SEM so far

I rushed through my morning yesterday in order to make my flight out of JFK in comfortable time. I needn't have bothered. The flight was canceled, and we were re-routed to LaGuardia. Frantic that we would get caught up in traffic on the rather expensive shuttle ride between the airports, we dashed downstairs to the baggage claim, and waited. And Waited. AND WAITED. Finally, two of us went upstairs to the luggage claim desk to investigate further, only to be told that our bags had been put on a plane that evening to Columbus. Why we were not on that plane with our bags, we could not understand. And why that flight was able to leave, and ours was canceled due to "bad weather", we could not understand. And why we had been told to collect our bags downstairs, when they had been automatically re-routed, we could not understand.
So we rushed outside and on to a shuttle. And waited. And finally offered to pay the driver more to leave with all six of us plus one non-NYU student, and one empty seat, rather than wait for an eighth passenger, so that we would make our new flight.
So off to LaGuardia we rushed, and got through customs just in time to hear that our flight had been delayed. Not a complete tragedy. It was about dinner time, and we were all pretty hungry. Several of us in the group are vegitarians, and several people have food allergies, and so our choices were rather limited. But we ate and talked, and waited together. Finally it got to the time when we should be making our way over to the terminal. We did that little thing just in time to discover that our flight had been canceled! We were booked on a new one in the morning that basically guaranteed that we would miss the first few papers we had all wanted to attend. But at that point, what choice did we have?
Brett, who had begun his journey on Monday evening (he was traveling from South Africa) was about ready to pass out, and so rather than drive all the way out to Manhattan and then back in the early hours of the next morning, we crashed at Allen's place in Brooklyn. Many thanks, Allen and Nicki. Your fold-out couch was very comfortable!
Part the next: On Thursday morning, we all woke up bright and early to get to LaGuardia. This time we actually got onto the plane before the waiting happened. But at long last, we got into the air, and on to Columbus. The airport taxis were unable to carry all six of us at once, so we went in two taxis. And three of us landed up at the wrong Hyatt. Who would have thought Columbus had two Hyatts?
But we finally got there, and got registered, and are now (relatively) comfortably settled at the conference hotel. The hotel, thankfully, did not charge us for the first night that we missed, but they did give away our double room, and so three women and one (tall) man are sleeping in one king-size bed and one cot. Last night the arrangement was less than successful. Tonight, we will have to try something different. Most of the NYU department gave their papers yesterday (and there were some very good ones among them), but Jenny, Brett and Allen all speak today, and I have my paper tomorrow morning.

end part 1

I'm heading back to South Africa today. The semester is over, the summer has started (it is actually colder in Johannesburg than in New York at present), and my first year as a graduate student has passed. I am tired, but very happy. And I really had the perfect last day, yesterday. Church in the morning, a visit to St Patrick's Cathedral on 5th avenue in the afternoon, lunch at the Rockefeller center, a super piano recital in a down town art gallery in the evening, dinner in china town, and several hours hearing friends of mine play Irish music really splendidly in a pub, to round out the evening. I really have been having the best weekend. I have been staying with a friend, as the university housing closed on Friday, and she and I have had a really relaxing time, which, after the intensely busy past few weeks, was exactly what I needed. She has been so warm and hospitable, even to the point of baking fresh orange buns for breakfast this morning....
I am just generally feeling particularly warm and fuzzy toward all of my colleagues, at the moment, though it is not without very good reason.
Oh, and before I forget, NYU commencement was last week, and I was highly amused to note that, among other things, the Empire State Building was in NYU colours for the event. I wonder what strings had to be pulled to make that happen!
Anyway, tonight I fly to Zurich, tomorrow I spend the day in the city, and then tomorrow night I head back to Johannesburg. And next week I am flying to Durban to visit my parents, and for the real start of my vacation. It will be good to get home.

A weekend in Virginia

I'm home, and well-rested after a good night's sleep, and an unintended sleep-in this morning (At least class is only this afternoon).
The weekend was wonderful. I had a bit of a bumpy start on Friday morning, when security at JFK spent so long checking all my paperwork to validate the authenticity of my South African passport and US visa, that I missed the plane, and had to wait on standby for the next one, but I caught that one without a problem, and T very sweetly waited for me in Richmond. It was wonderful to step off the plane in Virginia and take off my jersey.
The weather was beautifully warm, and it was wonderful to wonder around Colonial Williamsburg in short sleeves, with someone who really knows the area. I'm sure T will blog about that a little herself, but she spent several years in the town, and knows the ins and outs. We bought kitchy souvenirs, photographed buttercups and violets in the grass, hurled magnolia pods, and watched lambs hopping about in a way I would never have believed possible, had I not actually seen it myself. We also watched a parade of men and boys (and a few girls) enacting military manouvers, were followed up the oyster-shell lined street by a fife and drum band, and wondered around the kitchen garden of one of the establishments.
Finally, in the early evening, another friend joined us, and we spent a little time touring the college campus before the conference reception. T played some tunes with one of the folklorists who was there, and it was wonderful to hear her play (the first time I have). Finally, a group of us headed out to one of the few restaurants that was open at 22:00 (Williamsburg is not New York!) to grab some dinner (and chocolate raspberry cake for pudding. So good), before making our way back to the hotel.
Saturday started with cinnamon buns and orange juice at the university, before the panels started. We missed the first paper, but everything else I heard was superb. There was a really great range of topics, and I was very impressed with how polished and clear so many student papers were. The keynote speaker gave a really wonderful reference to the work of my advisor that made me very proud, and I spent a lot of time thinking how happy I was to be there. My paper was in the afternoon, and despite some technology fumbles in the morning (we couldn't connect my computer to the sound system, and I had to write a new CD, instead), it went well. I always feel like the inevitability of race issues in my work mean that I risk losing some of my audience before I even start (another white girl speaking about black music. sigh) and I got at least one of the type of question that makes it apparent that it was read that way by at least one person, but in general, I was happy with the outcome. And I enjoyed the intersections between my paper and the one that followed it.
The conference day ended on Saturday with a really long concert that showcased a huge selection of performers from among the conference attendees. I heard gamelan for the first time, and was really impressed by many of the departmental ensembles. Afterwards, T and finished up the evening at our hotel talking about everything and anything until the early hours of the morning. There is nothing like traveling with a friend to get to know them really well.
Sunday morning began with a joint panel between MACSEM (the organization whose conference we were there for), and MAFA, the Mid-Atlantic Folklife Association, who had parallel panels to ours all weekend. It was really interesting to hear both groups converse, though I wish I had had time to attend a full panel from the MAFA group. T gave the last paper of the weekend, which went really well, and ended things on a high note, and then a group of us went to a smart French restaurant for lunch. We had eaten every meal of the weekend in one particular restaurant, and so it was nice to have a change, and to have time to chat to people I am only just getting to know.
T and I then had a few hours to kill before we needed to catch our plane, and so we drove toward the airport via a particularly picturesque route so that I could see some of the countryside. Virginia looks so lovely, and I really hope I will have another opportunity to visit. T suggested a winter break there sometime next year, and the idea is really appealing.
And just to round off my set of new experiences for the weekend, we went shoe shopping at an outlet mall (which, for my South African readers, is an open-air shopping complex with a series of name-brand shops with significantly lower prices than in New York), and stopped at a self-service petrol garage (gas station) on our way to the airport. To my delight, my South African drivers license got me through security far more easily than my passport does, and before I knew it, we were in the air, and on our way back to New York.
It has been such an amazing weekend. I am really glad to have had the break from my routine, and the fact that it was in a beautiful place, with lovely people, made it all the better. Thank you, T, for a super weekend. I wouldn't even have applied were it not for you, and I am really glad I did.

Post Spring Break

After a really amazing week in SA, I am back in a surprisingly warm, wet New York. Working and living in Ikageng was really special, not least because it gave me an opportunity to watch the development of the attitudes of a group of people, many of whom had thought little, or not at all, about South Africa, before this trip. I did, I will admit, find myself bristling on occasion, as I listened to certain observations and oppinions that were informed either by lack of information, or outright misinformation, and once or twice I let my annoyance get the better of me, but by and large, I think this was a productive and information-rich experience for everyone.
We arrived in Johannesburg on the night of the 10th of March (Saturday), and drove the two and a half hours straight out to Ikageng in a convoy of mini-busses and cars. It was generally uneventful, but I did get quite a kick from pointing out the Johannesburg sky line, silhouetted against a colourful highveld sunset, and framed by the mountains and mine-dumps of the South and East rand. And the warm weather (which persisted throughout our visit) was wonderful, and very welcome after the rather chilly aeroplane cabin. In Ikageng, we were greeted with good old South African singing, and plenty of food, including many South African specialities that were unfamiliar to the majority of the travellers in our group. I love watching people encounter good things like local food and music for the first time.
On Sunday, we attended two church services, and it was lovely comparing the energetic, musically rich, and very long service, to the somewhat more demure New York services. The second service was at an outpost in a very poor, rural area, and it was something of a light-bulb moment for me to see just how important the church ritual, which I consider something of a luxury, is for people in a community in which I would have expected the function of the church to be more instrumentalist. It is very easy to fall into assumptions about what people should need when confronted by circumstances in which many of the things that I consider necessary are not present. While I consider my need to sing and to worship in church as essential parts of my identity, I dismiss those needs among people who don't have some of the things that I take for granted in my daily life. Under different circumstances, I would have felt guilty accepting luch from people who have so much less than what I do, but on this occasion, sharing a meal was an extension of the Eucharistic meal we had previously shared, and it felt absolutely essential to honour that.
After that service, we spend some time at the very smart house of one our hosts, and while the contrast with the place we had just been was rather startling, I think it was important for some of the people I was travelling with to see that the unequal distribution of wealth in South Africa is not purely along race lines. The circumstances in South Africa are more complex than that.
In the evening, we had a wonderful dinner at Potchefstroom hospital, followed by a tour of the hospital, during which I was reminded of the universal appeal of new born babies, before we all headed home to our respective hosts for the night.
The next few days were spend working at the building site that was the focus of our visit (we had come to build a rectory for a church in a poorer township), before the bulk of our group visited Pilanesberg game reserve and a mine in the area, and I spent some time with my parents. It was, as always, really good to see them.
I rejoined the group over the weekend at the Apartheid museum in Johannesburg, and we headed back to Potchefstroom for our last weekend. Our last church service in Ikageng was in the church at the building site where we had been working all week, and that was followed by a lovely braai (barbecue, to my non-South African readers) at a dam in Potchefstroom, and an emotional farewell to our hosts.
New York was surprisingly warm when we landed on Tuesday morning, and I was busy folding my coat as I sat on the shuttle that was to take me to my apartment, when the cotton holding the beaded South African flag I have been wearing on my coat, broke, spilling little black beads into my hand. I stored them carefully in my purse, and considered the significance of the incident in a way only possible after seventeen hours of in-air sleep deprivation. New York city rose up around my as I followed the now familiar route traversed by the airport shuttle, and was plunged back into the mid-semester chaos of grad school.
Was it only a week ago that I was sleeping in my own bed with my clingly little cat cuddled up beside me? It feels like so much longer. I can't be too home sick, though, as I spent the last two days with my dear friend Thembela (who has been visiting me in New York) reminding me just how South African I really am, despite my delight at being able to navigate Manhattan with only very occasional references to my trusty map book. It feels good to live in two places.

Spring Break

I am just finishing up my packing for spring break. I cannot believe it is that time already. My first year is nearly over.
I don't think I have blogged this before, but I am spending spring break in SA with a group of NYU students. We will be doing home stays in Ikageng, a township between Klerksdorp and Potchefstroom, and building a rectory for a church. I am very excited to see people's reactions to one another, and to the different lifestyles of the students and their hosts. There have been some protests in the area recently, over the proposed name-change for Potchefstroom, and some of the students and their families are a little nervous about the crime situation (thanks mainly to the BBC's comparison of Johannesburg and Iraq. Is it even necessary to point out what an exageration that is?). I will try to blog on both when I get back, because the reporting is interesting, if disturbing. But I really don't think this group needs to worry.
I am taking this opportunity to do some sound-scape recordings I need for another project, and so have a really exciting digital recorder with me for the week. I really am a techno junkie.
I am not going to have much time at home, as this trip is too short, and I will be working most of the time, but I am planning to spend one night in my own bed next weekend, so at least I will get to see my parents. The timing of all this is perfect, as my mom's birthday is tomorrow (Happy birthday mom!) and my parent's wedding anniversary is on the day I leave. Is it 32 years, mom and dad? Congratulations. I can't wait to see you both.
So I am going to be out of the blog-o-sphere for a little over a week. I should have lots to post when I get back, though