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Thursday, July 19, 2007 My trip to Europe has definitely started as a Scouting adventure. James Tiffany, my 17-year-old Senior Patrol Leader, met me at the home of our troop treasurer, Gary Klinger around 2:00 p.m., yesterday. James graciously volunteered to drive me to Dulles airport, and Gary volunteered to keep my Saturn while I am traveling over the next six months. I am grateful to both James and Gary. The past few weeks have been a frenzy of activity for me. My troop went to summer camp at the Raven Knob Scout Reservation in North Carolina, the first week in July. With more than 50 scouts, I and my fellow adult leaders kept busy. Back home for only a few days, I attended an Eagle Scout Board of Review for Evan Bowen, and prepared for our annual Planning Trip to the beach at Cape Henlopen, Delaware, with the new Youth Leaders of the troop and three of my Assistant Scoutmasters, Jeff McShea, Dave Price and Mike Tiffany. After the Planning Trip, and with only three days before flying to Europe, I still had to pack, buy foreign currency, pick up a supply of medications, and attend Evan Bowen’s Eagle Court of Honor. Somehow everything came together and despite waiting on the ground for over an hour, my plane took off for Amsterdam. The delay at Dulles resulted in missing the connecting flight, and another two-hour wait before finally taking off for London. I arrived in Heathrow around 11:30 a.m., local time; got my one checked bag, and headed to the Underground. My attention was diverted by a Starbucks coffee shop in the terminal where I purchased a “Grande Dark Roast.” Since it was about 6:00 a.m. on my biological clock, the coffee was worth every pence. (Note how cleverly I am starting to insert British words!) It took about an hour and half to get from Heathrow to the St. Paul’s underground station, and it was a short walk to the St. Paul’s youth hostel where I will stay a couple of days. The hostel is very nice, and the area around the hostel is fairly “upscale.” The London Stock Exchange and many nice shops are nearby. After unpacking a few things, and cleaning up, I went to bed for a few hours, and woke up in time for dinner. Although I could have purchased a dinner at the hostel (breakfasts are included in the room rate), I opted to walk to a Marks and Spencer food store across the plaza from St. Paul’s to buy food. As I approached St. Paul’s, there must have been a few hundred people in the plaza dancing and clapping wildly. There was no music, but everyone had an MP3 player or iPod, and was dancing to his own music. I asked one of the people in the crowd about this, and he told me these gatherings are called “mobile clubbing.” Another person told me it’s also called a “flash mob,” and these events are organized on line, advertised in local papers, and on the radio. Garrett Mears, an Eagle Scout from my troop, lives in London with his wife Kimberly. He graduated from Virginia Tech, and works in IT. After getting married, Garrett lived in Raleigh, NC, and was the first of my Boy Scouts to have actually been a Scoutmaster. He and Kimberely moved to London last year. I called Garrett from the hostel, and we have plans to meet tomorrow evening. After dinner, I brought my laptop out to start this journal, but another couple came into the dining room and we introduced ourselves. Their names are Gary and Bonnie Green, and they are here to work at the World Jamboree too. They are from Michigan. We chatted for about an hour, and then I excused myself to work on this journal. Like me, Gary has worked at our National Jamboree’s several times, been to Philmont, and is active in his home troop. This is Bonnie’s first-ever Jamboree experience, and Gary and my first World Jamboree experience. Friday, July 20, 2007 Breakfast at the hostel had some of the trappings of a “real” English breakfast, but not all. Beans and sausages were on the menu, but not the grease-laden runny eggs and pale bacon. I had the more ordinary corn flakes and granola. After breakfast, I headed to the British Museum, only a few stations from St. Paul’s. It’s been a while since I visited this venerable institution, and much has changed. The old buildings have had extensive renovation; the main courtyard is covered with an elaborate glass plate atrium enclosure, and there is a circular modern central building that houses special exhibits in the center of the courtyard. As I remembered, the British Museum has an incredible exhibit of artifacts from Egypt, Greece and Rome, and it also has good Asian and American exhibits. The Great Hall is special. It contains the library of King George III (American Revolution era monarch), and a marvelous recreation of the way things would have looked to visitors of the past . . . sort of like the Smithsonian Castle. I got to stand next to the Rosetta Stone, but had a hard time reading it.  After the museum, I went to Liverpool Station to check on transportation to Stansted airport where I am to catch a shuttle to the Jamboree. The train to Stansted leaves every 15 minutes, and I bought an advance ticket for the trip tomorrow. I also bought a ticket for the train to Inverness, Scotland where I will go after the Jamboree. I will have to return to London to catch the train to Scotland, but I was not surprised by that. The Liverpool Station has a special place in Holocaust history. It was the place that German Jewish children were brought before the war, 1938-1939, to be sent into the British countryside to live with families until things got better. The effort was called the “Kindertransport.” A memorial statue and plaque are in front of the station. Near the Liverpool Station is a very unusual modern glass and steel building shaped like a giant pickle! A Swiss Insurance company built it; locals call it the “gherkin.” Since the Liverpool Station is not far from St. Paul’s, I decided to walk back to the hostel. I passed the London Museum, but did not go in. The street is called “London Wall,” and at the museum I found out why. The Romans built a wall around the old city, and remnants remain near the museum. Near the museum is an old church with a plaque to John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist church. There’s been some type of church at this spot for more than 900 years. Further on I came to a little side street that went into Finsey Circus, which is not a circus, but a park. There was a great open green space with a tight grass lawn like on a golf green, but it was about the size of a baseball field. It was a field for bowling. A couple of guys getting ready to play explained the rules a little, and it reminded me of bocce. This English bowling involves throwing a small hard white ball onto the green, and then bowling with larger black balls to try to get close to the white ball, or to knock your opponent’s bowling balls away from the white ball. This must have been what they played on Bowling Green in lower Manhattan. The park also had a wonderful planting with a Boy Scout Logo and 100th Anniversary done in colorful plants and flowers. Garrett and Kimberly showed up at the hostel around 7:30 p.m.; I was in the middle of trying to connect to the Internet, but not having much luck. My laptop is new and it was giving me a message saying that it could only connect locally. Garrett is a computer science/engineering graduate, but he was not familiar with the new Vista operating system, and couldn’t find if I had a real IP address. We had a similar issue at Raven Knob where Nathan Sherrard discovered that I did not really have an IP address when I tried to connect to one of the camp’s networks. Moving to a place closer to the router did the trick at camp, but moving around in the hostel did not seem to work. I put the computer away, put on long pants and a short sleeve shirt, and the three of us went out to dinner. We walked across the Millennium Bridge to the warehouse district where there are many restaurants. We picked a Portuguese place that served a variety of chicken and hamburger type meals, but also had a selection of vegetarian meals (my choice was a bean burger sandwich with a hot sauce). Garrett and Kimberly told me about what they have been up to here in London for the past eleven months. Garrett accepted a transfer to the London office of his North Carolina company, and Kimberly started an MBA program when they got to London. However, soon after moving Garrett’s company decide to close the London office. So Garrett took a job with a small start-up firm working on mobile phone communication software. He really seems to enjoy the challenge, and they both seem to enjoying living in London, traveling on holidays and weekends. Saturday, July 21, 2007 This is the big day as I head to the Jamboree. After checking out of the hostel, I walked to the underground station at St. Paul’s, only to discover it was closed for engineering work. I had to walk another quarter mile to the Bank station, and then only one stop to the Liverpool Station where the train to Stansted was just about to depart. It took about 45 minutes to get to Stansted, and there I waited for the shuttle to the Jamboree site. Scouters kept arriving, and the women in charge kept saying the bus was on it’s way. Of course, more than two hours later the bus did arrive. However, one good thing was talking to the folks waiting for the bus. Several of my friends from home, Bob Zung and Demi Poulas, had flown into Heathrow that morning, and took a taxi to Stansted. It cost quite a bit, but they said there was a limitation on how much luggage they could carry on the regular shuttle between the two airports. Demi knew he would be working at the amateur radio section and Bob who has attended and worked at several World Jamborees expected to work at the human resources section (checking people in and assigning them to jobs, etc.). I did not know where I would be working, but Demi said he would get me a job with the amateur radio section, and he did. Demi was my instructor when I took my amateur radio license course many years ago. It started raining just as we approached the Jamboree site, and we knew we would have to walk about 20-30 minutes to the International Support Staff camp, called the Island Hub. A group of people met us when the bus stopped, and we felt fortunate that they had a small car and trailer in which they hauled our bigger luggage to the check-in tent. We hiked to the check-in tent carrying our backpacks. It rained a little as we hiked, but by the time we arrived the sun had come out. Check-in was trivial; in fact, we were told that the “real” registration would start in the morning back where the bus let us off at gate five. At the check-in, people filled out a short form with information from each of us and with our ID numbers from their database. I was not in the database! “Don’t worry,” I was told, “tomorrow, at registration, I would be added to the database.” It turned out that a lot of people were to be added to the database. The next step in the process was getting our tents, and setting them up in our campsite. The amateur radio section had staked out a site at the far end of the adult camping area. Demi and I headed up there and helped each other set up our tents. At our campsite, I was introduced to Alan Willson, his wife Barbara, and other people on the team. Most were English, but we anticipate having about 40 people all together from many countries. In fact, Demi and I may be the only two Americans working in the amateur radio section. The tents provided to the American staff as part of our fee is not like anything we normally see back home. The tent has an inner shell and outer and an outer shell. The inner shell is an enclosed tent with a “bath tub” waterproof plastic floor. The outer shell, like our looks like a large igloo, the dome-shaped rounded part hast the inner tent under it, and the tubular part is a vestibule with doors on the front and on the side. Our tents are blue nylon with several Jamboree logos. Setting up the tent takes three poles, and about 35 pegs! It took Demi and me over an hour to set up our two tents, and we had help from one of our British teammates. One question to be answered is what to do with the tent when the Jamboree ends. The tents are actually not too large when packed, and I may send mine home. We unpacked our gear, laid out our sleeping bags, and headed to the very large dining tent for dinner. The dining tent is probably two hundred feet long and fifty feet wide. It’s a rigid wall tent with aluminum support structure and a wooded floor. Eight thousand support staff personnel are to eat here. The food turned out to be quite good with many selections, including a vegetarian selection, several salad choices, cold and hot drinks, and breads and deserts. Behind the dining hall are other large canopy style tents. There is a large tent where people can buy drinks, including beer and wine, there’s a smaller snack bar selling sandwiches, baked goods, etc. As time goes by, other things will open, including several stores, a post office, and an Internet café. Sunday, July 22, 2007 After breakfast we headed to the amateur radio site in the central program area. It’s about 20 minutes from our campsite. One of the British radio clubs had brought two large antennas for us to use, and we had to assemble them, along with several smaller antennas. The large antennas are on trailers, but need to be raised, and need to have guy wires/ropes attached. It’s quite an operation as the largest of the antennas is about 100 feet in height. We set up one of the antennas and two other poles to support long wire dipole antennas. The actual radio operations will be in another big rectangular canopy. We actually had a lot of work to do, and took most of the day working on the equipment. At dinner, we had an amazing conversation with a 73-year old woman about what it was like when she was a young child during the Second World War. She had been sent off to live in the countryside for safety along with many city children. The family that accepted her got paid some money to support her, and at some point in her stay, the money did not arrive. She said it was a Friday when her host father told her “no money, no food.” By Sunday, after not eating for three days, she ran away, and wound up at the door of a neighbor. She knocked on the door, an older lady answered, and as the door opened, the little girl fell face first into the house. The woman knew immediately what was wrong, and fed and cared for her. Her family was called and the little girl convinced them to bring her home where her adventures with the bombing began. She talked to us for at least an hour. It was just fascinating. On the way back to the campsite after dinner, Demos and I ran into Michael Feigenbaum, a friend of mine from my early days in the Boy Scouts back in the Bronx. Michael was perhaps 13 or 14 when we first met as part of Ranachqua Lodge of the Order of the Arrow. I was a lodge officer and Michael was one of our key people making Indian regalia. Michael also joined a group of scouts from my troop who took a summer trip around the country. Meeting him here at the Jamboree was a delight. Michael has had quite a life in Scouting and in commercial art. I was embarrassed when Michael gushed to Demi about what a “fantastic” scouter I am. Monday, July 23, 2007 There was less to do today at the amateur radio site as we were missing some hardware and we were waiting for electrical power. So, after lunch, I caught the shuttle van into Chelmsford. My goal was to familiarize my self with the town so that when I have to catch the train after the Jamboree, I would be set. The shuttle van stopped at the bus station only a block from the train station. I decided that I would stay in Chelmsford for the night before I have to catch the train; the people in the local tourist information office helped me find and make a reservation at a small bed and breakfast not too far from the train station. After accomplishing my main tasks, I wandered into the center of town to explore and to see if I could find a flash drive for my computer. I bought one to use it to transfer files from my laptop to computers at Internet cafes. Then I went to the local public library to check my email and send a message home. I waited for the shuttle bus to return to the Jamboree site for more than two hours. Another scouter walked by, and I asked him if he knew when the return shuttle would be by. He told me that I was at the wrong spot, even though the shuttle drive told me this would be the spot to wait. The other scouter offered to give me a ride in his car back to the Jamboree, but he had to make a few stops on the way back to buy things for his section. I was glad to get the ride. It started to rain just as we got to the Jamboree, and it rained continuously for most of the evening and night. The earth is saturated, and with all the foot traffic, there was mud everywhere. I have the right foot wear, and rain gear, and my tent stayed dry. England is suffering some of the wettest weather it’s had in a long time. Many towns and cities are experiencing serious flooding and loss of drinking water and power. I hope it clears up by the time the scouts get here. At dinner this evening we met and talked with another fascinating scouter, Jack Glisson, from Lexington, Virginia. Jack is 77 years old, and he told us stories about his life as an engineer for the Navy, and as an active scouter. He worked with Will Scarlett at several National Jamborees in the Boy’s Life Wood Carving exhibit. Tuesday, July 24, 2007 We set up the rest of the antennas today, and had some time to walk around the Jamboree grounds. Things are still soggy and muddy. I found a corner in one of the construction tents to work on this journal again, and plan to go into town tomorrow to send part one home. Wednesday, July 25, 2007 The morning started with a large meeting of the “daily programs” groups as most people on staff have arrived by now. Our amateur radio section is filling out with people from all over the world. We still don’t have electrical power or tables, so after a long discussion of what was yet to be done, we had the rest of the day off. I headed back to catch the shuttle into Chelmford, but discovered the shuttle would not be running until after the Jamboree started officially in two days. However, there is a commercial bus into Chelmsford about 15minutes further down the road. So off I went. Actually, I am glad to have discovered this route, just in case the free shuttle is not running when I need to leave the Jamboree site. Philip Sternberg Scoutmaster, Troop 1131 |