 Travelogue
Due to the reciprocal agreements with various universities abroad, USC Upstate is able to offer students the opportunity to study or conduct internships in places around the world, such as Costa Rica, England, Italy, France and Germany.
Faculty also travel abroad during the summer months for further study, special appointments, and awards.
Some students and faculty have submitted journal entries to describe their experiences. Read below to learn about culture in other countries, what it's like to study abroad, and more!
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Journal Submissions from CZECH REPUBLIC: |
| Nov. 27 |
Thomas J. Mcconnell USC Upstate Associate Professor of English, Czech Republic - latest news! |
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Entry 3: Fall in the Czech Republic
We saw our first snowfall on November 17, and now, midday on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, it’s been snowing all morning and is only getting heavier. It shows every sign of staying. Temperatures drop to the teens at night and reach only 29 or 30 when the weak sun manages to come out. Just now, out the windows we can see our immediate neighbors but not the houses beyond them.
This weather has been a long time coming. Natives warned us we were having a mild fall. Back towards the end of September, when my shadow at local noon was longer than I was tall, a friend told us that she’d seen the weather report and summer was coming back: it got to 68 the next day.
Halloween came without the fanfare it has back home, but some folks here do put out pumpkins. They just don’t carve them. When we noticed jack-o-lanterns, complete with candles, we figured those were the balconies or stoops of Americans. We made our contribution of two small pumpkins and one large, which weighed 35 or 40 pounds and cost us the equivalent of $2.00. Unfortunately, the flower shop where we found it was all downhill from our house, so fetching it meant a short walk to the nearest tram stop, a short ride, and then a good half-mile of scaling the incline home. We probably should have bought the thing a tram ticket, as large packages are supposed to pay their fares too, but no transportation inspector turned up to check.
Thanksgiving, of course, is unknown here, but some Americans and some Czechs who’ve lived in the states are trying to import it. The latter much admire the tradition of a family feast this time of year. What this means is that stores can jump as early as October into the Christmas spirit. Their decorations are out in full force this week, hanging from lamp posts and store fronts, but inside they’ve had chocolate Santas and holiday displays for a month already.
Prior to Christmas, the Czechs have a holiday we don’t: St. Mikulas day, the sixth of December. On St. Mikalus eve, the children walk around to meet St. Mikulas, an angel, and a devil. They’re prompted to recite poems and sing songs, to be rewarded with candy if all goes well and if they’re able to report that they’ve been good children. Or so I’m told. I’ll be able to report more accurately on that next month. |
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| Sep. 29 |
Thomas J. Mcconnell USC Upstate Associate Professor of English, Czech Republic |
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Entry 2: Landing in the Czech Republic
From the air, the Czech Republic rolls out greenly a good deal like the Piedmont. Coming into Prague Airport, you cross woods, farms, then the city suburbs, with blue pools in more backyards than I’d expected.
The great differences emerge once you’re on the ground and in the corridors of the airport itself. Not that the facilities are noticeably different in anyway, but the language of signs is disconcerting. Though the alphabet is the same, written Czech looks like a Scrabble game in which some essential tiles have been removed and replaced by Z’s, then played with by enthusiastic four-year-olds. I knew to expect this, but no phrasebook or basic grammar quite prepares an American for this perplexity, I suppose; most of us would probably think that Czechs need to buy a vowel in the worst way. Before I left, I heard a joke about a Czech who goes to the doctor for an eye exam. When the doctor highlights a line of the chart reading K R Z T C H and asks if the patient recognizes anything, the man says, “Recognize her? I dated her!”
The American eye quickly latches on to what it remembers then, and there’s a good deal of that here, as there is everywhere in the world these days: New York Yankees baseball caps, GAP jackets, Levi’s, coats emblazoned with Knoxville Cycle Shop (whatever that is). Sometimes, it becomes apparent that the wearer may not be entirely aware of the import of what the garment says. My third day in the country, I saw a woman sitting on the steps of the Catholic church in our neighborhood, flanked by two small girls. Her t-shirt, decorated with spring blossoms, declared, “I’m a delicate #%*&ing flower” (I leave it to your imagination to supply the alliterative word here delicately replaced).
Aside from language, there’s much else the alien must get used to, of course, and one of those matters is registering with the Foreign Police, a separate force that every foreigner staying in the country longer than 90 days must notify. My host, the chair of my department (an American from Illinois, as it happens) gave me directions to the building near the train station where I was to report and instructed me to fill out a certain form, available from the woman at the front counter, before going down a dim corridor to the third door on the right. When I asked him in jest if that’s where the torture began, he didn’t smile.
The Foreign Police, as it turns out, are all women. They dress like waitresses in small American diners where the establishment doesn’t require a uniform. You wait outside the third door on the right down the dim corridor as the line grows longer and natives with visa problems leap through the door ahead of you when it opens. When your turn comes, 45 or so minutes later, you stand before a desk a while before you’re invited to sit, then listen in on a conversation entirely in Czech between two of the officers dressed like waitresses, wondering what your fate might be. In the end, I had no difficulties, but I sweated for a moment when I didn’t understand they wanted the paperwork for my visa and I instead produced passport photos of my family. But everything seemed in order, and I left relieved.
So the country has its bureaucracy, just like ours, and I’m discovering a number of other similarities day by day: issues about illegal immigration, health care reform, pension reform, the strength of the central government, education underfunding, and more that would strike any American as very familiar and all of which I’ll hope to come to as this journal continues. |
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| Sep. 19 |
Thomas J. Mcconnell USC Upstate Associate Professor of English, London |
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London Just About the Same as Ever
I may as well begin these entries at the beginning, which for my wife Janet, my son Bram, and me means London, where we came to spend a few days before going on to the Czech Republic.
What we discovered in transit was the determination of Homeland Security’s TSA, the folks charged with screening luggage. They opened four of the five bags we checked through to Gatwick Airport, on one suitcase breaking all three locks to gain access. Afterwards you find a card inside thanking you for your cooperation and telling you TSA has the right to do whatever they’ve done to your baggage.
In Europe, matters are quite otherwise. You don’t have to take your laptop out of its case, your change out of your pocket, doff your jacket or doff shoes. There are security warnings in the airports about unattended baggage, and waiting passengers are regularly reminded to be vigilant for such bags, but in general, any security is very unobtrusive. When we asked if our bags were going to be broken into for searching, the British Airways staff laughed.
One matter that does receive more scrutiny than I’ve ever seen before is directed toward traveling children, both in the states and in Europe. My son was questioned about his full name and age when his passport was examined at each departure point, no doubt a sad sign of the reaction necessary to combat international trafficking in children.
In London itself, the attitude towards security seems much the same as at the airport, despite the Tube and bus bombings of July7 and the abortive fizzles two weeks later. I expected searches in the Underground and at museums and sights of interest, but in fact we were asked to open our bags only on two occasions, on the morning of Saturday, September 10. I also saw a security officer (unarmed) closely eying a woman making a cell phone call on the steps of the Victoria and Albert Museum, watching and approaching slowly until he saw her complete the call. I don’t know if such observation had to do with the weekend anniversary of 9/11 or not, but cursory as the searching was, it was all we saw while in London.
In other matters, the British continue to make strides in refrigeration. Where a request for ice twenty years ago might have gained you a few thin chips, now there are virtual cubes, in drinks, in buckets for self serve, in small trays in the glove-compartment-sized freezers of apartment fridges (though don’t expect meat to freeze in such machines).
Next: we arrive in the Czech Republic. |
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