Tuesday, December 11, 2007

A Little Humor

I thought you might enjoy the following. Kevin wrote it for a class assignment.

Some of the times I've been embarassed are ones I'd rather not write about. In the one recorded here, however, I was acting against my will and better judgement. We were in Istanbul, Turkey. Our conference classes went on a field trip, and we were entertaining ourselves while waiting for a bus. Our fun-loving teachers decided on an interesting form of group amusement. At that painfully public spot, they had us all hold hands and make two circles, one inside the other. We walked clockwise, counter-clockwise, hands high, etc., hoping that only a relatively small percentage of Istanbul's population noticed the apparently insane Americans.

Things were as bad as they could get short of a PKK attack when the teachers unveiled an even more humiliating activity they had in mind for us. We dissolved the human wheels of humiliation and were instructed to repeat after the teachers.

"I said a-boom-chick-a-boom!"

At the very least we uttered something with more or less the same vowel sequences. The teacher repeated the above quotation, and so did we. Then,

"I said a-boom-a-chick-a-rock-a-chick-a-rock-a-chick-a-boom!"

It wasn't heartfelt, but we managed our repeat part.

"Uh-huh!"
(repeat)
"Oh yeah!"
(repeat)
"One more time!"
(repeat; horrified)
"Anonymous teacher #2 style!"

The styles included several of the teachers' personal variations of the a-boom-chick-a-boom, some other styles I've been mercifully allowed to forget, underwater style, and one where we were supposed to strum over our lips with one finger as we said the words.

Later on, in the bus, we were told to take off our nametags. When we asked why, one of the teachers told us it was so we wouldn't draw attention in the museum. At least of a couple of us thought it was, as someone put it, "a little late" to act inconspicuous, but we handed over the tags.

3 comments:

Patricia said...

Dear Inconspicuous American,

Were they full-grown teachers, or just interns?

Kathy said...

They were more like Sunday School teachers. Kevin says that other than that incident, they were great.

jeni said...

Kevin is so funny! I love his dry, ironic sense of humor.