Breiner on the road

Sitting on top of a volcano

2012-02-12T20:42:00.000-05:00

Steam vents at the Craters of the Moon, Taupo

Here in New Zealand we are perched on a land mass where two continental plates collide. Below us, the friction and fracturing create tremendous heat and release the molten rock that lies beneath the crust.

When that magma contacts groundwater, the steam finds its way up to the surface in the form of vents and geysers and bubbling hot springs. They make up one of the tourist attractions around the two big islands. The Earth here shudders and moves. A year ago, hundreds of people were killed in Christchurch on the South Island when a major earthquake struck.

Craters of the Moon, Taupo

Yesterday, Cindy and I hiked around the south part of the lake here in Rotorua, and sulfurous hot water came bubbling up along the shore and out in the lake. It smells like rotten eggs. The ducks and geese don't seem to mind.

The unstable Earth

All of this heat and bubbling and shaking are just a reminder of how unstable the Earth is. We tend to think of our planet as something solid and unchanging. But since long before man appeared, it has been in a constant state of flux, with ice sheets descending from the poles and then receding, sea levels rising and falling, land masses migrating thousands of miles, mass extinctions of species and massive climate changes. The magnetic poles of the earth have flip-flopped dozens of times. In other words True North is a temporary thing.

You need look no further here than the limestone visible in the mountains. It was formed from sea floor deposits and is filled with shells of tiny marine animals. How did creatures from the sea floor end up in rock several thousand feet above sea level? The planet is in flux.

Historical geology with jokes

The writer Bill Bryson is known mainly for his humor, but he did a fascinating book about the origins of our planet, A Short History of Nearly Everything. It is an easy read in spite of its being about a subject guaranteed to intimidate those with science phobia, namely historical geology.

Bryson lingers for many pages on the geology of Yellowstone National Park, described as a thin layer of rock barely containing a molten caldron of magma that may explode at any time with many times more force than atomic weapons. It makes our human conflicts and technologies seem very small indeed.

Redwood Forest, Rotorua

As if we weren't already feeling small, we took a hike through the Redwood Forest in Rotorua. Even though these trees are not much more than 100 years old, they are massive. They represent one of the many species of plants and animals introduced into the New Zealand ecosystem, which had been isolated from the influence of man until about 800 years ago.

New Zealand's forests have been stripped and restored a number of times, first by the Maori, then by the Europeans, now by industrialized harvesting. Still, New Zealand's government has created many reserves, parks and protected areas. The words that come to mind are green and clean.

How to speak Kiwi in New Zealand

2012-02-08T02:32:00.000-05:00

At the moment, the New Zealand accent sounds the same to me as Australian, and its most notable distinguishing features are:

The short-e is pronounced like a short-i. "Yes, we expect to visit that section of town" is pronounced "Yiss, we expict to visit that siction of town." If you're good you go to hivven.

The short-a sound, as in, "The fact is, it's a hard task," sounds like a short-e: "The fect is, it's a hahd tesk."

Long-a becomes long-e in New Zealand, so "Be careful in that area" comes out "Be keerful in that eerea."

And you park your car here with a Boston accent: "Hey, mate, don't park your car there" comes out, "Hye, myte, doon't pahk ya cah theah."

New Zealand chicken is where you go in the airport before you get on the plane.

That's half of it. With a day's practice, you could pass for a Kiwi in the U.S.

New Zealand was one of the last places settled by Polynesian peoples,
probably around 1250-1300 A.D. Map from Wikipedia.

Recent settlement

I am amazed at how short the history of human habitation is here. Eastern Polynesians were the first humans to visit the islands, and they arrived a mere 800 years ago. They were also the first mammals. They brought mice and pigs with them.

New Zealand's long isolation is remarkable given that Australia, the nearest large land mass only 900 miles to the west, has 40,000 years of human habitation. But the Polynesians had a great tradition of seafaring, and the aborigines who settled Australia did not.

Today the Maori people, descendants of the original settlers of New Zealand, represent about 15% of the population, and about one-fourth of them speak the Maori language. Maori is taught in the schools, but use of the language does not appear to be growing.

A grain of geology

Mount Ruapehu is one of the most active volcanoes in New Zealand.
It last erupted in 1995-96, but there are ski resorts on its slopes anyway.

In college I enjoyed studying geology, so I always like to know the history of a place. New Zealand has a lot of earthquakes and volcanoes since it is located where two tectonic plates of the Earth's crust collide. On our bus ride today from Ohakune, we passed a number of volcanic cones. We will spend the next few days at Lake Taupo, new Zealand's largest lake, which fills an enormous volcanic crater. When the volcano erupted some 26,000 years ago, its dust clouds spread around the world and may have contributed to the last ice age.

New Zealand: air and space

2012-02-07T16:38:00.001-05:00

Cindy and I have some friends in New Zealand, Daniela Cavallaro, who is a professor of Italian language and literature at the University of Auckland, and Dan Stollenwerk, a theology teacher at St. Peter's College. At various times they have asked us when we would come to visit, and it seemed like now was a good time, when we were in the same hemisphere.

Dan and son Stefano at Karekare beach, where some scenes
from the movie "Piano" were filmed.

Daniela was my first professor of Italian at Ohio State, where she did her master's degree. Dan was in the same class, which is how they met. That was 25 years ago. Dan, who lived in Columbus, was studying Italian so he could finish his theology studies in Rome. Later he and Daniela ended up on the same plane to Rome, where she was returning to teach.

The black sand at Karekare beach is rich in iron. A magnet will
create patterns in the sand. Steel companies have made efforts
to get mining rights, so far defeated.

Karekare beach is popular with surfers.

Daniela and Dan hosted us for three days in Auckland, which is a lovely harbor city. A third of the country's 4.5 million people live in Auckland. The population density of 42 people per square mile is about one-ninth of that in China, where we are living now.

After living for five months in one of the world's largest, most congested cities, the clean air here is a welcome change.

A wooden Maori meeting house, preserved in an Auckland museum.

This 80-foot-long war canoe was carved from a single tree trunk.
It would seat 100 warriors.

We took a train south from Auckland to a national park dotted with old volcanoes and laced with hiking and biking trails.

We biked out to the viaduct that carries the train between
Auckland in the north and the capital of Wellington
in the south.

View from our motel of Mount Ruapehu, which is 9,000 feet.

The town of Ohakune is quite busy with skiers and snowboarders in the winter, but here it is summer.

On the bike trail from Ohakune.

We hiked up to Waitonga Falls on the skirts of

Mount Ruapehu.

The hiking trail passes through a bog. Crayfish
swam in the little pools.

At the Waitonga Falls.

Why the Chinese will never drop their written language

2012-01-25T03:26:00.001-05:00

As I scratch the surface of Chinese, I now understand why the language cannot be simply converted to the Roman alphabet. They have to keep the ideograms, and we will never see newspapers or books written in the Romanized version of Chinese. Too bad. That would make learning the language easier.

This biography is supposed
to be flattering. I don't know.

Chinese does not have that many sounds. Many words are just one or two syllables. The problem is that you can have a syllable like shi which means different things in the four different tones for that syllable. But beyond that, each of those four tones may represent many different words and meanings.

One sound for 11 words

When you look in a Chinese-English dictionary for definitions for just the fourth tone of the syllable shì (the accent means falling tone) you find 11 different words with 11 different ideograms. This one sound represents city, market, vow, matter, power, family name, to be, to try and more. Neither the sound nor the Romanized written form gives you a clue to the difference. You have to see the ideogram. (Context helps, of course.)

Contrast that with English where homonyms like too, two and to are spelled differently. Or hoard, horde and whored; or palate, pallet and palette. At least in the written form, you can see that they are all different.

The same is true in French: fois, foi and foie all have the same sound but the spelling tells you that the sound represents words with different meanings.

Draw a picture

In conversation, Chinese will sometimes clarify meaning by using a finger to trace on their palm the character that represents the word they are using, just as we will spell out a word. But for the Chinese it is not the letters but the ideograms that carry the meaning.

So it seems an impossible task to convert written Chinese to a Roman alphabet. It is why you don't see books or newspapers written in Pinyin (the Romanized version of Chinese, with accents indicating tones). Someday maybe someone will figure out a way.

In mainland China, they have simplified versions of the ideograms that still look fiendishly complicated. Many require seven or eight or 14 strokes of the pen. (Taiwan preserves the traditional written form, which is somewhat analogous to looking at Gothic type.)

A typical Chinese newspaper uses about 6,000 or 7,000 different characters. I don't have any idea how people read it. Not counting the characters for the numbers one, two and three (strokes), I can recognize about four characters, but I haven't really tried to learn them.

Here are simplified characters for

sun moon star eye ear nose mouth

日月星眼耳鼻口

Impressions of China

2011-12-10T22:45:00.001-05:00

Pickup games at Tsinghua, from October.

A couple of times a week I go to the Olympic-size pool on campus to swim. There are a dozen outdoor basketball courts adjacent, and on class days, the students have pickup games. Even when I go swimming at night, there will be some guys still out on the courts in the dark, playing by the weak light seeping in from the street. The ball rings off the cement, the shadowy figures move around, the ball planks off the backboard. The game goes on even when the temperatures are in the 40s. I have never seen a girl on the courts or in a game on the many soccer fields.

We live on the first floor of this building.

We live on the southern edge of the campus in a six-story apartment building that is owned by the university. Many of the faculty members live here in rent-subsidized apartments. We have a small place. A living-dining room with a table and two armchairs, our bedroom with a big armoire, a second bedroom with a desk and single bed, a very small kitchen and a bathroom with shower. It is perfectly adequate. The apartment building is in the middle of a traditional style Chinese neighborhood, called a hutong, that is fast disappearing from Beijing.

An alley in our neighborhood.

The homes are typically one-story brick affairs that share a courtyard. One building will house bathrooms and showers for all the residents to share. By American standards, these homes would not be considered attractive. Many of the university's service workers live here. For a while Cindy wanted to move to the more-modern end of the campus but we decided that our place has other benefits, such as proximity to restaurants, stores, the subway stations and other amenities.

At Weihai conference. My teaching colleague, Joe Weber, a former editor at Business Week, is in the foreground. David Liu, a consultant to the New York Times, is at his right. I am going over my remarks.

A couple of weeks ago, I was invited to give a speech to a conference of Chinese journalism professors in Weihai, a coastal resort roughly equivalent to Ocean City Maryland. A lot of Russians come south to vacation there. Many of the cafes and restaurants have Russian signage. But when I was there, nothing was open. They asked me to talk about foreign correspondents covering China, so I prepared a talk about Edgar Snow, Nicholas Kristoff and Peter Hessler, all American journalists who wrote books during different eras over the past 75 years. I wrote out a 100-word introduction in English, had it translated into Chinese, practiced it with a tutor (I recorded her voice to get the tones right) and then tried it out on a Chinese colleague who told me it was understandable. Hen hao. Very good. The audience applauded very enthusiastically to this intro, more enthusiastically than to the speech itself (a translation in Chinese was published in the program, so they could follow along). I haven't put in the time and effort needed to learn the language. It should be a minimum of an hour a day. I spend maybe -- maybe -- a couple of hours a week. It's not nearly enough.

The Cleveland Indians, who have a
Korean player, are popular with
students here.

Chinese news media are tightly controlled by the government, but there are still lots of surprisingly candid articles that get into the press. Corruption stories are common if they focus on provincial or local officials. Criticism of the top party leaders at the national level is not seen. Foreign press are not censored. You can rely on what you see about China in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and the Economist, for example. But the government can limit their access to officials and make it hard to get information. The party understands the value of letting people blow off steam in the social networks like Weibo (the Chinese equivalent of Twitter), and there were some 120 million comments on that network that talked about a high-speed train crash and the failures of public officials that caused it. The government tolerated a week of this and then just shut down the commentary by filtering out any messages on that subject.

Teaching photography.

Teaching multimedia is a bit of a challenge here. I want each of the students to maintain a blog with material related to the course, but most platforms are blocked. For that reason I had my students set up blogs on Tumblr, a platform that was not blocked back in September. Now it is blocked. I can't access their work or my own without using special software, and only then when I am off campus. Twitter is blocked here. Facebook is blocked, as is YouTube. There may be commercial motivations for this so as to allow homegrown versions to develop, and they have. But the government also is very worried about "social stability," and free flowing commentary could threaten that A high-ranking party official at the university told me that the party itself is deeply divided on how much openness to permit. He said the trend is toward more transparency, but recent history shows the pendulum swings rapidly back and forth, depending on the issue and circumstances.

A couple of my students practice photography.

I am teaching two courses this semester: multimedia journalism, in which the students create and edit videos, audios, slideshows with sound and fully integrated multimedia reporting projects; and English news writing. 27 students in the former class, 25 in the latter. Their English is generally good. If I were a newspaper editor, I could work with their copy. I have seen worse from Americans. These students are the cream of the cream of the crop in China, so they work hard, pay attention and try to get better. They come from all over China. Tsinghua is considered the MIT of China; Beijing University, which is next door, is considered the Harvard. A colleague here this semester, who teaches journalism at the University of Nebraska, says the Tsinghua students are head and shoulders above the kids he works with. He was an editor at Business Week for 20 years.

The multimedia classroom where I teach has the latest tech equipment. They have a lab with a dozen big Macintosh computers where my students do a lot of their video work.

Subways are packed on nearly every line, at nearly
any time of day.

We live in northwest Beijing. The commercial and tourist center is toward the east and southeast of the city, almost an hour away on the subway. When Cindy and I want to do something with her expatriate friends, we go to that part of town, where they all live. Downtown Beijing has commercial centers that could be in any U.S. shopping mall, with the same brand name stores. We have also shopped at the Silk Market and other places that are more traditional.

One of the main shopping districts, with pedestrian mall.

Last Friday we saw an ad in Beijinger.com for an Irish movie that won the Golden Palm award in Cannes (The Wind Through the Barley, or something like that), and went to a neighborhood of hutongs that has been gentrified; the old brick houses have been converted into trendy restaurants, bars, etc. This place was like that, about two dozen seats total. We watched the movie and then stayed a bit to hear some Irish music played by a bunch of Americans. Subway rides are not for the claustrophobic. You are packed in more tightly than you are on any other subway system I have ridden in the U.S. or Europe.

Cindy with some of the students at Thanksgiving dinner.

Baked sweet potatoes for sales on the street.

Food is good. The university has subsidized cafeteria style restaurants for faculty and students that serve a variety of dishes. Typically you have chopped vegetables mixed with finely chopped meat or tofu. Dinner for two costs $2 or $3. Or you can go one floor down to the restaurant and get dinner for two -- more variety and higher quality -- for about $10 to $15. A few times a week we go off-campus to Starbucks or another cafe where there is free wi-fi and where we can use a virtual private network to access Facebook.

Thanksgiving in Beijing

2011-11-27T03:35:00.001-05:00

Cindy on the campus of neighboring Beijing University.

Today I am thankful for having a spouse...

....who is comfortable living in a country where she can't speak the language as long as she can figure out how to take the subway wherever she wants.

...who gave up a nice house and all its contents so we could have a couple of years of adventure on the road.

One of my students submitted this photo as part of an assignment.

...who contentedly dines at the subsidized faculty canteen where she can choose from dozens of dishes that contain she knows not what. (Dinner for two costs $2 or $3.)

...who has adjusted to the lack of curb appeal of our neighborhood and the spartan furnishings of our apartment.

Thanksgiving dinner was unremarkable. It was a workday here.

Studying Chinese

Today I had my fourth weekly one-hour lesson with a tutor. That is not nearly enough class time and I have not been spending the personal time. To do it right requires practicing every day. I do it maybe once a week on my own, which is like lifting weights once a week. Results are similar.

Still I have made a little progress and can now say a few things with confidence to total strangers. Occasionally I understand what they are saying back. Sometimes I can decipher the numbers that store clerks say. Usually they show a total in familiar numerals. Being surrounded by the language has its advantages. Not being able to read means progress is slower.

A calligrapher works in water on the sidewalk
at the Summer Palace.

Heavy workload

Directing the business journalism program here takes some time, but the demands of teaching have surprised me. I am teaching six hours in the classroom a week. One course is multimedia journalism, with 27 students. The other is news writing, with 25 students. I give them tests every week and assignments every week.

Grading 52 writing or media assignments a week takes an enormous amount of time. I teach in English. The students write in English. It is a challenge deciding how much of the English to correct. However, as one professor suggested to me, "You are not teaching English as a second language. You are teaching journalism. Focus on that." Good advice that I am following.

Still, I believe these Chinese graduate students write well, considering it is not their native tongue. They are sharp, dedicated and serious. They had to be to get in to this university. Tuition is free, but competition is fierce.

Leisure

Traveling around Beijing takes energy because there are mobs of people everywhere. Cindy takes the subway across town, an hour each way, a couple of times a week to meet friends from an expatriate group. The subways are usually jammed, no matter the hour of the day.

The lake and walkways of the Summer Palace
are a popular weekend destination.

Don't ask me how this works, but Cindy's Kindle reader from Amazon has some kind of wireless connection independent of any telephone or internet account we have. So when the spirit moves me I can order a book from our apartment in Beijing and within a couple of minutes it arrives in her apparatus.

At a park near the Forbidden City, tourists rent imperial garb
to have their photos taken.

Through this miracle of electronic consumption I have ordered and read Peter Hessler's "River Town," Lesley Chang's "Factory Girls" (both about China), a wonderful baseball novel, "The Art of Fielding," and now a biography of Che Guevara by Jon Lee Anderson that I had been meaning to get. This is an amazing work.

Speaking of amazing biographies, I was walking down the main drag near our apartment and a mobile bookstall had Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs in full-size paperback for 30 kwai, about $4.50. Obviously a pirated edition. (Don't tell Isaacson.) The book puts you right there in the room where the bullying, merciless and brilliant Jobs was bending his people to his will.

On the Beijing University campus.

My Japanese office mate

2011-10-19T04:28:00.002-04:00

Yoichi Nishimura is a newspaper editor on a one-year sabbatical here at Tsinghua University to study China-U.S.-Japan relations. We go to lunch together most days with Joe Weber, a visiting professor of business journalism from the University of Nebraska.

Yoichi has a nose for good restaurants and is always scouting for the next unique experience. He learned well during five years as a correspondent in Moscow for Asahi Shimbun, Japan's second-largest newspaper, and six years at the Washington bureau. "The secret of working in a foreign country is finding good restaurants," he says.

Yoichi is managing editor of Asahi. Twenty years ago the paper sent him to Moscow State University for a year of intensive study of Russian. He lived with a family and developed his conversational skills. All of this helped him cover the fallout from the collapse of the Soviet Union. He wrote a book about Russia's army and weapons systems in the post-Soviet era.

Asahi sends seven or eight reporters a year to foreign countries just to learn the local language so they can then work as correspondents. During this study year, they file no stories. (American media rarely do this. They often hire people who studied a foreign language and then train them as journalists.)

Asahi has vast resources. Its circulation of 12 million is six times that of the highest-circulation U.S. daily, the Wall Street Journal. Pretty amazing in light of the fact that Japan's population is only a bit more than a third that of the U.S. The Japanese lead the world in newspaper and magazine consumption per capita.

Yoichi is always suggesting outings (we went to a Tchaikovsky concert at the National Theater where Bridget performed in July) and encouraging joint interviews with faculty and other interesting folks.

Yoichi, in his early 50s, is learning Chinese to add to his repertoire of Russian and English. His wife and two kids are back in Tokyo while he does his research here.

A little tour of Tsinghua University campus

2011-10-01T02:15:00.000-04:00

The music is composed and played by Patrick Breiner: Dance Music for Tony Malaby.

Deciphering China, ideograms to menus

2011-09-17T01:53:00.000-04:00

You have to keep your head up and your eyes peeled while riding a bicycle around in Beijing, especially on campus, as this 13-second video shows.

We have been in country for two weeks now. Yesterday I taught my first class at Tsinghua University, where I am co-director of the Global Business Journalism master's program. The kids are the cream of the crop.

My bio, posted in the Journalism building, says nice things, I believe.

Hospitality

The staff of the university has dedicated enormous time and energy to help us get settled. They assigned graduate students to to go with us on our first shopping trips and visits to the administration offices, cellphone stores and other places where English is useless.

I wonder if U.S. universities are as thoughtful, hospitable and gracious with visiting foreign professors? I hope so. It makes a great impression.

The cost of everything

Rent is high here, equivalent to New York City, they tell me. So our apartment, given to us rent free by the University, is a really nice benefit. It is modest by U.S. standards but enviable by standards for what a Chinese professor could hope to rent.

In fact, many of the professors live in this university-subsidized housing. A couple of the Chinese journalism faculty live in the nearby apartments.

My new Gallop brand bicycle -- hand brakes, one speed, basket, bell, lock all included -- cost me $50. But a simple toaster that would cost you $10 in a Wal-Mart in the U.S. cost nearly the same as the bicycle, $47.

Point and eat

Last night Cindy and I went to a "hot pot" restaurant. They bring you a little pot of broth with spices, heated by a flame, and you drop in raw meat, vegetables and other stuff. We weren't doing it right but the waitresses didn't speak English so we just did the best we could.

Even menus with pictures are something of a mystery. The food is very good but what is it? On the menu it looks like chunks of meat but it might turn out to be tofu. Are those peanuts or soybeans that are part of that vegetable dish? We have to wait and see.

Manicure or pedicure?

The Great Big Lie that you hear everywhere in America is that when you travel abroad, "everyone speaks English". Well, if you are in a tourist hotel in an area frequented by Americans or Brits, yes. But most of the world does not fit that description.

Beijing's subway system and many of its stores are actually pretty user friendly with signs in English or in Roman characters.

But the normal language barriers are raised to another degree of difficulty when you cannot even decipher a street sign or any sign, for that matter. Are you on Haidian Street? If the signs are only in Chinese, and they usually are, you cannot know.

Seven thousand characters

Chinese newspapers supposedly use a limited number of ideograms, or characters. But still the total is 7,000. Will I ever try to learn the written language? I am not sure that I am up to it. At the moment I am learning a few phrases. The Berlitz books Cindy and I have are great because they show the English phrase, the pronunciation and then the Chinese characters. We show the appropriate phrase to the waiter or salesperson.

Store clerks have been helpful.

When I use Chinese words or numbers, people usually say them back to me in a helpful way, with the correct pronunciation. They know it is difficult to get the tones right.

Written Chinese was simplified a few decades ago, so you have different written versions. The old form is much more ornate. An analogy might be the Gothic script you see in medieval manuscripts.

50% more density than New York City

Beijing has a metro population of 19 million, almost exactly the same as metro New York, but the population density is 50% greater, 3,023 per sq km vs. 2,050 in NYC.

If it weren't for the fact that so many people ride bicycles, the density would be unimaginable. As it is, the massive expressway system built for the 2008 Olympics has trouble handling all the traffic.

In general, Beijing residents appear to be like residents of New York, Paris or Madrid in that they are in a hurry and you might be in their way.

We rode the subway across town last Sunday. It was standing room only all the way. Given the density, the city is amazingly clean and orderly.

Borscht and other Belarus delicacies

2011-07-09T00:53:00.043-04:00

The Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita) was also a butterfly expert. I thought of him when I saw this beautiful specimen along the road between Luninets and Brest, Belarus.

Cold borscht soup is a summer favorite. It has beets as a base with a mix of greens, a bit of cheese, a bit of pork and some spices. Another local restaurant served Fantasia, a kind of potato casserole topped with a tender slice of roast pork, tomato sauce and cheese. Great, for about $3.

You can have a nice dinner here for about $4. A pint of good local beer is about 75 cents. Ten hours of high-speed internet access costs about $1.75. A three-room hotel suite goes for $84 a night.

The Belarus ruble has been falling against the dollar and the euro, which causes problems for businesses. Newsprint and printing services, for example, are priced in dollars but paid in rubles. So although the nominal price in dollars is the same, the newspaper has to come up with more rubles to pay suppliers.

Inside the local Orthodox Church, where I was told after snapping this that pictures were not permitted. Older women with headscarves are referred to generally as "babushkas," which means grandmothers. As a kid I remember hearing the head scarf itself referred to as a babushka.

Houses here all have fences around them. When I showed a picture of my old street in Lakewood to a Belarusian guy, he asked, Where are the fences?

Sunflowers are a favorite for the yard. In neighboring Ukraine, they are a huge agricultural crop.

The countryside of Belarus is as flat as the Great Plains. It reminded me of Manitoba, with its forests interspersed with fields of wheat, corn and flax. Lovely.

Never lost, never out of control

I spent a total of seven hours on the road yesterday with Feodor, a charter member of the World Association of Over-Confident Cabdrivers (rearrange the initials to spell Wacco). Like all members of this club that I have met, he tailgates at 70 mph, passes on the unpaved shoulder, demonstrates his maneuvering skill by swerving in front of gasoline trucks and passes on curves in dense fog.

The Wacco card says on the front, "The bearer is one of the best drivers in the world"; on the back it says, "No, really I am the best" in 12 languages. Feodor assured me that his 15 years’ of driving experience guaranteed my safety, and to prove it, he showed me that he never wears a seatbelt.

Feodor inspects the insects that have plastered themselves on his grille. He does not smoke in his car and would not let us bring any food inside.

Feodor´s global positioning system led us down a dirt road to this path in Luninets. It was trying to lead us to the bridge overhead.

He had to ask directions from a woman on a bicycle. Such humiliation for a Wacco member!

A stroll in Brest

Women bow before entering the church precinct.

An orthodox church in Brest.

A woman begs outside the church.

Spain’s museums celebrate the simpler life

2011-07-03T14:40:00.004-04:00

We are not that far out of the village.

Some of the museums we visited on our trip through Spain got me thinking about the unrecorded history of ordinary people.

Up until a century ago, the vast majority of the world, even in the West, was living in villages. Even today, more than half of China’s 1.3 billion people live in rural areas.

The history we learn does not focus on village life, where people were illiterate, but on on the civilizations that had developed writing. Writing recorded the doings of the rich and powerful.

The Museum of the Galician People in Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain goes some way to correct the omission. The displays capture the detail of the crafts, homes, culture and language of these people.

A traditional Galician fishing boat.

Visitors can see their bagpipes, their farm implements and crafts, the fishermen’s nets and how they were made. This type of history by definition is harder to record. It depends on some published records and on inferences drawn from archeology and remnants of practices that persist today.

This museum was a welcome relief after several weeks of visiting palaces and castles and seeing the wealth accumulated by the warlords and thugs we call royalty.

Basque whalers roamed the world

When we moved on to San Sebastian, in the Basque Country of northeastern Spain, I was delighted to discover the Maritime Museum’s exposition on the history of Basque whalers. (Moby Dick is one of my favorite books.)

From www.heritage.nf.ca

The village fishermen in Basque country developed the industry 1,000 years ago and ventured all over the North Atlantic. As early as the 1500s, they had established outposts in Newfoundland and Labrador. I was surprised to learn British and American whalers learned the trade from the Basques.

Stone age cave paintings

In Altamira, Spain, we visited a museum with breathtaking re-creations of cave paintings from 14,000 years ago. The artists who made them were hunter-gatherers who had not domesticated plants and animals.

This is a modern interpretation of a bison depicted in one of the cave paintings of Altamira, Spain. The original dates from 14,000 years ago. Our ancestors’ transformation from hunter-gatherers to farmers and fishermen took place over just a few thousand years.

The original cave has been closed to protect the paintings from deterioration caused by the press of visitors. However, the replica cave captures every curve and niche of the original with the aid of 40,000 laser measurements. A team of artists used materials as close to the original as possible to duplicate the effects of the Stone Age artists.

The museum has videos showing how these hunter-gatherers made their tools of stone and bone and how they might have hunted. People in some parts of the world still use these techniques. We are not that far removed in time from them.

From village to city and back

All of this got me to thinking about what recent visitors we are to most of the known world. Although the genus homo has been around for several million years, our species, homo sapiens, is a newcomer. We left Africa only 40,000 years ago.

Only recently has our species had to adapt to all of the stresses of living in cities. That may explain why so many of our pathologies manifest themselves there. Villagers began leaving the country two centuries ago as the Industrial Revolution created new jobs, but the migrants have always expressed a desire to go back.

The return to the country is a theme of country music and the blues. We really want to go back home to the village.

Addendum from Belarus

As it happens, today I am working in Belarus and it is their Independence Day. There are parades and celebrations everywhere. On national television, folk dancers and singers form various regions are performing. It is a celebration of the rich variety of village culture.

Beijing revisited, 23 years later

2011-07-02T07:40:00.005-04:00

I spent a week running around Beijing to meet journalists and people connected to the business journalism program at Tsinghua University where I will start teaching in the fall.

Little is recognizable from a visit I made in 1988. The city and society have packed a century of progress into two decades. Beijing is now like Manhattan with wider streets. Freeways of 10 and 12 lanes ring the city center. Then it seemed there were 1,000 bicycles for every car; now it is the reverse. I have a few photos from then and now.

China, 1988

Bikes owned the road.

A hutong, courtyard home

The hutong homes once seen everywhere in Beijing are rapidly disappearing. In hutongs, several one-story brick homes surround a coutryard and families share toilet facilities. High-rises, highways and other new constructions are replacing them.

At the People’s Daily, printers were still hand-setting type 23 years ago. Today the media have world-class technology.

Beijing today

High-rises surround the Tsinghua University campus

The National Center for the Performing Arts, also known as the Egg, is one of many avant-garde buildings in Beijing. The Egg houses several large concert halls. The massive scale of the place is not, unfortunately, captured in this photo.

China’s economic success has made many people nostalgic for the simpler life of the old days. This night club is a kind of Cultural Revolution dinner theater, where songs from the era are performed. The Long March ballet was amazing. The restaurant’s tasty peasant style food was served by waiters in Red Army garb.

We didn’t run into a lot of Americans in Spain

2011-06-13T10:13:00.002-04:00

The sun and beaches are a big attraction for residents of cooler, cloudier northern Europe. There are three ferries a week from Portsmouth and Plymouth in England to Santander, shown here, on the north coast.

In a tapas bar in San Sebastian I heard American voices coming from several different corners. That’s unusual here in Spain. Salamanca has a Spanish language center for foreigners, so we heard Americans there.

But the U.S. doesn’t even make it into Spain’s Top 10 countries for foreign visitors. Great Britain is No. 1 with more than 12 million visitors to Spain, followed at some distance by Germany, France, the Nordic countries and Italy. Even tiiny Ireland, with 1/50th of our population, beats us out.

Mexico and Canada lead

Given that Spanish is taught in virtually every high school in America, it seems surprising that we don’t visit Spain more.

The top destinations for U.S. travelers in 2009 were: Mexico (19.5 million), Canada (11.7 million), the United Kingdom (2.7 million), France (1.9 million) and Italy (1.8 million). followed by Germany, Japan and Spain.

How to spend 9 weeks in Europe without losing your shirt

2011-06-12T12:19:00.005-04:00

When I completed my contract in Mexico in December without having another one lined up, Cindy came up with the idea of taking two or three months to travel around Europe. We might never again have the free time to do it, she reasoned.

We originally considered an involved itinerary that inlcuded several places we always wanted to see -- the Greek Islands, Sicily, the Cinque Terre in Italy -- but found the logistics were too complicated. We decided to focus on one country, Spain, with a visit to our daughter in Germany at the end.

We bought plane tickets and rail passes and Cindy began the process of building a budget-minded itinerary. In the end, the all-in cost for nine weeks in Europe was a little more than twice what we spent for two weeks in Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands.

It´s great if you have the privilege of traveling with someone like Cindy. She loves to solve puzzles, and the itinerary was a giant one with lots of different variables: how many days we might spend in each place, what we would visit, which attractions were free and their schedules, when the trains would get us there, where to find a reasonably priced room in the heart of the historic center of town with a private bath and free wi-fi.

The bull ring in Malaga was all by itself 50 years ago. Now it is surrounded by apartments and hotels. I saw a corrida there.

Solving the big puzzle

She consulted lots of sources. The books by Rick Steves are very good for traveling in this style, which means being a tourist without being gouged in tourist traps. Cindy also consulted guides by Fodor’s, Let’s Go and Lonely Planet, among others. The Austrian railway system has the best online guide for train schedules. She also used hotels.com and hostels.com.

(If you´re looking for information about history, culture and sights to see, I talk about that in earlier entries on this blog.)

Hotels and pensions

We started out going for the cheapest -- requirements at the beginning were a double with private bath. We got very small rooms with windows sometimes on air shafts, for around $60 a night. For a little more -- $75-$80 -- you get bigger, nicer rooms with wi-fi, a desk and exterior windows (I was doing a fair amount of work on the Internet). We found that to get a good price you have to give up at least one of three things -- location, ensuite bath or free wi-fi.

In Madrid we paid $65 a night to be in the historic center but had no wi-fi, which I desperately needed to finalize arrangements for some lectures I was giving. Fortunately, Starbucks and McDonald’s offered access for an hour at a time.

Sometimes free wi-fi meant access only in the lobby of the hotel, and a private bath meant you still had to cross the hall to get to it. In Granada we stayed in a low-priced pension where we had to share the bathroom with another guestroom. There was only one time when the other guests wanted to use it at the same time.

Most of the places took reservations online, but in some cases I had to call. Since I speak Spanish, I don´t know how much hassle it would be to attempt reservations in English. You might be able to say what you want, but when the person on the other end goes into explanations of things, it could be a problem understanding what´s being said. And sometimes those explanations are about the wi-fi being available only across the street.

Spain in five parts

Cindy had general plans for each of the five stages of our trip -- Madrid, Valencia, the Moorish South, the Northwest (Santiago), Basque Country -- and had day-trip options for each place. But the plan was very flexible. We changed the plan several times, improvised and made hotel and train reservations a day or two before moving on to the next place.

One of the things we learned as we went: visit less, hang out more. We shortened the list of must-sees and became experts at sitting in cafés or simply wandering about.

We like train travel. We decided to get Eurail passes and go by train rather than renting a car. In European cities, the convenience of a car is more than offset by the daily hassle and expense involved in finding a place to park within their narrow streets. Unleaded regular gasoline was selling for $7.20 to $7.40 a gallon while we were in Spain.

Plaza de España, Seville, built in 1929 for the Iberoamerican Exposition

Spanish train stations and trains were generally clean and modern. Ticketing was computerized, fast and easy to navigate. We changed reservations several times without a problem. The customer service centers were very good. Many of the trains had electrical connections at every seat so you could plug in your computer. Spain has high-speed rail lines between many cities (150 to 180mph), and almost every town of any size is on the rail grid.

On the hassle side of train travel...even with a Eurail pass, the Spanish rail system requires a seat reservation for almost every train, and we could get them only in train stations or rail system offices (U.S. credit cards were accepted in stations but not online, for some reason). These reservation "supplements" are not covered by the Eurail pass -- in essence, the pass gets you about a 90% discount on the long routes and about a 50% discount on the short routes.

Design for pedestrians

Unlike airports, train stations are in the center of whatever town you visit. We could often walk from the station to our hotel. Every city and town had large areas open only to pedestrians and great for wandering around and gawking.

Cindy studied maps and hotel offerings to find rooms that were conventiently located. It was not always obvious how to use the local bus system, but when we were in a town for more than a day, we would get a transit map and use the bus or, in Madrid, the subway.

Train travel itself is much more relaxing than trying to navigate an unfamiliar road system with signage that may not be as informative as one would like. I like sitting and reading or just looking out the window rather than being behind the wheel.

Public markets

A fish market in San Sebastian.

We quickly figured out that we could eat one main meal a day in a restaurant and eat quite well buying bread, cheese, fruit, juice and nuts in public markets, which are fun to visit anyway. The public markets have great stuff, and cheap.

I became quite fond of the long loaves (barras or flautas) of bread. So, a typical breakfast might be some bread and cheese, an orange, some almonds or peanuts and then to a cafe for a hot chocolate or coffee with milk. We ate our big meal of the day on European time, between 2 and 4. Then a nap. If we got hungry before that, we had some nuts or fruit or bread.

Tapas and the menu of the day

Cindy´s favorite meal was tapas -- small servings of a whole variety of different foods depending on the restaurant or cafe. A tapa might be a few greens with some egg, a Spanish tortilla (potatoes cooked with egg and cheese), some fish in oil and vinegar, some fried squid, a couple of meatballs, some sausage and cheese on bread, some olives and bread -- almost any little snack imaginable. We typically ordered four of these and shared. With drinks included, you´re talking about $20.

San Sebastian, in Basque country near the border with France, had the best tapas (or pinchos). There were a half-dozen tapas bars on the street where we stayed. The pension we stayed in was tiny, but it was modern with a private shower and excellent free wi-fi for about $45 a night.

In restaurants we often ordered the menu of the day, which might run from $10 to $15 and include beer or wine, bread, two courses -- one typical day I had white asparagus for the first course and grilled swordfish with a salad garnish for the second -- with choice of coffee or dessert (usually fruit, ice cream, yogurt, flan or something else simple). Depending on the restaurant, these can be great or ordinary.

In Malaga, along the seaside boardwalk known as the Pedregalejo, a specialty is anchovies (boquerones) cooked on sticks over an open fire. I had them fried in Sevilla.

Everyone asks about the food and it´s hard to give specifics because the same food might be prepared slightly differently and have a different name everywhere you go. As with menus in English, the language often waxes poetic to the point of being impenetrable.

In Heidelberg, Germany, commuters ride their bikes to the train station and leave their cars behind.

Back home

Now that we are home, people ask me what I missed the most. The truth is, other than family and friends, not much. We have many things to be grateful for in our country -- greater social mobility than Europe, more job opportunities and more meritocracy. Everything is cheaper here in the States.

At the same time, I never missed the American lifestyle, which takes place completely indoors or in automobiles. Here in suburban Atlanta, it is practically impossible to walk anywhere. You see benches and picnic tables planted at the edge of sun-baked parking lots, without an umbrella, and of course no one is seated at them.

The major roads are five and six lanes wide in all directions, and pedestrians are taking their lives into their hands at crosswalks.

A Wednesday afternoon in Luxembourg Gardens, Paris. France has a 32-hour work week, a great lifestyle, and a huge social safety net. It also has high taxes and inflexible labor laws that stifle entrepreneurs.

In Europe, we saw scenes reminiscent of the U.S. in the 1950s: children, unsupervised, at play in parks or along the street; children out riding their bicycles, on their own; old folks out walking, even with canes.

Here in the U.S. everyone is running around all day in the car. The volume of traffic at all hours, and the size of the vehicles, continually astonish me. There is too much stuff, too much air conditioning, too much consumption...too much everything, and it’s all way too big.

A visit to Paris to meet our French cousin

2011-06-03T18:37:00.014-04:00

Cindy, Laurent and me.

Seven or eight years ago, I got an email from one Laurent Brener, who lives in Paris and said he was a distant cousin.

He sent me an elaborate spreadsheet -- he’s a financial controller for Nissan Europe, so he knows his way around spreadsheets -- that tracks our family roots back more than 10 generations. He found me online through an expert on the genealogy of southwestern Germany, where my great-grandfather came from.

We corresponded by email, and he even invited me to his wedding, so I figured we had to visit him when we passed through France on our way from Spain to Amsterdam.

Sonia and Paul, me, Cindy and Laurent.

Laurent is in his early 40s and is a great guy. He and his wife, Sonia, a lawyer, took us to dinner at a fancy bistro on the Left Bank and brought their son, Paul, 5, who fell asleep after he finished his dinner.

Laurent traveled to distant corners of the world before finally settling down. His English is excellent. He has to use it in his work every day to communicate with colleagues all over Europe. Sonia speaks some English. She graciously tolerated my rough French.

The yellow marker at the bottom is Dambach, France, where our common ancestor was born. The jagged white line is the border between France and Germany; France is to the left and below the line. Bundenthal, the green marker in Germany, is where my great-grandfather was born. Border disputes in this area were common over the centuries. The blue marker is Stuttgart, Germany, where our daughter lives. The yellow € marker is for the European Union parliament in Strasbourg, France.

How we’re connected

Our common relation is Hans Friedrich Breiner, who was born in 1595 in Dambach, Alsace, which is now France. His son, Hans Wendell Breiner, was born in 1635 in Bundenthal, Germany, where my great-grandfather, Mathew Breiner was born two centuries later.

Our ancestors are from Alsace Lorraine, which straddles what is today the border between France and Germany. The area changed hands many times through history. In the 1870s, when the Germans occupied Alsace Lorraine, they made a formal proposal to the residents: you can stay or leave. His people decided to leave.

"In fact, looking back at the history of my ancestors’ branch, they progressively moved from Germany (Fischbach area) to Lorraine (France), then to Toulouse," Laurent said in an email. In France, they changed the spelling of the name to something more French -- Brener.

Laurent said his research showed that the Breiners were millers for generation after generation. In essence, they were small business owners. They ground the grain for farmers. The name Breiner is related to the word for grain.

Our own great-grandfather, who immigrated to New York in 1885, was a farrier (hufschmied in German), meaning he shoed horses.

When my brother Tim and I visited this area in 2001, we were struck by how German things were on the French side of the border. In a cafe in Lembach, France, we heard people speaking a dialect that was not quite French and not quite German.

In the town hall in Bundenthal where we looked for genealogical records, they were mostly in German, but for some periods they were in French, notably during Napoleon’s time.

Basque language has mysterious origins

2011-05-25T02:41:00.009-04:00

During our seven weeks in Spain, I enjoyed noting the language differences by region, and Basque is in a class by itself. It predates the arrival of Indo-European languages that surround it and has no relation to Spanish or any other language in Europe. (Spain has four official languages: Basque and three with Romance roots: Galician, Catalán and Spanish.)

Linguists are unsure where Basque came from; there are many theories. How it managed to survive as a separate language for thousands of years is a mystery.

Map of Basque Country (Euskal Herria) in France
and Spain. From stmarysmedia.co.uk

I got a history of Basque from a native speaker, Ramón Salaverría, who grew up in Hendaye, on the border between France and Spain, in the heart of Basque country. In his town, there were three distinct dialects of Basque -- one used by those living in the city center, one in the fishermen’s quarter and one in the rural section. Speakers of one dialect often had difficulty understanding the others.

Salaverría said there were so many variations spoken throughout the Basque country -- at least eight -- that in the 1960s an academy was formed to standardize it. (Salaverría is a professor of digital journalism at the University of Navarra in Pamplona, where I made a presentation to their faculty.)

A Basque newspaper, http://www.berria.info/

While we were in San Sebastian and Pamplona we saw television programs and newspapers in Basque. The Basque country is an autonomous region and one of Spain’s most prosperous, long a center of commerce and industry. Basque whalers, for example, taught their trade to the English and later the Americans.

There is a militant movement of Basque separatists, much like the Irish Republican Army, that has used bombings and assassinations to further its political goals.

Cindy and I visited an old fort that looms over San Sebastian and its large natural harbor. Basque whaling expeditions sailed from here all over the north and south Atlantic.

Video: Amsterdam moves on two wheels and water

2011-05-25T01:51:00.000-04:00

Cindy and I spent two days in Amsterdam, a place she had always wanted to visit. Mainly we just walked around and gawked at the people.

Like Florence, Italy, Amsterdam is something like a cultural-historical theme park. Most of the old city seems to be dedicated to hotels, restaurants and tourist services.

Coming from a small country without a lot of natural resources, the Dutch invest in their people, and specifically in language training. The Dutch and the Scandinavians, also from small countries, are amazing in their ability to speak English with hardly a trace of an accent.

The music for this video is by Vartan Mamigonian.

Sunday morning, in search of a cafe

2011-05-15T05:28:00.003-04:00

The Spanish operate on a different clock, and by that I do not mean they are casual with appointments as they are in Latin America. I mean that the rhythm of their daily lives is quite different.

It is Sunday morning here in San Sebastian, and at 7 a.m. I went looking for a cafe where I could read and have a cafe con leche. There was nothing open but a news agency on the square near our pension so I walked out to the main street. Little knots of young people were on their way home after the long night of drinking and partying. They were drunk but in the Spanish way, which means they were singing and talking loud, not stumbling and puking, but swaying.

On the main street one cafe was open. It was jammed with mostly young people, some of whom were drinking beer or brandy and some who were drinking coffee. This was not the crowd up early to read the Sunday papers. They had not been home yet.

Till the sun comes up

On Saturday night, it seems the rule is to stay out with your friends until the sun rises. At least this has seemed to be true in other places we have been, all cities and towns. They go home and then who knows when they get up. Maybe mid afternoon for the big Sunday meal.

On a work day, there are lots of people up and moving about at 7 in the morning and some are going to work, but for many people the work day seems to start about 10, with lunch from 2 to 3 or maybe longer. Then it is back to work and the evening rush hour gets going at around 7 and goes till maybe 8:30 or 9. That is a big generalization. It does seem that the whole work day is moved back about two hours.

School kids hold hands as they go on a little field trip.

People work hard but in a different way. I have noticed workers in restaurants, bars and cafes who are on the job for more than 12 hours a day. The same people who served us coffee in the morning were serving us dinner that night. Lots of parents pick up their kids from school, which ends at around 1 or 1:30, and walk them home. They may take coffee breaks during the day or go out for a beer but they go back to work and are on the job later.

I just liked this picture. Spanish women on holiday in Cordoba, posing with their ice cream.

Not in Madrid but in many of the provincial cities and towns, a business will close from 2 till 4, even a retail business like a pharmacy or shoe store. This is not true generally but you still see it. Some museums operate like that as well.

I had heard that cursing in Spain is all about blasphemy and bodily secretions while in Mexico it is all about who is screwing whom. I can attest to the latter, having received as a going-away gift from my Mexican colleagues a dictionary, titled El chingonario, of expressions and variations on their favorite curse word, equivalent to the F-word in English. That same word is not used much in the rest of the Spanish-speaking world, but when it is it means something like bother or annoy.

To be honest, I haven’t heard a lot of cursing here in Spain except to refer to the sexual equipment of a prostitute, a favorite expression also in Bolivia. At the bullfights here, the crowd is dignified and restrained in its applause for the toreros, as though they were discriminating and hard to please. At the one Mexican bullfight I attended, in Guadalajara, the crowd was boisterous and rude throughout. Drunks shouted insults at the toreros, even the good ones, "asshole" and "dumbass" being the favorites. At the same time, the Mexicans were far more enthusiastic and applauded louder than the Spanish fans when a torero executed a series of smooth passes with the bull.

The Spanish spoken here is very different from Mexico in much the same way British English is different from American. They have different words for the same thing, just as the British call a car’s hood the bonnet, the trunk is the boot and the windshield is the windscreen. Here a ticket is billete instead of a boleto, a pool is a piscina instead of an alberca, the sidewalk is the acera and not the banqueta, and so on.

Typical apartment block in San Sebastian, with bicycles stored on the balcony. A child was playing on the terrace on the top floor.

The oval white sign on the left was for our pension in San Sebastian. For $50 a night, we had a small room, very nice, with armoire, tiny bathroom and excellent free wifi.

Cities are densely backed in Spain, with lots of apartment blocks of five or six stories, and every city has large areas for pedestrians only. We have stayed in or near the historical centers, so we have had the benefit of being in the most walkable areas of Spanish towns and cities.

Like nearly every city we have visited, Pamplona has a rental system for bikes to encourage their use. There are five locations around the city. You use a credit card or special card to unlock the bike from the post. The first hour of use is free, every hour thereafter is 1 euro, $1.40. You hitch it back to a post when you are done.

Part of the sidewalk of many cities is dedicated to bicycles only. That means stay out if you are on foot.

Suburban sprawl is starting to show itself. We took a bus ride of about 45 minutes from the city of Santander to the town of Santillana del Mar and it was noticeable that some subdivisions of individual homes had been carved into the farm fields just as you might see in any metropolitan area of the U.S. Bedroom communities. They were noticeable because they were different from most of what you see.

Tapas or pinchos are our favorite food in Spain

2011-05-11T16:23:00.001-04:00

Typical snacks at a bar include all kinds of concoctions like deviled ham on bread with a little slice of salmon, a few small shrimp with veggies in a sauce on a crust of bread, a mini-hamburger, some olives, some peanuts with lemon juice, curried chicken, a bit of paella, some Iberian ham and cheese, a slice of spanish tortilla (a potato-egg pie), a slice of pizza or almost anything you can imagine. Unlike traditional tapas, which were a very small snack offered free as a courtesy with every drink, these cost $1.50 to $2.50 apiece. Two people can make a meal out of four of them.

Some places call these little snacks tapas, others call them pinchos. They are very popular in the tourist locations. In this bar in San Sebastian, on the north coast in Basque country, many of the tapas are made from haddock, shrimp, squid, octopus, anchovies, oysters, mussels and sardines. Here is a pretty good history of tapas.

At the public markets, many of the stands offer fresh fish displayed on ice. You point and the lady will wrap it up for you, maybe gutting it first if necessary. This market was in Santander.

San Sebastian is close to the French border, in the heart of Basque country. Santander is in Cantabria. It’s a 2 1/2-hour bus ride between the two.

We let the restaurants prepare fish for us, but in the public markets we would stock up on fruit, bread (the long bars or flutes), nuts and some vegetables like carrots. Peaches and apricots had a tender texture unlike the the tennis-ball hardness we’re used to in the States. We also bought plums, pears, bananas, strawberries and cherries. Toasted and salted almonds bought in these markets were the best I have ever tasted. Maybe because of their freshness.

About two dozen guys in wet suits, flippers and goggles dove into the harbor in San Sebastian and took off for the other side, supervised by some guys with Red Cross jackets. It would have been about a half-mile or mile swim. We think it was lifeguard fitness training.

San Sebastian lies in an amphitheater of hills facing the sea, which makes for a dramatic setting (pun intended). If you look very, very closely, you’ll see that there are topless bathers on this beach in San Sebastian.

Pilgrims still come to honor St. James in Santiago de Compostela

2011-05-05T16:28:00.005-04:00

In the square in front of the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, school kids listen to a rock band that was part of a rally to promote use of the Galician language.

We’re in Santiago de Compostela, a pilgrimage mecca for over 1,000 years and the center of the autonomous region of Galicia in northwestern Spain. It still attracts hundreds of thousands of pilgrims each year, who pay homage to Santiago, or St. James, one of the 12 apostles, whose remains are supposed to be in the cathedral here.

On the day we were in the church, the priest saying mass recognized pilgrims from Norway, Germany, France and the U.S., among other places. In the Middle Ages it rivaled Rome and Jerusalem as a pilgrimage site, and people still hike and bike the route. Sant Iago is known also as Matamoros, or Moor-slayer, because he is supposed to have appeared on horseback during a crucial battle and inspired the Christians to victory. It is probably not a good idea to promote that aspect of the saint these days.

The cathedral was packed for mass on a Monday.

One of the two official languages in the region is Galician, which is closer to Portuguese than Spanish for historical reasons that only a few language geeks like me would be very interested in (geek oriented article here; Spain has four official languages, including Catalán, Galician and Basque).

A friend from Galicia, Miguel Castro, tells me that between 80 and 90 percent of Galicians can speak the language but choose not to for political reasons. The language was banned for 300 years.

I can decipher written Galician, but it’s a slow process and I miss a lot of the meaning. The excellent local history museum has all its displays described in Galician. Only after going through a couple of the rooms did I notice that in each there was one inconspicuous card holder that had translations into Spanish. It was as if they did not want you to find the translation.

Spanish is the daily language for most people here, but I heard Galician spoken in some museums and restaurants. If I understand the context, such as a guide describing a church, I can sometimes follow it, but it’s mostly unintelligible.

We went from one medieval town, Salamanca, famous for its university, to another, famous for its cathedral and relics of a saint.

Fishing, farming and tourism

In the local newspaper there was an article in Spanish about the guy who caught the season’s first salmon, a 13-pounder, but all his quotes were in Galician, so the interviewer presumably spoke the local language with him. Also, there was some cultural news about books and music written completely in Galician.

On the long train ride to Santiago from Salamanca, the countryside seemed less intensely developed and cultivated than eastern and southern Spain. Galicia has the highest percentage of workers engaged in farming and fishing of any region, with 17% of the jobs in those sectors in 2000. (Academic paper on the subject here.)

The countryside and the museum I mentioned were a reminder that most of the world has lived in villages and small towns until very recently. In the U.S. in 1880, half the population was employed in agriculture while today it’s 2 or 3 percent, a huge change in a little more than a century. The process was slower in Spain, so many areas still have a rural feel, and Galicia is one of those.

Cindy and I liked this side chapel in the cathedral (below), where you can see the red cross of St. James in the seashell niche. The sword commemorates his warrior role, and the seashell is associated with the coastal pilgrimage route all along the Bay of Biscay from France.

Andalusia has different flavor from rest of Spain

2011-05-02T15:21:00.033-04:00

On our swing through cities that were the Moorish centers of Andalusia, we were dazzled by the palaces, forts and mosques. We are doing the whole trip by train.

When we arrived in Cordoba in southern Spain, the accent told us we were in a different part of the country. Local people drop their S’s -- gracias becomes gracia’, más o menos becomes ma’ o meno’, tres euros becomes tre’ euro’ and so on. Consonants are softer than in the north.

The accent sounds very much like what you would hear in Cuba, Puerto Rico or other Caribbean countries. I have read and heard that this is because many of the conquistadors came from Andalusia in southwestern Spain and left their linguistic imprint.

Moorish arches in the Alcázar in Seville.

Moorish influence strongest

In any case, Andalusia looks and feels different from the rest of Spain. The Moors held onto this territory the longest, much of it for eight centuries. The Christian Reconquest of what we now call Spain moved south. Granada was the last holdout, falling in 1492.

The Great Mosque in Córdoba. The Christians built a cathedral inside the Islamic structure.

Andalusian horses are trained and shown in Cordoba. They can dance passable Flamenco. The center of breeding and training where we saw this show was founded in 1567.

Inside the Great Mosque of Cordoba. The crucifix occupies a niche surrounded by Moorish arches.

Moorish castle, from Gibraltar.com

Gibraltar in "Ulysses"

In the famous last chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses, the thoughts of Molly Bloom wander back to Gibraltar, where she grew up. Her father was an Irish soldier in the British Army garrison stationed there. She recalls a romantic encounter with Leopold Bloom, whom she will later marry, "under the Moorish wall." We didn’t snap any photos of the wall when we were in Gibraltar, but we saw signs of Moorish influence in, of all places, the arches of the Anglican cathedral there.

The Romans left their mark in every town of any size in Spain. Here is the Roman theater in Malaga. Hometown boy Antonio Banderas has performed here.


In the Alcazaba Castle, which dominates a hill in Malaga.

A sculputure outside the bull ring, Malaga. Cindy refused to go with me to a corrida. A recent poll showed that about 10 percent of Spaniards are "very interested" in bullfights, 10 percent are "somewhat" interested and the rest are indifferent or opposed. Bullfighting seems to be more popular in the south. It is also part of a tradition in southern France, where Unesco recently recognized bullfighting as part of France’s contribution to world heritage. Story here.

Ronda is perched on cliffs. Like the Romans before them, the Moors built a fortress wall around their city, which has the natural reinforcement of a 400-foot-deep gorge. Views are spectacular from above and below.

In Granada, gypsies carved homes out of the soft hillside stone. This was part of a museum display, but modern homes and businesses are also cut into the rock.

Penitents in the Palm Sunday procession in Granada.

Every day during Holy Week, all over Andalusia, local religious societies stage processions through the center of town. In the bigger cities, a half-dozen processions are scheduled each day. The conical hats allow sinners to repent without revealing their identity. Each procession includes floats of Jesus and Mary borne by up to 150 men, several marching bands and costumed marchers. The tradition goes back at least 400 years. History and description are here.

A two-minute video of the Palm Sunday procession in Granada is below.

Women in the procession wear mantillas and carry a rosary and candle. The processions move very slowly and take up to six hours. The candle is for when it gets dark. Some of the women wear high heels, which has to qualify as a form of penance.

At the Alhambra "red palace" in Granada.

At the Casa de Pilatos in Seville. It had Roman, Moorish and Renaissance elements in the architecture.

The Maestranza in Seville was built in the 18th Century and is one of the country’s most renowned bull rings. I saw a corrida there. The next day, the reviewer said all three of the bullfighters (toreros) were crap, which confirmed my own uninformed opinion. Bullfighting rituals go back at least 5,000 years in the Mediterranean. A Minoan fresco from Crete 3,500 years ago shows a toreador leaping over the horns and onto the back of a bull. Both men and women practiced this ritual.

British are latest invaders of Spain, and not the worst

2011-04-16T13:34:00.002-04:00

St. James Church, Lakewood, Ohio, shows Arabic influence in its pointed arches and decorative mosaics (Examiner photo)

On my first trip to Europe about 25 years ago, I was with a group that was given lessons in history and culture in all three cities we visited -- Genoa in Italy, and Seville and Barcelona in Spain.

When I returned I happened to be back in my hometown of Lakewood, Ohio, standing in front of St. James Catholic Church and was struck for the first time by all the Arabic influence in the facade, obvious to me now after seeing Moorish architecture in Seville. The pointed arches and the decorative mosaics were clearly influenced by designers steeped in Islam.

Were the Irish Catholics of St. James parish aware of this irony? The founding pastor was. He authorized a design from a Sicilian church of the 12th century whose craftsmen likely included Muslims. (The church’s architectural history is explained here.)

To the victors...

Since that time I have visited many more places around the Mediterranean, and the history has a sameness to it, with only the names and dates changed. The prosperous residents of a place are set upon by armed invaders who want their land, their mines, their trade routes, their gold, etc. Thousands are slaughtered, a new language and culture are introduced, great palaces and places of worship are built, and mighty walls are fortified to protect it all until the next horde of armed invaders comes along.

The nightmare of history

I believe this is part of what the character Stephen Daedalus is referring to in Joyce’s novel "Ulysses" when he says, "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." The history we learn is a story of warlords who happen to employ squads of artists and poets to glorify their conquests and who subsidize the religion that makes their triumphs divinely justified.

Bull ring, Malaga, southern Spain

Roman theater, also in Malaga, Spain

In Spain the story goes something like this: the Iberians were set upon by the Celts from the north about 1,600 B.C. My travel book says that the Spanish word for beer, cerveza, is of Celtic origin. It figures -- Celts and beer.

The Phoenicians and Greeks arrived in the south and east somewhat later. The Romans and the Carthaginians (Phoenicians whose city was near modern day Tunis and was puzzled over by George C. Scott in "Patton") battled over Spain and the Mediterranean for several hundred years. The Carthaginian general Hannibal used Spain as his base of operations to lead his armies and elephants all the way to Rome.

We learned about all of this in 10th grade Latin class, including the famous phrase of the Roman politician, Cato the Elder, who ended all of his speeches with the phrase, "Carthago delenda est" -- Carthage must be destroyed. And so it was, in 146 B.C.

In the waning days of the Empire, the Romans themselves were set upon in Spain by the barbarian tribe known as the Vandals, who gave their name to juvenile delinquents everywhere. The Romans brought in their own band of thugs, the Visigoths, to hold off the Vandals, a task they evidently executed well.

They may have been thugs, but the Visigoths were Christians and they built many churches. These churches, however, were replaced by mosques, starting in 711, when Arabic-speaking Muslims known in history as the Moors quickly conquered the Iberian peninsula (modern day Spain and Portugal).

The term "Moor" is a fairly imprecise term to describe all of the Muslim dynasties that successively ruled over Spain for eight centuries, but it does serve to distinguish them from the Christians.

The Moorish occupation makes Spain quite different from Italy and France. Spanish is filled with Arabic words (azucar for sugar and azafran for saffron are two common ones), and the Islamic architecture was so admired by Christians that many churches incorporate the styles.

At the Alhambra palace in Granada, the Moorish influence is apparent.

Today we hiked up to the Alhambra palace in Granada. It is a fantastic place with many vestiges of the Nasrid dynasty, the last holdout to fall to the Catholic monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, in 1492, the eventful year in which Columbus sailed to the West and the Spanish expelled the Jews from the peninsula.

Bushes shaped into battlements in the Alhambra

The British are among the most recent invaders of Spain, albeit peaceably. As many as 600,000 of them may have relocated, mainly to the southern coast. Their ready cash fueled a construction boom in which local public officials did not always follow laws for zoning and housing regulation. Things were especially out of hand in Marbella, as this story indicates .

No slaughter this time, no new religion introduced, only British accents noticeable in many parts of Andalucia.

The Alhambra palace and fortress dominate the city of Granada.

Cordoba‘s main attraction: mix of Jewish, Muslim, Christian history

2011-04-12T13:12:00.005-04:00

A couple headed to a wedding on Saturday in Cordoba.

A thousand years ago, Córdoba in Spain was ruled by Muslim caliphs and is cited by many sources (see the notes to the linked article) as one of Europe´s most important cultural, scientific and economic centers at the time.

The Muslim rulers tolerated Christians and Jews, and there is quite a debate among Jewish scholars about whether the Muslims were benevolent, indifferent or worse. In any case, the three cultures coexisted, and there are signs of all three cultures around the city.

Inside the Great Mosque of Córdoba, here known as the Mezquita. A Visigoth Catholic church first occupied the site, and the mosque.was built on top of it.

In the 1500s, after the Muslims were expelled from Spain, a Catholic cathedral was built inside and on top of many of the origial Moorish arches; you can see the mix here.

The Jewish synagogue in Córdoba was built in 1315. The Catholic rulers, Ferdinand and Isabella, expelled all Jews from Spain in 1492 unless they converted.

Exterior of the Great Mosque.

The Romans built the foundation for this bridge 2,000 years ago. It has been rebuilt on the Roman base a number of times and now is open only to pedestrians. Buses park along this bank and discharge mobs of camera-toting passengers into the historic center.

The Romans left their mark all over Spain. Cordoba (Corduba) was an important city for them, and the ruins from a temple of that era dominate the center of the city.

Roman ruins in the city center.

The trees suggest columns in the gardens of the Alcazar.

School kids sketch in the gardens.

The Moors loved the effect of falling water, fountains and pools. This is in the gardens of the Alcazar.

Cindy thought the size of these daisy plants was impressive.

There were lots of groups of Spanish students touring the city, and we ran into groups of Germans, Italians and French tourists, as well as a few Americans.

These tourists were speaking French.

Spain is the world´s leading producer of olive oil, with 40% of the total. Traveling from Valencia to Cordoba, we passed through the heart of olive country and saw mostly olive trees on either side for several hours of the train ride. This article says Spain has 300 million olive trees and I believe it.

A scholarly article I read said the industry is heavily subsidized and producers have problems with soil erosion. The World Wildlife Fund and other environmental groups oppose the subsidies, saying they encourage a monoculture that damages the environment.

Most of Spain´s 300 million olive trees are in the South. We saw views like this for hours between Valencia and Cordoba.

Spanish comes in many flavors; gasoline at $7.20 a gallon

2011-04-10T13:26:00.004-04:00

A proud dad snaps shots of his daughter in a traditional dress.

Scientists who study the human brain have noted that memories created by smell have a special emotional power. It probably has something to do with our thousands of years as hunters and gatherers.

In any case, the scent of orange blossoms recalls a special experience for me. It takes me back to my first visit to Seville, Spain, 25 years ago. It was the first days of spring, and that city´s orange trees were in full flower. Their perfume helped freeze the images of moorish arches and mosaics, the fountains of the Alcázar and the stunning light of the Andalusian sun.

The Central Market of Valencia, built in 1928.

The local language of Valencia

I was invited to give a one-day course to journalists in Valencia, which is on the other side of Spain from Seville, but when we arrived there last week, we were soon awash in the scent of orange blossoms and memories of Andalusia. The trees fill many parks and plazas. The effect is magical but some Valencianos are so used to the smell as to be unaware of it.

The Lettuce Boutique, the sign says

Valencia has its own identity within Spain and its own local language, Valenciano, which resembles Spanish and French the way it is written. Street signs and place names reflect it -- carrer instead of calle for street, palau instead of palacio for palace and many more.

Schools require children to learn Valenciano. The local daily newspaper included some articles in Valenciano on a book fair and cultural events. Some radio programs use it. Unlike Catalunya, whose capital is Barcelona, Valencia does not make its local language a part of an autonomous movement nor a requirement in public life. A journalism professor told me she can understand Valenciano but has never been able to speak it fluently. Certain sounds have no equivalent in Spanish.

Schools in Spain take students on cultural trips at spring break. There were lots of them around Valencia.

A couple at a bus stop.

In the main park through the center of the city.

A chaos of Romance languages

I used to think that the language police of the Royal Spanish Academy and its peers in France and Italy were cave-dwelling protectors of the status quo. But when you see the hundreds of dialectical variations of the Romance languages, it becomes clear that there is a use for an Academy that establishes spellings and recognizes words.

Spain recognizes Catalan (northeast) and Galician (northwest) as official languages, but Valencian and other dialects add both richness and confusion to the Romance heritage. (Basque is the fourth official language, but it has Indo-European roots unrelated to the Latin-based tongues.)

When I lived in Bolivia and Mexico, I could see regional variations of Spanish that reflected their cohabitation with more than 100 indigenous languages in those countries alone. The Royal Spanish Academy has to deal with all those new words as well.

Paella, gasoline prices and high-speed rail

Valencia lies on the Mediterranean coast and gave the world paella, a dish of rice with seafood, chicken, sausage and hundreds of other ingredients according to the tastes of the chef. I could have it every day in one of its guises.

Incidentally, we got to the port city on the Madrid-Valencia train, which covers 240 miles in 100 minutes, an average of 145 mph. Much of the way, it was cruising at 180. Ohio´s governor, John Kasich, should make this trip. It would change his mind about high-speed rail. With gasoline at $7.20 a gallon, taking a train makes sense.

We traveled on a Eurail pass, but our tickets would have cost $112 each. They are cheaper than airline tickets for the same route, and just as fast when you consider the hassle at the airport on both ends. Airlines used to have 75% of the traffic and trains 25% between Madrid and Valencia. But since the high-speed alternative opened up in December, trains have 50% of the traffic.

Madrid, Segovia and lots of walking

2011-04-09T11:24:00.004-04:00

Puerta del Sol is the heart of Madrid. It attracts all kinds of protests and performance artists.

All highways in Spain used to measure their distances from Kilometer Zero in the Puerta del Sol.

Much of the heart of Madrid is for pedestrians only, and they mob the place

Botanical Gardens of Charles III, first built in the 18th century.

Parque del Retiro, Madrid.

Parque del Retiro

A puppet show keeps kids totally engaged

Jazz musician with his axe. Always in search of the next gig.

A Finnish tourist we met outside the Alcazar (fortress) in Segovia.

Kids in the schoolyard in Segovia

Storks occupy the tops of some trees and buildings in Segovia

Business and pleasure in Spain

2011-04-01T03:23:00.004-04:00

For two months, Cindy and I are traveling mainly in Spain. I am also giving some lectures on Journalism, but more on that in a minute. Yesterday we headed northwest from Madrid to Segovia, a lovely town with Roman and Islamic architecture in abundance. This wikipedia article about the city is obviously a clumsy translation from the Spanish original, but it gives you the idea.

Cindy in the city center with the aqueduct behind her. It was built 2,000 years ago.

The aqueduct was built with no mortar between the granite blocks.

The cathedral

A ceiling in the Alcazar shows Moorish touches.

Every journalist needs a suit like this.

The mountains were still covered with snow on March 31.

The Alcazar (fortress or palace in Arabic) dominates a hill in the city.

During a presentation at the Complutense University of Madrid (center), I talked about the new vision of entrepreneurial journalism (center photo) and some of its advocates. One of the attendees created a collage of the people mentioned: (clockwise, from upper left) Clay Shirky of NYU, Dan Gillmor of Arizona State University, Brian Stelter of the New York Times and Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter.

One of the students wrote a blog entry about the presentation, as did a professor who attended.

If your car has to break down, do it in Georgia

2011-03-13T08:00:00.010-04:00

The purple pin marks Jesup, Ga., where they treat you like neighbors.

I discovered Southern hospitality somewhere south of Macon, Ga. The rumpled little cashier in a service station surprised me by looking at me in a friendly way and saying, "How y’all doin’ today." I hadn’t been greeted like that since attendants pumped gas for you. She said it like she meant it.

"Well, I’m fine. How’s yourself?"

"It´s a blessèd day," she replied while making change. Then she looked at me, smiled and said, "Come back and see us again real soon." Like I was her neighbor. I was smiling all the way back to the car.

Breakdown

We were driving from Atlanta to St. Augustine, Fla., for the weekend and making good time.

A little farther on we took a shortcut off the interstate, and in Jesup, Ga., the clutch pedal went soft a couple of times. Finally the pedal wouldn’t come back up we couldn’t get the car into gear.

We were stranded right in the middle of a five-lane highway with cars whizzing past on both sides. Fortunately it was in front of Duckworth’s auto service. Cindy went in to get help, and two mechanics came out to give us a push into their lot.

When we described the problem, Ben, one of the mechanics, said it sounded like the clutch’s master cylinder or slave cylinder had failed. "We don’t fix those, but I know somebody who does."

Hop to it

It was noon on a Friday. Ben called Lonnie’s Auto, and someone there said he could take a look at it, no promises. Then Ben called a towing service.

The truck, from Grant Lewis Towing, arrived in five minutes. We hopped in and chatted with the driver, Terrance, while we rode a couple miles to Lonnie’s, a dumpy looking place with an unpaved parking lot. The tow was only $45, which to me was a pleasant surprise.

Inside Lonnie’s we were greeted by a wave of cigarette smoke and a big guy in a ball cap with a phone in each ear.

We waited till he was done, and then Cindy explained that her cellphone wasn’t working and could she make a long-distance call to tell the person we were visiting that we would be late. "Sure, come on in," said Lonnie (because that’s who it was).

Take my truck

The phone call done, Lonnie asked us if we had had lunch yet. It would take him some time to take a look at the car, so why didn’t we borrow his big old truck, a monster Ford F-150, to go to "the best place in town," Jones’s Kitchen, and get something to eat.

One of the mechanics drew us a map, and in a few minutes we were on our way. Jones’s Kitchen was an $8 all-you-can-eat buffet for very large people with oversized appetites. We loaded up our plates with nameless but intriguing fried foodstuffs, elbowed our way into one of the few open spaces at the family-style serving tables and chowed down.

It was all good. When we got back, Lonnie and his brother, Leland, were at work. Before we knew it, the car was ready. Lonnie said the problem was that something called the proportioning valve had failed and leaked all the transmission fluid. The car is a 2001 Toyota Camry with 89,000 miles on it. He called the Toyota dealer an hour away to ask what to do about the valve. The dealer’s mechanic told him they didn’t have the part and just to bypass the valve.

Two hours, no waiting

Lonnie lifted up the hood and showed me the offending valve and the thin metal tube he had installed to go around it. The clutch now worked fine. Total cost, $60.30, no extra charge for the long-distance phone call and loaner truck. The whole business had taken two hours.

If we had the same work done in any big city, I’m guessing that the tow would have been $100, the car would have been on the dealer lot for a week while they sent to Tokyo for the proportioning valve, we would have had to call a taxi to get us home, and we would have arrived there hungry. Final bill probably $675 ($250 for the part because they don’t make them any more). Dealer cash registers are calibrated, I’m convinced, so they cannot record charges of less than $500.

But most of all, we would not have been treated like real human beings with a problem, the way we were at Duckworth’s, the towing service, Lonnie’s and Jones’s Kitchen.

If you ever do have to have a breakdown, I recommend you do it in Jesup, Ga.

And, by the way, there is such a thing as a proportioning valve. I looked it up. It’s supposed to remove any hint of vibration when you engage the clutch. But we don’t even miss it.

Visit to Warm Springs and the Little White House

2011-01-28T15:47:00.003-05:00

Cindy´s Mom at the Little White House, where FDR stayed during his visits for physical therapy

Franklin Delano Roosevelt began spending time in Warm Springs, Ga., in 1924 to receive therapy from the mineral springs. Much of the excellent 2005 television movie Warm Springs, with Kenneth Branagh as FDR and Cynthia Nixon as Eleanor, was shot here.

Roosevelt was 39 when he contracted an illness that crippled him from the waist down. For many years, polio was blamed, but today scientists think he might have been stricken with Guillain-Barré syndrome.

The movie tells how his experiences in Warm Springs strengthened and deepened his character, preparing him to campaign for governor of New York and president of the United States. The State of Georgia maintains the home and museum.
Warm Springs is about 90 miles south of us.


FDR liked to zip around town in this 1938 Ford Roadster equipped with hand controls

One of his wheelchairs and leg braces, which he had painted black to be inconspicuous

A family tree at the museum showed that First Lady Eleanor´s maiden name was Roosevelt as well. She and Franklin were fifth cousins, once removed, and Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin's fifth cousin, was her uncle. Fifth cousins are six generations removed from their common ancestors. They have the same great-great-great-great-grandparents. Eleanor was one generation removed from being a fifth cousin.

Much of the house had a nautical theme. FDR loved sailing.

The bedrooms and furnishings in Roosevelt's home were very simple. The bathroom's spartan sink, tub and commode would not come close to the design standards of Better Homes and Gardens.

One of the best parts of the museum was the recordings of his speeches, including his 1932 Inauguration Address: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." Still good words to live by.

Roosevelt harnessed the power of the new medium of radio to galvanize the people with his "fireside chats." During his 12-year presidency, he mobilized the country to confront the two biggest crises of the century, the Great Depression and World War II.

Digital journalism center takes hold in Guadalajara with new leadership

2010-12-20T11:54:00.012-05:00

Una versión en español se encuentra aquí.

On a Saturday in December, the 15th class to pass through the Digital Journalism Center in Guadalajara, Mexico, had its recognition ceremony. It was also my last day directing the program begun in 2008 by the University of Guadalajara and International Center for Journalists.

Participants in the last class came from Venezuela, Peru, Colombia, Bolivia and various parts of Mexico.

Each participant in the Public Service Journalism course had spent five weeks studying online. The best were invited to Guadalajara to begin work on a final project. For example:

Elizabeth Estevez, agricultural reporter for El Diario in Bolivia, is planning a multimedia report on the shortage of wheat production in her country.
Luis Daniel Palmillas, a radio and print reporter in Rio Bravo, Mexico, on the U.S. border, is working on a website that would allow citizens to lodge complaints about city services, track the response and hold officials accountable.
Carlos Andrés Valencia Masso, who lost his father in the armed conflict in Colombia, has plans to expand his web-based reporting on movements of peaceful resistance to violence.

In Guadalajara the participants received hands-on technical training in use of video, audio, mapping, marketing and other techniques of online publishing. I was impressed with their commitment to serving their communities.

Journalists from 22 countries participated

Over two years, the Center, a project of the Knight International Journalism Fellowship program, offered 15 online training courses in Spanish to some 430 journalists from 22 countries as well as in-person technical training to 279 of the best performers.

My job was to get the Center started and turn it over to the University, which is now in the process of selecting a successor. For 2011, the five courses on the calendar include "Writing for the Web," "New Financial Models for Journalism" and "Digital Tools for Public Service Journalism."

Innovative course: entrepreneurial journalism

The Financial Models course mentioned above is really about entrepreneurial journalism. I taught journalists how to run a publishing business online. They had to propose a media project, create a marketing plan, business plan and then a prototype.

They learned concepts that are foreign to journalists who work in traditional media, such as sales, branding, customers and profits.

The course attracted a lot of attention. I gave it three times online and was invited to give a seminar version of two or three days in Chile, Colombia, Mexico City and Monterrey, Mexico.

Webmaster Luis Fernando Gonzalez Fernandez and administrator Norma Lilia Cerda Martinez, both employees of the University, are keeping things running until the new director is announced.

My wife, Cindy, and I headed back to the States for the holidays and prepared for the next chapter in our wandering life, which will probably continue somewhere in Latin America.

Designing courses for professionals

When I arrived in Guadalajara, the University already had an established distance-learning program but there were no online courses in journalism. I worked with Carmen Coronado, one of the University´s experts in designing courses for virtual platforms, to prepare courses for the Center. She helped me understand how to create engaging activities and lead discussions in the online environment.

Experienced professionals need a different kind of learning environment than college students. We made every participant´s work visible to every other participant, and they had to comment on each other´s work. This kind of feedback from peers was at least as important to participants as my comments.

In all, I designed six courses in Spanish for the Center and taught them online. I invited experts in digital technologies to teach the in-person courses.

In the process of participating in the course forums, I learned a lot of colloquial Spanish. Each country has its own version of newsroom slang. But journalists are pretty much the same anywhere in the world: irreverent, smart, funny, committed and passionate about their work. I love hanging out with them, even when it´s just online.

Sustainability: Online master´s degree in digital journalism

Manuel Moreno Castañeda, rector of distance learning at the University of Guadalajara, urged me to create an academic team in the second year of the program to assure sustainability.

We invited professors to participate in the courses, and a team of a half-dozen academics also helped design a master´s degree in digital journalism. This master´s, which has a heavy emphasis on participants creating their own digital media, will be one of the few online programs in digital journalism in the Spanish-speaking world. (Descriptions of the proposed courses are here.)

Safe practices for journalists covering violence

Mexico has become one of the most dangerous places in the world to practice journalism because of the linked interests of druglords and corrupt public officials. Reporters and media outlets that reveal corruption put themselves at risk.

As a response, the Digital Journalism Center, with grants totaling $55,000 from the U.S. Embassy, created an online course on "Safe practices for journalists" for 95 Mexican journalists and then held three in-person seminars.

Jorge Luis Sierra (left), an editor with decades of experience covering border issues, designed the course. Another Mexican journalist, Darío Dávila (second from left), who reports for several international publications, gave the course online.

Both of them participated in the in-person training attended by journalists like Claudia Beltrán, reporter for the daily Noroeste (next to me at the recognition ceremony).

Participants in the courses created all the content for a website that contains tactics and strategies that journalists can use to reduce the risks of the profession while still providing useful information to their communities. They also created another website with current information about the risks journalists face.

After hearing the stories from course participants about the daily threats and dangers they confront, I was particularly gratified that we were able to offer them some help.

Fewer or less: which is correct

2010-11-24T07:33:00.001-05:00

When I see misuse of this, it makes me crazy, for some reason. The worst offenders are the ones who are trying to be meticulously correct and impose "fewer" in places where "less" is really the appropriate word.

Newspaper copy editors have come up with rigid rules of usage that lead people to abominations such as this one from the Wall Street Journal:

Fewer than three years later, Mr. Slim earned more than $500 million in profit when Verizon Communications Inc. bought the carrier...

Ugh! I can just hear the Wall Street Journal´s copy editor saying, "You should use 'fewer' with things that can be counted." The editor would be right in saying that years can be counted but would be wrong in applying the logic to this phrase. Three years is a single measure of time, a unit, not a series of three discrete units.

It should be, "Less than three years ago..."

Here´s another abomination, from a story about Olympic sprinter Usain Bolt:

It took him fewer than 10 seconds to run 100 meters but at least 10 minutes to complete his victory lap.

Again, 10 seconds is a period of time, a single period of time, not 10 individual units.

It should be, "less than 10 seconds". "Fewer" doesn´t even sound right. Again, the editor is applying the rule of countable units inappropriately.

Here is another, from the New York Times:

An $11 fare to drive a passenger fewer than four miles was all D.Y. Kim had to show for his morning's labors.

Four miles is a distance, and in the context of the story is meant to signify a single unit of measure, not four.

It should be, "less than four miles."

Here are some examples of correct usage:

Less than 1 million barrels of oil spilled from the tanker. Correct

There was more than 3 feet of snow on the ground. Correct.

The robbers took less than $50 from the till. Correct

After the storm, the farmer had less than 10 acres of corn available for harvest. Correct

The bridge has clearance for vehicles less than 8 feet high. Correct

I´ve visited the online AP Stylebook and reviewed its "Ask the Editor" section, where people seek advice on how to apply this rule. Most of the time, the editor applies a fierce kind of logic that results in bad advice being given. Here´s an example:

Do percentages count as numbers or amounts? In other words, is it: "Fewer than 3 percent of the country's stores..." or "Less than 3 percent of the country's stores..." – from Los Angeles on Mon, Oct 08, 2007

Editor's reply: The example seems to refer to individual stores, so fewer would be correct.

I could not disagree more. In this case, 3 percent is an amount, a quantity, a single measure, not a series of three countable units. With editors giving advice like that, it is no wonder that the abominations continue to proliferate.

As I learn every day in my struggles to speak perfect Spanish, language resists logic. For every grammar rule that exists, there are other rules that countermand it. We need fewer editors sticking to the logic of a single grammar rule, and more understanding the context of the rule.

Some indicators of corruption

2010-11-17T07:29:00.003-05:00

Yesterday I was reading Mural, one of the better local dailies (there are five here), and I came upon this startling statistic: In the past 18 years, Mexico´s Secretary of Public Affairs has levied $3.3 billion dollars in fines (that´s correct, 40 billion pesos, or $3.3 billion dollars) against government officials for corruption.

That amounts to about $190 million dollars in fines a year against corrupt officials.

But the government has actually collected less than 1% of those fines. Why is the collection rate so bad? According to the article, the appeals process can be dragged out indefinitely, and, if it appears there will be a final resolution against the appelant in the case, he merely unloads all his assets so the fine can´t be collected. Perfectly legal.

Unbid contracts represent 97% of the total

On the same front page was a story about the handling of public contracts under the mayor of Guadalajara, Aristóteles Sandoval, who was recently elected on an anti-corruption platform.

As it turns out, the new regime has a worse record than the previous one in terms of awarding contracts not subject to a public bidding process. Under Sandoval, direct contract awards, made by the head of public works, represent 70% of total contracts, and another 27% are awarded to invited bidders.

Evidently the rules that require public bidding are open to interpretation. Juan Carlos Uranga, secretary of public works, says he alone decides who gets contract awards and who gets invited to make proposals for these unbid contracts. "And there is nothing untoward about it," he says.

The previous administration had 13% of contracts open to public bid, compared to this administration´s 3%.

Low pay, little opportunity here

2010-11-03T08:20:00.004-04:00

An article in the local paper said the highest paid college graduates are those who study civil engineering (construction of highways, water systems, etc.). A new graduate can expect to make $10,700 a year.

Other recent graduates:
-- Marketing, $8,300 a year
-- Computing, $7,700
-- Elementary school teacher, $5,000
-- Law, $4,000
-- Accountant (bookkeeper might be a better description), $4,000

There aren´t a lot of jobs being created here outside of the government or political parties.

At every busy intersection you find people selling stuff to motorists -- toys, windshield wipers, candy, bug zappers, TV trays, you name it.

Many adult males are "cuidacoches", a type of informal valet parker who helps motorists find a parking spot or pull out of one, and offers to clean your car while you shop, for anywhere from $2.50 to $10. If you´re just getting help with parking, it´s considered polite to pay 5 pesos, or about 40 cents.

There are some beggars, mostly old women in country dress or very young women with babies.

Mexico is cheaper than the U.S. for many things but it´s not cheap to live here. I don´t know how many people keep body and soul together.

The Elegant Dead: Mexico´s catrina tradition

2010-11-01T09:53:00.007-04:00

An ecologically conscious "catrina" with a skirt made of garbage bags.

Mexico´s Day of the Dead celebration is a mix of indigenous and Spanish cultural traditions, and in Guadalajara this year, it meant that the main street was lined with "catrinas".

The elegantly dressed skeletons (a "catrina" is an elegant woman) were designed by high school and college students and had a variety of themes.

A catrina in native dress captured an admirer.

The goddess of Death and the depiction of skulls go back thousands of years in Mesoamerican culture. There is an Aztec altar composed of hundreds of images of skulls (calaveras) in the heart of Mexico City, next to the main cathedral. Little sweets made in the shapes of skulls, called calaveritas, are part of the modern observance.

But the catrina tradition was made popular in the last century by a Mexican artist and caricaturist.

This catrina is outfitted in handkerchiefs.

The Goddess of Death is condemned by the Catholic Church but is worshiped by the lower classes and by narcotraffickers, who set up shrines to her.

Even young men want to pose with a catrina.

Some of the best catrinas were set up in the square around the cathedral so families out for a Sunday stroll could appreciate them.

The elegant dead like to garden....

...and to play with puppets.

Guanajuato, another magical place in Mexico

2010-10-17T15:10:00.010-04:00

Mexicans put lots of color into their streetscapes. Brightly painted stucco was part of the architecture long before the Spaniards arrived.

Guanajuato spreads itself on hillsides that have been mined for silver for centuries. Many of the streets tunnel beneath the city center, so there are really two cities. Navigating in a car is extremely difficult, with all the underground routes, one-way streets and hairpin turns. We parked ours and took cabs.

It´s a labyrinth, as you can appreciate on this map.

A cablecar takes you up to a scenic overlook of the city, which has about 100,000 residents. Cindy remarked that its wrought iron balconies, narrow streets and palatial homes reminded her of European cities we´ve visited, like Genoa.

The city is a Unesco World Heritage site, largely because of its well preserved colonial buildings.

There is a famous granary building in Guanajuato where the heroes of independence won their first battle with the Spanish in 1810. Later four of these heroes, including Miguel Hidalgo, Mexico´s George Washington, were captured, executed, and decapitated and their heads were displayed from the granary´s cornices for 10 years.

The former Hacienda Barrera is today a museum and has a half-dozen impressive gardens with various themes.

The gardens at the Hacienda.

Guanajuato takes its name from the Purépecha language. It means hill of frogs, and there is a plaza with statues of frogs in many styles.

Our Easter candy used to come in baskets like these on display in the city market. Mexico must have been the source.

Cathedrals are colorful here.

Our hotel, the San Diego, was in what used to be a palatial home in the center of the city. Many of the hotels we´ve stayed in in Mexico have been marvelous to look at. Many have high ceilings, french doors, balconies and other nice architectural touches. For $80 a night, the beds are probably harder than Americans are used to, the bathroom is functional but probably small by American standards. High-speed internet access was free. I´ll take this type of place every time over a Holiday Inn, despite a few rough edges.

We´re suckers for archeological sites. This ceremonial center, known as las Plazuelas, thrived until about 1,100 years ago, when it declined for unknown reasons. Maybe invading Chichimecas.

Visit to José Cuervo distillery in Tequila

2010-09-18T22:18:00.005-04:00

Today was our 40th anniversary, and we hadn´t planned anything special. We took a drive up to Tequila, a town where they´ve been making the José Cuervo beverage of that name for more than 250 years. The brand is older than the country. Older than the U.S. too, for that matter.

We´ve driven past the town of Tequila half a dozen times on our way elsewhere. It´s a Unesco World Heritage site and one of Mexico´s officially designated Magical Towns (Pueblos Mágicos).

It´s only about 35 miles from our apartment in Guadalajara so we thought it was time we stopped and visited. It lies in the heart of the blue agave region, which is used to produce tequila.

Blue agave fields are visible all around the state of Jalisco.

So we ended up going to the tequila museum and touring the José Cuervo distillery, where we had a couple of shots and some margaritas as part of the tour ($8 per person), and then had a nice dinner.

The piñas remain after the spiky leaves are removed from the blue agave plant.

They make tequila from the heart of the blue agave plant, which is a mass of starch that weighs about 75 pounds. This starchy bulb, called a piña, is cooked for a day and a half, which converts the starch to sugar. It is then crushed and pressed. The liquid is the base used for fermenting and then distilling into the liquor.

Mostly these kinds of tours don´t grab me, but I was struck by the figure tossed out by the guide: that particular distillery turns out 72,000 liters of tequila a day.

Two happy couples in the Museum of Tequila.

Of course, the tour bus for the town of Tequila has a distinctive styling. The shirt is for the Black Lions fútbol team of the University of Guadalajara.

All the towns in the state of Jalisco can use the name "tequila" on their distilled products of blue agave, as long as they meet certain standards. The designation of tequila is a "denominación de origen controlada" restricted to certain parts of Mexico, much like champagne and burgundy can only be used on products from those regions.

Mexico´s crisis looms over bicentennial

2010-09-16T16:15:00.014-04:00

I´ve just finished reading Mariano Azuela´s gritty novel about the 1910 Mexican revolution, "Los de Abajo".

He uses a stark realism to depict one of the bands of anti-government forces who fought the federales.

The peasants who rise up against the landed gentry and hacienda owners lose their ideals along the way. Hardened by the war, they see the lofty goals of land reform and democracy as dreams of fools. The people´s army degenerates at times into a pitiless gang of thieves and murderers.

It´s a dark tale about the pointlessness of war. The author, who is a native of the state of Jalisco, where we live, served as a physician in the forces of Pancho Villa, one of the revolutionaries. He knew what he was talking about.

A revolution every 100 years

That´s the saying in Mexico, where revolutions were launched in 1810 and 1910.

Mexicans are now celebrating their bicentennial, but there doesn´t appear to be another revolution on the horizon.

Enrique Krauze, a Mexican historian and newspaper columnist, wrote recently in the New York Times:

Despite a bloody mythology that venerates the great protagonists of 1810 and 1910, most of whom met brutal deaths, the common denominators of our national history have been social, ethnic and religious coexistence; the peaceful construction of cities, villages and communities; and the creation of a rich cultural mosaic. Many of us want to believe that we are living through a nightmare from which, one morning, we will simply wake up, once again at ease.

Krauze tends to be an optimist. More than a year ago, he argued passionately that Mexico was not a "failed state" about to fall apart because of the growing power of the drug lords. Obviously, he has maintained this confidence.

At the very least, Mexico´s state is being seriously challenged. Every day there are examples of increasingly audacious defiance of authority by drug lords, who execute mayors, police officials and anyone else who gets in their way.

The cry of freedom in 1810

Mural depicting Miguel Hidalgo, father of the 1810 Revolution, here in Guadalajara. The artist was Clemente Orozco.

So reflections on where Mexico is going are part of the 200th anniversary celebration of the uprising that threw off Spanish control.

The priest Miguel Hidalgo is regarded as the George Washington of Mexico. The revolution he started began in the deliberations of a book club (tertulia) in the town of Dolores, where he was assigned.

(Skip down to the heading "Involvement in Queretaro" to see how the Insurgentes, sort of the Franklin-Adams-Jefferson-Hamilton-Washington of Mexico, got started in a book club.)

Trained by the Jesuits, Hidalgo was an unconventional priest. He had relationships with several women and fathered at least five children.

Here is Krauze´s assessment of the revolution Hidalgo started:

From 1810 to 1821, the war for independence cost about 300,000 lives in a population of around 6 million. Afterward, state income, agricultural, industrial and mining production, and, above all, the availability of capital for investment did not reach their pre-1810 levels until the 1880s. And the material desolation was followed by almost five decades of insecurity on the roads, political instability and grievous civil and international wars.

It was in this church in Dolores that Hidalgo made his call for independence from Spain 200 years ago. This speech sermon is now referred to as El Grito (the shout).

Hidaldo was executed the next year, but not before the revolution was well under way.

We visited Dolores Hidalgo in March with my sister, Nancy, and her husband, Tom Lukens. In the photo below, Nancy and I are at the statue of Hidalgo.

Falcon Lake in Manitoba: relaxing family vacation

2010-08-21T19:45:00.005-04:00

The family of Bridget´s partner, Phillip Ens, invited us again this year to their lodge on Falcon Lake, Manitoba, about an hour east of Winnipeg.

Lovely place. We had lots of sun, warm temperatures, perfect for swimming and biking.

Christine, Bridget, Emily (Patrick´s partner), Patrick, their dog Sheva, Phillip (standing, Bridget´s partner), Alex (Phillip´s brother-in-law) and Johanna (Phillip´s sister).

The blue marker is Falcon Lake.

One day we took the boat and two kayaks to an island in the lake for a picnic, egg salad sandwiches and a couple of beers. That´s me, Phillip, Bridget and Patrick.

Bridget and Phillip went fishing one day and caught a couple dozen walleye and pike, which we feasted on over several days. Sweet corn was fantastic, as were the bison burgers, country sausage and saskatoon berry pie. Cindy and I each gained five pounds in 10 days.

Schlitz Gold beer, very tasty, had something to do with it.

We all used the kayaks at one point or another. It´s very peaceful to paddle along in the early morning, stop and listen. The loons sometimes paddled close before diving for fish. They can stay down for about a minute. Bald eagles like to occupy the highest spot on the highest trees on some of the islands in the lake.

Christine and Em

Patrick and Em bundled up on one of the few cool days. Mostly it´s warm in Manitoba in August, but you´re 400 miles north of Minneapolis. Six years ago during our visit the temperatures were in the 30s and 40s and we saw the Northern Lights.

A deer offers Phillip a carrot.

Em, Bridget and Patrick play a board game. Dominos were also a nightime diversion.

A swing through Toltec ruins and provincial towns

2010-08-03T07:53:00.016-04:00

We had a couple of days free and decided to swing down toward Mexico City. We made a big detour around the state of Michoacán, which has been a hotbed of drug violence, and stayed in Querétaro, which is famous for, among other things, its 275-year-old aqueduct.

On Sunday it provided the venue for sculptures of fanciful creatures.

The town of Bernal is noted for its crafts market. We went on a recent Sunday and bought our quota of lovely things.

Mexico has hundreds of charming towns, 35 of which are given the official designation of Pueblos Mágicos, and Bernal is one. We´ve been to about a fourth of these towns and all merit the designation.

While we were there, we saw a group of men marching down the street. The men were singing praise to the Virgin of Guadalupe, who is perhaps a more important figure than Jesus in Mexican religion. The priests might contest that but the people have their own way of worshiping, especially in the countryside.

In the background you can see the huge monolith known as the Peña de Bernal, which rises more than 1,000 feet above the town.

Exorbitant tolls

Incidentally, traveling by toll roads is safer but costly. For a 500-mile round trip mostly on toll roads, we paid about $75 in tolls, which works out to about $15 per 100 miles.

Americans would rebel against tolls that high. Rates on the Ohio Turnpike, for example, are about one-third as expensive.

The four imposing Toltec warriors are among the attractions at the archeological site of Tula, about 60 miles northwest of Mexico City. We hadn´t seen any statues like these before.

This site sprang up in the 8th century after the collapse of Teotihuacán, the massive cultural center to the east. It´s notable that these statues are of warriors. Historians say the warrior class replaced the priestly class as the dominant one in many Mesoamerican societies around this time. Prayer was less important than making war.

The Tula site is like a park, with lots of cactus plantings leading from the parking area up to the pyramids and ball court.

Marching like young warriors, a Scout troop takes in the sights. We saw an awards ceremony for a troop the next day on top of a pyramid.

Cindy is my tour guide. She figures out itineraries, reads the history to me in the car and takes a lot of the pictures.

Getting to these sites is complicated by the fact that signage is spotty and inconsistent. You´ll see 10 signs that say, "Don´t leave rocks on the roadway", for every one that gives you a hint about where a major historical site might be.

Back to Teotihuacán and the huge pyramids

We had visited the city of Teotihuacán almost two years ago but both wanted to go back. The massiveness of the pyramids and the sacred plazas takes your breath away. This one is the Pyramid of the Sun. The specks on top are people. We climbed to the top. That also takes your breath away. The stairs are very steep.

In their original state, the stone surfaces of the pyramids were covered with a thick plaster that was painted white and red.

Not much is known about the people who built this place. It thrived from around 2,000 years ago to its collapse in the 7th or 8th century. Historians think it might have been a combination of drought and then an uprising against the ruling priestly class that led to the city´s demise.

In the palace of Tetitla are impressive murals of priests and gods that are about 1,500 years old.

All around the sacred city are residences that are still being excavated. Depending on who is making the estimate, the city might have been home to 80,000 to 250,000 people at its peak.

Cussing and slang in Mexico: it´s all about Mom

2010-07-21T19:34:00.009-04:00

Mexican slang and cursing are different from every other Latin American country. The best place to find out why is in Octavio Paz´s classic essay on Mexican identity, "The Labyrinth of Solitude."

It´s all about Mother. Or the children of the Violated Mother, los hijos de la Chingada.

Mexicans use that phrase to describe themselves with a mixture of pride and bitter irony. It has to do with their history: indigenous women taken or raped by Spanish conquistadors and colonists. The Woman as Victim, a person they identify with. (Her opposite is the Virgin of Guadalupe, the Woman as Refuge and Protector.)

Paz dedicates much of a chapter to the unique Mexican use of the word chingar: in this country, it´s as vulgar as saying f---, but in other countries it means to fail or get drunk or mess up.

Daily speech in Mexico is filled with expressions about mother:

Un desmadre (trans.- dis-mother) is a mess.

Desmadrarse (trans. to dis-mother oneself) means to go wild.

Ya estoy hasta la madre (trans. - I´ve reached motherliness) means I´ve had it, I´m tired, I´m sick of it.

Te voy a romper la madre (trans. - I´m going to break/wreck your mother) means I´m going to kick your ass.

Me vale madre (trans. it´s worth mother to me) means, I don´t give a shit.

A toda madre (trans. - totally mother) means very good.

Me cae de madre (lit. - he/she strikes me as mother) means I think he/she is cool or great.

De poca madre, (trans. - not very mother) means cool, very good.

Mentada de madre (lit. - mention of mother) means to insult someone´s mother.

The legendary mentada de madre here in Jaliso came when the governor, clearly drunk at a fundraising event, presented a check of state money to the Cardinal to build a sanctuary.

The donation was highly controversial because Mexicans have a love-hate relationship with the Church. The governor had been roundly criticized. So in presenting the check to the Cardinal, the governor told his critics and all the electronic media, "If you don´t like it, then chingue a su madre" (f--- your mother).

Dad, on the other hand, is not associated with victimhood but with power and control.

Yo soy tu padre (lit. I´m your daddy) means I own your ass.

Qué padre (lit. - How dadly) means cool or great. Padrísimo is even better.

I work with a guy who is a poet in the way he fills every line of speech with creative variations on four or five vulgar words, in all of their shapes and variations. Cab drivers are quite good at it as well.

The words for me do not have the weight of culture and history. I´m like a child playing with sharp knives. I don´t know how to pick them up or throw them around without causing injury.

Or the words seem to be mere puffs of air without substance, until I utter one and see it jerk someone´s head back.

Renewing a Mexican visa, or Catch-22

2010-07-17T06:19:00.013-04:00

"Catch-22" is one of my favorite books because it makes hilarious comedy out of bureaucratic lunacy.

None of the bomber crew members in the story want to fly the suicidal missions over Italy. The only way they can get out of them is if they´re judged insane by the Air Corps psychiatrist.

But if they tell the psychiatrist they have horrific nightmares and they´re too terrified to fly the missions, that´s a healthy response, therefore they´re sane and have to fly the missions.

If a crewman really is crazy, then he enjoys flying the missions. So everyone has to fly the missions. That´s Catch-22. The world´s bureaucracies are full of Catches.

Mexico´s version of Catch-22

Getting a work visa renewed in Mexico is something like that. You´re wrong even when you´re right, and you will be punished. This year the government developed a new computerized streamlined system for the process. Here´s how it works:

1. It says on the helpful website that you just fill out the renewal form online. I ransack the website without finding the renewal form. There is no place on any page that has a link to it. I do a Google search for FM3 visas and find a blog dispensing immigration advice for Cubans living in Mexico. It has the link.

2. I fill out the form online. There is no English version, which is not a problem for me but must be for some of the other 1 million Americans who live in this country. At the end, the form gives me two choices: "save" (guardar) or "save and copy" (guardar y duplicar). Being a careful sort, I hit "save and copy".

Hitting "save and copy" was, I later learned, a big mistake.

3. Being a careful sort, before I fill out Cindy´s application, I take the printout of my application down to the immigration office to submit it to Answer Lady, whose job it is to help ignorant foreigners decipher the niceties of the system. She reviews my form. In the box for writing where the original visa was issued, I wrote, "Washington, D.C.", just as it said on my visa.

-- This is a mistake, said Answer Lady. Even though your visa says it was issued in Washington, it was really issued on Mexican soil because it was in the embassy there.

-- Oh, I said. So when I fill out my wife´s form online, I should write that her visa was issued in Mexico, right?
-- Right, said Answer Lady.

Believing Answer Lady was a big mistake.

4. At the immigration office the next Monday, the line is amazingly short at 9 a.m. We bring with us a fat file folder filled with documents that we had to present the previous year to renew the visas:
-- letter from me in Spanish attesting to the fact that I will support my wife during the time of my visa and not abandon her,
-- passport and two copies of each page of the passport,
-- visa and two copies of each page of the visa,
-- letters from the University and from Washington saying that I am in Mexico to do good things,
-- copies of passports of the letter writers with their signatures to prove that the letters aren´t forgeries,
-- copies of utility bills as proof of residence,
-- copies of three months of bank statements to prove income,
-- copy of my work contract with the International Center for Journalists,

-- three black-and-white photos face front, two photos in profile.....
-- and although we supposedly don´t need them this year in the streamlined system, I bring along the certified copy of our marriage license and certified copies of our birth certificates.

I also had obtained from Answer Lady the form you use to go to the bank and pay the visa fee for each of us.

To speed up the process, I paid the fees before submitting the application. Big mistake.

5. We submit our papers. Two women scrutinize various documents.

-- We have to reject your application, sir, because you made a mistake by hitting 'save and copy´. You only use that if you´re going to submit a duplicate for a child, and you don´t have a child seeking a visa. So you´ll have to go online and fill out the form again.

-- And we have to reject your wife´s application because it says she got her visa in Mexico but it was really in Washington, D.C.
-- But Answer Lady told me to put down Mexico, I protest.
-- Sorry.

6. We go to an Internet café near the immigration office and fill out the forms again, print them out, get back in line, which is longer now, and wait our turn. We submit our stuff again.
Do you have your payment forms? You bet we do.
-- I´m sorry sir, but we can´t accept your payment. It´s for the wrong amount.

Cindy´s is correct, but it turns out I had made a mistake and paid the same amount for both Cindy and me, about $100 each. I was supposed to pay $160 because I´m earning a salary down here.

7. They accept Cindy´s application but won´t accept mine until I go to a bank and execute a new payment for the correct amount. It´s not possible to just add on to the amount I´ve already paid. Cindy takes a taxi home. I take a taxi to the bank where I originally paid, pay again, this time $160, take a taxi back to the immigration office, take a ticket and get back in line. The line is longer now. I wait. I submit my application again, payment is correct, they accept the application and give me a number to check online. It will tell us when the visas are ready.

8. So what do I do about getting a refund for the erroneous $100 payment I already made?
-- You´ll have to talk to that lady over there.
She has me fill out some forms. Now what?
-- Well, the paperwork has to go through some channels and you´ll have to come back in three days.

9. I come back three days later, expecting to get a check or a voucher I can take to a bank and use to make a deposit.
-- Oh, no, you have to take this form to the office of a different agency, the SAT (tax collector) where they issue refunds.
-- Where is the SAT office?
-- There are several. You can look them up online, but you have to make an appointment.

10. I go online to try to make an appointment. The system is down and not working and continues not working the next day as well. I call the number listed on the website. A person answers and says that I made a mistake, this is the wrong agency. I check the number on the website. I had called the number listed, so evidently everyone who has this problem and calls this number will always get the wrong agency. She gives me the correct phone number.

11. I call the agency to make an appointment for getting my $100 refund. The woman asks me what SAT district I live in. I say I don´t know but I give her my address. She says she can´t tell from that what district I live in. I´ll have to go to one of the offices and ask which office is the correct one to go to for the refund.
Then I can make an appointment.

12. Meanwhile we find out that are visas are ready. On this day, the office is packed. We wait about two hours to get to the front of the line. I´m nervous as hell that I might have made some other mistake, that there is some hoop we forgot to jump through. The clerk asks us where our XXX forms are. What forms?
-- These forms. You mean no one told you to fill these out?
--No.
-- OK, we´ll just fill them out now."

Fortunately do not have to get back in line.
But this new form asks for information that we have already given them two or three times in different documents, but we have to fill it out.
We get our visas. Yay!

13. Now about my $100 refund for the erroneous payment.
There are two possible SAT offices that could be the one I´m required to go to. I pick the one by the Christopher Columbus Circle. I get in the line that says "without appointment". I give them my address. Yes, you´re at the right office. You´ll have to wait to see a counselor. I take a ticket. I wait. The counselor says that to get the refund I will need:
-- Proof of residence from a utility bill
-- a copy of my passport
-- the voucher that I already have and a copy of it
-- copy of my visa, both sides
-- the bank account details where they are to deposit the money (they don´t issue checks)
-- and I will need to make an appointment

Here comes Catch-22

-- So when would you like to make your appointment?
-- How about this week?

She looks at my newly issued visa. It´s a plastic card like a driver´s license instead of the old passport-style booklet. She checks the date. Technically, my new visa doesn´t take effect for two weeks because I renewed it two weeks before the old one expired.

-- I´m sorry sir, but we can´t make an appointment with you until this visa takes effect.
-- But I just renewed it. Look. Here´s a copy of my old visa.
-- Sorry, we´ll have to make an appointment no sooner than the effective date of this new visa.

14. Now uncertain whether my new visa is valid, I prepare to leave on a two-week trip to the U.S. I carry a 24-page full-color photocopy of my old visa, just in case. At the airport in Guadalajara, the immigration officer looks at my card-style visa as if he has never seen one before.
The new rules and new forms have been in effect for two months.
-- What´s this?
-- It´s my FM3 visa. It´s the new style. They just started issuing them.

He looks at me, looks at the picture, studies both sides of the card, trying to figure out what to do. Eventually he sees something he recognizes, writes something down and stamps some forms, giving me two copies.

15. I´m back now from the U.S. and have my appointment at the SAT office. I bring my fat file with me that has 10 times more information than is required because bureaucrats always want you to present something you don´t have.
She asks for a copy of the picture page of my passport, which by dumb luck I have. She looks at the bank account information.

-- This bank account isn´t in your name.
-- No that´s my wife. I don´t have a bank account. Here´s our marriage certificate.

After a half hour of looking at her computer screen and printing out a half-dozen documents, stamping each four or five times, she hands me a form that is a record of my application.

-- It will have to go through channels and be approved she says. You should hear within the next 40 working days.

40 working days. That´s more than eight weeks after you take holidays into account.

At this point, the authentic human response should be a shriek of frustration. But I know that within the bureaucratic system, you have to pretend to be civilized, or the system will punish you even more.

So now I´m waiting to see if the deposit will show up in Cindy´s bank account or for some notification that my application for refund was rejected.

On the other hand

The Mexican bureaucracy functions differently for special people, though. Yesterday I read in the paper that six state government officials, in illegal fashion and with approval from no one, awarded themselves bonuses last year totaling $2 million.

That averages to $333,000 apiece. I´m betting that they didn´t have to make an appointment at the local SAT office to get it.

Designing a master´s degree and becoming an academic

2010-07-14T06:29:00.007-04:00

This month I think I have finally resigned myself to the fact that I am becoming less of a journalist and more of an academic.

For the past several months I´ve been meeting with a committee of about 10 academics within the University of Guadalajara´s Virtual University, their distance-learning unit, to design an online master´s degree in digital journalism.

This is a fairly innovative program. There are maybe a dozen digital journalism master´s programs in the U.S., and I don´t know of any of them that are completely online.

There are only one or two similar programs in the Spanish-speaking world that both teach digital journalism (how you practice journalism in the multimedia world of the Web) and do it online. So it´s a stretch for all of us.

Meetings of the minds

The University has its own processes and values that have to be understood and respected, just as a newsroom does.

To begin with, you design a degree program as a response to a series of "problematicas" in society. Basically needs, gaps, problems. Then you describe "intervenciones" which your courses are supposed to provide to satisfy those needs, fill those gaps, solve those problems. This took a couple of weeks.

These interventions, if you will, are courses. Most of the participants in the committee are experts in education, online course design and pedagogy. Two are journalism professors with some professional media experience but little experience with digital journalism.

Words matter

I spent a lot of time just describing to the committee what is happening in the world of journalism today, which is a revolution on the scale of the invention of the book.

They needed a context to understand why I wanted to have courses on multimedia storytelling, citizen journalism, ethics in the online world, new business models for journalism, writing for the web and so on.

Then the hard part. Each course has to be justified by the "competencia" (skill) that the student has to demonstrate upon completion. And each of these skills is described in terms of abstract nouns whose meanings even in English are not always clear to me and often seem to overlap.

For each course we have to describe what conocimientos (knowledge), habilidades (abilities), actitudes (attitudes) and valores (values) are necessary to achieve the competencia (skill).

Into the home stretch

So after a series of six or seven three-hour meetings over the past months, we had the basic map of a master´s program, with individual courses, hours and credits described.

For the last two days, my team and I have been writing up detailed course descriptions with all of the habilidades, actitudes, valores etc. spelled out along with a description of course units and a bibliography. I did most of the 16 course descriptions that you´ll find listed on the left side of this wiki of the master´s program http://maestriadigital.wikispaces.com/.

Then we need to write up a formal document that describes the program in academic terms and get it approved by various committees of the Virtual University.

Tuesday we have a teleconference with a University in Santiago, Chile, to discuss offering our program jointly with them. They have a master´s in digital journalism, but it´s not online. (In the photo above, Arturo Catalán, who directs the program in Chile, visits one of our meetings.)

The goal is to get all of this done before my fellowship ends in December.

Impunity in Mexico: 49 toddlers die in fire, officials absolved

2010-06-25T19:37:00.012-04:00

That´s how it works here.

You can imagine how the justice system would have reacted in the U.S. if 49 children had been killed in a fire at a day-care center.

Mexico´s Supreme Court recently voted to absolve high-level officials of responsibility. A New York Times story quoted the reaction of legal affairs columnist Miguel Carbonell, who wrote in El Universal newspaper:

The surest thing is that the case ends as almost everything ends in Mexico: in oblivion and the most absolute impunity.

The Times story added:

In all, 23 people have been charged in the case and all of them are out on bail, said Lorenzo Ramos Félix, a lawyer for the victims’ families.

Except for the center’s four owners, all of the accused are low-level municipal, state and federal employees. “Neither the government nor the court wants to take a high-ranking official to trial,” Mr. Ramos said.

Families of the victims posted the Times story on their website, which is part of their campaign to seek justice.

Among the owners of the day-care center are a cousin of Mexico´s first lady as well as party and state officials and their spouses. It is no accident that those with political connections get contracts for these centers: they receive government payments for each child cared for. It´s guaranteed income.

Impunity for crimes against reporters

A similar impunity exists in crimes against journalists, which have been on the rise in Mexico.

We offer a course for Mexican journalists in how to protect themselves while covering drug trafficking and corruption. The journalists tell us that the institutions that are supposed to protect them, such as the courts, police and regulators, are sometimes in league with the criminals who threaten them.

This week there a ceremony in Tijuana honored journalist Francisco Ortiz Franco, who was murdered six years ago. According to a statement released by the Inter American Press Association:

Ortiz Franco was killed in front of two of his children as he was about to get into his car. A masked man, believed to be from the Arellano Félix cartel, shot him four times at point-blank range. Since then, despite the initial mobilization of justice authorities and the Public Prosecutor’s Office, the case has suffered numerous irregularities and today remains completely unpunished.

The complete statement is here.

This article describes Mexico as one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists.

In the past 18 months, the facilities of five media outlets have been attacked with gunfire or grenades, according to the Centro Nacional de Comunicación Social. So far this year at least 13 journalists have been attacked or killed.

Baseball at Nationals Park in Washington, sacred sites in Mexico

2010-06-11T07:49:00.009-04:00

I was two days too late to see the Nationals´ new phenom, Steven Strasburg, in his major league debut, in which he struck out 14 batters and created national buzz.

Thursday night was just another bad night for Pittsburgh, as the Nationals
beat the Pirates 4-2, and completed a three-game sweep.

What I like about baseball in person is the space reserved for the game. A ball park and the diamond it contains have a kind of perfect beauty and orderliness that the messy reality of daily life does not. The simple rules of the game -- and this is true for any game, including soccer -- create a ritualized form of reality, a more ordered version of it, in which what men and women do can affect the way the world turns.

Today´s athletes are heroes in that they act out our myths and beliefs about life, and because they have replaced the gods. Mexican wrestling matches have this kind of mythic battle of good vs. evil, gringos vs. Mexicans, etc. (See the next entry on this blog.)

When you explore archeological sites in Mexico, most of them have a ball court where a game resembling soccer was played. The game had a sacred significance, but it is also true that people played the game for fun.

The ball court at Montealban in Oaxaca, which we visited in December.

Supposedly Moctezuma, the Aztec emperor defeated by Cortez, would strap on his belt and play with his nephews for fun.

At some sites, evidence suggests that the losers of a ball game were ritually sacrificed.

No one was sacrificed after the Nationals-Pirates game, but they were subjected to press interviews. Basically the same thing.

I´m in DC and Boston for a few days, training Knight Journalism fellows and getting some training myself.

Lucha libre: wrestling with Thunder Boy and Princessa Maya

2010-05-31T09:09:00.012-04:00

Divino has his way with Thunder Boy on the ramp up to the ring, whose ropes are sometimes insufficient to contain all of the action and drama. Cameras aren´t allowed in the arena, but I snapped some images with my iPhone before an usher told me to desist.

You can´t live in Mexico without taking in a match of Lucha Libre (freestyle wrestling).

It´s a combination of morality play, superhero drama and acrobatics. Masked Mexican wrestlers are folk heroes. In movies they fight vampires, criminals and other forces of evil. The masks have a historical and cultural significance in this country whose indigenous roots run deep.

Here is the official website of the World Council of Lucha Libre and here is an article about the history and meaning of the sport.

On Sunday night a friend from the University who is a big fan took me to the Arena Coliseo to see six matches.

Siluetta throws Princessa Maya to the canvas.

Women wrestlers

It was family night. Adults pay $2 to $12 and kids get in for 40 cents. There were maybe 1,000 people for a two-hour spectacle that started at 6. A beer is $2, a bag of microwaved popcorn $1.50.

Not on the card was the leadoff match between two women wrestlers, Princessa Maya and Siluetta (a more appropriate name might have been Big Shadow).

They did some impressive acrobatic and gymnastic moves as they threw each other around the ring for a few minutes. Part of the deal is to create a villain who takes cheap shots. Then the aggrieved makes a comeback and overcomes evil. But sometimes evil wins.

Siluetta won out over Princessa Maya.

Kids love the wrestlers´ masks. Stores have hundreds of different styles and colors.

Aerial combat outside the ring

The top-billed match was between three guys without masks -- Strong Man, Gigante Bernard and Blue Panther -- and the three masked heroes, Atlantis, Averno and Mephisto.

Gigante Bernard and Strong Man were gringos who had a Mexican ally, the Blue Panther, and they beat the snot out of the three masked wrestlers. I wonder if the gringos always win in these dramas.

Gigante Bernard and his two partners claim victory, while the vanquished lie at the right.

Strong Man shakes hands with the fans. Sorry about the light.

In any case, the referee was completely ineffective at keeping the wrestlers inside the ring. A favorite aerial maneuver is to stand on the ropes in the corner and launch oneself onto an opponent.

They execute these flying maneuvers outside the ring as well, which looked awfully dangerous to the wrestlers, not to speak of the audience and vendors.

Leo, a handsome young guy without a mask, was a favorite with the young crowd. He took on the Exterminador.

Wrestler action figures.

The wrestler Alpha pose is everything. The jersey is for the Black Lions, the University of Guadalajara´s professional soccer team.

Family of free agents, wandering the world

2010-05-15T06:58:00.013-04:00

Cindy and I hung out with some journalists from Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina and Paraguay when we were in Bogotá, Colombia, recently. We spent an afternoon at the country house of our hosts, Carlos Eduardo Huertas and his wife, Lili, at extreme right and left.

Christine the mathematician is on a three-month visiting scholar gig at the Max Planck Institute in Potsdam, Germany, and has been giving lectures around Germany and, most recently, London.

She has started blogging. She´s the funniest member of the family. I liked her take on the low-cost airline RyanAir´s service from Berlin to London.

Potsdam is near Berlin, about six hours by train from Stuttgart, where our other daughter, Bridget has been dancing with the Stuttgart Ballet for some 14 years (here´s her website).

Bridget is now a guest artist with the company, so she has been booking free agent gigs to dance and choreograph in various cities around Germany. Here´s a description in English of of some of her latest choreography.

So the two daughters have had a chance to hang out together a bit on weekends.

Which brings us to Patrick, the jazz saxophonist, who has been out playing jobs in New York, Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland, etc.

The jazz scene in Madison, Wis., where he and his girlfriend, Emily, are living is not providing enough work for him. So he´s been on the road a lot.

Cindy and I were recently in Bogotá, Colombia, for about a week. It was our first time there. The Colombian organization of investigative journalists hosted an international conference and invited me to give a series of seminars and classes to their members.

Cindy has become a professional tour guide. She puts together briefing books on every place we visit, with a list of all the sights, the history, maps, etc. Without her research, I would have been ignorant of the significance of many recent events in the country.

The wars between liberals and conservatives depicted in Gabriel García Márquez´s "One Hundred Years of Solitude" have gone on intermittently for most of two centuries, in different guises with different names for the players. They´re still going on: right-wing paramilitaries vs. the left-wing guerillas, the FARC.

Cindy takes hundreds of photos while I´m in conference rooms.

Here´s a garden in the heart of Bogotá.

Bogotá has a dramatic skyline. It´s set amid mountains 8,600 feet above sea level. Climbing stairs leaves you short of breath.

May Day demonstrations in Bogotá brought out activists who occasionally clashed with the police.

We spent a morning inside the cathedral of salt, which was built in the depths of a mine near Bogotá.

Santiago, Chile, nine hours in the air from Guadalajara

The skyline of Santiago, Chile, city of more than 5 million, a third of the country´s population. Smog is a problem.

Cindy returned to Guadalajara and I went on to Santiago, Chile, where I had been invited by the Universidad Mayor to give a two-day seminar on new business models for news, which has become something of a specialty for me.

The University of Guadalajara, where I´m working, is trying to get an agreement with the Universidad Mayor to offer a joint master´s degree in digital journalism, completely online. I´m working on the design of the Guadalajara master´s.

The Santiago folks took me to a couple of very nice restaurants and treated me to lobster and fish of all kinds.

It is hard to describe just how far south Santiago is. It´s about nine hours in the air from our home in Guadalajara, Mexico, about the same distance from New York to Warsaw, Poland, 4,300 miles.

Signs of wealth

The city´s streetscapes reflect a history with the British, who exploited the country´s nitrate deposits, and other European powers.

I enjoyed using Santiago´s subway system. Chile is among the most developed and wealthiest countries in the hemisphere.

There were few visible signs of the February earthquake, although I heard from a reporter that quite a few apartment buildings, especially those built in recent years, were ruled uninhabitable.

It´s fall in Santiago.

College students (not mine) are the same everywhere.