Roma, the fourth leg, catching up

Interesting to leave such a gap in this log.  This morning I had breakfast on the terrace of this residence-hotel in Rome, with a gorgeous view of St Peter’s dome above the rooftops, and I thought about the past few weeks.  This is my “free day”—we had our Naples-Pompeii outing yesterday, and a chunk of the students are off having adventures either in Naples or Florence today—and tomorrow is the final exam and farewell lunch.  I had tried to go out this morning to find a New York Times to read over my breakfast, conjuring a version of normal routine from back home, but even in two orbits of increasing circumference I could not find a place open that sold the NYT.  So I just ate and wrote in my journal.

As I walked I realized how much of this past month I have been trying to conserve my energy, and there was a flash of guilt about having spent so many evenings tucked in by myself, not out exploring or eating in restaurants or trying new things or working on my language skills.  At the same time I had to forgive myself—or make excuses for myself—since I can’t help but recognize how over-extended I felt emotionally before the trip began, and how little in reserve I have felt I had all through the trip.  This lack of extra oomph has manifested itself in multiple ways: fewer freelance expeditions, fewer blog posts, fewer letters or e-mails, fewer photos, more time tucked in to my room, etc.  Yesterday on the bus ride home I remarked to Dana—as we stared through the giant bus windshield at the welcome rain pelting down on the drought-stricken Campania (Rome is contemplating water rationing starting next week)—that at times like this I just could not believe how much easier a stay-in-one-place program is compared to an always-moving one.  

This is my “free day,” and yet I have 29 in-class journals to mark, a final exam to print and photocopy for tomorrow, a spreadsheet of Saturday departure-groupings to collate, a group-lunch restaurant contact to ping, and of course some laundry to do.  My peculiar way of doing these courses is partly to blame, I know: those blue books are my way of making students engage in the readings every day of class, and in doing so I conduct a slow-motion dialogue with each one.  The blue books also provide me with blank lined paper for the final exam, I should add, as I have almost run out of the 200-sheet block of narrow-ruled A4 that I bought in London and used for the other two essays they wrote—another oddity of mine, that I prefer to have consistent sized paper to staple together when I work my way through a stack of essays—otherwise, one gets everything from tiny 4 x 6  spiral-bound sheets to whatever backs of handouts they happen to have ready to hand, and my borderline OCD tendencies just find that abhorrent.  It’s so odd to look at these things that I do from a distance, with a bemused smile; “it’s worked so far, why change it?” seems acceptable to me, as long as it is not too obnoxious.  Yet at the same time I am acutely conscious that in my journaling I am perfectly willing to snipe at people who are not willing to change their behavior or patterns of reaction / response; I suppose I justify my hypocrisy by judging my own fussiness more harmless or inconsequential…

I have been more transparent about my scheduling than usual, having been burned in the past by students who felt they did not understand how the program was put together.  This week in Rome for example was circumscribed in some strange ways.  We arrived on Friday morning and had a walk-around, interestingly following the exact route of many Grand Tourers, into the city through the Piazza del Popolo, then up to the edge of the Pincian Gardens to get an overview of this city and establish reference points (thank you St Peters and the ever-visible Vittorio Emanuel monument!), then over to the top of the Spanish Steps and down to Spagna, where a bunch of people bailed for lunch and a hardy dozen kept on with me to the Trevi Fountain, the Pantheon, and the Piazza Navona in the baking heat.  I left them there with the orientation of the Piazza showing them how to walk due north and get to Cavour and the the differently-named continuation of their street.  That evening I walked with Dana to the Aventine Hill so she knew the route too, enjoying the keyhole view of St Peters, and then having a dopey dinner on the river at a purportedly Tex Mex place, before following the river home.

Saturday was our day to visit the Forum and Ancient City—Dana and I had checked out the voucher-to-ticket sitch on our way to the Aventine the evening before—and I ended up skipping that attraction since I still had not touched the essays on Versailles that they had turned in before Les Houches, along with the journals they’d written on Shelley’s Vale of Chamouni.  That day was basically just hole up in the air conditioned splendor of this place and work through the piles, trying to conjure the same doggedness I do when I have a big day of work at Inverness or Tahoe.  That right there is an interesting exercise, to treat paper-marking as a professional skill akin to joist-setting or drywall-mudding or redwood-milling or shingling or tree-felling, the same sort of “make little ones out of big ones” attitude or excitement or feeling of anticipation, instead of getting intimidated by the size of the to-do pile.  I had the temptation of watching the Tour de France individual time trial, as well as some women's euro cup soccert, but I rationed myself, and finished the last blue books around midnight.

Sunday was a class day—had to be—and in the evening we took a big gaggle to the Aventine.  But immediately after class—where I turned back their Versailles essays, some with pleasantly surprising marks, others distressing—I offered some more office hours, and ended up with about 5 or 6 people in a sort of tutorial situation just working through some of the basic grammar and terminology and thesis-development stuff that I do in every writing class but which I was gun-shy to do this year because of the experiences in Paris last summer.  Totally different vibe this time—“I feel like a learned more in this past two hours than I have since high school”—which was pretty cool.  I confess I did not mark many blue-books that evening, and Monday was a short class because we had the Vatican tour at 11:30.  In amongst all this I had to field some challenges like the weird smarmy space cadet whose handwriting is terrible AND whose writing itself is so incoherent that I firmly believe he was either drunk when he wrote it, or so sleep deprived that it was impossible to follow.  I didn’t put a grade on it, and told him he had to read it out loud to me.  If my horses run according to form, he won’t.  He’ll find some cockamamie excuse.  This is the kid who texted Dana that “he was running a little late” to Versailles at the time we were supposed to be meeting there, and probably spent a total of a half an hour racing through the palace.  Ironically enough he is slightly older (26?) and has a lamentably exaggerated vision of his own charm and intelligence…  Yet in his bulletproof cluelessness he evaluated his “citizenship” grade (a mixture of punctuality, alertness, attitude, cooperativeness etc) as an A, despite having blown off multiple class events in London and Paris; the one thing you can count on with him is that when you are in ahurry to do something else, he will buttonhole you with some bizarre question or a breathtakingly obvious comment.

After just an hour of class we had Monday’s Vatican tour—arranged almost exactly 60 days before the date, to follow the arcane Vatican Museum website stipulations; I say “almost exactly” because they don’t update the website automatically, and you have this weird three or four days of every-four-hours checking the site to see whether the availability for your day is suddenly posted.  This year it took three days from the start of the official 60, and you get the official voucher to print out, and you have to have a special letterhead / sealed letter of authenticity about your status as a University group, and you have to include a roster of each student and his or her university affiliation to present at the group ticket counter after you bypass the literally blocks-long line snaking along the blistering street.  The tour itself was an adventure as usual, with the Costco style of floor-to-ceiling treasures and IKEA-style salmon-flow.  Our guide, Maria-Theresa, was cut from the same cloth as our wonderful Rosalba in 2015 (in fact they trained together) and mercifully applied just the right blend of erudition and humor to her task.  Of course, after the Sistine Chapel we lost track of many of the group as they went for food instead of continuing to the Basilica the easy way, and for me the absurdity of the whole enterprise brings out the Mark Twain sarcasm about the inconsistencies of Catholicism: these same a-holes enforcing a cover-your-shoulders-this-is-a-holy-place dress code are probably groping or wolf-whistling my students on the Metro after work.  God doesn’t want you to take pictures in the Chapel, although God doesn’t mind selling you photo-postcards in the gift shop just outside.  God really doesn’t want you talking in the chapel, but God doesn’t mind “NO TALKING NO TALKING” at ear-splittingly amplfied volumes booming through the hallowed hall every two minutes.

After walking with one of the students back to St John’s to pick up my backpack, I headed home again to mark journals.  Late in the evening—I took a nap that turned longer than I’d have liked—I attempted to scope out the best route to the Borghese museum which we would visit from 3-5 the next day.  Again this is one of those weird constraints that I shared with students: I want to do the B after the Vatican; the B is closed on Mondays; you can’t do Pompeii-Naples on Tuesday because the museum is closed on Tuesdays; you want to have a free day after Naples-Pompeii to facilitate trips; etc.  So the week falls the way it falls, dictated back in October but with some of the details not really set-able until much later in the organizational cycle.  That late-evening trip turned into an adventure: I had seen a possible bus solution to the Borghese, number 490, but it turns out there are 490s and there are 490s that are expresses.  And even though they go by Lepanto (the stop closest to St Johns) they don’t actually stop at any of the recognizable stops there (I checked).  Now, the buses are the sort of Varsity Team of public transit anywhere, but more so in Rome.  I am stoked to say that I have been much more willing to try them this visit than in past years, but this time I walked to Flaminio and then saw a 490 and hopped it—but it blasted through the night alarmingly non-stop, not announcing “Prossima Fermatas” at all.  As we entered a tunnel I hit the stop button hoping to avoid being taken all the way to the terminus at Tiburtina train station, but unfortunately found myself dumped in the frickin tunnel with everyone looking at me.  Chagrined, I got off and walked my way back up an increasingly narrow sidewalk and over to the park.  Walking home at 11 I realized I had taken a wrong turn in the overcast-dark park and was semi lost.  Fun.  But I survived.

Tuesday’s class I ended up doing quite a lot on Mark Twain’s riff about Italy as reflected in an Italian’s visit to America ("When I was there I was amazed to find that farmers tilled their own land, not some lord's, and they could worship whatever way they wanted, or not at all...), but I also had them do their self-evaluations where they write candidly about their own citizenship grade and also write about the contributions of at least three of their classmates—positive, not snarky.  This is something I’ve done every year since my second SA experience, and it is often incredibly revealing (besides providing me with a peer perspective that I use when a student asks me for a letter of recommendation down the line).  As with all “last things” I feel slightly emotional, even though I did not have them read Johnson’s Idler 103 this year.  During class Dana had scoped what turned out to be an awesomely efficient route to the Borghese using Metro assist to Spagna and then an improbable sequence of escalators and moving-sidewalks that would spit you out in a dusty corner of the park with just one awkward street-crossing before the park-avenue allee to the museum itself.  But before that departure (at 2 PM to ensure that I would be able to negotiate the voucher-to-ticket exchange and arrange for audioguides), I knew that we needed to nail down the arrangements for our Friday farewell lunch, which I hoped to do at the same little osteria on the Via Crescenzia that I had tumbled on in 2015.

As luck would have it, I didn’t really need my little paragraph of Google-Translate-assisted explanation.  She and I walked into the place and before I was two sentences into my spiel the guy Luca came over and recognized me with a huge smile—he was cooking now, not waiting tables, and he immediately agreed to the plan for a nice family style lunch at 13:30 on venerdi for 31 with no alcohol and some vegetarian stuff and so on.  Before all of that, would Dana and I like to eat-a, outside or in, what would we like, we asked him for a recommendation and he said the day's special was a pasta with tuna and olives and we said yes.  It could not have gone better.  We had a beer and this excellent pasta, he came out and we nailed down some details (“For the vegetarian, I can does a veggie burger, with-a potato and-a zucchini, no mit”) and when we asked for our lunch bill he refused “”No you are-a my friend! I see you Friday! You text me when you are coming-a.”  Unbelievable.  So yeah, they will get a nice payday on an otherwise slow afternoon, the students get a big nice meal of food they might never otherwise eat, and they have the evening free before they leave the next day.  I was soooo moved by this experience—the guy is such a sweetie and my cares sort of melted away.  That’s the last hurdle I know, and I won’t relax until they’re all flown Saturday at 10, but that was a load off of my mind.

The Borghese visit was great as always, even with some chaos around getting 30 audioguides (“Why don’t you do a tour, it’s chipper.” “Because tours in museums usually aren’t a great thing for students,” I said to myself).  For me the Borghese is the world’s richest trove of high-quality art in a spectacular yet manageable setting.  I had tried not to over-sell it to my students, but I was gratified to see their jaws drop at the Bernini sculptures or the Caravaggios and Titians.  We also enjoyed a slight cooling trend in the weather, which meant the walk home after our two-hour time slot was even more pleasant.  About the only discordant note in the day was this weird modern “installation” that begins about an hour into the visit: some guy won a competition to place this, and recorded his increasingly loud and excited breathing for three minutes, culminating in a weird sort of scream.  Oh right, this is “transgressive art,” I forgot.  I remarked to a couple of appropriately receptive students that this seemed to be a “Borgheseasm,” which actually I guess it was.  Definitely not my cuppa tea.

That catches me up to yesterday’s Naples-Pompeii expedition.  I had gotten the guide recommendation from Jay and Victor for my trip in 2015, and the bus was arranged by the STA folks in London.  It’s a schlep from Rome, almost a 3 hour ride depending on traffic and whether we stopped for a pee break (we did, since as usual the bus WC was non-functional), and there was some conflict toward the end as the driver was reaching the end of his allotted time.  I hope he was mollified by a nice tip.  But we got to Pompeii and found the ever-cheerful Carmine by the entrance, and then after at least a 15 minute wait for more peeing, we did our highlight-tour.  The guy is just plain skilled: easygoing but efficient, funny without being stupid, well-informed without ever being pedantic.  About 2/3 of the way through I made an executive decision to skip the long wait (in the sun) for the House of Pleasure, having been promised that we would see the illustrations in the Secret Cabinet in the course of our afternoon visit in Naples.  We saw stuff that I remembered, and stuff that I hadn’t seen before (some under restoration two years ago, I learned), and my group asked good questions and paid attention (not always a given).  With clouds looming to the southeast and some cool breeze, this was a much less furnace-like experience than my previous one, and we finished around 1:30.

Then it was back on the bus and into the cauldron of Naples downtown, which Ulisse our driver negotiated in pretty good form (he said he hadn’t received the full itinerary with the Naples leg, but indeed I texted the lady in London from the bus and she called the company to confirm).  This traffic is truly the bridge to third-world chaos.  As Carmine said, “In Naples there are one million people, two million cars, and three million scooters.  Lanes are only suggestions, and the most important item for the driver is the horn.”  Miraculously we found a legal spot to be dropped outside the pizzeria Carmine knows, where all but the lactose-intolerant enjoyed their enormous pizza margherita delivered four at a time from the oven out front.  It was nice to sit with Carmine, who just turned 50 but also just became a dad (watching his face light up as he talked about 7-month-old Luigi was a highlight of the trip for me).  

Then it was up to the Museum, walking through the improbably narrow streets of the old city, negotiating the ticket office easily, and enjoying this tour of the artifacts of ancient cities looted by the old King of Naples and others.  I loved the way Carmine hooked the students by talking about mosaics and level-of-detail / expense in terms of pixels and resolution!  I saw that he started with monochrome simple ones and blew their minds with the incredibly detailed almost-three-dimensional multi-colored ones later on.  As promised, he also showed us the Secret Cabinet, with a somewhat abashed smile (“If you were illiterate, or did not speak the local dialect, you could still order what you wanted by pointing to the picture of it, just like McDonalds”), but the students took it in stride, with one of them remarking as she exited past the Priapus statue, “Consult a doctor if you experience erections lasting more than 2000 years,” which I thought was pretty funny at the time.  Maybe we are all getting punchy.

By the time we finished up (and unfortunately the top gallery with the plaster casts and some other stuff I wanted to see was closed in the afternoon—Carmine shrugged and said, “they never actually tell you”), the bus driver was having a slight conniption, but we got the Naples-stayers’ gear off the bus and the other students on the bus in record time, and commenced our drive back to Rome through the intermittent rain, after a heartfelt round of applause for Carmine.  As usual, most of the students zonked out instead of watching the changing countryside, but I confess to dozing off for a 20 myself so I can’t complain too much.

That brings me basically up to date.  As I did last year, I find myself simultaneously wishing I could spend more time in Rome, and being very ready to get back home.  I have blue books to mark, a restaurant to ping, and some airport-shuttle groupings to communicate, but as I walked around this morning I couldn’t help feeling the incredible energy of this city and its people.  I don’t know what it is.  I can juuust feel the radio signal of Italian comprehension starting to tune in, with phrases (sometimes nonsense ones that just capture the rhythm) popping through my consciousness as I think about putting my foot tentatively into the rushing stream of syllables flowing by.  As in other aspects of this trip, I hold back a little, knowing I need to conserve my energy, but I am also conscious that I am on the edge of something powerful.  

What is it? I don’t know.  I have no idea whether this is truly my last round-up, Summer-Abroad-wise.  As I did when I talked Legal Writing with a small group of students at dinner in Les Houches, or talked grammar / terminology with a different group of students here last week, there’s a part of me that is reluctant to admit that I am completely hanging up my uniform for good.  I can see why aging athletes don’t know when to quit.  There’s no one really kicking me out the door, and yet, I know I cannot face the prospect of more day-in day-out drudgery of paper marking and ego-massaging and duckling-wrangling.  And when I contemplate another round of bureaucratic hassles and Summer Abroad hoop-jumping, part of me just says the hell with it, it’s not worth it.  And yet.  Maybe there is a combination of language course and cooking course I could get into.  Am I, like Jhumpa Lahiri, mesmerized enough with Italian to make the commitment to learn it?  I have no idea.  Most obviously, can I go through another period of uncertainty on the family front while still trying to do this? I doubt it.

OK, time to get back to the ostensible reason for my being here…

Chamonix - Les Houches, for the fourth time

This is just a placeholder post to keep the order semi right.  I need to comment on some blue books before I back-fill after my massive catch-up entry from Roma....

Mind the Gap (between posts)--almost done with Paris

Looking back on previous years' work in the Peregrinator I marvel that I was so dedicated about regular updates.  What the heck was I thinking?  Am I really getting that old and decrepit?  Probably.  Perhaps I am doing what the ballplayers do--grinding it out (although in the past tense they often comically say, "we just grinded and grinded," which I love)--but the more likely explanation is that there are enough other distractions in my life that an hour every couple of days on the blog seems like more than I can afford.  I guess it's oxymoronic (or just moronic) to say that I am working hard to conserve my energy, but I have found myself frequently just tucking back in and returning to my digs or being alone instead of opting for more socializing or touristing.

After the Oxford trip we had a weekend, yes, but a lot of that was spent either marking the papers or procrastinating about marking papers.  I found it well-nigh impossible to work much in my airlessness even when the temperature at ground level was low, so I was off in cafes much of the time.  A highlight was matching up with New Zealand nephew Kieran and his girlfriend Michelle for lunch at a Filipino place in the Fitzrovia section, near SoHo not far from the dorm.

We left London on a Monday morning, having had a meeting downstairs the night before where Dana and I impressed upon the ducklings that we were now embarking on the hard part of the trip, in so many respects.  As usual, David Sedaris' wonderful Picka Pocketoni provides a perfect humorous introduction to Paris Metro etiquette ("We are not going to be those American tourists, people...") but also had to get serious about catcalls, feel-ups and general safety.  It's sort of a military operation moving 31 people out of one place (turning in keys and transport cards) and getting them to the train station (12 minute roll for me, but not at Student Pace--even though if they took the Tube they would walk farther with more stairs for the one stop) and assembled outside the enormous Eurostar line to receive their tickets and pass through.  We didn't tried to do it all in one go, but instead stationed me back at the dorm and Dana at St Pancras, both of us counting ducklings and checking off lists.  As expected, one of them breezed in late for the evening meeting--and then asked stupid questions later.

The transfer from Gare du Nord onto the RER B and down to Luxembourg was straightforward enough, and it only took, oh, two hours to get them settled into their digs at the Maison des Mines dormitory on a narrow neck of the rue St Jacques.  Much of the management is different from last time (this is a good thing: last year Victor's group encountered ghastliness and bailed to a hotel, thus ruining the budget) so the rooms were (mostly) clean (one room had a spectacular ceiling full of black mold, but there was a spare)--but some of the night staff are a bit too much modeling their behavior after Chadian prison-guard for my taste (yesterday evening I had to muster my best Clint voice and say, "No, you have to let me finish.  There is no need to be impolite with these two students about making sure the door is latched, just because some other students screwed up.  They didn't even come through this door!") but this may be the last time we use this residence, even if it is cheap and close in.

Part of the problem is the way this year's calendar fell: arrive on a Monday and do a walkaround after everyone is settled; Tuesday class but then look at the weather, gonna rain so we move the Versailles trip to Thursday.  Do the Seine boat ride on Tuesday evening, with picnic in the parklet below the Pont Neuf.  

But the Americans in Paris people don't get back to me in time for me to get tickets for them.  So we do it anyway.  Cloudy but not rainy.  Wednesday class and track down Versailles stuff, can't do Versailles on B-Day of course so it goes on the Thursday BUT there's a complication with the supplementaire RER C tickets that get us the last few stops out to the Chateau station.  Typical French bullshit they want you to get off in Vivoflay (limit of central passes) and then re-enter with the supplements (thereby forcing you to wait for the next train).  But it turns out that Versailles station has given up taking tickets and just have open turnstiles with signs saying "Welcome," so when I went out at the crack of dawn to check the system I had to wrestle with the question, "Do I try to tell them to blow off the intermediary stop?"

All this because I absolutely hate the idea of doing the follow-the-umbrella style Guided Tour With Bus Driver style of excursion that I paid for in 2009 and 10.  I did, however, enjoy several delicious croissants while I waited for it to get more reasonable to hie myself to the Chateau, and then immediately realized that I hadn't been Absolutely Clear Enough that I actually meant for them to get out of the dorm in time to be there at the line as close to 9 as possible.  We had a nice enough visit but I spent most of the morning in the inner courtyard as people dribbled in, and I joined them for the Trianons and the gardens and the Hameau....    All this also meant that I couldn't have an actual class after Versailles, which is when I usually do my essay on it, so this time I did an honor-system take-home version, due Saturday evening (giving them a couple of days to allocate two hours in amongst the distractions of Bastille Day yesterday and Eurodisney (for a surprising number) today.

 So.  It has been a circus, not too bizarre but I was ready for an easy day in Paris.  I spent far too much of the morning wrestling with Summer Abroad administrivia, including some accounting stuff with the AggieTravel portal (don’t get me started on the saga involved in securing my travel advance this time) as well as a strange whack-a-mole game I need to play to actually get paid ("Turns out that retirees teaching in summer need to fill out and submit this UBEN 596 form and return it to Benefits as soon as possible.  The Benefits Office has moved, here is the link"--but no e-mail address, and of course the online form doesn't accept my signature, so I end up printing the form, taking a picture, porting that into a document and saving as a pdf, before discovering that there really IS no place indicated to submit electronically.  And of course SA personnel are...traveling or out for the weekend or both).  Got a similar nag from The System about needing to submit a receipt from Wells Fargo for the (accursed) cash advance, and of course that also took a half hour.
We have lucked out with the weather in Paris this year.  We missed the big chaleur of the week before--which culminated in Biblical rains that turned Metro station steps into impressive cascades--and we have had not too warm not too cool conditions.  I am hoping against hope that I don’t have any more blips (yesterday evening I spent an hour and a half of quality time helping to fill out a police report for one of my students whose room was entered (probably while she slept) and 150 euros cash lifted from the money-carrier she’d left on her desk underneath.  Her roommate’s wallet was taken but because it didn’t have any cash it was left over a chair in the hallway—with credit cards still there.  Aiee.  That episode in the 5eme police station down at Maubert Mabillon filled me with a teensy bit of apprehension as I realized that the dude's English was nonexistent AND that if I have to run interference with a similarly monoglot cop in Roma I (and we) will be in deep doo-doo, as my Italian is nowhere near my guerilla French, such as it is.

Personality wise this group is pretty OK but it is only halfway through, and I am loath to predict (since faithful Peregrinators know that I have been burned badly thinking things were good, and then learned that there were seething undercurrents in the reality-TV stew—sorority versus independent, in-group versus perceived out-group, or even lone-wolf weirdness that becomes toxic to the group as a whole.  We don’t have the couple-isolation of 2015, where two folks isolated in their connubial / infatuative bliss, but we have a guy who thinks of himself as worthy of special treatment (“I hate Wicked.  I can skip it and go out with this Danish woman I met last week, right?” or “I’m running a bit late getting to Versailles" [sent at 11 AM when the rendezvous was supposed to be “as close to 10 AM at the audioguides as you can”—he didn’t leave until 11! and then got lost! and then asked Dana, “Will I have my grade docked because I got lost?”  Unreal. And yeah, he was the guy who was late to the pre-Paris meeting too.  I suspect that he voted against Hillary.]
Speaking of competent women, Dana is high-energy and competent.  I hear that my OSC from 2015 forewarned her about my penchant for Paleozoic technology—my laptop is new but my iPhone 4S seems to have a weird problem sending texts to French cell phones under my AT&T international plan—no problem with UK or UC cells, I can receive texts, and I can even voice call French cells, but no texts; one of my plans for today, a tranquil post Bastille Day, is to call the 24 hour help line and see if I can discover whether this is some bizarre forced upgrade situation.  The AT&T equivalent of the French shrug that says, “Yes this eez a problem, m’sieur, but it is, alas, your problem.”

We have worked together pretty effectively, and I realized early in the Paris stay that I had forgotten to tell her that I really did appreciate all she was doing!  At least tonight I will be able (I think) to enjoy a nice dinner with Victor and Michelle and Raquel.  If nothing goes wrong.  Then it's Game On, hoping that I can prepare for the next transfer, the bus trip to Les Houches on Monday (having spent an hour in e-mails with the manager of the hotel, informing him of menu restrictions and miscellaneous other questions)

And in honor of Mr Trump, here's the best argument possible for a strong European Union and not a return to "My Country First" bullshit:

The amazing thing is, the number of same-names... families wiped out.  Now I will head over and pick up some papers.

Oxford, version 5

I'm about to go downstairs to the basement lounge and conduct my pre-Paris briefing, having once again walked the route from this University of London dorm to St Pancras International in advance of our Eurostar departure tomorrow, trying to leave nothing to chance: what if there is road construction, what if the route isn't exactly as I remember it, etc.  But I want to seize the moment and update the blog even briefly, since I can't get psyched to mark more of the in-class essays they wrote on Thursday.

It was a little disconcerting to have every student show up at the suggested-but-not-required time to walk with me to the Russell Square tube station and head to Marble Arch for the bus to Oxford. Usually we are in at least two clumps, but evidently a fair number of them hadn't bothered to bring the handout I'd made, and were counting on following the crowd. So the poor driver had to sit there and deal with a bunch of £20s making £6 change for every student day return (and for my Senior day return, says the newly minted sexagenarian). But we got underway eventually, blasted up the M40-A40 and into the City of Spires. I have to say the Oriel experience was less wonderful than it was the first couple of years--I'm not sure why but the librarian doesn't seem keen on letting a group of reverent American undergraduates into the Senior Library... But as it turned out, we were shown into Hall ("A miniature version of Hogwarts' dining hall, one said again--and I pointed out that Christ Church, aka Slytherin, was the place where they filmed some of the banquet scenes, aided by CGI magic) and then into the Chapel, where again I think they were slightly blown away by the idea of so many centuries of continuous worship in the same location. Oriel is attempting to fund-raise for its Campaign 2026 target, celebrating 700 years of incorporation as an institution of higher learning (well, let's not get too technical about the distinction between drinking clubs and medieval halls back in the day). I decided not to try to lead this group in a round (I'd been able to persuade my 2015 cohort to have a bash at Jubilate Deo just for fun) but I did do my extremely idiosyncratic whistling demonstration that was such a sensation two years ago. It's pretty amazing acoustics in there.

Then it was time for a bit of lunch after some quick walking around (showing them where I lived my first year, with the window that received beer mugs flung from yobbos carousing at the Bear Inn a few doors down), and then a 28-duckling walk up through colleges and the University Parks to the leafy suburb of North Oxford and the Cherwell Boathouse (we were 28 and not 29 because a student was sick with some sort of flu back at the ranch).

This group had a bit more trouble than some previous ones, I'm not sure, and I actually switched boats at least three times to rescue people from willows and demonstrate, up close and personal, that I really did mean it when I said, "Stand well back in the stern, propel the boat with the pole close to the side of the boat, and then leave it all in the water, off the very back, and steer straight before trying to pole again."  These are the magic words I guess, and I have to be actually in the boat for them to be heard.  This person had a terrible time at first (on the way upriver) and then got the hang of it on the way down: "I do so much better after you teach me.  Thank you Professor."  We had sun on the way up, overcast on the way back, meaning less sunburn.  Everyone seemed to enjoy their pint of shandy (most of them followed my lead) at the Victoria Arms just below Marston, and many were suitably effusive in praising this unusual way to spend a day.  I think after the amped-up pace of London, Oxford is just the antidote, and punting caps that aspect.  There was, alas, one "incident" where a boat moved right into the path of another of our boats and got T-boned, sending the pole-er into the drink.  Problem was, there was laughter before the compassion, and the whole thing could have been prevented if someone had fended off.  But the swimmer ironically enough had a friend studying for the summer in Oxford and was able to borrow dry clothes within an hour.  No harm no foul I hope, though I will raise this issue at the briefing in a few minutes.

I want to finish this entry by mentioning that before I left I made my ritual pilgrimage to the All Souls' gate adjacent to the Radcliffe Camera, the reading room I spent so many hours pinned to case-hardened oak chairs.  It was here, back in the summer of 1978 when I was visiting with a long-ago girlfriend before I started my Semester Abroad program, that I had a late-evening epiphany, quite momentous really, when I just felt this overwhelming sense that I wanted to study here, I would tap into this ridiculously powerful tradition of learning, and would do actual graduate study here.  Very few times in my life I can point to as truly life-changing in that way.

There you go.

Some worthwhile stuff going on, I think

Pretty interesting to be plowing my way through this iteration of the GT, worried that I'm forgetting something but basically having some of the routines down. Then something weird comes up as it always does. I'm writing this on the eve of our Oxford field trip, after having successfully crammed in their first-week writing exercise in class, our Globe Theater expedition to see a wackily musical modern-dress postracial genderbending performance of Twelfth Night, and a walk back to the St Pauls tube station.  The weather has heated up, and my room is again a furnace despite my re-installation of cardboard wedges propping open various doors.  It's right at the edge of what I can stand, actually, but I'll just keep taking showers and hoping for a break.

Thought I'd thrown in a couple of funny shots from the past few days.  For some reason the sight of a £300,000 Ferrari in downtown London just epitomizes the craziness of this megalopolis.  Is there a stupider way to spend (and risk) your money?  Dunno.  Of course one of things that I'm noticing around here is that, along with the cigarette smoke that still clings to the gargoyles who hang around just outside buildings, and the clouds emanating from the vape-ers as they ply their trade, there's enough dope being smoked in the nearby parks, mostly by construction workers on their breaks, that you can get a contact high just by walking through Brunswick Square between our dorm and the classroom at the School of Pharmacy.  One wonders what impact this has on the productivity of this cohort of workers...

For some reason I was stoked to see how game these kids were with navigating the Tube on their second day here--this was on Monday after we went to see Wicked, the show tickets arranged for us by our London vendor.  This shot is blurred because I was walking backward, but it somehow captures some good energy.

Dana-the-onsite-coordinator took this one yesterday I think--they are taking responsibility for arranging their own outings, and they are apparently honoring my exhortation to avoid letting cliques or in-group-out-group distinctions poison the collective vibe.

The production at the Globe was a great example of good attitude: I hadn't experienced being a groundling in a long time, but since I hadn't been able to splurge on seats for everyone, I had to count on a handful of folks being willing to join me in the courtyard.  It was wonderful to be so close to the actors, the music was a trip, and even with some loss of subtlety on the wordplay aspect...  The students that I talked to were blown away and surprised at how much fun they had at a Shakespeare play--let's hope the trip to Oxford goes as well.

They've all arrived, and we're off

In an hour and a half I will go downstairs and gather people up for their "Welcome dinner" a few blocks away at a none-too-fancy eatery, figuring that spending a ton of money on a nice dinner in London is a waste, especially for a bunch of jet-lagged students who have been staggering around on the "Hop-On-Hop-Off" Bus as much of the day as they could stand.  For me that was about four hours' worth: a remarkable percentage took me up on my "Meet me at 9 AM for a 9:15 departure, meet Dana at 10" offer, and we enjoyed a picture-perfect sunny-but-not-too-hot morning on the top deck, eventually ending up on the included Thames cruise from Westminster Pier down to Tower Bridge just after midday.  In between, some unthinkably crowded conditions around Buckingham Palace, where roads are blocked off (presumably to protect crowds from attacks) and the police presence is extremely high.

Yesterday was largely devoted to checking students in all afternoon, taking the load off the front hall staff here and repeating our spiel about not losing the door key or the turnstile key, not losing the Oyster Card (for the Tube and buses), and comporting themselves in a non-obnoxious manner.  They were supposed to be arriving between 2 and 5, but we had a bunch of students waiting to check in by 1:30 (thankfully our block of rooms was ready), several students pinging us by text with stories of lost luggage and delayed flights in Newark and Shannon, and fairly manageable chaos.  However, by the time we finished the short On-Site Orientation downstairs in the early evening, all but one--a fellow flying in from Sydney who had warned us a month ago that his exam schedule had been changed--had safely arrived.

Meeting all these students and trying to learn names is always a challenge for me, and I know it tires me out.  As usual some names come easily and I associate the faces immediately; alas, there are always a few for whom I have to resort to guessing or finesse to avoid busting myself admitting I don't know them.  Hard to get a read on the group.  There are some loud kids, but they are fairly nice so far.  There's a couple of the keep-an-eye-on-this-one variety, including a frat boy (probably econ or poli sci major, a type I know well from all my years teaching writing for future / wannabe lawyers) who has a strange oily demeanor that mixes a little too much praise than is comfortable.  The gender balance, as usual, skews to daughters, whose parents don't want to send their children off to Europe unsupervised, to the tune of 23 to 6.  I've already made an effort to continue my strategy of hopping determinedly from group to group, not only to avoid the appearance of having "teacher's pets" but also simply to try to get to know as many people as I can.  There are some thoughtful kids here, though who knows what lurks for me.

Tomorrow is our first class session, at 10 (I am experimenting with starting a bit later, since apparently the London weather forecast is for not too hot weather, meaning a later start is probably OK), and in the evening we will head down to Victoria and take in Wicked, the live-theater piece of our London vendor's offering (these tickets, along with the bus tickets, were some of the items passed along to me in St Pancras on Thursday afternoon post-Eurostar).  One of the tasks I have to execute between now and then is to compile an updated first week plan, as the pieces seem to have fallen into place (Tuesday, British Museum in the afternoon; Thursday, Globe theater Twelfth Night in the afternoon; Friday, Oxford excursion; weekend, open until a Sunday evening orientation before the Paris leg begins with a Eurostar trip).

The reality of this job is a strange mix of anxiety and pre-planning, and relief when a transition or an outing goes well.  Yes, I am already trying to sort out exactly which evening to try to slot in our fancier dinner in Paris: it can't be too close to Bastille Day (which is a Friday), but if it's the same day as the Versailles field trip, I dunno.  Might not be a good idea to put it the night before Versailles (though there won't be any of wine paid for by Uncle Charles, they may elect to cap the night with more lubricated pursuits as in past years, since they are dressed up for it), and the restaurants aren't super happy to accommodate a huge group on the weekend.

Realizing I haven't included any pictures yet.  I decided not to carry my camera, so everything is iPhone this year.  Yesterday morning I snapped a couple of shots that show some of the peculiar character of this place:

 This is the view out through the conservatory from the dining room in the basement.  Wonderful fresh air actually--but in good British style note the signage everywhere: No Smoking (that's a plus) but also the smaller signs all read, "Strictly No Food Allowed In The Courtyard Thank You."  Let's call those un-picnic tables....

And just to give a nice sense of the monkish digs:

Grand Tour 2017 Begins

Looking back I don't see any entries from my wonderful experience doing the Grand Tour two years ago.  Not exactly clear why I feel motivated to re-start the blog this year, but here goes.

I'm ensconced in a micro-"studio" up on the top floor of the International Hall residence-annex at  University College, London, having EuroStar'd under the Channel from Brussels, where I'd gotten over my jet lag with my brother Julius.  Though the time is nearly 10PM the sky is still light--no matter how many times I experience this strange phenomenon of far-Northern life, it still takes me by surprise. There's an ever-present hum emanating from my tiny bathroom, because the exhaust fan is on constantly--supposedly to guard against condensation--and I have already done some prospecting with my Swiss Army knife phillips-head for ways to disable it temporarily, as even with the door closed it is almost as loud as the jets passing in the distance.

I put "studio" in quotation marks because there is a galley-style kitchen along one wall, but there is no cutlery, no nothing anywhere, and the tiny fridge was off when I got here.  If the heatwave of last week had not broken, I probably would be slitting my wrists right now, because I'm sure the place was a sauna; the weather is cool now and for the foreseeable future, but if it warms up I'll probably ditch the fridge because of the heat it throws out.  Compounding the problem of southern exposure is the lack of air circulation: in the wake of the Grenfell Towers inferno, propping doors open is frowned upon, but according to a longer-term resident, the powers downstairs (like Norby the Hungarian chap who remembered me from two years back) have relented rather than face a revolution...  I've placed the (single) bed against the wall instead of where it was, dominating the entire room, so now at least there is a feeling of more space (e.g. for stretching or push-ups), and I suppose it's my way of making the place more "mine."

My students arrive on Saturday afternoon, and I have some logistical details to work out before then, even as I have already arranged most things (or verified that my Davis program coordinator arranged them).  It's a big group--29, plus an onsite coordinator--and I have only the slightest clue what sort of group it will turn out to be: I have met about half of them at info sessions and at the pre-departure orientation in May, but as I know from skinned-knuckle experiences, there is no foretelling whether there will be psychos or troublemakers or drama addicts who will spoil the entire experience.  One of my chores is to make some notes for my on-site orientation, in hopes of instilling a sense of cameraderie or discouraging the toxic back-channel talking that ruined several of my SA teaching experiences in the past.

That right there is a source of anxiety, as this year with all the stuff that has been happening back home, I feel as if I have less of a good-energy reserve to tap into, compared to past years where things were more stable on the homefront.  Some of these things were family related, some were just screw-ups and hoop-jumpings that emerged in the run-up to my departure.  If stress is like allergies, I had had a whole series of insults, and the threshold for resistance to future ones is thereby diminished.

That said, I enjoyed my leisurely mosey down from St Pancras International, where the Eurostar dumps you, not quite remembering the right combination of streets but not really caring, as I had no schedule and the weather was neither oppressively hot nor uncomfortably cold.  After dropping my stuff (and verifying that the exhaust fan was indeed supposed to run constantly, and was not defective) I elected to walk unencumbered over to the British Museum just because I could--no entrance fee, only a cursory weapons check to get in an hour and a half before closing.  Might as well practice what I preach to my students--that getting a little lost is fine, and that going into a museum and watching people / aimlessly wandering around is a great way to pass some time, an insightful alternative to the ultra-determined blasts through museums that so many tourists indulge...