Walking Towards Hel and Experiencing the Heat

Had a great day in Gdansk today. We started at 7 AM and left for the 2.5 hour drive from Olsztyn to Gdansk. When we got here, we parked the car at the Mercure Hotel, a large, fancy hotel in the center of town. We checked in and were surprised to find no air conditioning in the room. Praveen and I were set to share a room here and walked in to the room on the 13^th floor and found it quite hot. I asked our hosts whether we could get an air conditioned room, even if it cost more and he apologized profusely and called the front desk. The word came back that there were no air conditioned rooms in this hotel at all. I find this quite amazing. I mean, this is a classy, high-rise hotel with a luxurious lobby – and there are no air conditioned rooms in the hotel? Maybe I’m too focused on this right now because it is 11:30 PM and we just returned to our rooms. Today was a very hot day and the room is almost cooking. There’s no fan and no air conditioning and I’m dreading the night as I know I’ll get little sleep. SO bear with me while I get this frustration off my chest. It must be well over 80 degrees in the room now and I’m supposed to sleep?

Anyway, other than this, today was a fun day. We started by heading to the Vistula river and catching a boat to the Westerplatte. On the way, we stopped at a bar for a cold beer. It seems that no one here drinks water (they don’t even serve water with dinner – you have to specifically ask for it) but will find any excuse to stop for a beer. This time, it was an Okcim. We hopped on the boat and headed to the Weterplatte which is the place that is considered to be where World War II officially started. A German ship parked off the coast on a visiting excursion in Septmber 1939 suddenly opened firs on the Polish garrison at Westerplatte and began their invasion of Poland, starting WWII. There is a huge stone monument here to those that died on that day and those who died in the war. The day was warm and getting warmer by the minute. On the way to Westerplatte, we stopped by the beach on the Baltic sea and spent some time enjoying the sea breezes. This area is very famous for its amber and according to Radek (one of our hosts who is from this area and served as our guide for the day) you can even pick up small bits of amber on the beach as it gets washed ashore. So, we scoured the beach and picked up several little bits of amber. It was a lot of fun and apparently a common pastime on the beach. I heard the kids love to play along the beach and find pieces of amber.

At about 2:30 PM, we headed back to Gdansk and walked around the old town area. This area is really beautiful and all the homes that were destroyed during the war have been restored to their original glory based on photographs. So, it has the beautiful cobbled streets and spectacular frontage of the original homes. We ate lunch at a beautiful restaurant inside the Old Town Hall (washing it down with more beer) and then spent a few hours just walking around the town. It really was a great experience. As usual, it is so incredible to walk into a church and see an original astronomical calendar created be one Danzinger in 1442. Many of the buildings are just as old. Some of the original cornerstones for the homes bear dates from the 1700s. Quite an experience!

We then decided to take the local train to another beautiful town, Sopot. Gdansk (also referred to as Danzig by the Germans), Sopot and Gdaniya are close together and known as the tri-cities. They are all on the Baltic sea and all have long histories. Sopot is also the site of the longest sea promenade in Europe, and so we walked around that area breathing in the sea breezes. In the evening, we stopped at a bar and drank some more (I had a “Green Sugar” which consisted of Niemeroff Vodka and a bunch of other liquers and was quite delicious). I mean, yes, I’m drinking and eating a lot, but when in Poland …

Across the bay from Sopot is a spit of land that extends out to the sea and ends in the Polish city of Hel. A constant joke we kept up during the day was “Oh no! We’re getting closer to Hel,” or “Looks like we’re headed to Hel.” Doesn’t sound so funny now, but it somehow got a laugh from the group every time the tired joke was used again.

Also, just like I noticed on my last trip to Europe, people here view distances quite differently from us. It is amazing for me to realize how spoiled we are. Frequently during the day, our hosts would say something to the effect “It is very close to here – only 20 to 25 minute walk.” Truly, we walked EVERYWHERE today and these 20-30 minute walking distance is considered to be very close. Essentially, we left the hotel at about 10:15 AM and just got back after 11 PM. We were on our feet walking somewhere almost all day. I’d say we did about 8-10 hours of walking in the sun today. And none of these guys considered it even slightly odd. Everyone walks to places here. If we just started considering a 20-minute walk “just very near” like these folks seem to do quite naturally, I think half of our obesity issues in the country would disappear. Of course, people are noticeably slim here – very few overweight people.

Well, I better get to bed. We have an early morning tomorrow – we plan to hit the road by 7 AM and are meeting in the lobby (all packed and ready) at 6:20 AM. I genuinely don’t know how I’m going to sleep in this oppressive heat tonight, but that’s all part of the fun experience.

Pork, Fish, Beer, and Vodka

Had a relatively busy day today, filled with meetings at the University of Warmia & Mazury. The campus is vast and beautiful. The University is relatively young (with a history stretching back to only a hundred years or so). We met with the Associate Dean and with a group of faculty.

Highlights were lunch, where I had Carpacio Pork (very thinly sliced raw pork) and a breaded pork fillet (another Polish specialty) and beer. For dinner we started with Zyviewc beer (pronounced Zhi-vee-yets), Chlodnik (a cold, yogurt-based "soup" with beets and other vegetables) and sauteed pike-perch with wild forest mushrooms and deep fried potato cakes (another local dish). This was chased down with Zubrowka - Polish bison grass vodka. The vodka is very flavorful and has this relatively strong flavor it gets from a particularly tough, scented grass that the bison feed on. Dinner was at this beautiful restaurant (Prgystan) on a lake.

Again the weather was beautiful with a slight breeze and neither warm nor cool temperatures. I would guess, in the low to mid 70s.

Welcome to Poland!

So, my colleague and I got to Olsztyn, Poland this afternoon after a long flight from Minneapolis to Amsterdam (7.5 hours) and a considerably shorter flight from Amsterdam to Warsaw (less than 2 hours) followed by a 3-hour car ride from Warsaw to Olsztyn. While I made the trip fine, my colleague's bags never even made it to Warsaw. Hopefully, it's somewhere in Poland.

Olsztyn is in northern Poland and is the capital of the Warmian region. Warmia is where Copernicus lived and expounded his theory of a heliocentric astronomical universe. What I find fascinating every time I visit Europe is its living history. Most of us consider Copernicus to be old and waaay in the past. However, it gives me pause to think that Copernicus lived here in the 1500s. He published his theories on the earth revolving around the sun in 1543. Yet, in the town on Olsztyn, you can still see the castle that was built in the 1350s. Also still standing is the Cathedral of St. James which was built between 1380 and 1445. Now think of this. When Copernicus hung around here, these structures were already almost two hundred years old. I can just about imagine a young Copernicus showing visitors around the town explaining about these ancient castles (over a hundred years old!) in his neighborhood. Here we are, an additional 400 years later (more actually), still able to walk through these buildings and marvel at their construction.

That's what I love about history - it's entertaining to imagine people living and seeing these same structures five hundred or more years before me. It is even more fascinating to me to imagine people three hundred years ago pointing to these same "ancient" structures and wondering about the people who lived there two hundred years before them.

This is the sort of sense of insignificance it is hard to get in America. It is so strange to think of how incredibly young our land is. I mean, by the time we had out first settlement in the continental US, Copernicus had been dead for over a hundred years. And we're talking about the first permanent European settlement in the USA!

Had delicious pork cutlets for dinner. The weather here today is just astoundingly beautiful. The sn was shining, but it wasn't hot. We went for a walk in the afternoon and there was a strong breeze blowing that wasn't at all cold, but wasn't warm either. Both my colleague and I commented about how strangely perfect the weather is - not hot and not cold. Let's hope it stays this way.

My room at the Novotel is typical European style. While it is fairly large and not as cramped as these hotels usually are, there is no air conditioning and no fan. So, I know I'm going to find it difficult to sleep. How spoiled we are - I groaned and complained about the lack of air conditioning until I finally realized it wasn't going to do any good. I asked the front desk for a fan and they said they didn't have one. It is now 11 PM and it still isn't as cool as I'd like it to be.

Too Much Talk On The Lot

I was actually looking forward to the TV show On The Lot. I imagined it would be another shot at a great TV show concept like Project Greenlight. That was an absolutely outstanding show that HBO really shouldn't have killed.

But then again, maybe I enjoy watching shows on film making more than the average joe.

But it is so ironic that a show about good film making has such terrible pacing and awful storytelling. The show seems focused on talk, talk, and more talk. The attempts at building "tension" are old hat and a poor copy of Survivor, Apprentice, and American Idol. It's as if the producers of this show assumed that no one would watch more than one episode.

The relatively annoying host of the show keeps recapping what the show is about over and over and over again (and then over again after that). It is like they assume that anyone watching the show at any point has just walked in and has no idea what the show is about. Or, that the target audience is a group of amnesiacs or have serious short-term memory problems like the guy in Memento. She recaps the purpose of the show, the bios of the directors, the films that they shot, the reactions of the judges, and everything else in between. The amount of new content in each episode is laughably small and you really have to be dedicated or a heck of an optimist to tune in to the show again.

Lack of originality, poor scripting, boring writing, failure to use innovative visuals. While this sounds like the judges comments, it is what I would say about the show. Perhaps it's time the judges critiqued the filming and pacing of this show for one episode.

Another great opportunity to make a great show about film making lost. The brilliant Hollywood types are going to assume that it is the genre that cannot succeed instead of blaming the production values of this show.

Sad.

And why don't we just give the award to Zach Lipovsky now and get it over with?

Voglio Parlare Italiano

I'm fascinated by how we learn things. What is the best way to learn something? I am currently working on a project with a publisher on using video games to help students at the college-level learn.

But, beyond the game-based learning, I am intrigued by how all the different ways of presenting information can help or hinder learning. Given my upcoming trip to Italy next month, I decided to borrow some "Learn Italian" CDs from the public library. They all take completely different approaches to teaching the language.

The first one essentially presented a series of conversations in Italian. You listen to it and are completely lost. Then, they break down the conversations and explain the key words and phrases in the conversation. Finally, they play the conversation again. This time, you can pick up the gist fo what they're saying and it leads to a gratifying feeling of achievement and actually having gained something.

The second one presented the grammar and structure of the Italian language and tried to teach the language by explaining how sentences are constructed in Italian. This clarified some of the phrases that didn't make sense in the first set of CDs.

The third one essentially is a passive approach to learning. The instructor on the CD explicitly tells you to learn by listening and not to make any effort at learning the language. Very interesting approach. The CDs are essentially like a live taping of him teaching two students the language by starting with small phrases and then building it up and expecting the students to then use what they've learned to speak out loud.

All three approaches have strengths and weaknesses and I'm intrigued to see if there is some combination that is particularly magical. I think the method needed to understand the language may be different than the one needed to speak the language.

All very interesting and thought-provoking in the context of how I teach my college students.

Thai Food

Went out for Thai food (again). Is there any cuisine in the world that is so consistently outstanding as Thai food? I don't think so.

You can go to Thai restaurants anywhere and order almost anything and leave quite satisfied. As a broad judgment of styles of cuisine (beyond preferences for any single dish), I think Thai food is more consistently tasty and flavorful than any other cuisine.

Mmmm ... and you can get it as spicy as you want!

Dinner at a Japanese sushi place also reinforced the fact that you have to be able to suspend preconceptions in order to enjoy international foods. While I am not too much of a seafood eater, I decided to go with my hosts to a Japanese restaurant they were raving about. They ordered barbecued eel, "dynamite scallops" and a host of other dishes I probably would not have ordered on my own. Wow, this stuff was absolutely delicious. I think half of our food preferences are formed before we even take a bite. Make a conscious effort to avoid pre-judging and you are more likely to end up with a delicious meal. Who would ever have thought eel could taste this good?

Academics & The Real World

I am in Boulder today and tomorrow. I had an interesting conversation with a colleague here about the state of our discipline and whether the "real world" is moving much further ahead than us academics.

It is not whether academics are smart or whether we have the ability to make significant contributions. It is whether we are focusing on the right things and not giving enough attention to the phenomena that make a difference in the real world. In an effort to keep our research interesting, are we moving towards studying increasingly "fringe" phenomena? That is, are we getting so focused on publishing "interesting" research that we're studying behavior that is so weird and active under such special conditions that they have little relation to "normal" consumer behavior?

This is well beyond the "academic" vs. "real world" research. I don't imply that all research should have immediate application to the real world. It's just that we may need to study esoteric issues that may have no immediate application, but are rooted in normal consumer behavior over strange quirks in behavior under very specific conditions.

Obviously a very complex issue that has no easy answers. But, thought-provoking nonetheless. I now have more to think about (and argue with my colleagues about).