August 19, 2006
The time to leave Europe rapidly approaches. Hyon is already in California, and I leave Maastricht on August 30. In fact, to deal with the Dutch tax situation, I must leave the EU by the 30th. And to mollify the IRS, I can’t enter the US until September 4th! So I’m going to spend a few days in Canada… then on to California.
Alliant has six campuses throughout California, plus Mexico City, Tokyo, and Hong Kong, with still more international ventures in the works. Its management school has recently been named for Alliant benefactor and well-known executive coach Marshall Goldsmith. The Marshall Goldsmith School of Management specializes in the psychological aspects of management - consumer psychology, managerial psychology, and organizational psychology - and focuses on preparing graduates for careers in professional practice, as well as in corporate positions.
MGSM's San Diego campus, where I will be primarily based, offers the San Diego area's only doctoral programs (PhD and DBA) in management. Past faculty of the school include Igor Ansoff and Abraham Maslow.
I'll also maintain my affiliation with Maastricht School of Management, and spend part of each year in Maastricht, or on missions farther afield for MsM.
So there will still be exotic travel, but updates to the blog will be less frequent.
It will be a while before I'll get around to updating my info on Ryze, LinkedIn
, and Ecademy, and we
don't yet have a place to live in San Diego (!). However, I'll
still be reachable at my MsM email address.
But two years here and I still can’t speak Dutch? Here are the…
The jeweler sent us down the street, with the diamond in bond, to the setter’s workshop. No, no, he wasn’t Irish; in fact he is Armenian, and his common language with the jeweler is Russian. Say what you will about that last silly pun, but I now share two true facts: The only decoration on the setter’s work bench was a photo of Sharon Stone, and as he worked, he was listening to the Rolling Stones!
We witnessed the setting of the stone, and were escorted back to the jeweler, where we waited for the guy from the Gemological Institute to certify the diamond. There was ample time for talking about the Israel-Hezbollah situation:
Also finishing up my teaching for MsM for this academic year. Spent a day last week helping education administrators from Tanzania make a plan to upgrade their university, and the week before, taught an MBA thesis prep course to 16 students from Kazakhstan. Both courses were in Maastricht.
I was impressed by the Kazakhstan group. Multi-lingual, ethnically diverse (their folks originating variously in Russia, the Caucasus, Kazakhstan, China, Korea, Turkey), bright and friendly. They tell me all the country's non-Kazakh ethnic groups were originally refugees, and have adopted the Kazakh ethic of welcoming foreigners. I guess if you lived in the 9th-largest country in the world with only 15 million people, you’d welcome newbies too. After the fall of the wall, Russians were persecuted in the Baltic states – not to mention Chechnya! – and fled back to Russia. Russians fled from Kazakhstan too, but they didn’t have to, and now, remembering the more open lifestyle there, they are returning to Kazakhstan from Russia. The country (Kazakhstan) is doing well on oil revenues, and its people are quickly becoming more sophisticated and internationalized.
July 16, 2006
Tour de France
My aunt Reita and cousin Roaa stopped to see us on the last leg of
their trip around the world (another story, which my aunt and daughter
will chronicle separately). We drove to the country between
Maastricht and Aachen and caught some of the Tour de France.
Big business, the Tour, but out there in the boonies it was just a police roadblock and a few spectators with lawn chairs and coolers.
This was on July 4. On the way back we stopped at the American military cemetery at Margraten, expecting some kind of ceremony for US independence day, but the place – gorgeous landscaping and views, not a blade of grass out of place – was almost abandoned. Lofty sentiments engraved on the monuments, oddly jarring to the modern mind as they try to glorify a grim and ugly necessity.
We also enjoyed a day back in Bruges.
I stayed near the US embassy. There’re lots of American
restaurants
nearby, but I ate Peruvian, highly advisable because the food is good:
seafood, corn, many varieties of potatoes. Ate at a wonderful
restaurant, José Antonio's, used to be my host's father-in-law's
house.
Tried the national drink, the Pisco Sour: egg white, lemon juice, the
Peruvian equivalent of cachassa, and sugar, shaken. Pretty
good!
Shopped for alpaca and Pima cotton clothing, and silver. Gave the
commencement address, met with doctoral students, flew back to Europe.
It’s a diverse country (coast, desert, Andes, Amazonia), and I hope to see more of it next year, particularly Cuzco and Macchu Pichu.
July 1, 2006
Great to see some of the IC2 Institute and LBJ School mafia at the conference on Santorini. On Stony Ishikawa's recommendation, we ate at Nikolas; Gina had a stuffed zucchini with lemon sauce, out of this world. While I was conferencing, Hyon and Gina took tours to the volcano and some hot springs and beaches. The last eruptions were in the 1950s, but you can still burn your feet if you get too close. (We were all reading Captain Corelli's Mandolin, which takes place on Kefalonia, the next island over in the Cyclades chain. Corelli mentions the earthquakes that shook the islands in the year of the volcano.) To get to the hot springs you have to swim from the tour boat. It's customary to smear hot mud from the springs all over your body.
What a difference 35 short years make! Greece is no longer a poor country, at least the parts we saw. Athens is still spiffed up from the olympics. Piraeus, a dump when I last visited, now has a pleasant marina/waterfront, with good restaurants, cafés, markets. Olympic Airlines is very nice, best tourist-class legroom in the business, and edible food. To join the EU, Greece had to give up the drachma – the monetary unit in longest continuous use of any in history – in favor of the euro.
More story below the pictures.
Because some overseas grad students come in for the Partners'
Conference, we schedule a week of degree defenses directly after the
conference. Notable this time was a PhD defense held downtown at
the University of Maastricht. Much pomp and Latin; really felt
the thousand-year history of European universities.
Another of this week's doctoral defenses was memorable because I found out the supervising committee was not in complete agreement about the thesis. Well, why was a defense scheduled? A miscommunication somewhere along the line. The breach of rules, and the potential for embarrassment, were so great that I cancelled the defense, even knowing the student had already bought a nonrefundable ticket from her home country. (No reflection on the student's work, it's just that the committee didn't agree.) The student shows up, very upset as expected. She tells me she brought her whole family with her to witness the defense, but hasn't yet told them the bad news.
And not only that, but she had worked 20 years as teacher to a prince from a neighboring, very wealthy country – and the prince planned to fly his private plane to Maastricht for the defense! Hmm... follow the rules, or create a diplomatic incident, what a choice. I emailed the Director-Dean (who was traveling in China) and the Chairman of the Board to say, unless a miracle happens and the committee agrees, we're gonna have to do some very creative face-saving – and I do not expect the miracle to occur.
Two hours later, the miracle happens. Screaming among committee members behind closed doors, rapid repositioning of the thrust of the thesis to play to its greatest strengths. Four signatures! Email to the D-D and the Chairman: The miracle has occurred, the defense goes forward. A nice lesson here: There were ample opportunities to compromise principles and cut corners. We didn't, and everything turned out OK.
Student carries off the defense quite well. Family happy. The 20-something prince and the two teenage princesses are impressive, poised and outgoing. His two bodyguards are very large. Professor A whispers to me, "Do you know how big the plane is that he flew in on?" I say, "Dunno, I imagine something by Lear." He says, "No, it's a 737." "Well," I reply, "I guess you can't stuff those big bodyguards into a Piper Cub." Professor B chimes in, "Nor would you want to try."
Eyeing the bodyguards, Professor B continues, "Fred, it's lucky for you that you made this defense work!" Nah, I say, those are only two big guys; it was the Chairman of the Board I was worried about.
Thus was the doctoral program saved, and likewise the neck of the knight, and the princesses have lived happily ever after so far.
Artsy section
Hyon, with MsM's Arsenio Kranenburg, organized an art exhibition at Maastricht School of Management. All items by Hyon's classmates at Kumulus. A gala opening with lecture and music. Then all the Partners' Conference attendees (from 23 countries) saw the art. Then the degree candidates and the aforementioned royal family. Hyon refused to hang her own stuff, missed all that international recognition, I hope she learned her lesson.
June 7, 2006
Kuwait is 5 hours by air and one time zone from Brussels. We flew over Baghdad and followed the Tigris down to the Gulf. Many US soldiers were on board... it’s possible that the odds are in favor of a 747-full of American soldiers completing their tours and returning home safely – let’s hope so.
Compared to Egypt, Kuwait is less socially liberal, and yet English is more widely spoken and more people have traveled to Europe and the States. Kuwait is richer than Egypt, and it’s a monarchy. Immigrants cannot become citizens. There are more western chain stores, and lots of ethnic restaurants run by Asian immigrants.
At Kuwait-Maastricht Business School, our female students exclusively wear western clothes, but male students mix traditional and western styles. I saw an Arab woman in an Indian restaurant, dressed in full whaddyacallit; she had to hold a mouth-flap up to eat and drink.
Local faculty member Jonathan Njoku took me sightseeing. "OK, we'll drive toward Saudi Arabia, then come back to the city. Then we’ll drive a ways toward Iraq. But not too far!" Indeed, police checkpoints start 85km from the Iraqi border. We drove out toward Saudi to the start of true desert; we turned around at McDonalds, and back to the city. We drove out the other way, past the first Iraq checkpoint, and desert started again. We turned around at Burger King and went back. I kid you not! (The only local fast food chain seems to be Naif Chicken. I was thinking, yeah, the hipper chickens must be smart enough to avoid the fryer. But a faculty colleague told me Naif is the family name of the chain’s founders.) Sane people go out only at night this time of year, due to the heat, so the sightseeing was at dusk and I have no photos from Kuwait.
To point up that there are differences between any two Mid-East cultures as well as contradictions within each: I'm reading a memoir by Jim Harrison (author of Legends of the Fall). He writes that we've tended to put "all the nations of the Middle East into our giant dim-witted Mixmaster..."
Enron’s Ken Lay, friend of the imperial Bush, is behind bars. Before we think this is the end of the story, let’s consider the South Seas Company affair of 1721 and thenabouts, as described in Robert Goddard’s Sea Change. King George I (yes, George!) of England wanted his cronies who were board members or execs of South Seas Co. held harmless. The fix was in. Goddard mentions "[Comptroller Robert] Knight's escape from the supposedly escape-proof Antwerp Citadel and his abscondence across the border into France.... Another deal had clearly been done. Before the year was out, Knight had established himself in Paris as a financial consultant. As the former chief cashier of a bankrupt company with debts of £14,500,000, his credentials for such a role were manifestly impeccable." Will we see a replay with Ken and Jeff?
Miscellany
The world has discovered Namibia, now that Angelina and Brad's baby was born there. Maastricht School of Management, of course, has been there for a long time. Maybe we should offer little Shiloh a scholarship for her MBA. No, second thought, let's ask Jolie and Pitt to endow the b-school there at Windhoek.
Artsy section
The time to leave Europe rapidly approaches. Hyon is already in California, and I leave Maastricht on August 30. In fact, to deal with the Dutch tax situation, I must leave the EU by the 30th. And to mollify the IRS, I can’t enter the US until September 4th! So I’m going to spend a few days in Canada… then on to California.
The new job
In September, I will join Alliant International University as Systemwide Vice Provost for Research, and Professor of Management.Alliant has six campuses throughout California, plus Mexico City, Tokyo, and Hong Kong, with still more international ventures in the works. Its management school has recently been named for Alliant benefactor and well-known executive coach Marshall Goldsmith. The Marshall Goldsmith School of Management specializes in the psychological aspects of management - consumer psychology, managerial psychology, and organizational psychology - and focuses on preparing graduates for careers in professional practice, as well as in corporate positions.
MGSM's San Diego campus, where I will be primarily based, offers the San Diego area's only doctoral programs (PhD and DBA) in management. Past faculty of the school include Igor Ansoff and Abraham Maslow.
I'll also maintain my affiliation with Maastricht School of Management, and spend part of each year in Maastricht, or on missions farther afield for MsM.
So there will still be exotic travel, but updates to the blog will be less frequent.
It will be a while before I'll get around to updating my info on Ryze, LinkedIn
, and Ecademy, and we
don't yet have a place to live in San Diego (!). However, I'll
still be reachable at my MsM email address.I'd like to go back to Holland, wooden shoe?
Today’s weather was perfectly beautiful – makes me glad I’ll be able to return to Maastricht for visits to MsM. Maastricht has been a great place to live, and it will be a great place to return to, not to mention close to so many other terrific destinations in Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, France, England, and Switzerland. Excellent people at MsM and at the Maastricht aikido club.But two years here and I still can’t speak Dutch? Here are the…
… top 10 reasons I haven't learned Dutch:
- Everyone in Maastricht speaks English.
- Every time I learn a few words, MsM sends me to Egypt for three weeks, or Vietnam, and I forget it all.
- I can read menus now in Dutch, so what the hell.
- The working language at MsM is English.
- Nobody in Maastricht cooperates with earnest learners of Dutch. If they hear a question asked in bad Dutch, they reply in English.
- The words for beer and WC are the same in English anyway.
- I spend almost as many waking (non-working) hours in Belgium and Germany as in the Netherlands. (There’s a place just north of Maastricht where the Netherlands is just four miles wide. Get lost in Maastricht, you’re probably in Belgium.)
- The teaching language for all MsM courses worldwide is English.
- So many Dutch words make me burst out laughing, thus offending everyone in earshot. The word for a stage play sounds just like “toenail.” As I pack to move to the US, I’m acutely aware that the word for shipping is hard to distinguish from “sheep fart.” (If you’re into this kind of bathroom humor, finish the following sentence: Dutch astronauts just want some ________. Answer: The Dutch word for space travel is ruimtevaart.)
- They don’t speak real Dutch in Limburg anyway. Here it’s Limburgse, the Limburg dialect. See this excerpt from an interesting essay by Michiel Horn, in which he describes…
Turning over rocks
Speaking of languages, I believe I mentioned tongue in cheek that Hyon has almost learned Hebrew, in the course of getting to know every diamond merchant in Antwerp. We finally found a nice replacement for her engagement ring. She enjoyed participating in its design, and felt we got a bargain. (I’ll be glad to share what we’ve learned with any of you who are in the market for such stuff.)The jeweler sent us down the street, with the diamond in bond, to the setter’s workshop. No, no, he wasn’t Irish; in fact he is Armenian, and his common language with the jeweler is Russian. Say what you will about that last silly pun, but I now share two true facts: The only decoration on the setter’s work bench was a photo of Sharon Stone, and as he worked, he was listening to the Rolling Stones!
We witnessed the setting of the stone, and were escorted back to the jeweler, where we waited for the guy from the Gemological Institute to certify the diamond. There was ample time for talking about the Israel-Hezbollah situation:
- Tom Friedman was wrong to predict that Hezbollah would lose popular support by virtue of being unable to rebuild Lebanese homes. As we’ve now seen on CNN, Iran has sent lots of money, and Hezbollah is handing USD 12,000 to every family who lost a home.
- Israel's military intelligence isn’t as good as it once was. Granted, the Entebbe airport and the Iraqi reactor were not in residential neighborhoods, but those two operations were models of surgical precision compared to this tragic mess. Jeweler (an Israeli) opines that there are fewer reliable informants these days.
- My own student’s research reveals that (at least in pharmaceuticals) Israeli product can be imported into Palestine without import duty, while Palestinian drugs can’t be sold in Israel at all! It seems elementary (at least to me, after years of experience with development efforts on the Mexican border) that building a bigger Palestinian middle class would increase stability, or anyway decrease support for extremists. Why isn’t Israel trying to boost economic development in Palestine? The jeweler says there’re no policies for that. Sez I, Israel was once a poor country, but now it isn’t any more, and it can afford to implement such policies. Jeweler granted my point, but maintained that Israel is a young country, and hasn't had enough experience, political unity, or continuity to make such things work.
International News Bloopers
This is fun, and Metacafé has offered to trade web links if I show it to you, so here ya go. You'll need Flash Player.Packing to move
I’m up to my ears in cardboard boxes and luggage, trying to finalize what to ship by sea (charged by cubic meter), what to check through the airline (charged by kg), what to carry on board (new airline security rules), and what to mail (whoa, expensive). Boxes must be sealed for pickup and shipment three days from now! A going-away party this afternoon. And I haven’t sold the car yet, but have a couple of prospects on the line.Also finishing up my teaching for MsM for this academic year. Spent a day last week helping education administrators from Tanzania make a plan to upgrade their university, and the week before, taught an MBA thesis prep course to 16 students from Kazakhstan. Both courses were in Maastricht.
I was impressed by the Kazakhstan group. Multi-lingual, ethnically diverse (their folks originating variously in Russia, the Caucasus, Kazakhstan, China, Korea, Turkey), bright and friendly. They tell me all the country's non-Kazakh ethnic groups were originally refugees, and have adopted the Kazakh ethic of welcoming foreigners. I guess if you lived in the 9th-largest country in the world with only 15 million people, you’d welcome newbies too. After the fall of the wall, Russians were persecuted in the Baltic states – not to mention Chechnya! – and fled back to Russia. Russians fled from Kazakhstan too, but they didn’t have to, and now, remembering the more open lifestyle there, they are returning to Kazakhstan from Russia. The country (Kazakhstan) is doing well on oil revenues, and its people are quickly becoming more sophisticated and internationalized.
And signing off
I've enjoyed it - thanks for reading. For the nonce, this is -30-. |
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| Bishop's
Mill in Maastricht |
Hyon waves 'bye to Europe |
July 16, 2006
Tour de France
My aunt Reita and cousin Roaa stopped to see us on the last leg of
their trip around the world (another story, which my aunt and daughter
will chronicle separately). We drove to the country between
Maastricht and Aachen and caught some of the Tour de France. Big business, the Tour, but out there in the boonies it was just a police roadblock and a few spectators with lawn chairs and coolers.
This was on July 4. On the way back we stopped at the American military cemetery at Margraten, expecting some kind of ceremony for US independence day, but the place – gorgeous landscaping and views, not a blade of grass out of place – was almost abandoned. Lofty sentiments engraved on the monuments, oddly jarring to the modern mind as they try to glorify a grim and ugly necessity.
We also enjoyed a day back in Bruges.
Peru
Then I unexpectedly went to Peru for two days. That’s right, it was more time on the airplane than in the country. But an adventure, and always nice to see a new place.Between the airport and the Centrum business school of the Pontifícia Universidad Católica de Peru, Lima looks a bit like Monterrey, Mexico. (Indeed my host said Peruvians feel affinity for Mexicans, having the “same language, same culture, same dreams, same frustrations.”) But a second glance reveals Lima as greener, richer, and much bigger than Monterrey. Not to mention the ocean; Peru has over 3,000 km of beaches. There are 9 to 12 million people in Lima – 1 million of them Chinese! – a city where it never rains, and has never rained as long as humans have lived there. There is fog, though, and the green plants eat the fog. Lima has a low-key beauty. A university colleague drove me around for a quick tour. I could not stop to take photos of all the wonders I saw, but here are a few. Locals complain about the traffic, but Lima is much quieter (except for the casinos, where 90% of the gamblers are women) and less crowded-feeling than Mexico City. |
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| In the favela lives a boat-builder. |
 |
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| In the
bay at Lima: "The Old Man & the Sea." |
Prof.
Ferradas took me to José Antonio, a great restaurant. |
 |
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| One of
Lima's bays. |
"Vive
el sabor Peruano!" |
It’s a diverse country (coast, desert, Andes, Amazonia), and I hope to see more of it next year, particularly Cuzco and Macchu Pichu.
André Rieu
Reita and Roaa went to Paris and Amsterdam during my Peru trip, and we got together again in Maastricht for a day before they left for the US. We went to an André Rieu concert. This was notable because Rieu lives in a castle in Maastricht, and for his big hometown open-air concert he allowed video feeds into bars and cafes throughout the central city. So we enjoyed a 4-hour concert for the price of a few drinks. Corny, but excellent musicianship, and he succeeds in making classical music accessible. (Most such efforts fall flat, so I admired his approach.) Limburgers love him, and in fact the concert helped me better understand Limburg culture.July 1, 2006
Santorini
For this installment, I share photo credits with Hyon and Gina. Santorini's eminently photographable, and cooler than the Greek mainland. Delightful place to visit. We drove to Brussels airport, flew to Athens, taxied to Piraeus, ferried to Santorini, bussed to Fira town, and walked the last few blocks to our hotel. This is called "multi-modal transportation." As you see below, people arriving at the cruise ship port (as opposed to the ferry port) ride burros up to Fira and to their hotels, which have a/c and wi-fi. This is called "technological leap-frogging."Great to see some of the IC2 Institute and LBJ School mafia at the conference on Santorini. On Stony Ishikawa's recommendation, we ate at Nikolas; Gina had a stuffed zucchini with lemon sauce, out of this world. While I was conferencing, Hyon and Gina took tours to the volcano and some hot springs and beaches. The last eruptions were in the 1950s, but you can still burn your feet if you get too close. (We were all reading Captain Corelli's Mandolin, which takes place on Kefalonia, the next island over in the Cyclades chain. Corelli mentions the earthquakes that shook the islands in the year of the volcano.) To get to the hot springs you have to swim from the tour boat. It's customary to smear hot mud from the springs all over your body.
What a difference 35 short years make! Greece is no longer a poor country, at least the parts we saw. Athens is still spiffed up from the olympics. Piraeus, a dump when I last visited, now has a pleasant marina/waterfront, with good restaurants, cafés, markets. Olympic Airlines is very nice, best tourist-class legroom in the business, and edible food. To join the EU, Greece had to give up the drachma – the monetary unit in longest continuous use of any in history – in favor of the euro.
More story below the pictures.
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| On
the prominade in Piraeus, a guy enjoys the view. Note the orange tree, and the sidewalk waitress station. |
Activities
on the 9-hour ferry ride include backgammon (right), sleeping, sunning,
eating, sightseeing, complaining. |
Tattooed
woman hides in the shade on ferry. |
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 |
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| Blowup of the guy in the pic above. Facial expression priceless. |
Gina at the hot springs. |
Scene at Santorini |
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 |
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| Fira,
as seen from the conference center. You can see the stairway down
the cliff to the sea. |
Burros
and mules heading up the stairs. |
'Nuther
cliff scene. |
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| Cliff
sandwich: town at bottom, more town at top. |
The
dogs of art. |
Hyon
(right) at sunset. |
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Left: Waitresses dance at conference banquet. Right:
I left Hyon and Gina in Athens for another three days, and returned to
Maastricht for MsM's annual Partners' Conference. We took the
partners for a dinner cruise on the Maas.
|
 |
Another of this week's doctoral defenses was memorable because I found out the supervising committee was not in complete agreement about the thesis. Well, why was a defense scheduled? A miscommunication somewhere along the line. The breach of rules, and the potential for embarrassment, were so great that I cancelled the defense, even knowing the student had already bought a nonrefundable ticket from her home country. (No reflection on the student's work, it's just that the committee didn't agree.) The student shows up, very upset as expected. She tells me she brought her whole family with her to witness the defense, but hasn't yet told them the bad news.
And not only that, but she had worked 20 years as teacher to a prince from a neighboring, very wealthy country – and the prince planned to fly his private plane to Maastricht for the defense! Hmm... follow the rules, or create a diplomatic incident, what a choice. I emailed the Director-Dean (who was traveling in China) and the Chairman of the Board to say, unless a miracle happens and the committee agrees, we're gonna have to do some very creative face-saving – and I do not expect the miracle to occur.
Two hours later, the miracle happens. Screaming among committee members behind closed doors, rapid repositioning of the thrust of the thesis to play to its greatest strengths. Four signatures! Email to the D-D and the Chairman: The miracle has occurred, the defense goes forward. A nice lesson here: There were ample opportunities to compromise principles and cut corners. We didn't, and everything turned out OK.
Student carries off the defense quite well. Family happy. The 20-something prince and the two teenage princesses are impressive, poised and outgoing. His two bodyguards are very large. Professor A whispers to me, "Do you know how big the plane is that he flew in on?" I say, "Dunno, I imagine something by Lear." He says, "No, it's a 737." "Well," I reply, "I guess you can't stuff those big bodyguards into a Piper Cub." Professor B chimes in, "Nor would you want to try."
Eyeing the bodyguards, Professor B continues, "Fred, it's lucky for you that you made this defense work!" Nah, I say, those are only two big guys; it was the Chairman of the Board I was worried about.
Thus was the doctoral program saved, and likewise the neck of the knight, and the princesses have lived happily ever after so far.
Artsy section
Hyon, with MsM's Arsenio Kranenburg, organized an art exhibition at Maastricht School of Management. All items by Hyon's classmates at Kumulus. A gala opening with lecture and music. Then all the Partners' Conference attendees (from 23 countries) saw the art. Then the degree candidates and the aforementioned royal family. Hyon refused to hang her own stuff, missed all that international recognition, I hope she learned her lesson.
June 7, 2006
Kuwait
Imagine, if you will, a place with no natural fresh groundwater and completely negligible energy cost... Sounds like a set-up for a Rod Serling story, but no, it’s Kuwait, and it resembles a beer-free Orange County. I suppose this is because although energy really costs nothing in Kuwait, Californians just act as though it does. Actually, Kuwait wastes less energy than you might imagine, but cheap electricity does enable some daring architecture. Even Kuwaitis concentrate their Gulf-area real estate investments in Qatar or Dubai, though, so there’s not much to remark about in Kuwait. As Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, CA, there’s no there there.Kuwait is 5 hours by air and one time zone from Brussels. We flew over Baghdad and followed the Tigris down to the Gulf. Many US soldiers were on board... it’s possible that the odds are in favor of a 747-full of American soldiers completing their tours and returning home safely – let’s hope so.
Compared to Egypt, Kuwait is less socially liberal, and yet English is more widely spoken and more people have traveled to Europe and the States. Kuwait is richer than Egypt, and it’s a monarchy. Immigrants cannot become citizens. There are more western chain stores, and lots of ethnic restaurants run by Asian immigrants.
At Kuwait-Maastricht Business School, our female students exclusively wear western clothes, but male students mix traditional and western styles. I saw an Arab woman in an Indian restaurant, dressed in full whaddyacallit; she had to hold a mouth-flap up to eat and drink.
Local faculty member Jonathan Njoku took me sightseeing. "OK, we'll drive toward Saudi Arabia, then come back to the city. Then we’ll drive a ways toward Iraq. But not too far!" Indeed, police checkpoints start 85km from the Iraqi border. We drove out toward Saudi to the start of true desert; we turned around at McDonalds, and back to the city. We drove out the other way, past the first Iraq checkpoint, and desert started again. We turned around at Burger King and went back. I kid you not! (The only local fast food chain seems to be Naif Chicken. I was thinking, yeah, the hipper chickens must be smart enough to avoid the fryer. But a faculty colleague told me Naif is the family name of the chain’s founders.) Sane people go out only at night this time of year, due to the heat, so the sightseeing was at dusk and I have no photos from Kuwait.
To point up that there are differences between any two Mid-East cultures as well as contradictions within each: I'm reading a memoir by Jim Harrison (author of Legends of the Fall). He writes that we've tended to put "all the nations of the Middle East into our giant dim-witted Mixmaster..."
Mexico
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To
maintain my expat tax status, I have to ration my days in the US.
I would gladly have squandered some of them to see parents, kids, or
sister, but after some business near the border, I was left with a
messed-up, non-changeable return reservation to Europe, three extra
days, and not enough money or time to fly to see family. So, I went to
a Mexican beach. Rosarito Beach, just outside Tijuana, exhibits remnant 1940s Hollywood glamour with an overlay of head-banging Spring Breakism, plus pockets of very classy traditional Mexican style. The local specialty is Baja California lobster, cut in half lengthwise and deep-fried. They'll prepare the lobster any way you want it, so avoid this "Puerto Nuevo style." I found it greasy and tough, though flavorful. |
| Anna told me, "Stay out of trouble while you're in Mexico." As Mexico had just lost to the Netherlands in a pre-World Cup practice match, my technique for staying out of trouble was to say, "I'm from Texas." |
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You
know it's a new world when you pay more for one tank of gas than you
paid for your first car. Gasoline is 75¢ (US) per liter in Tijuana. In Kuwait, Jonathan had no idea and couldn't care how much gas costs. (In any case, a price in KD (Kuwaiti Dinars)/liter would mean little to you, dear reader.) Suffice it to say he drives his empty Camry into a station and fills up for 3KD, about 9 euros. By contrast, it’s now $3.33/gallon in California, and roughly $6/gallon in Maastricht, that is, ten times what it costs in Kuwait. Not just more expensive than beer, it's now more expensive than milk. I have a Camry too, and I've paid €90 (at least $110) to fill it up in Europe. Graphic at left is public domain, from the EU's European Innovation magazine. |
Aachen
again. My German assistant, Johanna, accompanied us to Aachen to
help us pay a parking ticket. Paying a ticket is surprisingly
complicated. The
highlight of the day was seeing an eierschalensollbruchsteelenverursacher
for sale. It's a device for neatly cracking an egg. Easier
to operate, let's hope, than to pronounce.
Maastricht. In other pleasant local outings, this spring’s Lion's picnic took place at Kasteel Rijckholt, and the Maastricht International Initiative meeting on a riverboat on the Maas.
Maastricht. In other pleasant local outings, this spring’s Lion's picnic took place at Kasteel Rijckholt, and the Maastricht International Initiative meeting on a riverboat on the Maas.
Departments
Current eventsEnron’s Ken Lay, friend of the imperial Bush, is behind bars. Before we think this is the end of the story, let’s consider the South Seas Company affair of 1721 and thenabouts, as described in Robert Goddard’s Sea Change. King George I (yes, George!) of England wanted his cronies who were board members or execs of South Seas Co. held harmless. The fix was in. Goddard mentions "[Comptroller Robert] Knight's escape from the supposedly escape-proof Antwerp Citadel and his abscondence across the border into France.... Another deal had clearly been done. Before the year was out, Knight had established himself in Paris as a financial consultant. As the former chief cashier of a bankrupt company with debts of £14,500,000, his credentials for such a role were manifestly impeccable." Will we see a replay with Ken and Jeff?
Miscellany
The world has discovered Namibia, now that Angelina and Brad's baby was born there. Maastricht School of Management, of course, has been there for a long time. Maybe we should offer little Shiloh a scholarship for her MBA. No, second thought, let's ask Jolie and Pitt to endow the b-school there at Windhoek.
Artsy section
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Hyon likes the relief sculpture on this front door in Maastricht. |
Johanna, who came to Maastricht to study classical guitar at the city’s conservatory – and who is also an aikido student – gave a concert at the dojo. Very nice! |
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