Bill’s First European Adventure: Hans, the 2 Susies and Martin Heidegger!

Like you, I was a study abroad student in my early 20s – just a few years ago now! Except, I guess that it wasn’t really a study abroad experience as I was full time in a British university and we didn’t have any “fall break”, but we did have a huge Easter break. We also had “winter break”, which lasted about 5 weeks between the beginning of December and the middle of January.

So, what to do in my first ‘break’ period when studying abroad? The answer came in the shape of two buddies on the university basketball team, Paul and Jeff. Paul had bought a second-hand Volkswagen beetle [named “Hans” – Paul was an American of German extraction and was training for the Lutheran priesthood] and he, Jeff [from Boston], Chris [an anthropology student from Berkeley who impressed me throughout the trip by reading Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit [Being and Time] in the back of the beetle, and I took off on a trip to Morocco.  Morocco was a pretty exotic destination way back then for four inexperienced North American travellers. We didn’t have credit cards, nor had ATMs been invented way back in the Neolithic 1960s. We carried our cash - francs, pesetas and sterling – with us. We kept to the back roads through France and Spain as the European motorway – first invented by Hitler in the 1930’s – had not spread far from the land of its birth. In France, we stayed in that great chain of French Hotels – the Hotels de la Gare – which are conveniently located adjacent to the railway station in every middle- sized French town. I thought at the time that, if I were a business student and not an Egyptologist [which I was, believe it or not], I would do a thesis on the business acumen of the “De la Gare” family. What foresight to have established a hotel in such proximity to the railway station in just about every French town! In Spain we stayed in pensiones: hostels hadn’t been invented yet.

We had a great time in Paris where we met two young women, both called Susie, from the University of South Carolina who were studying in Lyon. The wine flowed and a good time was had. We discovered that the French approach to plumbing – public urinals for the messieurs – and the all too familiar “hole in the ground” indoor toilets – was both more liberal and more primitive that was our custom. And none of us had ever seen a bidet before! The British at least – god bless them – had sit-down toilets; long may Mr Thomas Crapper, the inventor of the modern water closet, be remembered and praised for his invention. As I was from French Canada, I was the designated French speaker and interpreter. I remember my embarrassment and confusion in central France when I asked for “pain” in a “boulangerie” and the serving women didn’t understand me. In retrospect, it wasn’t the Quebecois accent.  Rather it was my cultural ignorance: just asking for “bread” in a bread shop didn’t work; one has to know the names of the different kinds of loaf on sale. So my 15 years of French were all to no avail because the French were far more sophisticated about bread than we lamentable, one-dimensional, sliced-bread eating North Americans. Later on, when the Volkswagen broke down in freezing weather in a snowstorm on the outskirts of Paris, I had to hitch a lift along the highway to get to a garage and ask for a replacement “distributor cap”. Except that I didn’t know the French term for “distributor cap”: it is not, for example, the “chapeau du distributeur” as it should have been; nor was it “le distributor cap” as the weekend is “le weekend”; instead it was, and probably still is, “le tete du delco”, a piece of French trivia that I have never forgotten because of the pain and anxiety it caused me at the time.
Spain was decidedly more foreign than France was, but nothing could have prepared us for Morocco. We visited Tangiers, Rabat and Fez. The first two were reasonably “modern” cities, but it
 was hard to know if we were in the 14th century or the 20th century in Fez. Fez was distinctly “untouristy” and made us aware of the enormous cultural gap that existed between Moroccans of the interior and North Americans.  I remember feeling uncomfortable in Fez: although we were humble students, we were westerners and incomparably better off than most of the people in Fez.

We spent more time in Spain on the return trip. On New Year’s eve in Valencia, I ran into a guy I played football with in Montreal. We had both graduated from college about 7 months previously. In France, we stopped in Lyon to meet the two “Susies”, the girls from South Carolina we had met in Paris on the way down.  Then “Hans” broke down: first the windshield wipers went, then the distributor cap. We were all glad to see the white cliffs of Dover. Although we had only been in England since September, it was now our “home”. I bought a copy of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit. And, no, I haven’t finished it and wouldn’t know even where it is.

No doubt many of you will feel the same after returning from spring break. Have a great time and be careful out there. In my next blog I might just get around to telling you about my first ever spring break, also with the two Susies!

-Bill

Flush Like you Mean it

I have noticed that this blog is followed by current students and alums alike. So some readers might remember the toilets at the ICLC.  Do you remember hanging out in the bathroom waiting for the toilet tank to refill so that you could have another stab at flushing because the first one didn't take?  Did you ever let the staff know that the toilets weren't working, only to be told that you should try going back and flushing like you really mean it?  I'm not trying to jinx us or anything, but hopefully before the Fall '10 group gets here, that suggestion will be a thing of the past!  Right now the builders are in.  Of the six bathrooms in the building, we have three that are fully functioning.  While some have toilets and sinks, they also have wet paint on the walls and doors so that they have to stay open, making the room somewhat less private.  Other bathrooms in the building have been completely gutted are are awaiting new and exciting things like stalls!  I have used more exclamation points than normal in writing about the new toilets, so I hope that goes some way to showing our enthusiasm for the work in progress.  This work should all be completed by the time the Fall '10 term starts in a few weeks.  Our recently retired caretaker, Fred, used to spend much of his time jury-rigging the toilets back into operable shape.  But with new toilets, we are anticipating that as long as no one gets upset writing their Shakespeare essay and tries to flush their laptop down the toilet, we should have smooth toilet sailing.

The painter is painting the skirting board in the first floor bathroom.  I can read from his body language here that he is as excited about the new bathrooms as I am!

35 Harrington Gardens is a really lovely building, the history of which Bill is capable of sending any audience to sleep with.  For example, I work in the front office which is the room closest to the front door.  Bill likes to tell visitors that when this was a private home this was the smoking room where the men would go after supper.  In my office I can hear Stage Combat students throwing each other on the floor in the Common Room above me, and in Bill's office he can hear the voice and music students practicing in classroom 1 below him.  Bill also claims that there is a poltergeist that haunts the building, which is something I'm a lot more likely to believe when I'm the last one in, locking up the building on a dark evening.  It really is a building full of character.  Built in the late 19th century, the ICLC is very much a 20th century building inside.  It has a Grade II listing which means it is an important building of more than special interest.  I believe being a listed building limits the changes that can be made to it, but I'm pleased to say it doesn't preclude installing new toilets!  Whoop!

This is Bill.  He's hard at work. (Hard at work stealing the red football off my desk and hiding it in plain sight on his desk.  Nice try, Professor Moriarty!)

We sometimes refer to the London Centre as a campus, and it is that, but I think the word campus may imply to some people a larger space than it actually is.  There are five floors which comprise the college, plus a flat above the fifth floor that is used by visiting faculty and staff from the home campus back in Ithaca.  Upon entering the building you are standing in the main entrance.  Bill, Sarah and I all have our offices on this floor.  One floor above is the Common Room, classroom 2 and the Faculty Room, not to mention one of our brand spanking new bathrooms!  On the next floor up there are 2 more classrooms, our 2 computer labs and yet another brand new bathroom.  These three floors can all be accessed from the main staircase.  To get to the next floor up you are relegated to the servant's stairs, our other staircase which spans the entire height of the building.  This top floor has 3 classrooms.  Oh yeah, and a new bathroom!  The other floor that can only be accessed from the servant's stairs is the floor on the very bottom of the building.  This is where the student kitchen and vending machines can be found, as well as the library, classroom 1 and the student pigeon holes where mail is put.  This floor also has the bathroom that is undergoing the most change.  It was probably the ICLC's least used bathroom, partly because people may not have known what to make of it.  This bathroom used to have a shower in it, but that has been removed and will be replaced by 2 toilet stalls!  Accessed from a back exit through Bill's office, there is a shared private garden behind the building where we are currently allowed to have a maximum of 4 Ithaca students in at a time.  Using the garden as a bathroom may result in Ithaca being allowed no students access to the garden, so I won't include that in my list of bathrooms.  And that's the campus!

St. Andrew- patron saint of Scotland and modesty in first floor bathrooms that are awaiting sheets of frost for the glass and which overlook hotels.  He is quite a specific saint.

 -Claire (and Elsie)