Five ways to enjoy “Suicide Sunday”

by Tom Johansmeyer on

I stumbled into Cambridge, England on “Suicide Sunday,” a joyous occasion in which the local university students cut loose and get wasted blow off steam following the completion of final exams. The streets are packed with tourists and students, the former gawking, the latter playing. To witness the events is figuratively intoxicating, while to participate offers a more literal experience. The booze flows plentifully, and merriment is omnipresent.

So, how can you get in on the action? Call ahead to the Cambridge University to find out when Suicide Sunday will be (it’s always in June). Once you hit the ground, here are a few ways to pass the time:

1. Pour yourself a drink: If you’re clever, enter one of the colleges. The signs prohibit non-student entry, and there are security guards just inside those doors (as I learned the hard way). But, if you can slip inside, you’ll be at the center of the party. It’s fairly likely that free liquor will flow your way.

Backup Plan: If the rent-a-cops bust you, shoot for an aquatic landing. Take a “punt” (flat-bottomed boat) or other vessel onto the River Cam. Slip up to the shore and climb out. Bribe a student (in the boat and on shore). Get wasted. Too easy.

2. Stay on the river for a bit: “Punting,” mentioned above, is really nothing more than pushing a boat with a pole along the River Cam. You can either rent your own and try your luck or hire a “chauffeured” punt to bring you along the river. Keep in mind that there will be plenty of self-hired punts out there, so you’re best bet is to stay in the hands of a professional.

People Watch: There are parties at the colleges all along the river. Watch for the splashes, as drunk students tend to toss each other into the water. Sometimes, small wrestling matches occur that ultimately lead to a trip into the drink. You can enjoy the show from start to finish.

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3. Fill your stomach: The most common picnic fare seems to be beer and cheap Indian food. Join the party! Both are plentiful. Grab your grub and head out for the punt bridges behind St. Catherine’s (on Silver Street). Look for a spot in the unmowed grass, and chow down. Buy a little extra – you may be able to host a small party of drunk college kids!

Heckle the Help: When you’ve finished eating, stake out a spot on a bridge. To fit in with the locals, pick up a few water balloons. Then, hunt drunks. You won’t be alone. More than a few people were on the prowl while I was waiting for my punt.

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4. Enjoy the architecture: Yes, there is a cultural aspect to Cambridge University. The easiest way to satisfy your intellectual obligation is to wander the streets and enjoy the downright regal architecture that the various colleges offer. Also, you can do this while meandering from one rockin’ party to the next, so you don’t have to sacrifice any precious drinking time.

Watch for Pitchers: The clean cut British boys pushing punting tickets aren’t as skilled as the souk-minders of Marrakech, but they’re trying. Don’t get sucked in by their innocent charm while you’re snapping photos of the buildings. Make your arrangements for punting when you get down to the river.

5. Protest, protest, protest: Cambridge, England is not unlike Cambridge, Massachusetts, in that there is always some group fighting the social and political injustices of the world. On the most recent Suicide Day, I saw a bike rally chanting: “Free Gaza now!”

Let It Roll: Speaking of bikes, they’re the most popular form of transportation in Cambridge. Look for them when you cross the street. Hell, rent one for a while. It’s nice to see the world like a local.

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Disclosure: Many thanks to Visit Britain, which picked up the tab for this trip and to British Airways for the flights. Obviously, it did not pay for my opinions. If they did, I doubt this is the story that would have been commissioned.

Bowermasters Adventures — Becoming a French state

by Jon Bowermaster on

Dozens of small tri-colored French flags hang from the awning of the bar 5/5 on Mamoudzou’s seafront. A Malagasy polka/country/blues/rock band plays to a mixed crowd of blacks and whites. Two weeks ago a historic vote turned the street out front into a riot of celebration when 95.5 percent of voters on this tiny island of 186,000 people voted to officially become French citizens.

Though Mayotte is closer to Mombassa than Paris, its traditional dish is manioc eaten with boiled fish, is 98 percent Muslim and known for cultivating the sweet-smelling essence ylang ylang (which made the perfumery Guerlain famous) it is now the 101st department – or state — of France.

A celebratory hangover lingers. I talk with a pair of women sitting in the back of the bar, taking advantage of a cool breeze blowing off the nighttime sea. They are all for the changes French citizenship will bring once the deal is formally signed in 2011: Social security benefits (though not for 25 years!), a new educational system, Islamic judges traded in for French ones and even the income taxes they will eventually have to pay. But they tell me they are also for a couple things the vote will outlaw: Polygamy and child marriages. “Those are from another time,” says one, her face masked by a traditional beige-colored paste of ground coral and sandalwood meant to keep the sun away, skin younger.

That its overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim population is set to become full-fledged French citizens seems a bit odd to me. Having lived in France for nearly a decade I have seen how the French in France often treat Muslims living there, rewarding them with a high rate of joblessness, apartments in the poorest banlieues and even traditional headscarves banned from schools.

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Not everyone is happy about the outcome of the vote. According to the U.K’s Guardian, in an in-depth pre-election report, the African Union and the Comoros administration – which sees Mayotte as an “occupied” territory” – denounced the referendum. There are economic disparities too: About a third of Mayotte’s residents are undocumented workers who arrived illegally from the three other Comoros islands; while Mayotte’s GNP is only a third of that of another French Indian Ocean island Reunion, it is nine times that of the neighboring Comoros.

During a walk through the streets of the capital city and talks with some of its savvier business people it becomes clear the vote was a power play masked by populist vote: Mayotte is a strategic asset in a much broader international power play as France tries to counter Iran’s growing influence on the Muslim islands off Africa’s east coast.

France is already struggling to deal with a wave of illegal immigrants from the other three impoverished Comoros islands, which risk their lives to reach Mayotte by boat despite the growing number of shipwrecks and drownings. Expectant mothers hope to give birth here and young people hope for jobs or a chance to get to mainland France and Europe. The European commission has criticized the dire conditions in Mayotte’s French-run immigrant detention centers.

But France is concerned with the strategic importance of bringing Mayetta into its fold. Last month’s visit to the Comoros by Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad highlighted the Islamic republic’s growing presence on the three islands, building schools and mosques and tightening ties with the current Comoros president, Ahmed Abdallah Mohamed Sambi, who studied in Iran.

Standing at the 5/5 bar I ask the bartender if he’s worried about the influence of Ahmadinejad and his Iranian bosses. He laughs. “I would love for them to come here and live for a few months, to try an island life. Maybe that would make them see the world in a different light.”

Read more from Jon at Bowermaster’s Adventures.

Human Rights International Film Festival

by Jamie Rhein on

A few years ago, in the audience of the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center watching A Closer Walk, a wonderful documentary about the global struggle caused by AIDS, I felt tuned into something bigger than myself. Reading New York Times film critic Steven Holden’s article about the Human Rights International Film Festival going on at the Walter Reade Theater through June 25, reminded me about that night, as well as, my day at the Cleveland International Film Festival this past March.

A film festival is an opportunity to view the world through a variety of lenses. In a summer of blockbusters where the popular theme seems to be horror and sci-fi—again, breaking up the fiction action with action that is real may give you that bigger than yourself feeling. If nothing else, seeing such films is an opportunity to see the work of passionate people who are like dogs with bones when it comes to getting a movie made about a cause they care about.

Besides, for people who are world travelers, heading to a film may shed light on some of the issues of the countries where one visits. Although one may visit a country, there may not be the opportunity to really find out what goes on behind closed doors, literally and figuratively.

Holden gave an overview of some of the films in his articlem and indicates that there is much worthwhile to see. You may have heard of some of the offerings. They are a mix of films that are new and others have been previously viewed elsewhere.

Because the films take in a range of slices of life in Afganistan, Ecuador, Pakistan, India and more–and often are about subjects that are not what one would think they might be about, they hold details well outside the sound bite version of the nightly news.

Here is a link to the films that will be featured and a link to the calendar to see when each will be screened.

Since I’m going to be in New York City next Wednesday, I have my eye on Regret to Inform, the award-winning documentary by Barbara Sonneborn. The film, nominated for an Academy Award in 1998 is about Sonneborn’s journey to Vietnam twenty years after her husband was killed there during the war. She set out to see where he was killed and along the way developed relationships with Vietnam war widows from the other side. Sonneborn will be at the showing and will give a talk as part of the venue.

If you do have a chance to head to the Walter Reade Theatre, take time to stop in the adjacent Furman Gallery to see the exhibit “Long Story Bit By Bit: Liberia Retold” by Tim Hetherington. Through photographs and writing, Hetherington has aimed to make sense of Liberia’s complicated past and present. The exhibit is another avenue to experience another person’s passion.

An artist is thrilled when people heading to a movie duck into a gallery to see his or her work as part of an event. The gallery is not open at night, so if you do want to see the exhibit, stop in before 5 p.m.

International CouchSurfing Day: Do you have a couch lined up?

by Jamie Rhein on

Ten years ago on June 12, CouchSurfing was born–or rather CouchSurfing.com was registered as a domain name and sleeping on the couch of people you just met became an organized system. More than just a way to hook people up with a free place to call it a night, CouchSurfing was created as a way to help make the world a better place.

See, if you stay on the couch of people who have agreed that they like people to stay on their couch as a way to get to know traveling types and expand their connections, the world becomes more friendly. When you make this a global scene, the power just grows.

As a person who CouchSurfed before it was conceived as an organized entity, I can attest to the value of staying with strangers. When I traveled across the United States with a friend of mine after we got out of the Peace Corps, we used our connections of friends to stay with their friends and family members. In most cases it determined where we headed and the experience created a sense that the U.S. was warm, welcoming and friendly.

Our couchsurfing found us staying in: Des Moines, Iowa courtesy of a home for wayward women; at a dairy farm in Vinita, Oklahoma, an itty bitty town; a bachelor pad in downtown San Francisco; and in a house near the beach in Carlsbad, California. At each place we hadn’t met the people before we showed up at their door (or they picked us up at the bus station). The rest of the time we stayed with friends of ours or my family members in various towns and cities in Kentucky, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, and California. Her parents sprung for the hotel room in Seattle and Vancouver and we tented it Utah and at the Rocky Mountain National Park.

That do-it-yourself couchsurfing experience has prompted me to welcome other people who have needed a place to stay into my home which has added to the feeling of expansiveness. It has also created a rich bank of memories of the people who have stayed with us who live in other parts of the world. One of them, Rita Goldman Gelman, author of Tales of a Female Nomad has made couchsurfing an integral part of her life. She stayed with her when we lived in New Delhi and we visited her two summers ago in Seattle.

Without our connections, there’s no way we would have been able to afford this trip and would have missed out on what helped me transition back into a life in the United States (until I moved overseas again).

Thanks to CouchSurfing.com people don’t need to rely on their own connections which might be a paltry number. The whole world is ones oyster thanks to an organized, Internet based system. To date there are 232 countries, 59,929 cities and 1,168,136 people who are registered with couches.

To celebrate International CouchSurfing Day you can also begin looking for a couch in a place you’ve always wanted to go–or offer someone yours. Here are two events happening to celebrate the occassion.

For more Gadling couchsurfing perspectives check out Brook Silva-Braga’s experiences in northern Europe and Tynan’s in Haiti. Neil also vouches for couches and has fond memories of an experience in Kazakhstan.

Bowermaster’s Adventures — Communing with hermit crabs

by Jon Bowermaster on

It is with great privilege and no small amount of humility that I spend as many days as I can on remote, uninhabited atolls. This Sunday morning it is in the Alphonse group of the Seychelles – south of the main granite islands of Mahe, Praslin and La Digue – and is called St. Francois. Shaped like a broken piece of coral, with several small fingers jutting northwards, it is just two miles around. But the lagoon that surrounds, outlined by a sharp reef, is a sizable nine by three miles.

Two facts of nature here in mid-April warrant an early morning exploration of the island: high heat and low tides. By nine it will be over 90 degrees F and humid, the lagoon covered by just a shallow, warm sea.

At seven, when much of the world is contemplating miraculous ascensions and chocolate egg hunts, I am communing with hermit crabs. I’ve never seen such a huge population (though it’s rivaled by a small island off Peru we visited last fall, which had a more intense concentration but nowhere near the volume). Every shell on the beach has been converted into a mobile home, from fingernail sized round shells to the long and conical to big, mossy, partially busted. There are easily fifty quick-moving hermies per square foot trundling shells of every size, shape and color. There does seem to be some weird segregation going on; though admittedly purely empirical it looks on parts of the beach that white shelled crabs mingle only with other white shelled crabs and that in other parts, moss-backed green shells hang only with their own kind.

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It’s possible that Sunday morning is moving day too, because we saw an inordinate amount of “house hunting” going on; big red hermit crabs having grown out of their existing shells looking for, and fighting over, bigger, empty versions. Something resembling a Manhattan condo open during headier real estate times.

By eight, it’s too hot not to be in the water, though it’s almost 90 degrees too. While the plunge is not exactly refreshing it’s an absolute necessity. Swimming alongside are a solitary hawksbill turtle and dozens of bonefish being chased by big jack fish. This lagoon is a Mecca for fly fishermen in pursuit of glassine-tinted bonefish, but never a paradise for boaters given the mean reef rimming the lagoon. From shore three big metal hulls rust where they ran aground decades before. It’s certain that this beach on an otherwise uninhabited island has been home over the centuries to a variety of shipwrecked sailors. I wonder if their ghosts still roam here?

It’s important on luxurious days like today – far from land, away from civilization, alone on an uninhabited island – to stop and listen. My aural memories of remote corners are as powerful as the visuals I carry in my head. This morning it is the far-off crash of waves on the reef; the gentle wash on sand as they lap onto the beach; and the distinct clicking of dry palm fronds rubbing together, blown by a hot breeze. (The most distinct sound I took away from yesterday was on yet another pristine sand beach, on D’Arros Island, where hundreds of frigate birds nested in tall, beachside palms. As they swooped just overhead on the way to feeding it was possible to hear only the flap of wings as they whooshed by.)

By nine, the tide is running out fast through the lagoon’s main pass, requiring a slow kick and swim to reach the reef edge. Floating on my back in the now hot, two-foot deep Indian Ocean, a last ditch attempt to cool off, I am surprised by another great sound, the whiz of a flying fish as it zips out of the water and past my head. Which if it isn’t a good-luck sign, I’m making it one.

Read more from Jon at Bowermaster’s Adventures.