Saturday, September 14, 2013

field lab in st petersburg - some links

John's trip with students in St Petersburg got some press. Here are the links. The first is translated from a Russian article so reads a little strangely:

http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http://www.psy.spbu.ru/news/948-13-09-2013-2

http://www.semesteratsea.org/2013/09/04/sas-clinical-psychology-students-visit-st-petersburg-university/

We are leaving Antwerp in about 15 minutes and should be in Le Havre by morning. I'll write more about our stay in Antwerp after we are underway.

Wednesday, September 11, 2013

hamburg

Although we are currently in the Port of Antwerp (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_of_antwerp) and have been since yesterday around 6pm local time, we won't be allowed off the ship until tomorrow morning. So I will try to catch up a bit and post something about our stay in Hamburg (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamburg), and our trip to this new port. I am sitting on our balcony during a sunny break in what has been a very rainy and cloudy couple of days. This is a beautiful port, which is nice since we have to be on board. Incidentally, the reason we need to be on board is that another "sea day" (meaning "classroom day") is required right now. The European ports have been so close together that sometimes when we are not moving, class activities are still going on in order to meet the strict academic requirements of the program.

Like St Petersburg, John had a field lab with one of his classes that required him to be with the students in port for the first day in Hamburg. While he did this, I participated in a bus tour of Hamburg that provided a pretty good orientation to the city, in spite of the fact that the guide was often difficult to understand. Much of Hamburg was destroyed during World War II, so many of the buildings in the city have been erected since then. One of the highlights of the tour was a stop at St Michael's Church (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Michael%27s_Church,_Hamburg) where we were told we would hear an organ recital. It turned out to be a prayer service that lasted about 20 minutes, and most of us came away disappointed that the organ parts didn't take advantage of the magnificent pipe organ there. Several of us were happy to find a news stand along the way with English newspapers. (News has been hard to come by on the ship and we are hoping to convince the powers that be to restore the news station that was on the TV when we first boarded.) There is a nice Portuguese area near the port and following the bus tour I went with some others from the tour to one of the restaurants in this part of the city for lunch. We  had some lovely fish dishes and there was so much food we couldn't eat it all; one of the members of our party reminded us that Germans tend to have their big meal at noon. 

The second day, John and I decided to get on a hop on, hop off bus and do another tour of the city. We have done this in several places over the years, and usually there are headphones and channels where other languages are available. This particular bus only had live German delivery, and the woman giving the commentary occasionally translated into English for us. Apparently we were the only English speakers on the bus, but with 3 or 4 minutes of German to only 30 seconds of English, I suspect we weren't getting the whole story. In any case it was very similar to what I had seen the day before, and also covered many of the places John had seen. We gave in to an urge for Starbucks, one of the very few places John can find brewed coffee and I can get something other than black tea, and spent some time on the Internet updating our devices. Lots of students were there using Skype to phone home and eating up the bandwidth, but we managed.

When we bought the hop on, hop off tickets, we purchased tickets to a harbour and canal tour as well, so on Saturday we got in a little ferry and toured the Port of Hamburg (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_of_Hamburg). That tour was entirely in German, but we were given a sheaf of papers in English and left to try to figure out where we were in the commentary. We did fairly well with it, following some of the signs in the port. We found a lovely place for dinner in the Portuguese area that was actually Italian and made the best pizza we have ever eaten.

As in St Petersburg, we were scheduled to leave on Sunday, so decided not to stray too far from the ship in order to avoid the long lines of students coming back that day from trips to Amsterdam and Berlin. We took a bit of a walk and found a small restaurant where English was not spoken, but where we tried out what little German we have and managed to order a very nice breakfast. Although we re-boarded well before "on ship" time of 6pm, we never actually left this Port until about 12 hours later. 

After having been moderate and mainly sunny during our stay in Hamburg, the weather turned chilly and cloudy and sometimes rainy, and has been that way since. We saw some pretty spectacular lightening after sailing back down the Elbe River to the North Sea, gray-green sea punctuated with whitecaps, and rolling clouds that occasionally opened to driving rain. Water was a bit choppy and there was some seasickness, but John and I have found it fairly calm compared to some of the turmoil on the first trip. We were back to sighting land very quickly as we entered the Netherlands at the Scheldt River (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheldt) leading to Antwerp.

We have been notified of the names of the four students who will be our extended family on this trip. Although I emailed them this morning, we don't expect to see them until after this port and the next one, since we have no "sea days" between Antwerp and Le Havre and many people are doing overland travel to France. This port will be John's last field lab, so we will stay with the ship during travel, though we might stay on shore a night or two during the time. In any case, more on our extended family next time!