The Old Country

Some people might wonder why World to the Wise cultural tours have been exclusively to European destinations (so far).  The 2010 tour took us to England, France and the Netherlands, and this year’s tour saw us in Italy, France and England. While there are many, many other destinations that hold our interest (and perhaps yours as well), there are a number of reasons we have chosen to focus initially and primarily on Europe.


As Caucasian Americans, my wife and I both recognize that our roots lie almost entirely in Europe. By blood, I am actually not a Durham; my father, whose surname was originally Oatis, was adopted by an aunt who had married a man named Durham. Still, there are strong Anglo-Saxon lines in my family, as well as German. My mother’s maiden name was Knox, as in John Knox, the great Scottish church reformer. When I am in Europe, I feel a sense of connectedness, as if I were visiting grandparents I never knew. Although cultural differences abound -– both between American and European cultures and among European cultures themselves –- many “aha moments” are waiting for Americans who seek to understand their own culture better.


It also doesn’t hurt that I have lived in Europe for a total of twelve years, have friendships and contacts there from the last 30 years, and that all the languages I speak are European languages. This greatly facilitates the tours, as I’m sure any of the participants will attest. As I said earlier, there are countless other places on this planet of ours we would like to discover and/or take others to see -- for example, we hope to organize a third-world experience for Americans in the not-too-distant future (Haiti, perhaps?) –- but much of my heart, as well as much understanding of where we have come from as a culture, lies in what for many of us is The Old Country.


Tell us about your experiences visiting the land(s) of your ancestors.

Marvelability

We have just wrapped up the 2012 World to the Wise cultural tour. My wife Becky and I said goodbye to some perhaps travel-weary but no less satisfied people at Heathrow airport, while we prepared to take a few days in the Midlands and Lake District to decompress.


One of the most gratifying moments at each destination was seeing their faces when confronted with the wonders of human achievement. In Rome, for example, as soon as you come out of the metro (what Americans call subway), BAM! the Coliseum towers above you like a toothy-grinned giant. Nothing can prepare you for its imposing presence. In Paris, we took the metro from the right bank headed south; at a certain point, the train that is mostly underground becomes overground, and BAM! the Eiffel Tower looms larger than life over the Seine and the great city it adorns.


One's senses would have to be entirely dulled not to appreciate these wonders; many other things, however -- some more subtle -- awaited discovery and marveling. The gentle hills of Tuscany, home to countless olive groves and vineyards; the reminders from the Renaissance that changed the course of human history; or the awe-inspiring majesty of St. Peter's Basilica or Westminster Abbey drew more gapes and gasps than I could count.


The next few posts on this blog will be musings on this life-changing experience -- an experience which sharpens and cultivates what I like to call marvelability.

In just three days from this writing, a dozen curious souls will wing their way to an adventure of a lifetime. The 2012 World to the Wise Cultural Tour kicks off on Tuesday, June 5, and you're invited to come along via the photos, blog posts and vlogs we'll be posting. Follow us here on this blog or on Facebook ("like" the World to the Wise page while you're there!) -- and who knows, maybe you'll be among those who join us for the next great adventure.


We'll begin in Rome, the "Eternal City", then train to Pisa. Our Tuscan hosts, the Ammirabbile family, will then pick us up and take us to our home base for the next five days in the village of Montespertoli, a half hour outside Florence. After reveling in the Renaissance and Tuscan cuisine, we'll make a brief stop in the mythical canal city of Venice. An overnight sleeper train will take us from there to Paris, the City of Lights, where we'll take in as much as our senses can handle, followed by a five-day stay in London. We'll include a day trip to Oxford, along with some of the quintessential sights and experiences that British culture has to offer -- Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London, cream tea, the Globe Theatre, and a spectacular performance of Les Misérables in the West End theatre district.


We look forward to sharing our impressions and experiences with you! To receive regular updates in your e-mail box, just sign up on this site!

The Two-Thirds World

If you've read my blog for any length of time, you know I am an avid proponent of overseas travel. Not so much to see how many of the world's great beaches you can enjoy, but primarily to expand your cultural horizons. I recently had the privilege of speaking at the Vanderbilt University Virtual School, a wonderful program that uses video conferencing technology to reach middle school and high school students all over the US and beyond. My assigned topic was "Travel as Cultural Education", and even though my audience in this case was middle schoolers, I gave them plenty to look forward to, encouraging them to think about how they could take advantage of opportunities to broaden their cultural landscape.


This summer my wife and I are leading a group of primarily high school students to three European countries. We take great delight in helping Americans discover new cultures, languages, and, of course, this means people. But I also like to challenge young people in another direction: spending time in the two-thirds world. What we mean by this term is the fact that two-thirds of our world still lives in conditions that almost any American would consider substandard, whether it be lack of indoor plumbing, running water, or other commodities most Westerners consider indispensable.


What does this look like? The possibilities are too numerous to mention here, but one does not have to go far to find the two-thirds world. The poorest country in the western hemisphere, Haiti, is in our back yard, a two-hour flight from Miami. You get off the plane and feel as though you're in Africa in many ways. Then there is Visiting Orphans, the organization my daughter-in-law works for that facilitates visits to orphanages in developing countries. It would be difficult to overstress the importance of getting outside one's familiar surroundings to see how "the other half" lives -- and what better time than while you're still young. Bluntly put, it is better to see how spoiled one is early on. If used properly, this experience can help shape our decisions and lifestyle for the rest of our lives.


Are you or do you have a graduating senior? Perhaps the best gift you can give them is an opportunity to see how (part of) the rest of the world lives and thinks. 

Tintin the Intrepid

All three of our sons were born in Europe, the two older sons starting school in a bilingual classroom (English/French). We spoke English in the home so the boys would be able to maintain it as their mother tongue, but we also began collecting French books and reading them to the boys from time to time. One of the earlier titles in our collection was Le Secret de la Licorne (The Secret of the Unicorn), one of the adventures of the intrepid hero Tintin. 
Tintin was the brainchild of Belgian artist Georges Rémi under the name Hergé. Rémi began writing the Tintin stories in 1930's Belgium, and the stories of the boy hero, reporter and world traveler quickly captured the imagination of young people all over the Francophone world. One of my favorite talk show hosts, Tom Ashbrook of NPR's "On Point," interviewed his own French father-in-law on his memories of reading Tintin as a young boy in the midst of the Nazi occupation of Paris.

Director Steven Spielberg has now brought Tintin to the big screen -- none too soon, as the popular European comic series has been translated into more than 50 languages and sold more than 200 millions copies worldwide. I haven't seen the movie yet (The Adventures of Tintin) -- but regardless of how many thumbs up the movie gets, it will bring back many fond memories of families the world over -- including mine.

Havel the Hero

The word "passion" is quite in vogue in our time. We want to find work we are passionate about, we are passionate about our favorite causes, and we like passionate love stories. But when we consider the etymological meaning of the word, it casts itself in a different light: we get our English word from the Greek pathos, meaning "suffering". When you list your passions in terms of what you're willing to suffer for, the list tends to shrink somewhat.


On Sunday, the world lost a man who was passionate in the purest sense of the word: Vaclav Havel, best known in the West as the leader of the 1989 so-called Velvet Revolution in what was then Czechoslovakia, passed away peacefully with his wife at his side. After more than two decades of peaceful protest, often through his plays, Havel and others brought about the demise of the Communist leadership of his country without a single shot being fired. What many of us did not know is that Havel also suffered for his cause, spending four and a half years in a Czech prison for his opposition to the oppressive, Soviet-backed Communist regime of the 1960's.


Two things strike me about the man and his life. First, the fact that a nation would elect a playwright as president. Not a politician, not a businessman, not an economist, not a diplomat. A playwright. A writer. All playwrights are not the same, but good playwrights have at least one thing in common -- an understanding of human nature. Havel seemed to have a grasp on the fundamental drives, the aspirations, the strengths and weaknesses of 20th century mankind, and I find it nothing less than astonishing now, as I did then, that a nation would turn to an artist for leadership. I have long said that artists are the mouthpiece of culture, but it is rare when a people chooses to entrust its political well-being to a playwright. Unfortunately, his leadership was attenuated when his party was voted out and Czechoslovakia became two distinct nations, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.


The other thing of note about Havel is that he chose the high road, refusing to yield to the temptation to meet violence with violence. His commitment to the non-violent protest of injustice put him in the company of monumental figures such as Gandhi, King and Mandela, and he doggedly continued to believe and profess that it is actually possible to take the moral high ground, even in the realm of politics. For this he was often dismissed as out of touch with reality. Perhaps he was not the most astute politician, but he will and must always be remembered as a noble statesman who called his people, and indeed the rest of the world who would listen, to higher ground.

Irresistible Italy

My wife and I, along with our friends Jim and Mary, just recently returned from a 10-day trip to Italy, where we were doing logistical advance work for the 2012 World to the Wise Cultural Tour. It had been 17 years since our last visit there, and Becky had never been to Rome, so there was much to see. 
I could have spent a month in Rome. It had a similar effect on me as London and Paris -- the word that comes to mind is gravitas. It's difficult to overplay the presence of the city's ancient history -- I've never been in a city that has succeeded in preserving so much of its ancient reminders. But Rome is much more than Roman ruins, more even than the Vatican and the symbolic yet paradoxical shadow it casts on the local culture. And it is virtually impossible to move about the city without noticing the astonishing attention -- and priority -- given to works of art. Even Florence, in all its Renaissance splendor, can't compete with the countless piazzas adorned with elaborate Bernini fountains and statuary.


Reluctantly leaving Rome behind, we trained to Florence, where we picked up a rental car and drove to a retreat center called Poggio Ubertini, about 30 kilometers outside the city. As we climbed the suburban hills in our peppy little Opel, the view of the Tuscan countryside below brought ooh's and ah's from the wives while I forced myself to keep my eyes on the winding road. Each day in Tuscany brought its own set of adventures, from the obligatory and timeless Renaissance masterpieces in Florence to the picturesque hill towns of Siena, San Gimignano and Monteriggioni, from the magnificent Duomo to the salt-of-the-earth Ammirabile family and their wine and olive enterprise we were able to visit. 

We cannot WAIT to introduce our tour participants to this magical land, where you are tempted to forget that the rest of the world exists -- and that's only one leg of next year's tour!