“Our memories are the only paradise from which we can never be expelled.”So far, I have blogged about the anticipation, about the departure, about the warm-up at Hyco Lake, about our experience in Durham and Raleigh, and about the things we had learned by the time we left Raleigh. Yet our GSE trip did not stop there. This blog post is about the rest of the voyage.— Jean Paul Richter
On Wednesday April 20, we visited Wendell. What a difference 20 miles can make! It’s hard to believe that this small town, just over 4,000 inhabitants, is not geographically further away from the city of Raleigh, because it appears as it lies in the middle of nowhere. A textile printing firm, Moretex, found itself a good market niche, printing sportswear with school logos, and somehow manages to survive. We also visited a gun shop, and were quite surprised to find not only revolvers and shotguns, but also semi-automatic weapons lying around on sale, as if they were kitchen knives. Even Belgian-made FN FS2000 assault rifles, which are normally used by the Special Forces of several armies.
The next few days we spend at Wake Forest. These were not very hectic. Not much is going on around there, and around Easter even less. We had a brunch and a meeting at the very beautifully renovated Lions Gate Inn. We visited an old-timer muscle car shop, but did not buy ourselves any vehicle. On Friday, we went karting and shopping. On Friday evening, we were invited to the home of the Killians (Nick’s host family) who served us Frogmore stew. There is seafood and saucages, but no frogs in the dish. Reportedly, there is no lack of frogs in Frogmore, Saint Helena, South Carolina, the unincorporated community where this stew originated, and yet somehow the inhabitants over there reportedly prefer the boring name “Saint Helena” over the more meaningful and original “Frogmore”.
On Saturday, we went shopping (once more) and in the evening we went bowling. We proved experimentally, amongst other things, that is possible to hit the pins by rolling the balls from a fixed position with two hand. No alcohol was allowed in the bowling alley, so we stopped after a couple of games and went to a sports bar.
On the International Zombie Day and Chocolate Festival, we played some computer games.
Many thanks to my host family, Bill and Maggie Goldstone. Also, their two cats and two dogs entertained me, especially the recurring theme where one lazy dog would lay down, and on of the cats would approach very provocatively, only to be off so fast that when the dog finally leaps up, he hardly knows in which direction to chase.
The next few days we spend at Oxford. I visited the Granville Community College (where the lessons on computers and electronics weren’t too difficult) and the city manager of Oxford gave us a tour in city hall, and the local County Historical Society in their museum(s).
The tabacco industry may be decaying in North Carolina, but it isn’t dead. On Wednesday April 27 we visited the American Spirit Cigarettes factory. They make “naturally grown” cigarettes, although they probably are just as bad for you as any other. Before we headed off to Asheville, we went skeet shooting. Filip turned out to be a Natural Born Skeet Killer.
Bob and Marsha Nelson were my host family. Even though Bob is a shoe stores (plural) manager, he had to take me to five different stores (only of them was his) before we could find replacements for my broken shoelaces. Finding the right kind of shoelaces or the right length was easy; finding shoelaces that were the right kind, the right color and the right length not so much. (In the end, we found them in Walmart.) Thanks, Bob!
On the way to Asheville, we learned that President Barack Hussein Obama had released his Long Form Certificate of Live Birth.
In Asheville, Bart Cleary took us to Biltmore on Thursday April 28. That estate with its late 19th century mansion is beautiful and impressive! Back then, the Vandebilt family made a fortune by building railroads, and subsequently wasn’t very stingy when building the place. Today, the luxurious castle is open for the public, and the family uses the revenue to keep the estate in great shape. It is beautifully decorated, and includes a very nice libary, an indoor swimming pool and a bowling alley.
On Thursday night, several restaurants and bars were participating in the fundraiser Dining Our For Life, donating portions of their proceeds to AIDS agencies. As part of the programme, we ended up with free tickets to the Scandals nightclub, where “Twenty Fingers and a Missing Tooth” would perform (that turned out to be a knife throwing act) before the drag queens’ show. Scandals is a gay place, where Peace Scholar Marios proved to be very popular.
The next three days, the Rotary district held its conference in the Marriott Renaissance hotel where we were staying. I was impressed with Marios’ presentation on Friday on his home country Cyprus, but even more with the lecture “Failure is not Final” by retired Navy commander Scott Waddle on Saturday. He was the captain of the USS Greeneville (SSN-772) during the Ehime Maru incident, in which 9 people (including 4 high school students) lost their lives.
On Saturday evening, we went out once more with the Peace Scholars. And, once more, the only bar with both music and customers in it turned out to be a gay bar. Truly, Asheville earnt the nickname “Assville” very deservingly! (Other case in point: the day before, I found myself in the hotel’s hot tub with two girls. The minute I left the hot tub for another few laps in the swimming pool, those girls were all over each other.)
By Sunday evening, we were in Fuquay-Varina. There I stayed with Mark and Lynanne Fowle and their lovely daughter Kennedy, to all of whom I owe a lot of thanks. My host family was good friends with Mike and Cindy, Nick’s and Filip’s hosts. We ate a very delicious meal at their place, in a stylish dining room, dressed in suits, eating from cardboard plates with plastic cuttelry (that broke). Very soon, Cindy got referred to and addressed to as “Mom”.
Later that evening, I joined the Fowle family as they were watching The Celebrity Apprentice. La Toya Jackson had just asked the boss, Donald Trump, in a suprise move, to re-hire her, as the programme was interrupted because the President of the United States was about to address the nation. In the next hour, the historical announcement was delayed a few times, but eventually at 11:35 pm (the family already went to bed, but I was allowed to stay up some more) President Obama confirmed: “Good evening. Tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden…”
On Monday, we visited Johnston Community College. On the way back, our driver Vitaliy brought us to a great homemade ice cream place. I ordered an ice cream with two balls of ice, but when I saw the size of those balls, I knew immediately that I had erred. American portions tend to be larger than European, but at Sunni Sky’s you really get more than enough.
On Tuesday, we visited Bob Barker’s company: it supplies all kinds of things to jails and prisons. The company made the mattresses itself, and did the name printing on the prison uniforms. For other things (from toothpaste to handcuffs) it is just the wholesaler. In the afternoon, we went for a hike in Raven Rock State Park. It wasn’t a very long hike — it was actually very short — so the half-hour introduction beforehand by the Park Ranger was really quite a bit overkill. But the Ranger explained about the Park and its fauna and flora with so much gusto and enthusiasm, that we politely stayed listening.
Vitali drove us around in a different van: opening the side door required a crowbar.
That evening, after Kennedy’s dance performance, my host family went to a bar trivia quiz, and I joined them. Nick and Filip were invited to, but they declined. To inform my host family that they weren’t coming, “Mom” sent a text message that Nick and Filip were grounded. Nobody would believe the original reason (Mom likes it too much when people talk back at her) so the texted instead that Nick and Filip were grounded because they had redirected the website of her children’s theater to a porn site. I prevented the quiz team from making one mistake: the brightest star in the Northern Hemispere’s night sky is not Polaris, but Sirius.
On Wednesday, we got a tour behind the scenes of Raleigh-Durham International Airport (RDU). If you ever need to be in the gate area of the airport without passing though metal detectors or invasive full body scanners: take a tour. We did not get inside the flight control tower, but did visit the luggage control area and ground traffic control. When driving around the terminal, we saw a gate where they a plane with the coffin of a deceased soldier was about to arrive. The other thing we came a cross was a luggage cart with the Stars and Stripes flag of the United States. A bit further we saw some heavily armed policemen escorting inmates into an airplane.
Then we went to the last place of our trip: Chapel Hill. On the way, we stopped at Duke University’s Lemur Center, the world’s largest research center on prosimian primates. (They’re lemurs, not monkeys, nor apes!) Ancestral lemurs could be found all over Africa 60 million years ago, but today lemurs in the wild are endemic to only the island of Madagascar. As Douglas Adams observed: Madagascar had been a monkey-free refuge for the lemurs off the coast of mainland Africa for millions of years, and now with the increasing human presence in Madagascar, the non-human-inhabited Nosy Mangabe refuge/reservate island is set up as the monkey-free refuge off the coast of mainland Madagascar.
On Thursday May 5, we visited the University of North Carolina’s School of Government. Here, they give classes and additional education to elected officeholders (mayors and such), to city and county officials, and to Civics Class teachers (who get to be students once more). We sat in on such a class, and the school teachers and their teacher, a Law professor, discussed Virginia v. Black, 538 US 343 (2003): both the case itself, and some pedagogic notes about how to teach about it in high school.
The case is about a law that outlawed burning a cross in Virginia, since the Ku Klux Klan had a habit of burning crossing near the homes of those they wished to intimidate. (Nick, on the other hand, was not aware of this symbolism, and associated a burning cross with Madonna, since it appeared in her music video “Like a Prayer”.) For those interested in the outcome: Justice Sandra Day O’Connor opined for the Court that a State is indeed constitutionally allowed to prohibit and penalize burning a cross (or causing a cross to be burned) with the intent of intimidating any person or group of persons, but the Court struck down the provision that any such burning is in itself prima facie evidence of an intent to intimidate.
In the end, Nick managed to turn this First Amendment discussion into a Second Amendment discussion, at least for a few minutes. Yet in that three minutes conversation, the teacher-students managed to touch all the Major Issues surrounding the Second Amendment: the difference between what one thinks the Constitution says and what one believes the law (or constitution) ought to say; how this amendment is the worst expressed and most ambiguous sentence in the text of the Constitution; whether keeping and bearing arms are one or two different rights; whether this amendment was intended by the signing parties to apply to militias or to individuals; how the use of a comma (“as opposed to a semicolon”, according to one student) between the dependent and independent clause indicates that most likely the intent was to regulate militias; yet how for the use of the ungrammatical first comma there seems to be no good explanation; and how the body of jurisprudence interpreting the Second Amendment as an individual right is now so immense that, because of the stare decisis and jurisprudence constante principles, the Individual Right interpretation of the Second Amendment is now so firmly rooted that one should consider it to be the only valid interpretation, even though it probably wasn’t originally meant that way. According to one student, this approach is consistent with the view of the Constitution as a Living Document, to which the law professor replied dryly: “Yes, but just don’t tell Scalia that that he’s played such a big role in the life of a Living Document.”
In the evening, we went for a drink in Top of the Hill, a bar where Jeff turned out to be member of “the founder’s club”; and for a drink in Milltown, a bar where one can find some great Flemish beers: Duvel, Delirium Tremens, Bosteels Tripel Karmeliet, Arabier, Sint-Bernardus 12, and others.
The next day we got a tour of the campus of the University of North Carolina and its sporting infrastructure. By then, the students had finished their exams and were preparing for the graduation ceremony the next day. In the evening, we attended a graduation party at an anthropology professors’ house (some students were housesitting and dogsitting during the professors’ absence). The Peace Scholars were there too. We made the best out of our final night in North Carolina.
Many thanks to my host family, Don and Rose Heineman, for the wonderful stay, and for staying up so late and driving me home safely that night.
The next day we made our bags, and went to the airport. Too soon, this great trip was over. Shirin Mashhoon stopped by to say “bye”, and I got a touching “we miss you” letter from Abteen.
