This month’s issue of Global Traveler has a wonderful article on London, with plenty of great suggestions on what to see and where to stay and dine. I shared the piece with daughter Jenny, as she and her fellow students would be spending a month in the area during their study abroad experience. Our family had actually stayed in London for several days a number of years ago when Jenny’s big sister was studying in England, so she had already had the opportunity to experience some of that delightful city’s offerings. We visited St. Paul’s, the British Museum and the National Gallery, shopped at Harrods and took in a play in the West End. There was not enough time to see everything we wished, so Jenny has been looking forward to getting back to London.

 In just the last two weeks on daytrips in to the city, she has toured the Tower of London (and has decided the jewels alone would make it worth being Queen of England), spent some time in the museums, visited Harrods (again!) and thoroughly enjoyed a production of Sister Act: The Musical at the Palladium Theatre. That is not all she’s taken in, though. No, as a nursing student, Jenny has also visited some lesser-known attractions in London that have been, at the very least, eye-opening.

First stop was the Hunterian Museum, located at the Royal College of Surgeons. John Hunter, an 18th-century surgeon, collected and preserved thousands of specimens of plants and animals (and assorted human body parts) in order to better understand anatomy and improve medical treatment and surgical techniques. His original collection was purchased by the government in 1799, given to the Royal College and grew exponentially over the decades. Even though a large portion of the collection was lost during the bombing of London during World War II, Jenny was amazed at the number and variety of items on display.

They then proceeded to the Old Operating Theatre, dating back to the 1820s and the oldest in all of Europe. It’s actually located in the attic space of a church which adjoined St. Thomas’s Hospital — convenient, I guess, whether the surgery was successful or not. Actually, a large skylight just above the operating table provided good light, and the gallery gave apothecaries and physicians-in-training the opportunity to observe and learn. This was, of course, in the days before anaesthesia was available (except for opium and alcohol, that is), so speed was important. Jenny’s group saw a demonstration of how an amputation might be done, including the knives and other instruments used. Her one-word assessment: “Gross!” Usually, these modern nurses-to-be would also visit the Florence Nightingale Museum, also located at St. Thomas’s, but it is closed right now for updating.

Just this past Wednesday the group took in a little more medical history when they visited St. Mary’s Hospital and the lab where Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928. Fleming had been working with staph bacteria before he’d left on a two-week holiday. On his return, he was clearing away Petri dishes that had become contaminated with mold and happened to notice that the bacteria in those dishes seemed to have been killed by the mold. Jenny found this quite instructive and deduced a few nuggets to live by: Taking a break from work can be good for you in unexpected ways, and perfection in housekeeping could be detrimental, also in unexpected ways. (I would say that when she was a teenager in our house, she had already embraced that last philosophy!)

It just goes to show that there are always fascinating places to see and new things to learn that are often off the beaten track from the usual tourist destinations in the cities we visit. Follow your own interests and inclinations, grab a map or Google a bit and create your own personalized tour.

– Patty Vanikiotis, proofreader

Two bright, pretty young women choose to spend part of their college experience studying in a foreign country. Then, little more than a month after they begin sharing an apartment together, one is found brutally murdered and the other is charged with the slaying. I am referring, of course, to Meredith Kercher, a 21-year-old British student killed two years ago in Perugia, Italy, and Amanda Knox, now 22 and hailing from Seattle, Wash. Amanda was convicted this week after a year-long trial and sentenced to 26 years in prison.

 With my own 21-year-old daughter preparing to depart on her travel and study abroad experience in just a month, I find this story contains all my own worst fears about what my child could encounter so far from home. While I’ve experienced first-hand the joys and expanded horizons that overseas travel provides, and our older daughter survived and thrived during her own foreign study several years ago, I also know there are dangers that a naive, albeit bright, young woman may face.

I’ve followed the Amanda Knox case almost from the beginning, at least in part because her family lives in the Northwest and she attended the University of Washington. The story was often in the news as her parents tried to counter all the salacious stories the Italian press pumped out over the last two years — most based on wild rumors and imagination rather than fact. Print and television newsmagazine reports which closely examined the police investigation and prosecution tactics have convinced me that Amanda and her then-boyfriend have been wrongly convicted.

Apparently, I’m not alone.  After the verdict, Washington’s Senator Maria Cantwell cited the “negligent handling of evidence by investigators,” harsh treatment Knox received after her arrest and the fact that jurors weren’t sequestered and were exposed to all the highly negative news coverage throughout the trial. She also stated that she had serious concerns about whether anti-Americanism tainted the trial.

Is it likely that my own precious child will be murdered or wrongly accused of a horrific crime while she travels? No, but nevertheless I will be sure to share with her an article from Global Traveler’s July 2008 issue by Leif Pettersen about what to do when facing an encounter with legal authorities overseas. Along with all the magazine’s great articles on destinations she’ll be visiting, I’ll include Ron Bernthal’s piece from May 2009, “Safety First.” While Jenny’s school has advised its students on guarding against pickpockets, drugged drinks and travel scams, I’m not sure they’ve covered what to say and NOT say when involved in a crime (as victim or accused) in a foreign country.

I’m not one of those parents who wants to wrap her child in cotton and protect her from all the bad things in the world. I trust her instincts, resourcefulness and brains to get her through most of the situations she’ll encounter as she travels (she has survived quite nicely on her own in Chicago these last three years, after all!). I believe she will return enthused about all she will have seen and experienced and wiser for facing the wider world on her own. That won’t keep me from sharing those articles with her, though, and praying for her safe return every day she’s gone.

– Patty Vanikiotis, proofreader 

My younger daughter, Jenny, is preparing for study and travel abroad in the new year, and so her focus for the last several months has been on where to go, how long to stay in each place and how to get there. Being a child of the Internet age, she has of course done extensive research, visiting numerous travel websites, plotting various itineraries and comparing fares to get the most out of her time and money. Bright and detail-oriented, she has tackled the task with gusto and not a little pleasure, but one aspect of the trip has made planning it more than a little challenging: she will be traveling with seven other girls.

Last spring Jenny learned she would be one of 12 senior Loyola nursing students to serve her community health clinical experience in Guildford, a small city located in Surrey, southwest of London. Four days a week for over a month she will get a first-hand look at Great Britain’s public health service. On long weekends and before and after that term she plans to get in as much travel on the British Isles and the Continent as possible. For two-plus weeks before her study starts, several of her nursing friends will be visiting a slew of cities. Starting in Madrid, they’ll go on to Barcelona, Paris, Rome, Florence, Venice, Munich and Berlin.

Just hammering out that itinerary took some effort, as you can imagine trying to accomodate the wishes of eight young ladies might. When it seemed no one was moving to start nailing down flights and accomodations as this fall term ticked away, Jenny went into full travel agent mode and spent hours finding the most efficient and economical links between cities and options for overnight stays. Frustration struck when, just days before the girls were to gather, credit cards in hand, to book their intercity flights together after agreeing on the details, one of the group finally decided she wanted to explore other options. What about train travel? (More expensive than flying, overall, Jen had already found.) Do we really need to worry about reserving hostels in advance when we’ll be traveling in the off-season? (With eight of us? Are you kidding!?) More than anything, Jenny was more than a little upset that at that late date someone had finally decided to jump in after she had spent so much time and effort on behalf of the entire bunch.

Everything was put on hold for another week as a few of the girls went off to a Student Travel Agency office and came back with an alternate plan that added another city and some Eurail travel — and at least $400 to the bill. The benefits were that the agent would be able to book and reserve all their travel and accomodations at once and bill each traveler separately. Jenny graciously (well, okay, I heard some grumbling) decided she’d just go along with the new plan. She did warn me, however, that if there was any complaining during their travels from the others about not having any money to spend on food or shopping, she might find it difficult to bite her tongue.

Her dad and I have mostly sat back and observed this process, offering a sympathetic ear and only a little advice. We know that all of this is part of learning to be a world traveler, and although Jen has been fortunate to travel abroad twice already, this is her first experience at taking the reins herself. My hope is that once all the bother of nailing down the mundane but necessary details of the trip is done, she and her friends will be able to really enjoy each destination and each other as they explore these new places together.

– Patty Vanikiotis, proofreader

I was driving around running errands yesterday and pondering, among other things, what book I should read next. Just a few days earlier, fellow GT blogger John Wroblewski had written about some of the books and authors he enjoyed. He mentioned some which I had not heard of before but which sounded like the kind of thing I would like. I can get in a bit of a rut with what I choose to read — same genres or authors or subject matter – so I like getting a nudge in a new direction now and then.

I had my radio tuned to the local public radio station (if there is a decent local news/talk radio station in this valley, I have yet to find it) and only listening with half an ear when I realized the current interview was with an author . . . of a graphic book. Now, that’s definitely a subject I know next to nothing about. They’re basically comic books, right? Mostly about superheroes or science fiction/fantasy subject matter, biggest fans are kind of nerdy young men? I vaguely was aware that several had given rise to some very popular recent movies (V for Vendetta, The Dark Knight, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, The Watchmen). As a former English teacher and avid reader, I’m all for anything that will encourage kids — and older folks, too — to get away from a screen and read, but this format has never enticed me personally.

Having a healthy imagination, I’ve never felt the need to have pictures help tell a story when well-chosen words will do (although I greatly appreciate, even now, a beautifully illustrated children’s book). And as I said, action/science fiction/superhero stories as a whole aren’t very high on my list of preferred genres. But I’m always open to something new and decided it’s high time I checked out these graphic novels. Listening to the NPR interview, the first thing I learned is that not all of these books are fiction. The author of the one under discussion, Michael Keller, just completed a graphic interpretation of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. As I listened to the interview, I began to understand that presenting information or a story in the graphic format could allow a writer to present ideas and demonstrate concepts or theories in a way that the written word alone could not — much as there are certain things one can do or show in an animated film that are impossible or at least fall short in a live-action movie. Seems so obvious, yes?

Poking around the Internet last night, I found that, indeed, the format has been dominated by adventure and sci-fi stories, but that’s not the whole story. Back in 1992, the Pulitzer committee gave a special award to Art Spiegelman for his graphic memoir Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, about his father, a Holocaust survivor. In 2005, Time magazine included Spiegelman in its list of 100 Most Influential People in the world. There are graphic books for kids, tweens, teens and adults, and the subject matter can be light or very heavy. Though fiction dominates, one can find subjects from biography to science, history to philosophy. A recent publication, The Book of Genesis Illustrated by Robert Crumb (anyone out there old enough to remember Fritz the Cat?),  gives what one reviewer calls “a new perspective on this ancient work” and says the detailed artwork makes the text (from the King James Bible) more accessible to all, no matter their religious background or beliefs.

I have to say, reading some of the reviews on graphicnovelreporter.com’s website has me eager to check out this genre and some of the very intriguing-sounding titles listed there. I’d be curious if anyone reading this blog has delved into the graphic novel world and has any comments/recommendations to make.

– Patty Vanikiotis, proofreader

So which group of students do you think would be more likely to get poor grades: the kids who watch more than three hours of TV a day or the ones who drink two or more cans of soda per day? According to a summary of a study by Washington state health and education leaders, it’s the pop drinkers! Say what? Seriously?

Yep, and what’s more, the article also states that those pop lovers are also more likely to report poor grades than those who skip breakfast or don’t get enough sleep. At least, that’s the way the results were reported in a brief article published in the Oregonian newspaper a few weeks ago. My husband subscribes to an electronic clipping service which sends him all kinds of education-related articles, and he shared this one with me. I thought it would be interesting to share it with you, but then I decided to go in search of the actual report itself. I wanted to get a little more info on the study and check out the statistics for myself, and I’m glad I did.

As I compared the charts and wording contained in the report (”Research Review: School-based Health Interventions and Academic Achievement”), I realized that my cursory reading of the Oregonian article had led me to incorrectly interpret the report’s conclusions. And it’s probably important to know that the results were based on a classroom survey called “Healthy Youth Survey” given to eighth-graders, so they are self-reporting. It asked questions about 13 different health risk factors, including substance abuse and chronic health issues as well as nutrition (the soda-drinking) and physical activity (the TV-watching). Students were defined as being academically “at risk” if they stated they regularly got Cs, Ds or Fs. The researchers included the “C” students, reasoning that students tend to “over-report” their grades (that sounds reasonable!).

What became more clear to me as I checked out the statistics is that each risk factor actually wasn’t being compared with another. Instead, the observation was the difference between, say, those who got more than eight hours of sleep per night and those who did not. The overall conclusion was that “for each specific risk factor, the difference in academic risk by health risk factor was statistically significant, including after adjusting for gender and socioeconomic status.” (Except, I would note it would appear, whether or not a kid got five or more servings of fruit and vegetables a day. Don’t tell the kids!) Hmm, okay . . . but didn’t the article about the report  say something else? Not really, but it sure didn’t state the results very clearly, and left a lot open for misinterpretation by what it didn’t say.

ACTUALLY,  students who drink two or more sodas a day are twice as likely to receive failing grades as those who drink less than that. That percentage is greater than the percentage of students failing who watch more than three hours of TV per school day versus those who watch less than that, or the percentage who fail while getting less than eight hours of sleep a night versus those who get more. And, besides arriving at the fairly obvious and logical conclusion that “healthy” kids tend to do better in school than those who are not, the study doesn’t attempt to explain the correlation between heavy pop consumption and poor grades.

What I learned (or re-learned) from all this is that it’s not a good idea to rely on a secondary source (like an article, political ad or biased commentator) to explain or interpret the results of some study or survey. Key information can be omitted or inaccurately portrayed (intentionally or not) to arrive at conclusions that are unsupported by the original facts.

Oh, and I’m glad my mom didn’t let us drink pop, watch much TV or stay up late when I was in school!

– Patty Vanikiotis, proofreader