Dixon Donnelly at Sea

Summer 2006

2006-05-20T07:41:00.000-07:00

Interested in Semester at Sea? This is the blog I've set up of the scripts I did when we sailed throughout Europe in the Summer of 2002. But now we're going back! And this time to Asia. The next blog is up at www.lulu.com/gypsyteacher along with the 'blooks' I've published on Lulu from all three of my blogs. So you can read about Semester at Sea here for free, or buy the book! Either way--thanks for visiting.

Wednesday, August 21, 2002

2006-03-08T08:56:00.000-08:00

Dubrovnik, Croatia/Miami, Florida:
Back in the U.S…

Flew into Miami Beach BOAC…

Well, we know it’s Miami, not Miami Beach, and BOAC is now British Airways, but it still describes what I’m doing as I write this.
And there is no USSR anymore either. But during the last week on Semester at Sea, the singing group of faculty, staff and My Irish Husband, dubbed “The INeptunes,” wound up the shipboard Talent Show with a rousing rendition of the Beatles tune, ending with “Back in the US of A!”
For the students, aging baby boomers playing air guitar to out of date songs was probably the turning point—“Get me off this ship!” For Tony and me, the end of the voyage seems exactly right. We’ve loved every minute, but it’s time to go back. For now.
How will we be able to catch up on three months’ worth of Miami politics? What happened with Frasier? And we've decided not to think about how the apartment, the car and the cat have fared.
The good news: No disasters for most of us on the trip. Considering the risks of taking 400 college students, 100 faculty and staff, and a Greek crew on a ship for two and half months throughout Europe, the gods were with us. For Tony and me, one pair of reading glasses—with customized clips—on the bottom of the Adriatic; one Visa Check Card left behind—twice—and retrieved—twice; and one flight delayed one hour. You can’t get much closer to perfect than that.
This past week, since we left Dubrovnik, has been filled with packing, finals, dancing, singing, hugging and crying. Jimmy Buffet's Oh, What a Lovely Cruise is another INeptunes favorite. I wanted to talk to students to get their feelings now that it’s over. But they don’t know what their feelings are yet. What will you do differently? I don't know. How has this experience changed your life? I don't know. What is Europe like at this juncture in history? I don't know. Yet.
Semester at Sea holds a convocation ceremony at the end of the voyage for the students who are graduating from their respective universities. The graduates wear Semester at Sea caps with tassels, but the Academic Dean and the Registrar wear academic regalia, Pomp and Circumstance is played, chosen students read from their journals, and the valedictorian gives a speech. She echoed the others: They are better people now, they’ve seen the world now, their friends at home won’t understand.
One oft-used quote is from T S Eliot:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive at where we started
And to know the place for the first time

It’s all true, and poignant, but after I hear the fifth person strike the same theme, I think: Get me off this ship!
For Tony and me, our exploring has lead us to the Bosnian Dubliner on holiday in Dubrovnik, the grandfatherly Milosevic in his nice gray suit, the frozen dead of Pompeii, the gum-cracking Morris dancers in Antwerp, the waving Germans along the Kiel Canal, the ghosts of Auschwitz, the Russian women wearing transparent blouses because they can, the Scottish pipeline inspectors in the Norway pub, the asylum seekers making a home in Ireland, the young people sharing their sandwiches on the beach in Spain, the British children from all over the Commonwealth coming out to congratulate Queen Elizabeth on her part in the past 50 years of European history.
One of the convocation speakers gave a variation on a quote I asked my students to discuss on the final: “A fish doesn’t know it’s in water.”
Well, we were in water, and on land, and now in the air. Out of our fish bowl, we saw the world differently. How is Europe? Jumbled, but consolidated. The EU is raging ahead, immigration across fluid borders is coming back to bite them in their shorts, and if they manage to expand according to plan in 2004 they will create a market almost twice as large as the US. However, they will still be eating Big Macs, wearing Hilfiger, and dancing to Britney.
There were times when we were in the middle of a body of water, with no land in sight, that I felt as though we were floating inside a huge bowl of blue-gray. We could walk all the way around the ship’s deck, 360 degrees, and everywhere see other ships or oil rigs spaced around the lip of the bowl. As Robert Louis Stevenson said, as he rode the train across the plains of the US,

We were at sea—
there is no other adequate expression...
There was a certain exhilaration
in this spacious vacancy
this greatness of the air,
this discovery of the whole arch of heaven,
this straight, unbroken,
prison-line of the horizon.

For the WLRN Radio Reading Service, this is Kathleen Dixon Donnelly—no longer at Sea.

Wednesday, August 14, 2002

2006-03-08T08:49:00.000-08:00

Dubrovnik, Croatia: Full Circle

Dubrovnik is spectacular.
The bright limestone walls encircle the city in a protective embrace, repelling warring armies and raging pestilence since medieval times. Today, they have also kept out McDonald’s, Burger King and Pizza Hut, while attracting tourists, mostly European, who come to enjoy “the Pearl of the Adriatic,” scramble over its walls and lie out on its beaches. Although it is part of Croatia, the languages we hear most frequently are English, German and Italian.
Inside the walls is a sea of red roofs, topping sandy-colored, limestone buildings. There must be a tremendous fine for using anything but red tile on your roof here. The streets are also made of blocks of the same bright stone; after centuries of people walking on them, they now shine as though someone polishes them every day.
Outside the walls are the clear, bright blue waters of the Adriatic Sea, and a newer town, with modern versions of the same limestone buildings and red roofs. It is the most color-coordinated city we have been to on Semester at Sea.
It is also the most beautiful of the eight ports we’ve now docked in, and has the most fascinating history. For seven centuries, until Napoleon conquered it in 1808, Dubrovnik was an independent republic. It was known for commerce and traded all around the world. The current inhabitants are very proud of this diplomatic heritage and will point out to us traveling Americans that they were one of the first European sovereignties to recognize the upstart 13 colonies when we became independent back in the 18th century.
After Napoleon gave up, Dubrovnik became the southernmost tip of boomerang-shaped Croatia, and so was part of the cobbled together federation known as Yugoslavia, both as an independent capitalist country after World War I, and as a communist dictatorship after World War II. When the other Eastern European communist countries started to fall in the late eighties, Yugoslavia began to fragment as well. Croatia declared its independence in 1990, and was engaged in a five-year war to break free of Yugoslavia, a bloody precursor to the ethnic conflicts that would soon engulf neighboring Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia and Montenegro.
Peaceful, diplomatic Dubrovnik became a symbol of the senseless brutality of that war. In the fall of 1991, while the world, including me, watched live on CNN, the Yugoslav People’s Army shelled this art and culture capital of the Balkans for eight months. I remember seeing the images of ugly warships sitting in the beautiful blue harbor of a Mediterranean walled city that glistened in the sunshine. Dubrovnik had no military importance and had not been at war since the 15th century. The only strategy advanced by the bombardment was the total destruction of the tourist industry and the hurt to the pride of the Croatians. As we realized when the Taliban blew up the ancient statues of Buddha in Afghanistan, a government so determined to destroy art can go on to destroy humanity too easily.
When we walked the city walls of Dubrovnik with the other tourists, we looked down over the charming Mediterranean style buildings, stairways and courtyards, as well as the few crumbling houses that have yet to be restored. In the other cities we have visited, mounds of rubble indicate years of neglect, or the inevitable forces of nature at work. Here it is the more recent effect of man’s inhumanity to man and culture.
Serbia, the largest chunk of the former Yugoslavia, is not that far away, and its former president, Slobodan Milosevic, is currently on trial by the World Court for crimes against humanity, including attacks on Croatia. When Semester at Sea was in Belgium a few weeks ago, special arrangements were made for some to go to The Hague to observe the trial. 15 students and staff decided to make the trek, and were able to observe the last day of testimony before a four-week recess. I have asked two of those who experienced this bit of history to tell us about what they saw.
Linda is a librarian at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law and is in charge of our library here on Semester at Sea, and Amy, one of my students, is a senior communications major at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. Welcome Linda and Amy.
Gypsy Teacher: You arrived at The Hague that morning and had to go through metal detectors to get into the building. When you first came in, give us an idea of what the courtroom looked like and what you saw, Amy.
Amy: When we first came in there was a room set up with chairs for us to sit in and a bulletproof glass window that we could look through to see the courtroom, including Milosevic and the judges, prosecutors, lawyers, bailiffs, security guards and lots of computer screens. There were just people everywhere.
GT: What was your first impression? Did it look at all like a courtroom in America or did it seem very foreign?
A: It didn't look like the courtrooms I've seen in America. It had a lot higher security and there were a lot more people than what I envisioned. There were more judges, more lawyers, more of everything.
GT: And Linda, you have a law background. From the point when you came in and they returned from the recess, what was going on in the trial?
Linda: We walked in right after a 30-minute recess that had been requested by Milosevic. This was so that he could prepare to cross examine his former security chief who was the witness that day. Milosevic wanted to question him about whether the security chief had ever specifically received orders to kill Albanians in a particular town. That’s what he was questioning him about.
GT: Milosevic was doing the cross examination. What was your general impression of him and of the whole legal process?
L: He asked a lot of long questions, a lot of multiple part questions. I can paraphrase. They were something like, Did you ever receive any kind of memo or any kind of communication from me about killing the Albanians in that town that day? There were so many different questions all at once and the security chief could easily answer by selecting a part of it, which is what he tended to do in response to Milosevic’s questions. One of the ones I recall was when Milosevic asked something like what I just said, Did you have any kind of communication from me about killing the Albanians in that town when you went there in that week that had already been established in direct examination?
When the cross examination was finished, the prosecutor redirected and asked the separate parts of that question. Were you ordered to go in that day ? Yes. Were you ordered to kill that day? Yes. Were you ordered to kill Albanians that day? No. We were there to rid the area of terrorists. Were you aware that there were Albanians living in that town? Yes. He admitted that there were. It was that kind of breakdown that had to occur.
And after that re-direct, the prosecutors went on to directly examine Milosevic about a memorandum, which none of us had seen of course and which was not available in English, but by following the hour or so of testimony we were able to ascertain that this was a memo that had been transcribed based on interviews with this security chief while he had been in prison. It was his description of why and how corpses had been transported from mass graves into Serbia.
GT: Milosevic has insisted on representing himself, right? He's his own attorney. How is he? Is he a good attorney?
L: Yes, I thought that he was doing fine. On the day that we saw him, he was asking for relevant facts and seemed to have a good sense of the feel of the room—who was whom and how things were organized and when to assert his rights. I mean, there was a point at which he objected to a piece of evidence, some testimonial evidence. The prosecutor was asking the security chief about the cash to finance this operation of the transfer of corpses in a refrigerated truck. Immediately Milosevic jumped in and objected on the basis that it had not been established that there was any cash transfer. And so the prosecutor, without knowing better than to withdraw the question, went backwards and said, Do you remember transferring money on that day and was that to finance this operation? Yes. And where did that money come from? And was that money in the form of cash? Yes, it was. And so Milosevic kept them on their toes; I give him credit for that.
GT: And Amy, you were very young when all these atrocities happened. You went in without a lot of historical background. But what was your impression of him, of Milosevic, just seeing him there?
A: He really looked like a nice little old man with gray hair and a nice suit. It’s hard to picture him as the nasty man that they accuse him of being. I didn't have that impression of him just by his physical looks. He was very friendly with the guy they were interviewing. They were kind of buddy buddy.
GT: What about any of the other attorneys, the movement and activity in the courtroom while you were there?
A: There wasn’t a whole lot of movement. They all sat at their desks, and when they were questioning the security chief they stood up and gave him his questions and then sat down. Everybody else stayed seated and just helped while everything was going on.
GT: And then after Belgium we went on to Italy, but then to Croatia. I assume for both of you this is the first time you had ever been to Croatia or the Balkans for that matter. Having seen Dubrovnik and what a beautiful city it is, where there any impressions that you had? Related to the fact that you had seen this trial of this person who actually ordered the bombing of it—we suspect that that was what he did. Were there any connections that you made?
L: I was on a tour of a hospital and orphanage while we were in Dubrovnik and the guide was pointing out facts that might be relevant to people who were visiting the hospital. And he showed us where the old hospital was and he said it was almost completely destroyed. He said they had to move patients into the basement and he was saying, Imagine how it is to be sick and hardly able to move and you are so sick you have to be in a hospital and they take you downstairs to the basement because there are bombs crashing all around. You can't even feel safe in a hospital, that was the impression that we got. And he took us on to the newer hospital and assured us that they are going to be renovating the old hospital. But that he was there and witnessed it and felt it and knew people who were in it was very moving.
GT: And Amy, what were your general impressions of Dubrovnik?
A: When I walked around the city walls and you could see out over the town, I was amazed at how rebuilt everything was. It was all bright and white and shiny but there were a lot of new roofs. You could tell that they had been replaced just in the last few years and there were just a few old roofs that were blackened and dirty. They were the ones that stood up to the war I guess. But it was very rebuilt. I hardly saw anything that wasn't perfect. It looked good.
GT: I think most of the people on the ship were very surprised with Dubrovnik, even though people had told us how beautiful it was. It was just such a delight as the last little crowning jewel on our trip. Thank you Linda and Amy.
At a hotel near the beach, Tony struck up a conversation with a young man who had a really strong Dublin accent. Tony was amazed to find out that this fellow Dub was actually a Bosnian. Part of the wave of 2000 refugees accepted into Ireland from the war, just over the ridge of mountains to our north, he had spent the past 10 years living and working in Dublin with his family. Now he was here in Dubrovnik on holidays.
Ten years ago today, in Dublin, Tony and I met. We’re celebrating our anniversary next to the clear blue Adriatic, now married, marveling at what forces of fate brought us to this point. Tonight the ship will leave to bring us back to where the voyage started, in Athens.
Compared to anywhere else we have been, Dubrovnik has a different feel. Thanks to sturdy medieval construction, and the constant work of the Croatians over the centuries to repair every bit of damage, the walls of Dubrovnik are still intact.
It feels complete.
For the WLRN Radio Reading Service, this is Kathleen Dixon Donnelly—at Sea.

Wednesday, August 7, 2002

2006-03-07T12:09:00.000-08:00

Naples, Italy: Mother Nature Always Wins

In my marketing class, I teach that one way of analyzing different cultures is to look at how they treat outsiders. Do they welcome them warmly, as the Irish do? Or treat them as tolerated, but useful strangers, as the Russians do? Or do they keep them outside their circle, as the Neapolitans do?
Our Interport lecturer, Francesco from Rome, has explained how the Southern Italians are focused on family ties and have created a culture that mistrusts anyone outside their group. We see evidence of this the first time we buy sodas in the café-snack shop near where the boat is docked. The place is populated with guys who look like rejects from a Martin Scorsese casting call. Before you get your drinks from the man behind the counter, you pay the person at the cash register—usually a woman—who gives you a ticket. They will only trust one employee, a female family member, with the cash.
Because they don’t trust us outsiders, they also try to kill us on their streets. We Miamians have railed against South Florida drivers who, as columnist Dave Barry says, drive under the rules of the country they were born in. In Naples, it’s different. There are no rules. They drive down the wrong side of the road—the main road—and we were advised to get across the street by walking downstream of a local who has figured out the game of Frogger you play with the speeding cars and mopeds. As another Floridian on the trip commented, this is like walking along I-95.
So let’s just say, out of respect for my Italian-American friends and my Italian born stepmother, Naples isn’t a walking city.
It isn’t a breathing city either. The cloud of smog and dirt that we find in the air the first hot, humid day is as bad as it was in St. Petersburg, but the smells are worse.
I’m a big city girl. I love the hustle and energy of cities from Miami to New York to Dublin. And, as Woody Allen says, I am “at-two” with nature. But after one morning of trying to walk around Naples—where are the little European outdoor cafes? The lovely parks? The charming streets without discarded syringes littering them?—we are ready to hightail it out to the countryside.
The field trip the first day includes walking up Mt. Vesuvius, which hovers over the city like a sword of Damocles, ready to punish the inhabitants for what they have done to the air and water. The tour bus (which isn’t allowed to chance the city streets but drives through the docks area to get out on the highway) takes us up hairpin turns, honking along the way to alert those coming down.
The guide points out the swath of dried lava left by the most recent eruption, in 1944, which cuts into the side of the mountain. Not many were killed then because the occupying Allied forces of World War II evacuated the hillside towns. Apparently most of them survived to open pizzerias because there are lovely trattorias specializing in the local dish all the way up the 3500 feet the bus is allowed to go.
The base camp at that level is the first of a series of souvenir stands selling lava jewelry, holy statues, and thank God, bottles of water. I admire the Neapolitans’ entrepreneurial spirit, and make a note to use the guy renting out walking sticks as an example in my next marketing lecture. The trek up the almost 90 degree slope on the gravel path makes us realize what poor shape shipboard life has left us in. It’s great to breathe clean air, smell the yellow wild flowers blooming, and feel muscles in the backs of our legs that we never knew we had. Glancing down over the slight wood railing, the twisting mountain road we just drove up appears even more astounding.
Once we reach the crater, where the path sometimes has no railing, I have visions of tourists bouncing down the side of the mountain like the pebbles that precede an avalanche. Maybe the locals figure that, if they haven’t killed you on the streets, they’ll lose you up here.
The layers on the rim mark the eruption in AD 79 which buried Pompeii and, two or three feet higher, you can make out the lava that was added in the most recent eruption. At the end of the path, in the shimmering Italian summer sun, is the last souvenir stand. I take a picture to show it nestled high up in the mountains; it’s a good example of location, location, location.
After our descent, which is even harder on the leg muscles, and the obligatory stop at the local cameo store, we are back in port, wondering what else we can do to get out of town. One of the senior passengers recommends the local water taxi that runs to the little villages down the Amalfi coast. It’s cheap, it involves being outdoors, and you don’t have to cross the street to get there. Let’s go!
The small boat, that smells like petroleum, chugs along the mountainous coastline, past beautiful houses hanging on for dear life with no visible means of support. It deposits us in the heart of Positano, an entire village clinging to the side of the cliff. With a beautiful church and lovely narrow streets snaking their way up, we get another walking workout, past hundreds of elegant tourist shops.
On a blind turn high above the town we reach the internet place—€8 an hour, the highest yet—and know the only thing we’ll find farther up is crazy people. We decide to chance the bus ride along the coast, south to Amalfi, 18 frightening kilometers away. I’ve heard stories about this trip, and so, with fears of all of us tumbling into the beautiful Atlantic, shakily find a seat on the east side of the wide bus—and promptly fall asleep. Tony, standing in the back, is treated to the full roller coaster ride, looking down the side of the cliff to the rocks and ocean below and forward to the cars, mopeds and other buses we meet head on.
Once in Amalfi, just as beautiful as its sister city but with a little more elbow room, Italy has redeemed itself. Shops are selling lemons the size of grapefruits, and four young guys are playing a game of kayak basketball in the harbor.
Heading back up the coast in the water taxi that evening, we wonder again at how man has managed to carve roads and dwellings out of this hillside. The houses are 50, 75 190 years old—what are we building at sea level in Miami that will last that long? Their windows and doors make them look surprised that they are still here in this precarious position, or just astonished at such a beautiful view.
We have signed up for the tour of Pompeii, the town that Vesuvius buried almost 2000 years ago. The 25,000 inhabitants who lived there that day have left behind clues to help the archaeologists decode their lives. Ruts from chariots gouge the well planned streets, and brightly painted frescoes tell us which house was owned by a hunter, which was a bakery, which was a brothel.
Pompeii had been a commercial center for almost 600 years while its citizens went about their business—first as Greek traders, then as Roman allies and finally as colonists. Vesuvius was always in the background, guarding them, until it spewed forth a three-day shower of gas and ash that literally stopped 8,000 of them dead in their tracks. The plaster casts made of their bodies, looks of horror frozen forever on their faces, are displayed respectfully along with their furniture, statues and urns.
A reminder to all of us that in the end, Mother Nature always wins.
Back on the ship, we are told that some people who wanted to go to Capri or our beautiful towns along the coast that day couldn't because the seas were too rough. The ocean decides when the water taxi will let you get out of the city.
With five days in Naples instead of the usual four, we allow ourselves one day on deck to sit in the sun and read magazines. What a luxury. Most of the other 500 students and staff have found their own way out of the city, either north two hours to Rome or on side trips like we have already taken.
In the once beautiful Bay of Naples, through the man-made smog and haze, the island of Capri is to the right, inviting. Mount Vesuvius is to the left.
Waiting.
For the WLRN Radio Reading Service, this is Kathleen Dixon Donnelly—at Sea.

Wednesday, July 31, 2002

2006-03-07T12:05:00.000-08:00

Antwerp, Belgium: Beer and Chocolate

In addition to the formal classes we have on Semester at Sea, before we land in a port, the students, staff and anyone on board particularly knowledgeable about the upcoming country give an informal presentation about what we can expect at our next stop. In the session before Belgium, a group of students stood up in a line and all said the same sentence, each in the language of his own heritage: Spanish, Polish, Japanese, Korean, etc. The sentence they repeated was:

Belgium is not only
Beer and chocolate;
Amsterdam is not only
Drugs and sex.

First, it was great to see that there was more diversity on the ship than we thought, and that the all-American student body is not only Midwestern blondes. But also, after all the tourist tips—about where to sample the 600 types of local beers that Belgium offers—and cautions—about illegal drugs and legal sex being so readily available just two hours away in Amsterdam—it was good to be reminded that the Benelux countries, like the rest of Europe, have so much more.
One of the field trips offered was a tour of both Belgian specialties, a chocolate factory and a brewery. How could one country be expert at two such different flavors? In the formal classes about Belgian history, we learned how; it is definitely a country with a fragmented personality.
Created as a buffer state in the early 19th century to keep France and Germany tame, Belgium has never truly unified. Today, the north half, Flanders, speaks Flemish, which our Flemish law professor assures us is Dutch with a funny accent. The southern half, Wallonia, speaks French. Flanders has its own elected parliament; Wallonia has two—one for economic issues and one for cultural issues. There is also a small, totally German-speaking region in the east that was given to Belgium as a prize after World War I. It is governed by the Walloon parliament for economic issues but has its own parliament for cultural issues.
And then there is Brussels. More a county than a city, like Miami it has 18 separate governing municipalities within it, and a parliament for economic issues as well as separate commissions for Flemish and French cultural issues.
All of these elected bodies work with a separate but equal elected national parliament—which has declared three official languages, French, Flemish and German—and a King, descended from a prince they hired away from Germany back in the 19th century, to pull this mélange together.
Confused yet? Here's the amazing thing: It works. And the proof is that they have never fired a shot at each other. Obviously, diplomacy and negotiation are among their cultural traits. My Irish husband was amazed. How come the Catholics and Protestants, the Brits and Irish, can’t do this?
On our first day in port, Tony got up early, looked out the porthole, and announced, “We're in downtown Antwerp!” Unlike in Dublin, where we docked in East Cleveland, here we were right in the city center. We hit the streets immediately, and was thrilled to discover the only port where I was able to use my French, and my bit of high school German to translate the Dutch signs—which are really in Flemish. The cuisine, too, is a mixture of Franco and Germanic influences, so everyone sits in cafes and drinks beers, while eating Belgian waffles with chocolate sauce. We decided that we like this.
These cultures are so easily linked by the great European train system, that we had to decide whether we wanted to tear ourselves away from lovely Antwerp to visit the other cities recommended. We agreed on one day in Amsterdam because Tony had been there in 1971 and again in 1981, and wanted to see if his son, who visited recently, had found the same fascinating city that he had as a youth.
The only official field trip Tony and I signed up for was a briefing at the European Commission offices in Brussels. We got off the bus with about 40 other students and faculty, and, there it was: The tall, non-descript, modern building, surrounded by car parks and construction, that holds the offices for thousands of workers who run the European Commission arm of the European Union. It’s one thing to read about it in the newspapers, but another to experience it firsthand.
Our meeting was with the Director General of Education and Culture, a German native who spoke fluent English and French, taking time out from his Dutch class to explain to us the intricacies of one of the biggest bureaucracies on the planet. Whenever conflicting interpretations of the body of rules and regulations that has grown up with the 15 member-states arise, the official advice is, “Look to the treaties, the treaties, always the treaties” that originally established and have since enlarged the Union.
Once the recalcitrant Irish finally ratify the Treaty of Nice this fall, the way will be cleared for 10 more already qualified nations, including Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, to become full members with the next regularly scheduled election in 2004. The total population in the Union, which is already 100 million more than in the United States, will jump another 100 million or so.
What better city than Brussels, with its hodge-podge of governments, the peacemaking middle child between France and Germany, to play host to this unifying force of nine official languages and four currencies? When our briefing was over, and I had raided the bookstore for free brochures to use in my classes, we wanted to have lunch in the traditional part of the older city that every tourist hears about. The EU staffers we asked seemed nonplussed about how to get there. Well, you could take a bus. Or you could walk; it's about 20 minutes. I got the feeling that to them Brussels was the modern office buildings not the quaint cafes.
We walked and walked, first on the very narrow sidewalks rimming parking garages and office buildings, then circling around the 19th century palace of the King, visually and physically linking the two halves, and finally downhill on cobblestones to the original city with its wide plazas and squares, back alleys filled with restaurants pushing bouillabaisse and paella, and a swirling mix of languages, smells and beers. An arrow pointed us to the symbol of the city, the Mannekin Pis, but our quest for ice cream in the heat didn’t take us that way. Later when we were on the train, a young Belgian male obliged by stopping his bike on the side of the road and taking a leak. You don't have to go far on this planet to see a little boy pee.
We headed home via Ghent to take in the Arts Festival. There were street performers on stilts and stages, unicycles and tightropes, and a magnificent jumble of buildings making up the university and the town, with examples from every century, from the 20th all the way back through to the 12th, linked by a canal system filled with floating modern sculptures for the festival. After one good Guinness at an Irish pub, we decided we’d move there in a minute.
Back in Antwerp we were sharing the city with the International Folk Dancing Festival. Throughout the town were Europeans of all ages, dressed in storybook costumes with white stockings, dark velvet vests, and colorful ribbons streaming from every orifice, spontaneously bursting into song and dance in every cafe or square. Or they could be seen, in costume, walking the streets, chewing gum, smoking cigarettes, and getting drunk on those 600 beers. I’m sure there are Balkan-like rivalries over who had the most ribbons, but to us all the dance steps looked the same.
At sea again, we are learning about Italy, with its many nation-states now united by a common language, but divided by a schizophrenic political system. A perfect member for this European Union.
For the WLRN Radio Reading Service, this is Kathleen Dixon Donnelly—at Sea.

Wednesday, July 24, 2002

2006-03-06T13:38:00.000-08:00

Gdansk, Poland: Shall We Gdansk?

We leave the gray of St. Petersburg for the gray of the Baltic Sea, headed for Poland. Semester at Sea has economically provided Soviet expert Ron to serve as our Interport lecturer for Russia and Poland, because he has firsthand experience studying and living in both.
Before Russia, Ron addressed my marketing class to complement the videotape I show about the establishment of the first McDonald’s in Moscow. He explained how impossible it was to get any decent food, even if you were an American with dollars to spend, in those pre-perestroika days.
The Women's Studies professor on-board had talked to us about the plight of women in the Soviet Union and how even in this day, there are young girls tricked into slavery. The students in my marketing class have brought examples of ads and cards for “dating services” that promise young, blonde Russian women for any man with the money to pay.
Students from the History course have taken the Siege of Leningrad tour and seen the perimeter where the Russians held off the Germans for 900 days, and the graves of those who starved to death, including the grandparents of the tour guide.
As we approach Poland, in the Core course, Ron describes the effect of the Second World War on that country, the collective guilt that the Poles felt and have tried to absolve for their treatment of the Jewish population.
The history professor shows shocking photos to prepare those who have signed up for the optional three-day trip to Auschwitz, if you can possibly prepare for such horror.
We need a break.
It turns out that Ron is also an expert at song parodies. As we passed Denmark, he organized some faculty, staff and Tony for a rendition of “Wonderful, Wonderful Copenhagen.” The day before we arrive in Poland, this group returns for Ron Linden's version of “Shall We Gdansk?,” including those famous lines,

Now that we're a part of NATO,
Just like France,
Take a chance.
Shall we Gdansk?

The best part is that we now have Rogers and Hammerstein going through our heads instead of one of Danny Kaye's weaker efforts.
We are more than halfway through our trip, and the excitement of approaching each new city is now mixed with a secret desire to nap. In Gdansk we are not close to downtown, but a short walk away is an easy tram system that gets us to city centre in 10 or 15 minutes. But the first day this means waiting in the line of college students at the ATM to get zlotys, figuring out how to buy tickets and which tram to take. I’m not feeling well, so Tony does all the hard work.
He uses the new zlotys to buy things at the. store, and it appears everything here will be as cheap as in Russia. Once I’ve had some juice and get to the train station in the heart of the town, I'm feeling a bit better but still a little queasy. Our students and faculty are all milling around, getting maps, trying to figure out what trains they can take for short trips on their own. The buzz is starting to get to me.
I need a break.
Out the station window I see the promised land—TGIFriday's. I need a burger. A big one. And I need it now. Tony and I slip away from the Americans and head to one of the most American spots around, Of course, many of the students soon follow, but my husband and I wallow alone in two cheeseburgers—with fries, an indulgence I never allow myself at home. And two big Polish beers.
Thanks, I needed that. Now we're back in travel mode.
That evening, we find the old part of Gdansk, a series of beautiful Hanseatic buildings, all gabled like those in Bergen, Norway. Amber is for sale cheaply everywhere—along with beer, ice cream, and Gofry, which we eventually figure out is a Polish version of a Belgian waffle.
Gdansk is one of those great European cities you can just walk around and enjoy, stop to have a beer or a meal, listen to street musicians. Because everything is so cheap, we eat away from the ship more here than in any other port. At one outdoor café I decide to chance the “steak of the house,” even though the waitress learning English can’t explain whether it is beef or pork. It turns out to be filet mignon done perfectly rare—for $6.
For us Gdansk is relaxing. We have signed up for only one trip, a meeting at the local development office to discuss Gdansk's current urban problems. Because of lack of jobs, people are deserting the center city for the suburbs, buying more cars and using public transportation less, and building new malls on the outskirts. Oh, my God, it’s turning into Florida! I tell her to come visit us to learn from America’s mistakes.
She shows us the offices of Solidarity and we tour the museum at the shipyards where the 1980 protests were staged. The students are interested in the video news reports of tanks rolling over strikers, but to them it is very long ago. Most were just being born along with the revolution in Eastern Europe.
But while Tony and I were strolling around Gdansk, eating desserts and drinking cheap beer, many of our students chose to have a different experience in Poland. They signed up for a three-day trip, leaving the first evening we arrived, to Krakow, Auschwitz-Birkenau, including the National Museum situated on the site of the largest Nazi death camp during World War II, and a nearby salt mine, one of UNESCO's World Cultural and Natural Heritage sites.
I have asked two of those who chose to go on this trip to join me to talk about their experiences. Dan, a junior at the University of Iowa, is an undergraduate in both of my classes and grew up in South Florida, and Kathryn, a student in the Pitt law program on board, is a second-year law student from Arizona State University. Welcome Dan and Kathryn.
Gypsy Teacher: What made you decide, back when you signed on for Semester at Sea, to spend your time in Poland at Auschwitz and down a salt mine? Dan?
Dan: As you said, I grew up in South Florida and made friends with quite a few Jewish people down there. The first reason I went was just out of respect for them, just to learn a bit more about the history of their people and their family members. The other reason I went was because I made a vow to myself that I would do something in each country that I could learn from and that I would take back home to tell my friends and family. I thought that this was the perfect opportunity for me to see something that literally was probably one of the most important things in history. That's why I decided to go.
GT: And Kathryn, you had seen some other places like this in Europe previously and chose to see Auschwitz too?
Kathryn: Yes, that’s correct. I'd lived in Eastern Europe, in Romania actually, which no longer has any Jewish population, and then I spent a lot of time in the historic sites around in Germany. I really felt called again, like Dan said, out of respect for the events that I had read about and knew that had occurred in Poland, to visit Auschwitz.
GT: On the ship they did a lot to prepare the students for what they would see. Did you find that what you saw there was what you expected, or was there some things that were, maybe, surprising? Or that really hit you when you first got there?
D: I think that they prepared us as well as they could. But I don’t think you could really; once you get there, as much preparation as you have, it’s still just hits hard. You try to realize and prepare yourself, but even though I had prepared myself for the most part, just seeing and feeling everything and just taking it all in—I don’t think anything could have truly prepared me for it.
K: I agree with Dan. It was just such a tragic event and has affected so much past, present and future, it’s a lesson about something that can happen. It was a potent experience and preparation was definitely well done here on the ship. But again I think there were a lot of things that were just difficult. Maybe not a surprise, but difficult to deal with while there.
GT: What was the main thing that struck you, that physically being there was different from pictures or from things that you had heard?
D: I didn't realize that it was more of a museum. When I got there we walked through the barracks—I’d seen the pictures in the history books of the front gate and the train tracks—but walking through there and seeing all of the shoes. I think the room that really changed me and scared me the most was the room full of human hair. An entire room filled with human hair of people who had died in the Holocaust. That was something that we hadn’t seen in books.
K: Seeing the suitcases with the people's names, the belongings, the hair, knowing that there were people who had identities and lives, like the group of us who were going through with our own individual identities. Seeing the contrast of this life with just the staleness and the museum-like atmosphere that we were visiting, that was definitely difficult.
GT: Neither of you is Jewish, but you both said that you had Jewish friends at home and here on the ship. I’m sure a lot of the students on the trip were emotional, but did you find that there was a difference? That people were helping the Jewish students to deal with it?
D: I think there was kind of a difference. I think that everyone dealt with it in their own way. I noticed that a few of the Jewish students did stick together almost as support because I think that they just had that connection. A lot of them had links to victims of the Holocaust; there were a lot more of them creating their own support for each other. I think that they really realized and knew in their own way that they had that connection to each other.
K: It was interesting because we were experiencing a very grave thing as a group, but we had a busy sort of tourist agenda. We went straight from Auschwitz to lunch and then on to the salt mines as you mentioned. So I didn't see as much of the effects of the emotions of individuals that I believe happened later at various points, before, during and after.
I know there are a couple of students who are Jewish on my hall and they had a lot of preparation for just going and visiting. I was really impressed with how much respect was given to the feat that we were undertaking—going and visiting and just taking the time to reflect. I think maybe that’s good; we combined doing something as a group, but then we took the time to retreat and then reflect as individuals.
GT: At Auschwitz itself or at Birkenau, did you see any students who went off by themselves to deal with it on their own?
D: There were quite a few, especially at the memorial. One of my roommates on the trip had grandparents who both survived actually being at Auschwitz-Birkenau and I noticed him going off. He actually walked over to one of the senior passengers on the ship and broke down. He was the most emotional of all the people that I saw because he had that direct link. There were quite a few people going off by themselves and reflecting, especially after seeing the memorial and reading the passages that were there.
GT: How did it feel, right after that experience, to go back into the “real” world? Like you said, you had lunch, and you went on the salt mine tour, which I think some students kind of enjoyed and other students weren’t happy about. For you, how did it feel, going from the camp to that?
K: There was a bit of criticism about the agenda; going from one event to another. Interestingly enough, we dined at McDonalds of all places, right after visiting Auschwitz. I think for everyone in the group there was that uncomfortable feeling of, please, no, this is uncomfortable. But I reflected on that and thought, that could have been one of the best things that we could have done, to have some American symbol associated with such an event. I think now I’m never going to forget when I go home and see McDonalds or eat a Big Mac that uncomfortable feeling that I felt when we ate at McDonalds after visiting Auschwitz. That’s a good thing because I really think you can set aside a set period of time to visit a concentration camp, or to visit a death camp, or to visit Auschwitz. But to really take the time and reflect and think about the lives that were lost and what it means and how we can avoid things like this in the future—that’s what we need to do to avoid these things and to give respect to those who suffered and lost family members.
GT: What do you think is one of the main things you will take away from this? Dan?
D: Just an appreciation of everyday life. I think I took a lot for granted living in America; going to these camps makes me realize that it can be taken away in a heartbeat. I’m just really trying to appreciate every day and live every day to its fullest. Just appreciate the people I meet, the things I see, and the things I am able to do.
GT: For most of the students I talked to and the faculty who were on the trip, it is something they’ll never forget. So thank you for sharing your feelings with us.
Back on the ship, we set sail into the Baltic, west into the sun, and the sunshine of Gdansk has turned to cloudy, cold weather. This feels like Norway and Ireland again. Where is summer?
A whole day is set aside—meaning no classes or regular activities—for the ship to go through the Kiel Canal. The time has been scheduled months in advance. We clear the first set of locks in the morning, while many of us are sleeping in. We slip through Germany, cutting across the peninsula that it shares with Denmark. The friendly people in the beautiful houses along the water come out to wave at us, and a Royal Dutch Air Force plane dips its wings as a salute—perhaps to the lovely coeds exercising on the back deck.
Seeing this pretty part of Germany, in the Europe we have all been learning about for weeks now, one of the senior passengers asks the political science professor, “It all looks so beautiful now. How did all those horrible things happen here, not that long ago?”
Once we clear the lock at the North Sea end of the Canal, we are on to the beauties of Belgium. But we had to go through that passage first.
For the WLRN Radio Reading Service, this is Kathleen Dixon Donnelly—at Sea.

Wednesday, July 17, 2002

2006-03-04T08:55:00.000-08:00

St. Petersburg, Russia: The Layers of Russia

St. Petersburg is a beautiful dowager who has been living with a cigar smoker for much too long.
Her opulent, onion-domed churches, brightly painted palaces, and open, airy parks are covered with a layer of grit and grime from too many automobiles and crumbling buses, and years of neglect by the Communist regime. But you can see her glory days peeking through.
The morning our ship pulls into the St. Petersburg dock, I awake to a bizarrely-shaped piece of sheet metal out our window. It turns out to be the corner of the passenger terminal and hotel, which was a fine example of socialist architecture when it opened in the early 70s. The ground floor entrance I see out my porthole is strewn with bottles and rubbish. The metal walls are streaked with black and the signs over the doors are broken. An old abandoned building, I think. And then someone walks out of it.
Next to the doorway is an old, beat up Volvo. An abandoned car, I think. And then someone gets out of it.
And those are just two of the layers of Russia. Everything that looks old, decayed and closed turns out to be functional. Sometimes, just barely. Sometimes, beautifully.
Our guide on the brief orientation tour sports a Donna Karan New York scarf around her neck, over the neat, pale green polyester suit she wears. She does her best to avoid the screeching feedback through the aging PA system on the bus, but can't do much about the non-functioning air conditioning. Amazingly, it is hot and sunny. According to the guide, St. Petersburg gets 100 days of sunshine a year. We will experience four of them.
The bus takes us through the city’s layers of history. The top layer is the scaffolding on the official buildings as they are renovated for the third centenary next year. Peter the Great founded the city in 1703. Between then and now it has been Leningrad, Petrograd, and now back to St. Petersburg again. Most of the scaffolding is swathed in bright green netting, but some of the contractors have gotten creative and used netting that is silk-screened to look like a building. A façade of the façade.
Underneath the scaffolding, which is underneath the netting, there are beautiful museums encased in peeling paint, once-bright yellows, pinks and blues. They are rarely more than four stories high, with rectangular windows outlined in white. Each is built according to an 18th or 19th century order, very square, all right angles. But the effect when they are lined up together along the canals and rivers is of a jumble. They stand up straight, facing the water, all slightly different heights, with different colors and different layers of dust on each.
The museums were once offices for the previous government, palaces for the previous rulers, or churches for the previously faithful. When Communism fell and religion was freed, the state couldn't give the church buildings back to the Orthodox Russian diocese because it doesn’t have the resources to take care of or even heat them. The current democratic government is doing an admirable job restoring these masterpieces of 18th and 19th century workmanship, and the congregations are allowed to hold services in them a few times a year.
I fantasize about life in those centuries, when the buildings were new and stately, filled with women in swirling skirts and noblemen in formal wear, a mix of pastels moving around the sprawling city. But My Irish Husband Tony points out that, if you look under the layer of peeling paint, the buildings were originally either dark red brick or gray concrete block. The colors were added in the 20th century, but not in enough layers.
Growing up as a suburban American in the Cold War, the sight of the Cyrillic alphabet produced a frightening effect. In our Irish Catholic house, Russians were like the Ku Klux Klan, Orangemen and Roosevelt-haters: The enemy. Our high school was innovative enough to offer Russian and Chinese as languages to study, but when I considered it offhandedly my father protested instantly. No Communist languages in this house! Where are all those boomers now who were smart enough to learn those Communist languages? Probably working here, or in Beijing, in a great State Department job.
But we’re here too, and for the first half day we feel like alien invaders, plopped down on this strange, mostly gray planet. Not only is the landscape unfamiliar, the tour bus gets so hot they have to open vents, thereby letting in decades of the air pollution that permeates St. Petersburg. We arrive back at the sheet metal passenger terminal in the afternoon, feeling as though we have been coated in petroleum and sprinkled with soot. I look at the “cheat sheet” Semester at Sea gave us, that transliterates some of the Cyrillic symbols to Latin letters, and then the city map with the English and Russian names on it. I think, “We're toast.”
After the city orientation, we venture out alone for the first time. The ATM gives us rubles from home. We tentatively buy a Coca Cola at the little shop in the terminal, where the woman speaks very good English. Less than a dollar for a Coke; maybe this won't be too bad.
It's a long walk from the ship to the main part of town. We see trolleys and buses, but how do we take them? Cab drivers show up at the ship, smelling American dollars. But how much should we give them? Where do we want to go? What will we do while we're here? On a big night out in St. Petersburg, where can you not get mugged or sick? Seasoned travelers that we are, we haven’t a clue.
Tony and I walk through construction, down a dusty main street, and see cafe tables and a vendor selling snacks and drinks. Beer. The universal language. By pointing we order one large bottle of German beer and one Miller Lite, just to be sure. Less than $2 for both. This is getting better.
We’re feeling more acclimated. Quick arithmetic tells us everything is awfully cheap, after Norway. At the ballet that evening, we buy champagne during the interval for a little more than $2 a glass. This is turning out to be my kind of town.
On the second day, our excursion to the Hermitage starts out with 12 Americans walking down a street trying to figure out which bus to take. We might as well have targets on our backs. Luckily, our Interport Lecturer, Soviet expert Ron, can translate. The answer to our bus question turns out to be: take a cab. Ron negotiates a rate with a cab driver and he calls the dispatcher to send two more. The trip down the road and across the bridge to the Hermitage takes about an hour and comes to $2 per person.
One of the sheer delights of a program like Semester at Sea is that, not only do we get to see amazing places like the Hermitage museum with a group of really interesting and interested people, we also have an art historian, Kate, from our faculty, and Ron, a Soviet expert, along. Between the two of them, we gain a better appreciation of not only the fabulous paintings and sculptures, but also the fantastic rooms they are housed in. Why the peasants revolted becomes abundantly clear.
When we decide to take a lunch break, Ron tells us there is a cafeteria in the basement, but he can’t vouch for its quality or cleanliness. We decide to chance it. It turns out that the cafeteria he remembered has recently been replaced by three cafes, one of which includes on-line computers at every table.
This is another layer of Russia, the newest internet layer. Most of the places we find are modern, open 24 hours, and charge the equivalent of $2 per hour.
Throughout the city we see dark doorways underneath the ever present scaffolding, making the buildings appear gutted and dangerous. But “St. Petersburgians” walk in and out, doing their shopping or having drinks and dinner. Indeed, any cafes recommended to us looks shabby at best from the outside. Inside, we find a modern lounge, with a full bar, complete dinner menu—excellent food, very cheap—and Frank Sinatra playing to pictures of New York City and the wrestler The Rock on the walls.
By now St. Petersburg is growing on us. Her streets are broad, if crowded; her parks are beautiful and green, even if the air is gritty. On one walk we hear the sounds of a jazz band at a free concert on the steps of the Pushkin museum. Young people spontaneously get up and dance to “Route 66.” We move on to a church where an Orthodox service is taking place, complete with a full choir singing a cappella, in the loft above the souvenir shop. We take the boat ride on the Neva River, where the other passengers as well as the commentary on the PA are Russian. On the way back they switch to local radio and we hear the familiar strains of Eminem singing “It’s So Empty Without Me.”
Western popular culture lays on the surface of St. Petersburg. Hugo Boss stores, of course McDonald’s, Britney Spears blaring. Just beneath that layer is the non-designer label signs of the new freedom: Women in transparent blouses and dresses, wearing them now because they can; blatant ads for sex stores slapped on every bus shelter.
Beneath that layer are the everyday Russians. Waiting in lines for decrepit buses to take them to work, in front of billboards for American cigarettes; pushing strollers through swarms of tourists buying Matryoushka dolls with either rubles, euros, or dollars.
By the end of the four days we feel that we either want to stay for another week to really crack the code of this beautiful old city, or leave now with a memory of her as she looks at this stage. If we come back in a few years, she will be all dressed up, ready to go to the ball.
Our next stop is Gdansk, Poland, another non-market economy recently come over to the West. We’re told that at least they use the Latin alphabet. Belgium, the stop after that, is starting to look like the light of home at the end of a long gray, formerly Communist tunnel.
For the WLRN Radio Reading Service, this is Kathleen Dixon Donnelly—at Sea.

Wednesday, July 10, 2002

2006-03-04T08:52:00.000-08:00

Bergen, Norway: Money, Money, Money

To Norway I went
Excessive Kroner I spent
But naught I regret
That is how one student summed up the Norway experience when assigned to write a quick haiku about the port we had just visited on Semester at Sea.
In the few Core sessions between Ireland and Norway we were told how this non-EU nation has managed to re-distribute wealth and narrow the gap between rich and poor. Through extremely high taxation compared to America, Norway provides one of the highest standards of living in the world for all its citizens. Why join the EU? Unlike Ireland, which joined the first chance it got, back in the early 70s, Norwegians have turned down the opportunity in every vote, even when their government has recommended it. Their North Sea oil is a state-owned asset—why mess with success?
We were interested to see this paragon of the welfare state, where maternity leave lasts six months and no one goes hungry. It didn't occur to most of us that these services are funded through $9 glasses of beer and $8 packs of cigarettes. Everyone was surprised by the prices, and it did slow down the students’ drinking. Dinner and lunch on the ship—with the wonderful food we are served every day—looked even better after a glance at the prices on any local menu.
Not only did we have to learn to divide by seven—7.1 Kroner to the dollar—for those checking our banking accounts via internet, the price increase was compounded by the revelation that the dollar had apparently plunged since we’d left Dublin. All those Visa transactions in euros came out to be equal to dollars, instead of a little less. Damn that MCI!
I have to admit, though, I personally would be willing to pay $20 for a burger and fries at TGI Friday’s if it meant I could get free health care and education for life.
We docked in Bergen, a truly lovely seaside port, an easy walk from the ship, with an open air fish market and gabled wooden houses from the 18th century that have been turned into retail stores selling Scandinavian sweaters and replicas of the gabled wooden houses. In addition to the fish trade, Bergen has regular ferry service to and from England, many Chinese and Thai restaurants, and, like most ports, at least three Irish pubs.
At Scruffy Murphy’s, we struck up a conversation with two Scottish oil pipeline inspectors. As free-lancers, they go wherever the money is. They were not fans of Margaret Thatcher, because she had privatized so many British industries, Tony Blair, because he had become too right-wing, or George Bush, because he had labeled Iran a non-democratic terrorist state when they knew firsthand that Iran does hold elections. They had worked there on the disputed border with Iraq and even had had a fight with their cab driver one night about which country their hotel was in. They leave their families for six months at a time and find this lifestyle a lucrative way to make a living in the new global economy.
Of course they both had e-mail. I've been tracking the growth of internet places. Last summer, when I brought students to London, we patronized the storefront in Islington, with folding chairs and aging computers that charged ₤1 (about $1.50 then) an hour, pro-rated.
This year in London the most convenient place in Hammersmith was a stuffy, three-room office with not very fast computers that charged ₤2 for the first 20 minutes, ₤1 for the rest of the hour, or about $4 an hour.
In Greece, I ducked in to check on prices at one place on the Plaka, where all tourists are sent to shop, and found that it was up four stories on a winding staircase that had been built before the internet was a gleam in Al Gore’s eye. On my way to the top I met a Brit who told me that it was a couple of bucks an hour. Once we were in the port, Piraeus, a local photo shop with four computers did a bang up business, and had a line of students at all times. They advertised five minutes free to check e-mail, but I can barely get AOL open in that time. If you actually used it, it came to $4 an hour.
The best internet place we have found so far was in Cadiz. A few blocks from the ship, the crowded rooms held fast modem computers. You could bring a disc or download files, and also make phone calls from booths that were set up for international direct dialing. They charged only €1.80 an hour for internet use, pro rated by the minute. If you could finish up in half an hour—90 cent please.
Dublin was a bit higher, the rooms weren’t as crowded, the computers were great, and you paid up front the equivalent of $6 an hour, ordered in quarter-hour increments. Norway was about the same, although one little newsagent-snack shop-internet café came out to one Kroner a minute—meaning almost $9 an hour! At the cheaper place we went to, for $6 an hour you could go downstairs to a clean, modern, but very dark room with fellow internet travelers seated around tables, some wearing headsets. It was very quiet. A bit like an opium den.
This new industry of internet service provides a fascinating lesson in global economics. As The Economist magazine’s Big Mac index shows how currencies vary around the world by comparing the price of a virtually identical product, the Big Mac, so the pricing of internet service should even out with ever more of us wanting to check e-mail and bank balances.
These businesses have more in common with each other than with the economy that they are located in. Local stores closed on Sunday? Not the internet shops—9 or 10 AM until midnight, seven days a week. The young attendants all speak fluent English. And in Spain, when the whole country was on strike, the internet shop stayed open even though the protesters came marching in insisting that he close. This entrepreneur knew he had a gold mine and wasn't going to let any silly local issues—such as EU regulations—get in the way of his commerce. He is a globalized small business owner.
The money itself has made it easier to do business internationally. In the past you had to use up as much local currency as you could on your last day in town, and then change what was left over when you crossed a border. We don't have to do this for Greece, Spain, Ireland, Belgium, and Italy. All use euros. Their paper money is identical, but each government minted coins with the euro symbol on one side and a national symbol on the other. We're making a collection of one from each country for the neighborhood kids back home.
European economists and mathematicians have set up studies to track the diffusion of the coins throughout the continent. They know exactly how many are in circulation from each country, and exactly when they began to be used—January 1, 2002. Participants in the study check their change at intervals to see what a mixed bag they have. In Spain I picked up a Greek euro—was it brought by one of my fellow shipmates from Piraeus? Or by a Greek who recently stopped by, the way the Phoenicians did 3000 years ago?
As we sail closer to the half way point, we are coming to the first port where all bets are off—Mother Russia. Will our ATM cards work? Should we use American currency? How many rubles to the dollar—even the US Consulate advisory information doesn't tell us. We hear that some stores claim to take Visa and then deny it when it’s time to pay. And what will we want to buy? Those meals on the ship are looking better all the time. Will things be cheaper or more expensive than in affluent Norway?
On the second day at sea after blustery, cold Bergen, summer returned. The students were back out by the pool for their aerobics workouts, and a bunch of us crowded on the top deck to see the point where Sweden is on one side and Hamlet’s castle, Elsinore in Denmark, is on the other. We watched as the ship slipped by the longest bridge in the world, which connects the two countries.
Priceless.
For the WLRN Radio Reading Service, this is Kathleen Dixon Donnelly—at Sea

Wednesday, July 3, 2002

2006-03-04T08:49:00.000-08:00

Dublin, Ireland: Comin’ Home

As I suspected, coming back to Dublin was like comin’ home. I was born in Pittsburgh, and now live in Hollywood, Florida. But Dublin is my other home.
I went there first on the bus tour; then back for a whole summer, which ended with me meeting Tony Dixon. Two more trips and I enrolled in Dublin City University to get my Ph.D., and went to live there with Tony for a year while I began my research. Since then I have been back once, to defend my dissertation —carefully timed to coincide with the exhibition NFL game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Chicago Bears—and most recently for the bringin’ in of the new millennium in 2000.
Tony and I got married last St Patrick's Day, so now I guess Ireland is my second home. Last week, as I was falling asleep, looking forward to the next port, I thought, I have a husband in Ireland. How odd. Oh my God, I have in-laws in Ireland.
The four days allotted by Semester at Sea in each port seems like enough to get to know a city. But for me in Dublin it’s barely enough time to do the shopping and see the relatives.
Amazingly the weather was great the first two days in port; it rained a little but the sun came out and sometimes it was quite warm. The students would think I was just whining when I described how bad the rain and wind are. However, the next two days supported my complaints. Gray and lashing.
Tony had already been there for about three weeks, visiting with his two grown daughters and our flower girl, three-year-old Erin. Semester at Sea lets family members visit the ship in ports, so we got passes for them. Erin treated the whole ship as her toy and went running up the steps and across the decks, exclaiming, “I've never been on a ship like this before.”
Unfortunately, the ship was in an out-of-the-way part of Dublin docks, and it didn't make for a pleasant introduction to the city. Instead of a 10-minute walk to town as we had been told, it was more like a 15-minute—and not cheap—taxi ride. The administrators made an arrangement with a local cab company to ferry people to City Centre for €3 a head, but coming back you were on your own. We certainly made the Dublin cab drivers happy.
Despite the unexpected expense, the students loved the city. They quickly discovered Temple Bar, full of cafes, artists’ galleries and pubs. They did their part for the Irish economy by dropping lots of euros in shops on Grafton Street and in pubs. They drank Guinness at the brewery and in pubs. They could walk in the parks in the little bit of sunshine, and when the weather got bad, duck into pubs. Some signed up for the one or two day trips to the south, or the south east, or, most interesting, Northern Ireland, across the border in the United Kingdom. They got to see quite a contrast in cultures. And more pubs.
But the real story of Ireland in 2002 is off O'Connell Street, on the side of the River Liffey where not as many tourists go. What a different Dublin from the one I saw two years ago, when the Celtic Tiger was just beginning to roar.
That Christmas and New Year’s I was amazed to see and hear advertisements seducing the Irish Diaspora, visiting for the holidays, to put their foreign college degrees to good use and get a job back home in Ireland. The Economics class watch a 60 Minutes video about how the Irish, defined for centuries as immigrants sailing to the western world in search of prosperity, were now coming home to live and work, and recruiting their former hosts—British, Australians—to come and work as well. “English workers on Irish job sites?” exclaimed the reporter.
Since that story ran, the Celtic Tiger, along with the rest of the world economy fueled by the high tech boom, has taken a rest. The Irish economy is still better than ever before, as evidenced by high retail prices and soaring real estate values. The influx of European Union investment, along with capital from the US finally paid off in the late 90s, and the educated workforce has less to complain about.
But, as the United States learned in the late 19th century, when a country thrives on innovation and technology, and opens it borders to capital and materials from the rest of the globe, in comes foreign labor. As 20th century America was formed by waves of immigrants—my great grandparents included—coming for opportunity, so Ireland tomorrow is being formed by a whole new phenomenon. Not just guest workers from the rest of the EU, but asylum seekers from all over, especially Nigeria, China and Romania.
Walk just west of O'Connell Street to Moore Street Market, the original home of the legendary Molly Malone, who plied her wares by calling “cockles and mussels, alive, alive oh.” The old Irish women who used to call “Lighters, five for a pound” and “Tobacco, five for a pound,” have been replaced by international phone calling centers, Internet shops, and the African-Caribbean grocery store. All advertise specials targeted specifically at their Nigerian, Chinese and Rumanian customers.
In addition to the entrepreneurs, mostly Indian, who have started businesses to cater to these groups, there are sign boards with handwritten notes tacked to them. Rooms for Rent; Workers Wanted. Some in English; most in Chinese characters or Cyrillic. These are the same messages my great grandparents read on the South Side of Pittsburgh in the 1880s.
Tony introduced me to a German chain store called Aldi that is the Wal-Mart of grocery stores. We went there to stock up on supplies and were surrounded by Nigerians and Romanians, well dressed, thrilled to find Romanian wine for only €5 a bottle (so were we!). This was just a few blocks from Palmerstown Place, the street where my husband was born, in a different Dublin 50 years ago. That street has become part of one of the newly gentrified Dublin neighborhoods.
I decided to interview Tony, as an observer who recently spent three weeks back in his hometown, to get his impressions of how the old place has changed, and how the Irish are handling their new place in the world.
Gypsy Teacher: Welcome, Tony.
Tony: Hello.
GT: You were away for two years and you had the chance to be back for a good three weeks or so, with your family. So what are your impressions of how Dublin changed in that period?
T: Firstly, I think there is more, much more money since the time I left. There are more cars on the road. More new cars on the road. And there is also a certain, more of a self confidence about Dubliners than there was before I left.
GT: Besides the money, what have you noticed? I mean, there's got to be some sort of downside to the money. There's high prices—what else do you find? Are Dubliners dealing well with their new prosperity?
T: I'm sure they are. Prices have gone through the roof as regards basic commodities—which means Guinness. But I think with the introduction of places like Aldi, you can actually live pretty well.
GT: Traditionally Ireland has always been one of the most homogenous populations. When I was there, everyone was white; it was rare to see an African, or anyone who was visibly from a different culture, unless he was a tourist. So with the immigrants coming in, how do you think the Irish are handling that?
T: They're handling it pretty well. There is a problem with asylum seekers who cannot work but who can collect some social welfare. It's not actually called social welfare. It's called an assistance program for people who come here from Eastern Europe and Central Africa. They get a certain amount of money per week to live on and they’re housed in pretty nice bed and breakfasts around the city. This is one aspect of this new influx that’s causing problems because Irish people don't particularly like it. They're dealing with it, but they don't like it.
GT: Did you hear much about immigration in the newspapers or on radio? I know Ireland has radio call in shows like we do in the States with people calling in with opinions about the new asylum seekers.
T: Sure. One thing I'll say is that they’re discussing their problems. They're not just getting angry; they’re discussing their problems. They’re discussing them on early morning talk shows. For the three weeks I was there, there were at least three or four call in shows that dealt with this influx of Eastern Europeans and Africans.
GT: When I was visiting my former campus I saw that there had been a rally that was labeled as an anti-racism rally. They were afraid that there was more racism and bigotry popping up. Did you notice either the racism or the anti racism side?
T: I did notice that there were a lot of people who you could consider racist. They didn’t like these people coming in here. They didn’t like them being looked after in regards as the assistance aspect of it. I can't say that I've seen 100%; there was a small minority of people who I would consider racist. Not them all. But there was a small minority.
GT: And what do you think in the long term that is going to do to Ireland? They're good at talking about their problems, but what about doing something? How do you think it will change the culture?
T: I think that eventually they are going to have to deal with not being on their own and realizing that there are other cultures, other people, who may or may not be a different color than they are. And they will just have to deal with it. It’s going to take them a while, but eventually they are going to have to deal with the fact that there are other people in the world who want to come and live there because it offers them a better life. You have to remember that 150 years ago Irish people were the ones who took the boats to America to England to Canada to Australia to find better lives. It’s our time to help. And that's what I can say about that.
GT: And God bless them for doing it. Also, our ship was docked in the docks area and that's not far from where you used to work. What kind of differences did you notice in that area of Dublin?
T: When I worked there eight or nine years ago, it was a very depressed area. There were no businesses except for trucks that passed through from the Dockland area into the west of Ireland or on their way out of Ireland to England. Now it’s become a very upscale area of the city. The International Financial Services Center is there; most of the banks of the world have offices and buildings there. There’s a Jury’s Hotel on the docks which is quite amazing to me, having seen that block every morning when I walked to work compared to what it is now. There are also a lot more taxis that go down to that particular area of the city. That’s a good thing, because it has breathed new life into that part of the city that needed it for so long.
GT: So you think you want to move back?
T: No. Hollywood, Florida, is where I live now, in the United States and that's where I'm going to live. That's where my home is now.
GT: Your wife thanks you. And don't forget to pick up the laundry, honey.
I was thrilled to be back in Dublin, such an easy town. And pleased that most of the students were finding it as comfortable as I do. But on our last night, in the Palace Bar, home to Irish journalists for decades, when the young Japanese woman I was talking to described the whole city as “Brilliant!” I decided maybe it was time to move on.
Ireland is on its way to becoming integrated in the world market, and we need to get back on the ship and head off to the next European stop, Norway, which has managed to become a wealthy country without being a member of the European Union.
For the WLRN Radio Reading Service, this is Kathleen Dixon Donnelly—and Tony Dixon—at Sea.

Wednesday, June 26, 2002

2006-03-04T08:46:00.000-08:00

Cadiz, Spain/Dublin, Ireland:
The Ocean Fights Back

What’s the difference between a sea and an ocean?
For us, the sea—the Mediterranean—was as smooth as glass. Sailing on the World Renaissance was like being on a grand hotel, gliding through the water.
But the ocean is roiling. Not even rough (yet). But one day out of Spain, and, boy, did we notice the difference. Students in classes turned green before our eyes. While we're teaching, someone slumps over, too drowsy on Dramamine to stay awake; as teachers we don’t take it personally. Ailing faculty members cancelled classes. The one teaching a fascinating course in the Anthropology of Food opined, “I can't talk to them about food today. They all look like they're going to throw up.”
Seasickness comes to Semester at Sea. Personally, I feel great. When surrounded by lurching, crawling, heavy-lidded colleagues, somehow you feel even healthier. One warned me that he felt great the first day, too, so I shouldn't get cocky. We're still in the Atlantic. The North Sea, between Ireland and Norway, is notoriously choppy, we’re told.
The medical staff put pills outside the clinic. Shipmates walk around with beige patches behind their ears, and some wear blue gray bracelets. But the word is that none of those are any good once the malaise strikes. At that point, switch to ginger, apparently a miracle cure.
When I planned my courses, I assumed that, the first day back on board after a port, the
students would be filled with stories to share. Because of the assignments I gave them, I decided to set aside that whole first period to let them report and share.
But on our first, first day back in port, it was like talking to a painting. I started by announcing that anyone who felt sick could leave, but apparently it set in for many during class.
I asked what experiences people had in Spain. One said, “Women outside a church offered to read our palms and then took our money.” “How did they ‘take’ your money?” I asked her. “Well, we gave it to them; but you felt like you had to.” Others said that happened to them too. Someone else ate something he hated.
At one point I stopped and looked at all 40. “You all look as though you had the worst times of your lives in Spain.” Not a chuckle.
Eventually someone reported that when she and her friends were lost until 3 am in Granada, they were amazed to find a full family at that hour—grandma, parents, little kids—up and about, walking the streets. The family talked to the students and helped them back to their hotel.
Then someone added that she had been on the beach with friends and started talking to some Spaniards. One pulled out a loaf of bread and began cutting it up for sandwiches. He even had brought meat and cheese. Being Americans, the students offered to pay for their share, but he said, “No, we're friends now. Eat.”
By the end of class, when I asked which experiences were the most representative, they decided that the helpful family and the sandwich guy would win out over the deceitful palm readers.
Personally, I loved Spain. Because the day we arrived was a national strike, we were advised ahead of time that everything would be closed. Forced to spend the day walking around warm, sunny Cadiz, a centuries-old, walled city, thrust into the Atlantic Ocean on the tip of a peninsula, was a wonderfully relaxing experience. The town felt like a deserted movie set. They were getting ready for us; just wait. Tomorrow, we'll bring on the actors and the action.
Although the strike was to last until midnight, the Spaniards couldn't resist. By 10 PM, cafes set up tables with their ubiquitous umbrellas, serving drinks and tapas. Our Interport Lecturer, Rafael, was a wonderful guide through the narrow streets, dodging the droning motorbikes along the way.
When a group of faculty went out with Rafael again on the weekend, someone asked to go to a “nice” restaurant, you know, inside. As he lead us to the best in town, we walked straight into a street fair celebrating the longest days of the year. The locals had built tableaux, like the floats we would have in a parade. Rafael explained that they were parodies of bad things that had happened economically or politically in the past year. By coincidence, right after our ship left, they would set fire to them to get rid of all the bad things of the past. There were costumed men and women pouring sherry; the mayor of the town came through, and a stage was set for synchronized singing. We decided this looked much better than any indoor restaurant. We pulled up a big table and enjoyed watching the locals and eating everything Rafael ordered for us. The best experiences are the ones you don't plan.
The students loved the flamenco dance cabaret we went to, and one, who had been raised in Hawaii, noticed the similarities with the hula: The graceful hand movements, the way the women dancers took turns. Some students talked to the strikers in Seville to understand what they were protesting. That's the kind of insight they would never get if we just mentioned it in class; experiencing it for themselves, they learn so much more.
The reports are that all 369 students have been remarkably well behaved. One had to go home for family reasons; one missed the plane for the three-day Barcelona trip because she slept in. Rumor has it that she was sleeping off a hangover. Other than that, everyone is getting along and helping each other out. We'll see how small these cabins become after a few more weeks of roiling seas.
This week we prepared for Ireland. Because this is the only port I have any expertise in, I did double duty, giving presentations about Irish culture and passing out tips on the best pubs. But mostly I tell them, when in Dublin—walk, sit, relax. Just enjoy the city.
The morning we dock, My Irish Husband Tony will move in, and we'll see how small this cabin will become. I’m going to tell him bring along some ginger, just in case.
For the WLRN Radio Reading Service, this is Kathleen Dixon Donnelly—at Sea.

Wednesday, June 19, 2002

2006-03-04T08:40:00.000-08:00

Cadiz, Spain: Americans at Sea

No phone. No cars. No radio.
Not a single luxury.
Like Robinson Crusoe,
It's primitive as can be.
Not exactly. No phone, no radio, no newspaper, no internet, no e-mail. But great food, surprising amounts of storage space in the cabins, and an incredibly doting crew. So far, that has been my experience since we left the port of Piraeus, Greece.
We have 19 faculty and 25 staff members from Semester at Sea, and their 11 family members. This includes kids and grandkids aged three to 16, and a group of 13 “senior adult learners” who have agreed to call themselves the Baker’s Dozen.
And also 367 all-American (and two Canadian) college students. 72% are female and only 28% are male. You can feel those hormones popping.
The student body is 85% white. Only 17 Asians, 10 Hispanics, five African-Americans, two Native Americans and 19 mysteriously categorized as “other.” Very different from my classes in South Florida.
Where is the famed American diversity? This isn’t a purely monetary issue. True, signing up for a whole semester on board a ship sailing throughout Europe isn’t cheap. But there is financial aid available that many less than wealthy students can and do avail themselves of. Apparently, not enough of them.
The program attracts suburban white kids who are studying business (21%), and communications (14%), which is what I am teaching, and a variety of other majors. There are also 12 law students on board and members of the University of Pittsburgh Law School faculty to teach their classes.
The students come from 43 states (but almost one-fourth are from California). Surprisingly, only 13% are Pitt students. The next largest group—four percent—comes from the University of Colorado at Boulder where the program used to be headquartered.
Only seven are from Florida—one each from the University of South Florida, Tampa, St. Thomas University, and Rollins College; one ’Nole, from Florida State, but two ’Canes, from the University of Miami.
Also one from my alma mater, Lycoming College, who I have yet to meet.
We teach and the students take two classes each day that we are at sea. Everyone on board (except the 200 crew members who wait on us hand and foot) attends the morning course, known as Core. The students will take tests and be graded on this. Each faculty member presents a section on his or her specialty area related to the upcoming port. For the past week we have been hearing about the culture of Spain—bullfighting, the Civil War, Guernica, flamenco. We are now experts and, most important, can correctly pronounce the name of the city we are docking in: Cadiz, CA’ deeth.
In the evening there are more informal presentations and films on different aspects of the culture.
For some legs of the voyage, Semester at Sea has hired Interport Lecturers, academics from the culture who answer questions and talk about their country.
When possible, there is also an Interport Student from the upcoming culture who can interact with our students and prepare them for what they can see and do in the upcoming port.
On this first leg we are fortunate to have with us an Interport Student, Magdalena Munar Munoz. Originally from Palma, in Mallorca, she has a degree in Pedagogy (or Education, as we would say) from the University of Barcelona, and is currently doing a specialty study on Education for Peace.
I have asked Magdalena to tell us a little about her impressions of the American college students she has met on this trip.
Gypsy Teacher: Magdalena, I know that you spent some time in the United States before this, so you have some experience with Americans. But overall, what is your impression of this group of students?
Magdalena: As you said, you have to have a lot of money to do this, so they are not regular students, we call them “students of their fathers.” That means that they have had things done for them, more or less. That's my impression. They are very nice and they are very kind and they are very enthusiastic about doing this program.
GT: Have you found that their expectations of what they see in Europe are different from what you know they will see? Do you think they will be surprised?
M: I think so, because they don't know Spain very well, and I think they are looking for, not a poor country, but poorer than America. Spain is very different from America, but it is not a poor country. We are a developed country. People are quite similar to American people. Not in language, but if you see people walking around the streets, you cannot say, he is American and he is Spanish. They are going to be surprised about that, I think.
GT: Have you found many who could talk to you in Spanish? Because some of them study it in school. Were there any who spoke good Spanish?
M: I found two students with Mexican background, so they speak very good Spanish. And some of them who are studying Spanish in America can speak a kind of Spanish a little bit, but it is different Spanish.
GT: You should come visit us in Miami. Everybody speaks Spanish. Have you found too that the American students seem a little younger or a little older than you are used to in Europe?
M: They look younger, if I compare them to our students the same age. They think like a younger student in Spain. I think it's because they have a nice situation at home. Their economical situation in the States is much better than in Spain, so in Spain you have to carry responsibilities earlier and you have to work earlier and you have to worry about other things very early, so you grow up.
GT: I think, too, that if they can come on this trip for two and half months, they probably aren't working at home. At my university, we do have a lot of students who work and go to school, so they can't take two and half months off. Even though you lived in America, were there any things that you were used to about Americans that surprised you.? Maybe some of our students didn't fit the stereotype of Americans. Was there anything different about our students?
M: Most of the students are interested in nightclubs in Spain or how much does the alcohol cost in Spain, and things like that. But I found a small group who are very focused on Spanish culture, who want to have contact with it, real contact with it. I think that's great because that's the meaning of this experience.
GT: I think, no matter what, they'll have a great experience, don't you?
M: Yes.
GT: Thank you, Magdalena.
One of the important aspects of culture that has been emphasized in our morning Core course is that of values. The professor leading the course asked all the students the first day to write a paragraph describing what they thought they would be doing when they are 45 years old. Just fantasize. I told him that personally I'd love to fantasize about being 45 years old again.
The results surprised the students, but not the faculty. The ones he read out in class the next day—which he assured us were representative —were all amazingly similar: I want to be happily married to a faithful wife or husband. We will have children and a dog. I—or my husband—will be wealthy and will travel everywhere. Many of the females said that they would no longer “have” to work because their husbands would be rich and they would do volunteer work in their community.
Surely a happy family with a faithful spouse and children is not a bad, nor uniquely American, value to have. The reality, of course, is that, if the current statistics hold, half of them will be divorced at least once by that age. But the continued mention of material wealth was very disturbing to many of the students and the staff. One of the nurses said to me, “Where's the spirituality? Where's the giving back?”
The professor assured us that there were answers that included working to help the disadvantaged, world peace, etc. But he estimated that 90% described the American dream in very commercial terms.
That exercise has made the students reflect on their own values. In my course on creative problem-solving, they have to come up with their own project. Many have very creative ideas. One group will interview people of different ages in each port, and on the ship, to see what their thoughts and feelings about other generations are. Another group wants to ask the same set of questions of people their own age in every port: What's the first thing you would do if I gave you one million dollars (or euros)? What do you think of the color red? Where were you on September 11th?
Another group wanted to find out what each country uses to say “Cheers!” I encouraged them to include other phrases, such as Good luck or Happy New Year, to lure their research out of the bars.
According to the head of security on board, there have been few incidents. Rather than banning drinking—i.e., spitting in the wind—Semester at Sea has a bar for the students with restricted hours in the evening, and so far none has abused the privilege. When the physician on board addresses the group, he always mentions that there are free condoms sitting outside the medical clinic. Remember, the ratio is three women for each man.
After being on an amazingly calm Mediterranean Sea for the past five days, tonight we passed through the Straits of Gibraltar. I willed myself to stay awake until midnight so I could go up on deck and watch it. It was a clear night, so on one side you could see the lights of North Africa—someone said it was Morocco—and on the other side the lights of Southern Europe, with a black space that is the Rock.
You could almost feel the moon.
Tomorrow we are going to spew forth 400 American college students and others on unsuspecting Cadiz. There is a national strike throughout Spain, and a meeting of the European prime ministers in nearby Seville. We will amuse ourselves walking the cobbled streets of a once-walled city that was founded by the Phoenicians in 1100 BC. Then on Friday we'll root for the US to beat the pants off Germany in the second round of the World Cup.
Next week we will be approaching one of my favorite cities—Dublin! Where my husband, Tony, will join us.
Until then, for the WLRN Radio Reading Service, this is Kathleen Dixon Donnelly—at Sea.

Wednesday, June 12, 2002

2006-03-02T12:55:00.000-08:00

London, England/Athens, Greece:
Rivalries

For our last full night in London, I suggested to my students that we meet for a drink in the pub where we started, in the center of Hammersmith.
I didn't count on the juggernaut that was the England win over Argentina in the World Cup. The game was over by 2 PM; at 6 you still couldn't move through the crowd and they were just beginning to sweep the broken glass off the floor, so no last drink together after all.
The next morning the students were off to the second half of their course, in Berlin, and I am in London for two days before leaving for the next phase of my trip on Semester at Sea, beginning in Athens. What to do? All the things I hadn't had a chance to do over the past two weeks? Or laundry? Why not go early to the Tate Modern and get tickets for the Matisse Picasso exhibit?
Part of my academic research was on the writer Gertrude Stein and the American ex-patriates in Paris in the 1920s who visited her salon. Through this I learned a lot about her earlier years supporting painters such as Matisse and Picasso and found their relationships fascinating.
Along with the other tourists I indulged myself in the recorded audio tour. We all lined up with long gray plastic sticks up to our ears, taking in the British interpretation of the complex relationship between these two giants of early 20th century art.
A huge brown-gray Picasso of a boy and a pony hung in the first room. The description next to it said that it was one of the first paintings Gertrude and her brother Leo Stein bought from the struggling Spaniard. In those days, he couldn't give them away; now people pay ₤10 just to walk by.
It's not one of my favorite Picassos. But it occurs to me that Gertrude probably loved the joke of a having a young male’s exposed genitalia hanging in her salon.
And the frame. This is probably the original frame. Her partner Alice B. Toklas said she learned about the paintings by dusting them. She dusted this frame. I'm close enough to touch their Left Bank salon at 27 rue de Fleurus. But in a 21st century museum—no touching. Alice got to touch them every day.
In the second room, there is Picasso's 1906 portrait of Gertrude Stein. Almost 100 years later, she is once again at the center of things, the way she was in her salon. The people buzz around her, looking at the paintings, waiting for a word of wisdom, some insight into the craft of writing, the creative process. Now there is no Alice to decide who will be allowed into the inner circle and who will be kept away. No Alice to sit with the wives. Anyone can come; anyone with ₤10. They circle her, then move on. But I linger.
In the painting, her red brooch is nestled in her white scarf; a gesture to femininity. Her brown hair is piled high on her head, When their friends first saw the painting and claimed it didn't look like her, Picasso said, “It will.” And it does.
I tear myself away and continue with the audio tape, wallowing in the early 20th century, the birth of modernism, the tension between two great talents trying to outdo each other. Matisse paints a nude. Picasso paints a bigger nude. Touché!.
Through the First Great War, through rooms of Matisse's models and Picasso's mistresses. Then the occupation of Paris in the Second World War. Picasso stayed; Matisse went to the south of France, Gertrude and Alice to the west.
By then they had become great friends. When Matisse died, he left behind his odalisques for Picasso to paint. The last room is full of Picasso's acrobats, performing feats not possible in nature, juxtaposed against Matisse's cut outs, blue shapes floating off the white pages. It is like entering the rehearsal room for a circus.
How can you top that for an afternoon? My time in London is done. Back to the room, pack, have dinner, get ready for departure.
In a blink of an eye I'm in Athens. The original anxieties about the trip—Will I have enough cash for the taxi? How will I maneuver my luggage? Where do I exchange money?—all have faded away, and there I am in the Athens airport. Old men are smoking under the no smoking signs.
In a strange city for the first time, I'm now facing the anxieties of this part of the trip: Will I have enough cash for the taxi? How will I maneuver my luggage? Where do I exchange money?
The cab driver is the perfect tour guide, and I have enough euros for him with five leftover. My roommate, Sandra, assigned by Semester at Sea, is from Dublin and now lives near us in Florida—how perfect is that? Outside our room we can see the Acropolis, towering over the city, with a Nokia billboard underneath it.
I've been in countries where I didn't speak the language—but here I don't even know the alphabet. However, our orientation keeps us in the hotel all day. An “Intercontinental,” it lives up to its name, reflecting that pan-European culture that seems to spring from no ethnic roots, but caters to the globalized business person who adapts anywhere.
The World Cup is still the buzz. A separate room is set aside in the hotel with a large screen TV to view all the games; probably to keep the more emotional fans out of the upscale bars.
At the introductory meeting for faculty and staff, I explain that My Irish Husband will be joining us in Dublin. I add that, although Tony and I are both excited about this trip, right now, Ireland is up one nil over Saudi Arabia at the half, and not much is more exciting than that.
As soon as the meeting is over, Sandra and I find out the results—They won three nil? They won? The Irish? By three? There's no chance Tony will call me tonight—he and the rest of Dublin are on the biggest spree they've had in years. Next, Argentina and France are both out—no one is crying for them. The American team has amazed the whole world—except America, where no one seems to care. And they played so well!
Match ups such as England vs. Nigeria, Paraguay vs. Slovenia, illustrate why Europeans have always been so much more international than Americans. They grew up watching athletes from Cameroon and Thailand and Pakistan playing football on television. Back in the 50s, when I was growing up in the richest country in the world, just reading about other cultures, over in poor Ireland Tony was watching the political and economic conflicts of the globe being fought on the fields of World Cup soccer.
By watching these complex rivalries we learn so much about the unique talents involved.
At dinner, I look around the room at the faculty, staff and crew that I will be sharing a ship with for the next 65 days. Who will I become close to? Who will get on my nerves? What rivalries will be fought and won over the next two and a half months at sea? What lifelong friendships will develop?
This weekend Ireland will move through to the next phase of the Cup and will be playing Spain while we are watching on board, sailing to Cadiz on the Spanish coast. And for the Final we will all be watching, with My Irish Husband Tony, in a pub in Dublin.
For the WLRN Radio Reading Service, this is Kathleen Dixon Donnelly—soon to be “at Sea.”

Wednesday, June 5, 2002

2006-02-26T13:12:00.000-08:00

London, England:
The Queen's Jubilee vs. The World Cup

Her majesty's a pretty nice girl,
but she doesn't have lot to say...

We used to make fun of the Establishment, but now the Boomers and our rock idols are part of the gang up on stage at Buckingham Palace. Paul McCartney, known here as “Macca,” is the new saint, one of “us” working class Boomers, but now invited to the Big Party. In fact, he's the co-star of the Biggest Party to hit London in a long time, the Queen's Jubilee.
Tony and I tried to think of a good place to watch the Party at the Palace rock concert from—a decent pub maybe, away from the crowds. We finally decided on the best seat in the house—our hotel room. We discovered that our window looked east toward Central London, so we could watch the concert on TV and the fireworks out the window. The other advantage was that, as aging boomers, we could sing and dance along to all our favorites without the embarrassment of having others critique our performances.
While it was still light out—until about 9 or 9:30 PM this far north—we located the party out our window by lining up the red BBC blimp in the sky with the aerial shots on the screen.
Some of the younger British performers in the show were unknown even to My Irish Husband who has spent most of the past eight years in the States, but is in touch with his 20-something kids in Ireland. We figured out who Baby Spice was, of course, but was the one hanging out of her dress part of “Atomic Kitten”? And why is everyone excited about this kid Will Young? Bring on the Beatles!
A tribute to British music over the past 50 years, the program included a lot of American touches—Motown?! Tony says it was very big over here in the 60s, and it was the root of a lot of English pop music, particularly the Rolling Stones (Where was Mick, by the way? And Ringo?! And Bowie?!), but it still seemed an odd choice.
The Queen, with her earplugs, seemed pleasantly entertained but nonplussed that all these people were in her garden. Cherie Blair, wife of the Prime Minister, was bouncing and singing. One newspaper reported that Heather Mills, the just about to be next Mrs. Beatle, was officially seated next to Yoko Ono, the most famous Beatle widow. At the end, everyone sang along to “Hey, Jude.” Once the fireworks started, we could watch out our window and on TV at the same time.
The following day, Tony took off for Dublin and I decided that home in Hammersmith, west of the Central London parades, would be the best venue for watching the rest of the celebration.
But one million people, royalists, curiosity seekers and tourists, showed up at the Mall leading to Buckingham Palace to salute the Queen for 50 glorious—well, extremely interesting—years. The estimates in the London Times are that another one million watched outside on large-screen TVs in Trafalgar Square, Hyde Park and Green Park. Very un-English gorgeous weather all weekend held through all the festivities—maybe there is something to this “divine right” thing. The Brits were having a great time walking around in the sunshine with no umbrellas or jackets.
A group of my students, God bless ’em, left the hotel at 5:30 AM to get a good seat—and they did! On the second row in the bleachers in front of Buckingham Palace, they had four British mums sitting in front of them so they got a clear view of the golden carriage, and, best of all, Prince William. A real heartbreaker, he is now the second favorite royal after the “Jubilee girl” herself, Queen Elizabeth II.
In all the commentary, on the wall to wall television coverage or in the many sided newspapers, there was no mention of William's mum, the late Princess Diana. He and his brother, Prince Harry, another charmer in waiting, look exactly like her. Likewise for their cousins, the Princesses Beatrix and Eugenie, the beautiful, now teenaged offspring of Prince Andrew and, what was her name? Oh, that's right, Sara Ferguson. It was as though these children were motherless and the young females who shook up the House of Windsor had never existed. Prince Edward’s much more acceptable wife, the former public relations executive, Sophie, was there, along with the previously ostracized Camilla Parker Bowles, Prince Charles’ now-acknowledged longtime paramour.
The Royal Family, having learned some public relations lessons from Sophie, or perhaps Diana, throughout the Jubilee showed the Queen and her family as “normal” people. I certainly had never before seen pictures of Elizabeth and Prince Phillip surrounded by young children, representing all corners of the Commonwealth, strolling towards Buckingham Palace. The BBC commentator hadn't either.
Also, unlike the 1977 Jubilee, this time the Palace went out of its way to reflect the entire Commonwealth—we call it “diversity”—a reminder that Africans and West Indians can be British as well.
My student Juan Carlos was the organizer who got the others up at that ungodly hour so they wouldn't miss out on history. I've asked him and a student who watched from St. Paul's Cathedral, Izabela, to share their impressions of all the hoopla.
Gypsy Teacher: Juan Carlos, what made you get those kids up so early to go to Buckingham Palace?
Juan Carlos: It was a once in a lifetime opportunity to see the Queen and witness what British royalty is really about. And we all felt we couldn't miss out on it. And I think the Golden Carriage had a lot to do with us being there because it is such an ancient piece of work. We wanted to witness the Queen going down the Mall.
GT: And did it live up to what you expected?
JC: Yes, however, a little bit too short or too fast. Four hours of standing for about two minutes of royalty. But it did pay off and I'm sure we have great pictures to help us remember the whole event.
GT: Izabela, what made you pick going to St. Paul's Cathedral to watch?
Izabela: I was coming back from my aunt's house. She lives in Kent which is about an hour away. This was the best place for me to see where the parade would come by. I have to say I was running a little late because the train was slow because a lot of people were on it. And it was unbelievable.
It was so crowded I really didn't think I was going to get a chance to see anything. But thank God I'm short because I pushed my way through and I did see part of it. I saw the carriage, which was magnificent, and I saw the Queen. It was really hard to take any pictures so I figured out that, because she was going to St. Paul's, you could see her getting out and then the carriage would be coming back the same road. So there was a chance to see the carriage twice. It was empty the second time but I got the chance to see it again. It was really wonderful.
GT: Did they look like what you expected? Sometimes celebrities look shorter up close.
JC: They looked great. Both William and Harry looked very well. They’re sharp looking men. We were very impressed by the fact that Princess Anne was riding the horse with the rest of the Calvary. That was amazing to us. I said to the British couple behind us, I guess she's wearing a bullet proof vest. They said no. The royal family refuses to wear them. I was impressed by that and I guess everyone in our group was too because they all commented on it afterwards. They all looked very sharp and it was an amazing spectacle.
I: The crowd was impressive; I have to say; everyone was very supportive. As soon as everybody saw the Queen coming they all cheered and they were very supportive of her. As soon as she came everybody was clapping, yelling, screaming. What excitement! It was nice to see.
GT: Were they yelling out for any of the other .royals besides Elizabeth? Were they shouting to some of the others?
I: They were shouting to everybody I think. They were just happy to see the whole family coming.
GT: You mentioned the bulletproof vest, but what struck you as being different from the States, let's say if George Bush were coming? How would it be different?
I: First of all, he wouldn't come in a carriage. It would probably be a limousine or some kind of a car and this was beautiful, all gold.
GT: How would it be different in Miami?
JC: What amazed me was no political protesting going on at the time. Everyone was just following the event itself. As if they felt, we are here to see the Queen and to pay homage to the Queen and the rest of the British royalty. And I don't think anyone ever thought of defying protocol. That impressed me. How was it different from Miami? We saw it not too long ago when President Bush was visiting Miami. There were protesters from all walks of life, Colombians, Haitians, Cubans — they were . all trying to put their word out.
GT: I think there are some staunch republicans here who are not supportive of the monarchy, but they weren’t in evidence. They weren't trying to disrupt things. Americans want to be there with their signs just to state their case. There wasn’t any evidence of that on the streets, that I saw.
Overall, since you've been here in London, what are some of the differences you've noticed—besides the weather—between here and Miami? Things related to the people and how they act? The sports fans? The language?
JC: The language is different.
I: They're very polite. A little too polite. Culture-wise they have their own rules. It is just a different way of life altogether. The language is different because they speak very proper English. They have very nice manners. So you notice that. It just stands out.
GT: What about the food? Have you found good food or mostly bland food?
JC: We actually found good food but it takes a lot of looking for it.
GT: What was the good food that you found?
JC: We did find some good food at pubs today for example, and Izabela mentioned having good Thai food. We ate good Italian on Saturday at Notting Hill.
GT: Thank you very much, Juan Carlos and Izabela.
Back in my hotel room, when I heard them announce the final flyby of the Royal Air Force jets and the Concorde, it dawned on me that I would be able to see that out the window too. There were red, white and blue trails behind each plane, and the Concorde separated from them and took on up into the amazingly clear skies.
And the damages after a four day binge? Negligible. Three arrests in the crowd during the last two days. Three! I looked at that crowd, inching forward in an orderly manner behind the police on foot and on horseback, and thought, What would if this were Miami?!
The consensus is that all the events exceeded expectations. During the build up over the past year many felt it would be a big failure, but the crowds proved them wrong. The papers were full of praise and pictures, and very grateful for the purple and gold swathed Empire State Building, by the way.
And for you National Public Radio fans, I got to see Washington Post London Bureau Chief Tom Reid on TV. When he is interviewed on NPR’s Morning Edition, he's an expert on London; on the morning chat shows here, he's an expert on America.
It was quite a party—a knees up, as the British say. Four days of World Cup (a draw) and Jubilee partying (a resounding win) and now the Brits are all back to work and the weather is back to dreary. Now we’re watching the World Cup to see if this love fest of British history can include another victory over Argentina.
And next week I'll be traveling to Piraeus; Greece, to begin my next adventure, teaching for Semester-at-Sea.
Until then, for the WLRN Radio Reading Service, this is Kathleen Dixon Donnelly—at Sea.

Wednesday, May 29, 2002

2006-02-26T13:09:00.000-08:00

London, England:
Getting Settled in London

Globalization.
In Miami, where I teach at a public college, we call it “diversity.” Here in London you feel the world coming together.
I brought my own global group of students with me. Kelli's mom works for one of the airlines, so she has been everywhere—for free. Leana was born in Morocco, grew up in Miami and is looking forward to Berlin, a hot town for young adults these days. Gilliane and Charlene are Americans with French heritage.
Coming from a South Florida public university, there are of course Hispanic-American students as well. Lazaro is Cuban-American and says he wants to adapt to any culture he visits. He described drinking tea instead of Cuban coffee as a life-changing experience. Juan Carlos, from Colombia, who lists Texas as another culture he has experienced firsthand, is excited about meeting up with his Colombian cousin in nearby Fulham. She moved to London hopeful of getting accepted into a master's degree program in Spain or the United Kingdom.
Our Izabella, born in Poland, now a US citizen, has been visiting with her aunt who emigrated to the UK from Poland about 15 years ago, fell in love with a Brit, and stayed. She gave us a hot tip on the nearest Irish pub.
This west end neighborhood, Hammersmith, boasts the current London production of that Irish classic, Riverdance, as well as restaurants featuring Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Greek, Thai, and French food. The one named “Manhattan” is full of pastas, risotto and pizzas.
And this week begins the World Cup, broadcast live from Japan and South Korea, a time difference which is driving the Brits mad. The English team has a Swedish coach and their first game is vs. Sweden on Sunday morning. The pubs are advertising that they will show any game live during their regular opening hours, and will open specially for Ireland or England games. Beckham's foot has healed! He can play!
Someone had stepped on Beckham's foot. One of the Irish, on the other hand, shot himself in the foot. Their only world class player, Roy Keane, “threw the head,” as they say, in a fight with the coach. Always a chancer, Roy said things he shouldn't and the coach banished him from the training camp in Japan. At first there was hope that one side or the other would come to his senses: Say you're sorry, Roy! the headlines screamed. They even had a seat reserved for him on a plane back to Japan. But now it's official. He's not playing and they don't stand a chance.
Sky TV, Rupert Murdoch's version of CNN, lets you vote on a question each day through your remote control. Which will you celebrate more—the World Cup or the Queen's Jubilee? Two to one for the World Cup.
Only the third British monarch to reach the 50-year mark, Elizabeth is out touring the provinces. Still, most public institutions have found ways to tie in with the festivities. DFS, “Britain's Leading Upholstery Specialist,” has a glossy 12-page insert. Each model on each page is posing with something that makes her royal—a tiara, a crown, a scepter. I searched one picture of an attractive woman with a blouse cut down her to navel—very un-Elizabeth—to see what could possibly be the connection with the Queen. Finally it dawned on me—Corgis! She was sitting with a bunch of Corgis, the Queen's favorite dog.
My students are working on a project about marketing cameras to European young adults, 18 to 24. They are discovering more similarities than differences. Already they have found the clubs that play the same music they dance to on South Beach. In this age group, do they have more in common with each other than they do with old farts like me, from their “home” culture?
Kim is a recent graduate of our program whom I visited here in London. Because of her new master's degree, she was able to land a job here that she had never dreamed of. A native New Yorker, she was recruited to work for an international non-profit. Next step—on the plane to London. Two weeks here, and then, go check on fund raising in Rome.
She's on the phone every day with field operations in Russia and Argentina, all conducted in English. And this isn't a nasty corporate conglomerate manufacturer; it's a non-profit that funds educational programs around the globe. There are 25 people in her office in north London, and only about 10 of them are British.
In Miami we feel that we are on the cutting edge of an international economy because so many Hispanic groups are represented; here in London, the whole world comes together. The accents, the food, the body language. Of course you see these influences in hotel lobbies, at tourist attractions, and in the local internet cafés. But now the global village is also on the sidewalks and in the pubs, away from the town center. Going to work. Buying cameras. Rooting for England.
So in the first week of my summer-long journey, I’m not only “at Sea” but surrounded by representatives from all Seven Seas. When My Irish Husband Tony arrives later this week, we'll see what gets the most attention, the Queen's once-in-50-years Jubilee or the every-four-years World Cup.
For the WLRN Radio Reading Service, this is Kathleen Dixon Donnelly—at Sea.

Wednesday, May 22, 2002

2006-02-26T13:03:00.000-08:00

Hollywood, Florida: Ready to Go

Lists.
We keep making lists.
Somehow if we make enough lists, we will have captured everything that has to be done for us to leave home for three months on our great adventure.
This Saturday, I leave for London with 12 American college students for two weeks visiting advertising and public relations agencies. I did this last year, so it's a path once traveled. But still—the responsibility! What if I have to explain to parents why their daughter was sold into white slavery?
A week later, my new husband will come over. We'll have a weekend to spend together and then enjoy the Golden Jubilee celebrations. After that, he'll take off to his hometown of Dublin, Ireland, to visit his children and three-year-old granddaughter, who was the perfect flower girl for our St. Patrick's Day wedding earlier this year.
But after I put the 12 students on the plane to Berlin for the second part of their course, my real voyage begins.
After a few more days in London I will fly to Greece to meet up with Semester at Sea. Teaching for this program, operated by the Institute for Shipboard Education and the University of Pittsburgh, has always been a dream of mine. I thought maybe we could go in 2003, 2004—sometime in the future.
We’re going now!
Their summer program usually goes around the Mediterranean. However, this year, after the events of September 11th, they decided to re-route.
After orientation in Greece, we ship out for Cadiz, Spain. I'll be teaching two courses, Marketing Communications and Creative Concepts: The students will have assignments to do in the ports.
After Cadiz we sail to Dublin, where my new husband, Tony Dixon, will join me for the rest of the trip. What a honeymoon!
Then off to Bergen, Norway; St. Petersburg, Russia (St. Petersburg!); Antwerp, Belgium; Gdansk, Poland; Naples, Italy; Dubrovnik, Croatia—where Tony and I will celebrate the 10th anniversary of when we met in Dublin—and then back to Greece, then London, then Miami.
What an interesting time to be with American college students in Europe. How will it be different from last summer in London, before September 11th changed everything"?
Then, down in the Tube station, I couldn't find a trash bin to throw my candy wrapper in. Took a while before I realized that it was the IRA I should be annoyed at for hiding bombs in trash bins. How quaint.
Now, will we be thinking, America should get rid of all the trash bins in public places? Will the people we meet be sympathetic to us or point out that we finally woke up to the way much of the rest of the world lives?
Few of my Miami students have ever ridden public transportation, let alone depended on it. But last year they took to the Tube like fish to water.
Two of them have never been out of the
country before. One grew up in Key West, but, as I pointed out to her, no one grows up in Key West. A few are seasoned travelers—been there, done that. The rest have been to their family's home country in South America, but not to Europe.
It's going to be quite a journey. And I plan to chronicle it here each week and with taped reports on the WLRN Radio Reading Service.
Traveling across America by train in the 19th century, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote,
We were at sea—
there is not another adequate expression...
There was a certain exhilaration
in this spacious vacancy,
this greatness of the air,
this discovery of the whole arch of heaven,
this straight, unbroken
prison-line of the horizon.
And that's how we will be for the next 13 weeks—at sea. We hope you enjoy coming with us
So for the WLRN Radio Reading Service, this is Kathleen Dixon Donnelly—at Sea.
There. One more thing checked off my list.