Euro-Rail trip

The end of summer has marked a successful end to my studies in Cologne. I "passed" the Numerik math class that gave an end of the semester exam and got certificates of participation in the other classes who didn't offer takeable exams for me.
 
I left last Sunday after a frantic move-out from my 23rd-story apartment in Cologne and met a friend from Dallas, Aidan, at the train station in Duisburg, Germany. Aidan spent the summer learning Italian and touring the opera houses of Italy.
 
We met two Canadian girls on the connecting train to Amsterdam who recommended a youth hostel there. We had just picked one at random from the internet so we blindly followed. The Bulldog, it was called, happened to be in the midst of the Red Light District in Amsterdam so we got a first hand look at the Amsterdam underworld and nightlife in the evenings.
 
During the days we saw the Van Gogh museum, took a canal tour, hiked around the city, and visited the Nemo, a stunning Science and Technology museum with tons of neat experiments to wow little kids like me.
 
On Tuesday we headed to the Hague and spent a nice evening on the beach and even took a dip in the frigid North Sea waters. A beautiful sunset over the rocky pier ushered in the night and the chilly north wind. But we still had time and energy to admire the beautiful yachts moored in the cove and dream about hitchhiking a boat ride to Bilbao or Lisbon.
 
From the Hague the next morning we left early and went to Brussels where the whole town was out to celebrate our arrival. There were tons of people waving flags and the whole military and even the king turned up. It was actually the Belgian Independence Day and we just happened to visit at just the right time.
 
After a nice Belgian lunch and some potent dark beer, we hopped on the Thalys high-speed train to Paris and on to Bordeaux. We were originally planning to go to Nantes but we met some other Canadian backpackers who convinced us to head to Bordeaux, where on the first evening we tried to order two glasses of French wine and ended up with two half-liter beer mugs. Oh well.  The next day we took a tour of the Bordeaux vineyards and got to see firsthand more than we ever need to know about the entire wine-making process. It is indeed a feat that some of these little chateaus can bottle more than 400,000 bottles of wine a year.
 
From Bordeaux, we took a train to the coastal city of Arcachon and then took a ferry across the bay to Cap Feret where we have been for the last 24 hours. Yesterday we rented bicycles and rode all around the peninsula and put our feet in the Bay of Biscay. Since the youth hostel is so cheap here, we figured we could have one real 2-and-a-half hour French meal, which much more than made up the price differnce between here and the hostel's in the other cities.
 
From here it is on to San Sebastian, Bilbao, Salamanca, Lisbon, Gibrlater, Barcelona, Interlaken (switzerland), Nice, Monaco and Rome or until we run out of time along the way and have to speed to Rome to get Aidan to his flight home.
 
I then have another week to see Italy and return to Germany to collect my belongings that remain at my aunt's in the town of Hagen.

>> See Walter and Aidan's web site, EuroTrip 2004

The dog days of summer

And greetings once again from the basement of the Mathematical Institute at the University of Cologne.  I hope this e-mail reaches you all in good health, good spirits and in a time that is not as hectic as the chaos during the rest of the year.

Since my last entry, I have crossed the little pond known as the Atlantic twice, on a 9 day trip to South Carolina to see my LITTLE brother Benedict's graduation and a house full of relatives, family and friends.

It was a great change of scenery for a few days and nice to see freinds and family after four months of separation.

The past few weeks have hardly seemed like "real" school at all here with the plethora of breaks and German holidays. Two weeks ago, we had the entire week off for Pfingsten, known in English as Pentacost, as the Catholic religion still dominates many aspects of life here.

This past week we had a Thurday free for Fron Leichnam, which has something in the church to do with the body of Christ.  In my first translation, the holidy became known as the "Happy Cadaver" and the name has stuck with me.

Our family has finally found a nice house in Atlanta and the planned move date is set for middle August, just before my return to the country. My father has received an awesome post at Georgia Tech's brand new research center for biology and materials sciences and will begin work there next semester.

Classes here in Germany are going well, but are seeming just a fraction of all that goes on here.  For instance, Fussball fever has struck Europe as the European Cahmpionships are currently being played in Portugal.

Germany tied their first game against Holland and also play against Latvia and The Czech Republic later in this first round. Fingers crossed!

In other news, a bomb exploded in Cologne in Little Istanbul about a week and a hlaf ago, but the international press made it out to be much more than it really was: Authorities think now that someone was mad at a Turkish barber in front of whose shop the bomb went off and devised this nail bomb as a result.

Maybe it's just me, but I'm usually not that upset over one bad haircut.

Well, time to head to the Mensa (Student Cafeteria) and grab lunch with some friends.

Mexico and back

Once in Chiapas, one of the southernmost states of Mexico, and after a three hour ride hanging off the back of a redila (basically a small truck with an open back covered only with a metal frame from which at least 20 people hang as we rumble through the mountainous jungle of Chiapas), we reached Zapatista territory.

The Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional orchestrated a 12-day armed uprising in January of 1994, and have since continued, through non-violent means, to call attention to the plight of the indigenous people of Chiapas -- namely economic exploitation, political and social exclusion, and a sub-human standard of living. And I got to visit their territory.

I was first greeted by a sign that read "You are now in Zapatista territory in resistance, where the people rule and the government obeys." A short walk through a mud path led me to the center of their community, a community that consisted of a small group of wooden houses surrounded by mud, animals, and the massive and gorgeous Chiapas jungle. The center of the community, a sort of downtown, was made up of a small store, a church, a K through 6th school, a library (which housed an impressive collection of Mexican history, literature, and Marxism), and some Zapatista offices, all decorated with the faces and words of Ernesto Che Guevara, Emiliano Zapata, Pancho Villa, and the leader of the EZLN, Subcomandante Marcos. Messages like "Resistance into a new dawn," "United in the Struggle," and "Education, Health, and Resistance" emanated from these murals, accompanied by images of plentiful corn, of people of all colors, and of visions of justice.

The two University of Monterrey students who accompanied me and I first went to the Vigilance Committee, where women whose faces were covered interviewed me about the purpose of my visit. After waiting about an hour, they informed me I could speak to the Junta de Buen Gobierno (Council of Good Government), the governing council of the community. We went in once again for a similar interview, I asked if I could interview them and different members of the community about opportunity and social mobility, and I was told they would inform me of their decision later that day.

I spent the rest of the day speaking to a teacher, a member of the governing council, and some observers from the human rights center that enabled me to go to the community, trying to cook a meal with little to no utensils, and walking through the community as its people gathered at dusk to talk, smoke a cigarette, or simply stare at the darkening horizon as the rumbling of military convoys resonated not too far away.

As day turned into night, a member of the governing council approached me and told me I would not be allowed to perform my interviews. I also could not accompany them on their field labor the next day, which I had also asked about. And with those news ended my experience at the Zapatista community.

We headed back at 4am that night, riding the three hours back through the rainy jungle in an overcrowded and ancient American school bus, trying to sleep while standing and realizing the interminable distance between the world I had just visited, and that in which I live.

Mexico City was glorious, grand, gigantic and pulsing with the lives of its 20 million residents. I spent most of my time at UNAM, home of approximately 200,000 college students and excellent research institutes and programs. I visited the city?s museums, saw its innumerable monuments, danced with the Aztecs in its plazas, and heard Mexican professors tell a sad tale about no opportunity in a Mexico that is richer than ever.

And with a short trip in my last few days there to the town of San Blas, on the Pacific coast of Mexico, to conclude my travels, I headed back to the states.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for caring. I have seen so much beauty throughout these lands, beauty that has often been coupled with pain, and I hope that I was able to show you a small part of it. The remnants of a violent past, the questions about an uncertain future, the cry for some, any, form of progress, will plague any person that takes but a second to see the life south of the US border. Yet you can also see its vitality, feel its passion, hear its hopes, and dance its dances of celebration. Whether a God, or the Sun, or a feathered serpent, or any deity you choose, someone or something lovingly molded the land and sky of Latin America and gifted it with its wealth and beauty and magic and even pain, and today waits to see its people arise. There is much to be done.

Reporting from Germany

Eleven days ago I finally moved into my own apartment here in Cologne. And things are going well. I now live in the "Uni-Center," a short five-minute walk from the main building on campus on the 23rd story. The Uni-Center is the largest Apartment building in Europe and houses over 3.000 people and that's 3,000 (in English notation) not an overly precise decimal.

I am actively attending four classes this semester in Elementary Number Theory, Numerical Analysis, International Financial Markets and Risk Theory.

Thus far, I have plans to take the final exams in the two Math classes. The Number theory class is really quite interesting. So far we have explored many relationships among prime numbers and various algorithms for dealing with these relationships.

The Numerical Analysis class has thus far dealt with computing errors, interpolation errors, and various methods of numerical differentiation and interpolation. I am "missing" a few of the prerequisites for this class and having to struggle a bit to keep up, but in the end will have learned basically two semesters worth of stuff.

And when the Germans say international finance, they really mean a comparison between the European and American financial systems. Here, I have learned basic concepts of global trade and different risks associated with investing in the States as a European and vice-a-versa. Now we are moving into studying low-risk portfolios in an international (err trans-Atlantic) context.

The risk theory class is really training for insurance lawyers, not what I thought at first, and I am thinking about dropping that one all together. There are only eight students in the class and the others are all older, near graduation and want to study insurance law. Not quite my cup o' tea.

For sport, I have joined a local basketball team but am not sure when the games start. We have training tonight though. I also have played indoor soccer and table tennis to keep in shape.

I am having a great time in the slightly less hectic world here but am at the same time eager to return to Dallas and return to the world of deadlines and near-constant excitement. I have had lots more time here to read and think for thinking's sake here in Germany and have really enjoyed that. I have been keeping up to date with the new from the NY Times each day that is delivered to my Email inbox. I also get a free copy of the Wall Street Journal Europe when I go to my Financial Markets class on Tuesday and Wednesday.

I bought a neat book here called NANO!? and have been reading through that. It describes the underpinnings of the nanotech revolution and tries to quantify what it is and where it is going. I have also been reading article from www.smalltimes.com, a website that tracks happenings in the nano world. I was excited to see an article and mention of Zyvex there this week!

Lots else is new (besides 'c' over lambda) but if I don't stop writing about it soon, I'll miss it. I miss all of you guys a bunch and can't wait to see you all later this year.

>> See Walter and Aidan's web site, EuroTrip 2004

Costa Rica y Guatemala

With only one week spent in Costa Rica and one in Guatemala, it went by very quickly.

In Costa Rica we discovered what may be the best public health system in America -- the words "universality" and "solidarity" took precedence over all other considerations. Visiting a community of upper-middle class and wealthy residents and visiting another in a marginalized and impoverished area meant little difference in the health services offered. There was a uniformity in the quality and quantity of services medical teams whose purpose was to reach every home, whether made out of brick, metal, or cardboard, and whether they had to travel by bus, motorcycle, or horse, and they were the best organized and most efficient teams we had yet seen. Every community, no matter the average income of the residents or the amount of crime in the area, had a school and a health center, side by side, serving the people in an equitable manner across the nation.

Whether it is because Costa Rica never had a large indigenous population and therefore few problems with slavery and widespread discrimination, or because they abolished their army after the civil war in the 1940s, or because they have catered to US policy for the last 50 years, it was generelly a more safe, more peaceful, and more stable nation than the others we have seen on our trip.

Guatemala was very different. Centuries of blatant and violent oppression and repression, decades of brutal warfare, hundreds of displaced indigenous communities, and thousands of people who have "disappeared" over the decades make Guatemala`s social services incipient, to say the least. Guatemala is yet another vastly rich country with a fertile and beautiful land that has been exclusively owned by either the Spanish, the US (home of the infamous United Fruit Company), or the national economic elites, depending on the era--the rest of the population (about 80%), until today, has largely lived in fear and hunger. And yet it was here, where we saw the greatest struggle, that we also saw people empowering themselves and their children unlike in any other nation.

There are thousands of communities in Guatemala that have no access to education. After the armed conflict ended in 1993, numerous outreach programs were created to expand access. One of these, the biggest and most successful one, asks for parents of children in marginalized rural areas to organize themselves into committees and petition the government for funds to start their own schools. They then hire a teacher, build a school with whatever materials they have available, cook daily school meals for all of the children, buy utensils, and build boards and desks for their children with the labor of their own hands. We took two buses, hitchhiked on a truck, and rode on a motorcylce for half an hour to reach one of these communities, where we were warmly welcomed. These people, whose first language was Cakchiquiel (Mayan), proudly showed us every part of their wooden, two-room school for their 70 children. We sat with the children on the ground to speak with their teachers, since they had no floor, and barely had a ceiling. The parents told us of their years of struggle to build the school, and the teachers told us of their dreams for the children. "Maybe I dream to big," said a teacher, "but I would like them to make it to the university." They invited us to a delicious lunch of native tortillas and rice, and sent us off with a humble plea for help. And we promised we would help.

And with this promise in mind we head to the state of Chiapas in Mexico, the last country of our journey. I will be in Mexico for roughly the next three weeks, searching for the Zapatistas, and for hope.