American Pictures – A Copenhagen Surprise

The March 23 USA Melting Pot meeting (12:30-2:30 p.m. at the Troy Public Library) reminds me of a slide presentation I rode over to see one June evening during my 1981 bicycle tour of Europe. I’d seen a notice on the bulletin board for American Pictures advertising a European’s impressions of his visit to America.

It sounded interesting so I rode my bike on Copenhagen’s bike-friendly streets. It would be light until about 10 p.m. so riding home in the dark wouldn’t be an issue. Oslo and Stockholm are on the same latitude as the middle of Hudson Bay; Chicago is on the same latitude as Madrid, Spain.

An American’s Impression of Europe, 2012

On Saturday Kettering University student Philip Mitchell will show pictures from his Ireland visit and also other European cities during his fall 2012 study session in Germany. You can read more about the March meeting, our club and previous meetings in Weilou Gao’s blog post.

We saw an early draft of his presentation at lunch this week and it looks really good. He’ll be talking about Irish culture and history, Irish immigrants to America and his impressions of Dublin, Limerick, and the Irish people and scenery.

He’ll also show pictures of Rome, Milan, Florence, Pisa, Venice, Budapest, Prague, Austria and Switzerland as well as several cities in Germany where he studied in Reutlingen.

Tour Guide for his Classmates

Philip planned weekend trips with Eurail passes with three of his classmates, staying at youth hostels. He’ll share details of how to travel inexpensively, including train, bus and air travel within Europe.

Like many students in study abroad program, he made the most of his time in Europe. When asked whether he wanted to return, he had an emphatic yes! I’m curious to ask him where he plans to visit and find out more about what it costs today.

USA Melting Pot Club visitors

There will be other interesting people to talk to. Sreedhar Patil, one of our coworkers from India, is here until June with six others from his company. His family owns a dairy farm near Bangalore and he’s agreed to talk at our May meeting about India’s farming methods, which are quite different from America.

We also invited some Brazilian colleagues who are here for three months for training. These visitors should be an interesting addition to our regular attenders.

Everyone is invited to come and join our club. There is no cost – the library lets us use their meeting room for free - all ages are welcome.

We’re hoping to have our Skype connection working this month so Marcus Chen can call in from his home in Ann Arbor and our friend Paul Jennings can call from Ardee, County Louth, about 70 km north of Dublin.

Copenhagen, Denmark, 1981

My 1981 bike tour was split into thirds: the first third was in the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland and Austria, the second in Scandinavia, the third in the UK. I didn’t get to Ireland, so I’m looking forward to hearing about Philip’s impressions.

I enjoyed the German-speaking countries and remembered enough of the German I’d learned in high school and in the summer of 1977 in Krefeld (kein Englisch was the main rule) to get around easily.

I liked eating Brötchen in Germany at breakfast, but I was glad when they had corn flakes as a choice in the hostel in Copenhagen. I’ve heard of expatriate families asking people to bring them Cheerios and peanut butter for their kids. Food is what defines us sometimes…

American Pictures – A Surprise Conclusion

I had an easier time sightseeing in cities than most other people who traveled by train with backpacks because I had wheels. So I rode over to watch the slides – the visitor had stayed with migrant farm workers and very wealthy people.

Wait a minute, they're leaving out the vast majority of Americans, I thought, and then the bomb dropped. This inequality was unfair, they said, and we need to have a revolution to make everyone equal. They would take a break and continue after intermission.

I was not buying their sales pitch, having visited Berlin and seen firsthand what communism did to a country. I’d heard the DDR propaganda, ridden two of the three train corridors into West Berlin, and spent a day sightseeing in East Berlin.

Checkpoint Charlie and East Berlin

We’d been warned not to exchange money on the black market (the going rate was three Ost-marks to one Deutschmark while the official rate was 1-1). No need anyway, since you had to exchange more per day than I wanted to spend anyway.

With my extra money I bought some DDR souvenirs (including a song book about the joys of the worker’s paradise there), had a decent meal in a restaurant, saw their main tourist area, then ventured to a random neighborhood on the train with a guy I’d met at the West Berlin youth hostel.

With drab buildings everywhere, the grocery store we visited had the milk in little plastic bags sitting on ice, not in normal refrigerators.

There’s something wrong with an economic system that has to build a wall to keep its people in. America has the opposite problem.

Thankfully the Berlin Wall came down, through the efforts of leaders like Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, Lech Walesa and the prayers of many faithful people. Sad to say I didn’t pray for that – I thought it was the way things would always be.

The people of Eastern Europe are no longer fenced in. Barbed wire is for cattle, not people.

Korean Berlin Wall

When the Korean Berlin Wall comes down one day, it will be partly because of President George W. Bush, who had the courage to call North Korea part of the Axis of Evil along with Iraq and Iran.

North Korea is dark on a nighttime photograph of the Korean peninsula as its Dear Leader plays nuclear blackmail with the rest of the world. Meanwhile, the thousands who live in forced labor camps experience growth in numbers while his people are several inches shorter than their South Korean relatives from malnutrition.

"Ambassador" Dennis Rodman says Kim Jung Un is "honest" and "awesome" but shows a complete lack of discernment by posing for pictures with him and not sticking to the sports outreach.

Perhaps better things will come from the Google executive's visit - ever look at Pyongang's empty streets in daytime on satellite image? There are no Google maps yet, and the North Korean people just recently learned of John Lennon's death and had a staged mourning.

I don’t know what other leaders will stand firm to make the lights come on there or when it will happen, but this time I will join with many in Korea and elsewhere who are praying for their homeland to be united in freedom again after over sixty years of oppression.

Conclusion of the Copenhagen story

So I left at intermission and rode back to the Copenhagen youth hostel, disappointed that my country was being misrepresented to people in Europe.

I’ll write more about my bicycling experiences later; I loved traveling that way enough to return in 1984 after taking a semester of French, visiting Luxembourg, Belgium, France, Suisse/Schweiz (Switzerland), Italy, Yugoslavia (Slovenia & Croatia), Hungary, Austria and Germany, and Iceland.

One of our newer USA Melting Pot club members is originally from Croatia; I’ll have to ask him where and see if it’s near anywhere I visited.

Everyone is Invited to Saturday's Meeting

American-born people are welcome too. More than the usual number who were born here came to our February meeting on the Civil War.

There won’t be any surprises from Philip. Like all of the previous coop students we’ve had in our group, he’s done excellent work for us. He’s upbeat and enthusiastic and will give a great presentation.

We’ve open to all views in our club but expect generally a positive angle to things; we’ve not been disappointed in the excellent quality of presentations.

Please make plans to come Saturday and bring a friend. More details are on Weilou’s post.

Club Website

If you can’t make it, look for Philip Mitchell's presentation on our website later.

There are other great presentations on the site, recently updated by Marcus Chen. You can view and print our travel spreadsheet with common phrases in several languages.

The February Civil War presentation, the January presentations on African-American culture and skiing can be found there, as well as the other Culture & Country presentations from previous meetings: Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, India, Korea, and Mexico. Teachers may find this a good reference for their students.

Under Hobbies & Fun, you will find Bicycling, Camping, Canoeing & Kayaking as well as skiing.

Visit the website often and send Marcus an email at marcus@usa.meltingpot.org if you want to post an event from your community or join the club to leave comments.

Hope to see you at Saturday's meeting!