to keep the same Latin instructor and I wasn't all too interested in learning Irish (yet I ended up doing well in the course). The textbook I had for the instructor that year was just a dictionary as she provided the worksheets.

And since I've babbled too long on here, I'll post the rest of my undergrad through textbooks in another post.

Learning Devices

Yesterday this appeared on my Facebook feed and it's about the University of Ottawa considering a proposal which is a ban on electronic devices in the classroom such as laptops and smartphones and other related devices. This comes from a professor saying that it's distracting.

I have brought my laptop to class many times and from the classes I've been to I don't think any of the profs were bothered by it. Maybe some of them are but not as vocal as the prof mentioned in the news report.

Some find laptops help them learn. The advantage to having a laptop is it saves paper. If the instructor posts notes online there's no need to print them (and for some no need to attend the lecture but you should go once in a while if you're that kind of student). The laptop is also useful in taking notes.

For the phones (whether they're the newest iphones or the basic phones) they're useful if let's say someone is waiting for the doctor to call with some good or bad news, or some other emergency. There are two instances in which I remember accessing the internet through a smartphone (1 instance was technically an ipod touch) was useful in class. The most recent one was someone reading out a list of people who had to do something during the instructor's office hours when he couldn't remember who he has scheduled during that time. The other instance was someone looking up the definition of a word on his ipod touch.

But are they a distraction? They can be, but it's not something that should be banned.

From a teacher perspective they want to make sure the students are actually learning something, even though we are adults and are responsible for doing whatever assignments and showing up to class. Depending on the acoustics of the room there may be some instructors that dislike the sound of keyboards click-clacking. And yes, instructors may be able to tell when you're texting or not

From a student perspective, I have brought my laptop to class many times and I do go on Facebook and other websites. I have brought my laptop to work on other assignments for other classes. I have also seen other students with laptops in class and I remember seeing someone watch anime. If you can watch the video the comes with the article, one student mentions seeing someone watching porn on their laptop as wells as someone shoe shopping. Call these distractions yes but in my opinion students get bored. There are days when you're in class and the instructor just drags on so might as well see what your friends are doing on Facebook, watch something on YouTube, or read the latest gossip posted by a blogger.

I think there should be a compromising solution to this rather than an outright ban. If a certain instructor doesn't want technology in the classroom that's up to the instructor but it shouldn't be campus wide. It's understandable on test and exam days but on regular lesson days it shouldn't be a problem. Even if there is no net service in the classroom there are other ways to distract oneself with the laptop.