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It’s not every day that one gets to walk across the international border between two unfriendly countries in the grip of a major bilateral crisis. But that’s what I did late last year when I walked from India into Pakistan. It was Thanksgiving—the day after a wave of terrorist attacks began in Mumbai. I was visiting friends in the region where I had lived and worked for six years as a journalist.

The Wagah border, named for the village that straddles it, is the only official land crossing between India and Pakistan, countries that the 24-hour news networks won’t ever let us forget are “nuclear-armed neighbors.” The village lies in fertile farmland between Lahore, the capital of Pakistan’s Punjab province, and Amritsar, the Sikh religion’s hub in northwestern India. The two cities are just about 50 miles apart. When British colonial rule ended in 1947, creating Pakistan as a homeland for Indian Muslims next to independent India, Punjab was split in two, and Wagah, an unremarkable village along the Grand Trunk Road, sat on the dividing line.

Air travel has made the act of crossing boundaries perfunctory, mundane. But on foot, you can’t help but think about how magical it is to walk from one country into another. And this is a storied border. Over the years, its daily flag-lowering ceremony has become such a popular spectacle that bleachers have been set up to accommodate the crowds of Indians and Pakistanis who gather to watch and cheer on each side. The border guards of both nations put on a show-stopping performance at Wagah late every afternoon, full of choreographed stomping and fierce gestures, and the crowd goes wild.

At the end, when the guards shake hands and fling the gates shut, spectators rush from the stands to talk to each other across the few yards of No-Man’s Land separating these two countries. Sometimes they just stare.

Back in 1947, people thought things would be different. They hoped the border would be much like the one between the United States and Canada—easily and frequently crossed by people who speak the same language and share much in common. Instead, India’s 1947 partition sparked perhaps the largest human migration of the last century, with some seven million people leaving one country for the other—and led to a horrific spasm of violence, mostly in Punjab. Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims all slaughtered each other—a million dead in the end. India and Pakistan ended up fighting three wars and continue to view each other with distrust and suspicion, rattling sabers over the disputed region of Kashmir and other irritations—the most recent being the Mumbai terrorist attacks, for which India blames Pakistan, and Pakistan denies responsibility.

So I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I arrived at Wagah about 15 hours after those attacks began. What I found, to my relief, was a scene of bustling normalcy. After I got out of my taxi on the Indian side of the border, I walked past dozens of huge trucks laden with vegetables, all lined up and waiting to cross over. In the past, they had to hand off their goods to porters, who carried everything across by hand. Now the trucks can rumble right on in after clearing customs. A very tall Indian porter spotted me and grabbed my 50-lb duffle bag, hoisted it on top of his head and loped away, shouting, “Come with me--hurry! The border’s closing!”

I sprinted after him and found myself in a crowded, noisy arrivals hall filled with Indian and Pakistani passengers from the cross-border bus, a service that began in 1999 when relations were in a thaw and has operated in fits and starts since then, subject to diplomatic ups and downs. (Oddly, citizens of these two countries can’t actually walk across. Only foreigners can do that, and I was the last one of the day.)

The porter steered me to the front of the queue where I shoved my passport into a window, among many other arms and hands doing the same, all of us trying to get the attention of a calm-looking immigration official. Once my passport was stamped, the porter guided me back outside. We walked a couple of minutes, and before I knew it, he was bidding me farewell at the painted white line demarcating the narrow No-Man’s Land between the two countries. He handed me and my duffle bag to a plainspoken, white-bearded Pakistani porter. (“You come from a big, powerful country. So you please give me a big, powerful tip.”) He and I walked side by side into the other country. And just like that, I was in Pakistan, where things were so quiet I could hear the birds twittering in the late-afternoon sun. I set my watch half an hour earlier to conform to the local time.

Whenever I’d done this before—and this was my ninth crossing--I’d been ushered into various rooms off the veranda of a colonial-era bungalow where I’d sat and chatted with Pakistani officials to complete the formalities. The entire crossing process could take a couple of hours, what with all the conversing and waiting around. This time there was a much more impersonal arrivals hall with X-ray machines and counters. It was vast and vacant, and built, I suspect, to match the building on the Indian side. But there were still traces of the old hominess. An immigration official walked by wheeling a baby in a stroller—the child of a colleague, he told me with a smile. A money-changer waited nearby, urging me to give him a little business and wondering if there was anyone else coming across after me—he looked relieved when I told him about the busload of passengers. The Pakistani customs official explained apologetically that the X-ray machine wasn’t working, but the main thing he needed to know was did I have any alcoholic beverages in my luggage? I told him no (the truth), and that was that. My passport was stamped and I was on my way. 

The first time I crossed this border, back in 1989, I was headed in the opposite direction. I left Pakistan with a group of American friends and we bounded into India as if we’d just entered the Emerald City, dazzled not by the sign welcoming us to the world’s largest democracy, but by a billboard advertising beer--something we hadn’t seen much of in prohibition-bound Pakistan.

Thirteen years later, in the summer of 2002, a time when India and Pakistan had massed a million troops along their border and fears of war were so serious the U.S. had ordered “non-essential citizens” out of India, I made the crossing again. (It was easier and quicker than going by air, since the two countries had called off all direct flights.) Given the grave state of relations between the two countries, I figured I might be in for some aggressive questioning.

 “Are you coming back?” the polite, middle-aged Pakistani immigration officer asked while he thumbed through my battered passport. I told him I lived in Pakistan and planned to return within a week. “Then please bring me two tubes of Colgate toothpaste from India,” he said.

I pointed out that he could easily get Colgate in Pakistan.

“Please,” he said, exit stamp hovering above my passport.

Fine. Then, in the customs room, “I need medicine from India,” a young employee said sadly, after a perfunctory rummage through my luggage. “Medicine not available in Pakistan.” He wrote down the name of the drug,  Penagra. When I asked what it was for, he raised his elbow and winced. A painkiller, I thought—poor guy, dealing with all these heavy bags.

Returning a week later, I stopped off at a pharmacy in Amritsar. I handed over the slip of paper with “Penagra” written on it. The elderly, long-bearded Sikh pharmacist glanced at me and tossed a few boxes of pills on his table. “These are expensive,” he said.

“Really?” I said. “What’s this medicine for, anyway?”

He looked at me balefully. “Sex!” he growled.

I didn’t spot either of those border officials from 2002 during my most recent crossing. But I hope they eventually found what they were looking for. Clean teeth. Good sex. No matter what side of the border you’re on, the fundamentals still apply.

-Hannah Bloch


   

Happy January!

Everyone knows January is the first month of the year. And in the dim recesses of our brains, we might even recall learning—in what was it, fourth grade?—that the month is named for Janus (below), the two-headed Roman god. Janus could look backward and forward at the same time, making him the perfect figurehead for a month that ushers in a new year, marks the change from days growing shorter to days growing longer, heralds a farewell to one American president and the inauguration of another, and starts the new season of American Idol, with a supercool fourth judge added to the tiresome old mix!

Only here’s what they probably didn’t teach you in elementary school: January wasn’t always the first month of the year. In Roman days, it used to be the 11th month. Back then, March was the first month of the year. Named for the god of war,  March was the time when the Romans planted their fields and went off to battle. “War was very, very important to the Romans,” explains Judith Hallett, professor of classics at the University of Maryland. “The Romans loved war. They benefited from it.” The spoils of war included land and the ever popular plunder.

Meanwhile, January and February brought up the end of the Roman year. “They were two depressing months,” Hallett says. The only bright spots during those times were certain festivals, like Lupercalia, the February bash during which men ran around naked and whipped women to promote fertility. I’m guessing the men enjoyed that festival more than the women did.

But I digress.

So how did January go from No. 11 to No. 1? Blame it on politics!

A couple of hundred years before the reign of Augustus Caesar (31 B.C. to 14 A.D.), the Romans began thinking of a better way to wage politics. Instead of inaugurating their consuls in bellicose March, why not install them in office in January, two months before the country went off to war? To mark this political upheaval, the 11th month of the year thus became the first month.

I know what you’re thinking: What an uncanny parallel to American history! Our president used to be inaugurated in March, too—until the 20th Amendment, ratified in 1933, changed the date. Franklin D. Roosevelt was the first to take office on January 20. The reason for the change? To cut back on the long period of lame duckery.

So here’s a tip of two hats to Janus, god of gates and doors—and a much better symbol for new presidents than Mars.

-Marc Silver

Perhaps you hit the eggnog a little too hard at the party last night. Or maybe champagne did you in, and now you're cursing that "friend" who kept filling your glass.

No matter how it happened, though, you now have a hangover and will do just about anything to get rid of it. Doctors advise drinking copious amounts of water and taking vitamins and aspirin. Some people swear by grease--burgers and fried eggs are popular antidotes in America. Others, like the Japanese, follow a more virtuous regimen of fruits and green tea. In this month's magazine and on our website, we take a look at some international suggestions for how to cope with the effects of one too many.

Hangovers happen to anyone who drinks too much alcohol, but some people fare worse than others. It all depends on what you drank--some say clear booze is less toxic--how much you drank, what size you are, and possibly even your temperament (if you've had a particularly difficult time of it lately, or you're prone to anger or anxiety, you may suffer more severely than others).

One of the biggest contributors to the wretched hangover is dehydration. Alcohol is a diuretic, meaning it makes you go to the bathroom frequently, and every time you go, you lose a little more water. While you're having fun quaffing drinks, your body is quickly becoming dehydrated and will punish you for it the next day. Pounding headaches, nausea, and dizziness are just a few of the delightful ways a hangover can manifest itself, so consider this a warning and watch how much you swill at those holiday soirees.

Now, that said, even the most careful among us gets carried away sometimes. And it seems everyone has a secret remedy. One of my friends swears by bananas and ice cold Coke. Another says a chocolate milkshake works wonders. Who else wants to weigh in? What do I take if I'm hung over in Paris? Or Puerto Rico? Let's hear it! And oh, cheers. But clink the glasses together softly, please -- my head is killing me.

-Catherine Barker

Those little bowler hats—called “bombins”—perched quaintly on the heads of Aymara women in Peru and Bolivia, and every once in a while, on the heads of reality show contestants, certainly have an intriguing history, we’re just not sure which intriguing history it is. 

See, while we were researching how this particular accessory made its way from Europe in the 1920s and became a staple of traditional Aymara dress, we came across some great stories. But experts haven’t been able to tell us which, if any, of the stories are true. Myth or truth, here are a few interesting tales:

Story #1: A large shipment of bowler hats arrived in Bolivia, destined for the heads of European workers based there. The hats, however, were too small for them, so they were distributed to the locals, who came to love the miniature look and kept the custom going. And going. And going.

Story #2: A local store owner accidentally ordered a large quantity of European derby hats. Horrified at his suddenly large stock of strange headwear, he decided to market them as a women’s accessory. The hats caught on and soon, that’s all he was importing.

Story #3: Some sources say that however bombins got to Bolivia, they have remained popular for so long because women believe the hats increase their fertility. 

So, which story do you like best? Which one do you think is true?

-Winona Dimeo-Ediger

National Geographic photographs by Ivan Kashinsky
 

If you caught some of Hillary Clinton’s speech to her supporters in New York this week, you may have paid as much attention to the way she spoke as you did to her actual words. During the endless primary season, Clinton was repeatedly bashed for allegedly using different accents, depending on where she spoke and to whom. Author and social critic Camille Paglia wrote: “For every new state or region, [Clinton] trots out a new tone or accent, from the crisp to the cornpone.”

But was Hillary purposely pandering? Or just engaging in normal human behavior? “We modify our speech all the time,” says Steven Weinberger, director of linguistics at George Mason University, home of a speech accent archive. “We do it unconsciously, every day. It’s very, very normal.”

The University of Pennsylvania’s William Labov, one of this country’s most distinguished linguists and co-author of the Atlas of North American English, agrees. I asked Labov to listen to a couple of excerpts of Hillary's supposed southern accent. He shared his thoughts via e-mail: “I hear her doing just what many effective political speakers do: making slight adjustments without changing her basic Chicago speech pattern, as a way of making contact with the audience.”

Labov also analyzed video clips of Clinton’s South Carolina debate and found “she is consistent in her use of her native Chicago dialect.” During her 2000 New York Senate campaign, people “wrongly thought she had adopted a NYC pattern. In fact, I found she had returned to her native Chicago pattern, abandoning some of the Southern features she had picked up in Little Rock.”

And it’s not surprising she would have picked up some Southern speech habits. She did, after all, spend nearly two decades of her adult life in Arkansas. Linguists say that’s long enough to adopt a way of speaking different than the one we grew up with (though not enough to sound like a native).

“People who have lived in two or more places for long periods may have two near-native accents and may be able to shift (consciously or not) between them,” David Harrison e-mailed me. He’s a linguist at Swarthmore College and co-director of National Geographic’s Enduring Voices project to preserve endangered languages around the world. “Lots of people shift their accent to some degree when they are in the environment of another accent,” Harrison says.

Robin Dodsworth, a linguist at North Carolina State University, points out that women tend to be more “stylistically flexible than men in language use. Men don’t style-shift as much.” (“Style-shifting” is linguist-speak for making adjustments, often unconsciously, for different audiences). Explanations for this behavior vary, but perhaps women use language more flexibly to get their point across because historically they’ve had less power.

So maybe style-shifting is just part of what it takes to make a historic run for the presidency. It's certainly part of being a royal. Linguists in the U.K. analyzed Queen Elizabeth II’s annual Christmas messages over 30 years and found “the Queen no longer speaks the Queen’s English of the 1950s.” In that decade, she pronounced the word “had” as if it were “hed.” By the ‘80s, it rhymed with “bad.” The linguists concluded that “there has been a drift in the Queen’s accent towards one that is characteristic of speakers who are younger and/or lower in the social hierarchy.” But when it comes to style-shifting, neither Hillary nor Elizabeth II can match the biggest style-shifting queen of all: Madonna.

-Hannah Bloch

People in Washington, D.C., are talking about peeps—specifically, the dioramas made from the garishly hued Easter candy for a Washington Post contest. And here at National Geographic headquarters, we’re especially proud of the one made by the society’s communications staff, an effort that placed among the finalists: “U2 PeepD,” an homage to the 3D film distributed by National Geographic.

Juggling Peeps, foam, exacto knives, and hot glue, the team of Stephanie Montgomery, Ann Barrett, Ethan Fried, Heather Cabral, and Kate Baylor toiled for hours, suffered glue burns, and developed carpal tunnel syndrome from cutting out photos of the drum set, cell phone, and other props. If you want to visit the Post’s Web site and cast a vote of support for this National Peepographic entry as a reader favorite, well, you won’t hear a, um, peep of protest out of Peep, er, Pop Omnivore.

 

I am from Maryland, and I love dessert. And now, my home state legislature is poised to make Maryland one of the very few states in the nation to have its very own official dessert: Smith Island Layer Cake.

I must confess that, growing up in Baltimore, I never even heard of Smith Island, let alone its luscious cake. And what makes it an island delicacy? I asked Jonna Jones, an editor at Tidewater Publishers, which has published a cookbook of island recipes. Jones says that it's one of the classic recipes passed down from mother to daughter on the isolated island. Cookbook coauthor Frances Kitching, an island native, opened a restaurant and prepared (and preserved) many of the dishes.

From our extensive Internet research, we have found three other states who have enshrined a local confection are Massachusetts (Boston Cream Pie), Florida (Key Lime Pie), and South Dakota (Apple Kuchen). We’d love to hear from residents of other states about the dessert they’d like to nominate as their local best. Or if you'd like to read about a variety of regional eats, check out this Pop Omnivore entry.

Meanwhile, for cooks with a lot of butter and an hour or so on their hands, the recipe follows.

-Marc Silver

Smith Island 10-Layer Cake:

Frosting

2 sticks butter
2-12 oz. cans evaporated milk
8 heaping Tablespoons unsweetened Cocoa
2 lbs. confectioners Sugar

    * Melt butter. Stir in evaporated milk (off heat).
    * Whisk in Cocoa until smooth, return to heat and cook for approximately 10 minutes. DO NOT BOIL or Scorch.
    * Remove from heat and whisk in confectioners sugar slowly.
    * Cook slowly until thickened and will stick to back of a spoon or to the whisk (It will form a ribbon when you drizzle a spoonful onto mixture while cooking).
    * Approx time: 45 minutes.

Cake

2 cups sugar
2 sticks unsalted butter, cut into chunks
5 - eggs
3 - cups flour
1⁄4 - teaspoon salt
heaping teaspoon baking powder
1 cup evaporated milk
2 teaspoons vanilla
1⁄2 cup water

Cream together sugar and butter. Add eggs one at a time and beat until smooth. Sift together flour, salt, and baking powder. Mix into egg mixture one cup at a time. With mixer running, slowly pour in the evaporated milk, then the vanilla and water. Mix just until uniform. Put three serving spoonsful of batter in each of ten 9-inch lightly greased pans, using the back of the spoon to spread evenly. Bake three layers at a time on the middle rack of the oven at 350 degrees for 8 minutes. A layer is done when you hold it near your ear and you don't hear it sizzle.

Start making the icing when the first layer goes in the oven. Let the layers cool a couple of minutes in the pans. Put the cake together as the layers are finished. Run a spatula around the edge oft he pan and ease the layer out of the pan. Don't worry if it tears; no one will notice when the cake is finished. Use two or three serving spoonsful of icing between each layer. Cover the top and sides of the cake with the rest of the icing. Push icing that runs onto the plate back onto the cake.
To ice the cake

    * Take one slightly cooled layer and spread with cooled frosting. Add crushed candy randomly on layer. (Reese cups, snickers, milky ways, or whatever your favorite is—candy is optional as well )
    * Add next layers, frosting, candy, and repeat process till the 10th layer.
    * Do not add candy to final layer.
    * Finish frosting the cake and sides. May have to wait to ice top and sides until the icing cools.
    * Enjoy!

From Mrs. Kitching’s Smith Island Cookbook by Frances Kitching and Susan Stiles Dowell. Copyright ©1981 by Tidewater Publishers. Used by permission of Tidewater Publishers, Centreville, Maryland

Project Runway is over, but thank goodness for Project MOMA.

An extraordinary new show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art shows how scientists are designers too. The show is called “Design and the Elastic Mind,” and it is 3 parts technology, 1 part fashion, and 17 parts crazy.

If you can’t make it to New York for the show’s run (through May 12), here’s a sample of what you’ll be missing, and a “status report” on the products.

NON-STOP SHOES. They’re sneakers, finished in red horse hair and reflective plastic film. I really don’t want to use the “f” word but I can’t help myself – they’re totally fierce. But the fiercest thing of all is the technology these shoes are said to possess. They contain some kind of device that will capture and store the energy you put out all day long. You know, when you leave your desk to walk to the bathroom or run out to buy a mid-afternoon Red Bull. At the end of the day you can hook up the shoes to a special device that will harvest the stored energy and use it to power your home electronica. Status report: The MOMA exhibit did not explain exactly how these shoes work or when they will be on the shelf at Payless.

VICTIMLESS LEATHER. Dilemma: You love the look of leather but don’t want animals to give up their lives so you can have a hot new coat. Solution: Victimless leather! Here’s the theory: A “living layer” of animal tissue, grown in vitro and fed by a nutrient bath, could grow into a leather garment! No animals will be harmed. Status report: There is a prototype featuring a wee leather coat, from the so-called “Tissue and Art Project” at an Australian laboratory.

BEE VASE.  We appreciate all the honey, but why can’t bees work harder for us? A scientist created a scaffold that enabled bees to build a honeycomb in the shape of a lovely vase. What comes from flowers ends up creating a vessel for flowers! Status report: Totally real. The vase is on display. I’d pay $19.99 for it in a heartbeat.

PERSONAL IRRIGATOR. This cool white network of PVC pipes blow out “marine mineral concentrates” that will allegedly improve your immune system (don’t ask me how) and “the body’s elimination functions.” Plus, I bet you’ll always feel like you’re at the seashore from those salty minerals. Sweet! Status report: A French designer is working with biologists and others to produce a variety of devices that improve your “personal environment.”

DOG COMMUNICATOR. What does your dog really mean when it wags its tail? An LED light, calibrated to the connection between wpm (that’s wags per minute) and canine desires will spell out in red lights what a dog wants: 55 wpm means “WALKIES!” And 90wpm: “I REALLY LOVE YOU.” Awww, Fido! You’re the best. Status report: Two British designers created a prototype as part of the “Augmented Animals project.” No word on how they determined the meaning of wags per minute.

The museum shares this amazing stuff online, too.

P.S. Dear Project Runway designer Chris March: There’s a “Cotton thread and human hair” necklace created in Spain in 1996. So you’re not so weird after all!

-Marc Silver

I'm from Albany, NY, where they don't have anything I'd call "local" in the way of food. Growing up, I ate things like spaghetti, steak, pot roast, and chicken hearts (a foodie from the start, I think I'm the only one who ate this last item), and no matter where I went in the USA, these things - ok, not the hearts -  were always on the menu.

But when I started researching my story on regional foods for the September issue, I was surprised at how differently (at least from a gastronomical standpoint) other folks were raised. A friend from Maine told me she remembered her disappointment when, as a little girl, she discovered that they don't sell lobster rolls at every McDonald's. And, while I was busy eating routine chocolate ice cream cones, I had no idea other kids were getting exciting-sounding things like buckeye candies in Ohio and gooey cake in St. Louis. 

So now I know that there's more than one way to eat ravioli and there's more than one word for ground-up pig parts. What was on the table where you grew up? Remember how you felt when you realized that you couldn't find it once you left home? Is it still hard to find, or is it everywhere now? What do you think is the proper way to make it, and eat it?

— Catherine Barker

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