Day 2 - Lectures Really Start, Small Group Projects Are Assigned

Mozart's birth house in downtown Salzburg.

It seems impossible to have enough time and peace of mind to sit down to write a real, comprehensive blog about what’s been happening. We finally got out of our last session today at 10 PM after which I rushed to my room to wait for Ken’s phone call and subsequently went to the Bierstube, the basement “bar.”

I now have my carefully dosed medicine of one beer in me which is pretty helpful with my jet lag sleeping problems. I’m loopy and hungry, but I’ll try to at the very least give a rough account on what went on today.

We started at 9 AM with a lecture by Norman Yetman on The First Universal Nation: People in the 20th and 21st Century. He opened his lecture with Frost’s “Mending Wall” and went on to talk about immigration, race, identity, and many other things. After a short coffee break we went back for a plenary discussion and got introduced to our Small Group Project.

Each group (there are seven of them) gets assigned a country pair and is supposed to research on immigration, both historical and current. I was assigned to the USA-Mexico group along with seven others including the faculty advisor. Before lunch we also had our group picture taken with the Sound of Music background. After lunch we briefly met with our groups. Around 2:45 PM we went on a walking tour of Salzburg after which Roberto, Sandra and I went shopping. I bought way too many German books and ended up loosing both Roberto and Sandra and ended up taking a cab back to the Schloss.

Dinner! We ate and got a make-up of the Schloss Tour which had been rescheduled since we weren’t here yet yesterday when it was supposed to happen. The tour was decent and we went to our next lecture straight after that: Mapping Ethnocentrism. It was quite long and many folks I talked to (including myself) nearly nodded off during, although we all agreed that the content was fascinating, but I guess what David said about the jet lag hitting you really hard on the second day became true for most of us during the lecture.

Nevertheless, I couldn’t help but still go to the Bierstube. I played some table tennis and foseball with Nate.

There’s so much more. Great conversations. Moments of feeling a new connection within our group. Making new friends. Having really “big” conversations. Having life-changing realizations. I hope there will be detailed descriptions of those. For now, stay tuned, and I’ll see you all tomorrow!