Day 14

This was our last academic day. It was another loosely paced day with a late start, so I slept a little later and still got up early to write. Christina was our guide again, and we visited two museums, each with a short tour and some free time to wander. This was the best way to structure the day, I thought, and we all got a lot more out of it with a little free time to ourselves.

Academic Tuna

The first museum was the Museum of Modern Art. Even two days later I don't remember very much, just that it was great to finally see some art that was being created now, in the culture we are here experiencing. There are still some pieces that I don't get and probably never will, and some pieces that make me wonder what would stop me from having my scribbles in a museum, but I am starting to appreciate more and more of it. Our guide was wonderful, and he took us on a brief tour, showing us some highlights and giving us some anecdotal history. One painting made me feel like I was in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, the way it portrayed life as a sort of disjointed machine. I was of course drawn to the photographs, and found one artist I was particularly fascinated with. She had taken a series of photographs of her own hands in different poses on barred gates, doors, and windows, all presumably shut and locked. Her left hand with its wedding band was a point of focus in each picture, and her hands added a unique human element to each picture. I couldn't take my eyes off them. I hardly got through the rest of the museum, I looked at them so long.

everybody dancing

Lunch was in a beautiful park near the second museum, but it was a quick lunch and not really worthy of a paragraph as nothing particularly interesting took place. In the next museum, we also had an excellent tour guide who was clearly used to student groups and was very good at integrating us into the conversation and the discussion of the art. She explained cubism and orphism in more detail and I found I could connect her lectures with the ones we had in class the day before. Finally, at the very end of the week, there was a sign of academic experience. I encountered that same artist I had seen in the other museum, this time with a different series of pictures but still using her hands. Our guide explained that she used her body in her photographs because it is what was available and more importantly what she knew best. This set of pictures was of the manipulation of a line, like so: The first was her hand with a pen at the end of a "line" she had just drawn. In the next photo, her hand moved to the middle of the line and grabbed it with her fingers, making the wrinkle that was visible in the next photo. Then she had taken a picture of her fingers under the line, lifting it up, and the next few photos were of different positions of the line where her fingers had lifted and twisted it. They were simple pictures and absolutely fixating; I stood there looking at her hands and what she had done with them and was finally able to make a connection from all of these museum visits into my own study of mime.

flag dance

I tried to buy a book about her at the museum shop, but all they had was in Portuguese. But when I get home I will buy one; look her up if you'd like and see what I mean. She's a Portuguese artist and her name is Helena Almeira. There were some other works there, too, of course, and even some others that caught my attention, but not much that touched me like hers. I wish I had had a chance to do some research online about her before we left and had to revert back to the crummy connection and the charges per minute. There's been so much confusion that I'm afraid to use the internet at all.

Anyway after that museum we had a short debrief while we waited for the bus and put off the other debriefing until we had left port. One of our members was considering leaving the group and we had a long discussion about our own goals on TSS and whether our Learning Circle, as small as it is, could fulfill them. Of course I didn't want to assimilate into other groups because Arts and Culture is the only one I wanted to be in. In the end we decided that we wanted to stick together as a group - at least most of us, there are still a few people trying to get switched out although I don't think they will get to - and make the most of the experiences we're presented with. We did get lots of chances to give feedback and they've developed a task force to improve future AFPs for this voyage and the voyages to come so that everyone's experiences are better. There was a general frustration from all the Learning Circles about similar issues to the ones we had.

hands and lines

So something I noticed about all of our guides and the people we spent any amount of time with: they always give a bit of a speech at parting, wishing us a safe and fun trip and all of that, but also wishing us the best in our lives to come and in our futures. Every guide without exception gave similar wishes upon departure. It was interesting to view their wishes in the sort of cultural context we experienced from outside the program, which differed quite a bit. Waiters were not particularly friendly, vendors never smiled at you even when they were trying to sell something, and people in the street didn't acknowledge you even if you accidentally bumped them. But our guides were so friendly and polite and genuinely interested in us that I find it hard to believe that this isn't a norm. I think the people on the street were just not putting on a mask; they act their feelings and don't feel the need to perform for a stranger. Everyone we met and talked to more personally was very nice; it just took that extra little step from stranger to acquaintance to get to the friendly part.

pretty street and tram

Dinner was at the University again, but this time in a much nicer, more formal venue. Dress was "smart casual," whatever that was, and of course ranged from shorts to fancy dresses among the TSS crowd. The food was amazing; I wish now that I had taken pictures of the presentation. They had a huge table covered with fruit that would have made a great picture before the hoards got to it.

After dinner the University's Academic Tuna group performed for us. By tuna I don't mean the fish; Tuna is the name for a group of musicians that play traditional music at their institution. Apparently there are groups like this all over Europe. These guys were amazing - their music was great and they sang as well; they even did some a capella stuff towards the end. Stay tuned for videos. Partway through the performance I started to notice movement behind the curtains that separated the kitchen from the dining room and realized that the serving ladies were dancing back there. Finally someone opened the curtain and they all came out into the middle of the floor and danced, and were soon joined by a couple people from our group as well. Unfortunately there was a huge knot of people between me and them and I wouldn't have been able to get out there.