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Date is exactly
2021-06-18
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2021-06-18
Tourism Story: Florida After Travel Restrictions
I graduated from my Bachelor's program in May 2021, after vaccine rollout and as travel restrictions were being lifted. To celebrate, my family organized a short trip to Florida in June, where we would visit the Universal Studios theme park for a couple days, which had always been a dream destination for my parents. This was a huge deal for us, because my family has never been able to afford a vacation like that, and we saved during the pandemic to be able to afford it once travel restrictions were lifted and we were all vaccinated. By the time we went, almost all travel restrictions had been lifted, and I remember the strange mix of relief and uneasiness I got from how "normal" everything seemed in Florida. I hardly saw anyone even wearing masks, and I was honestly glad for that not being a requirement in the theme park - I'm from Kentucky, and I hadn't been prepared for the intense Florida heat and humidity! I'll always treasure the memory of seeing the ocean for the first time and getting to spend time with my family, and even though I was still worried about the pandemic, it felt like such a relief to have a normal vacation after such a stressful and scary year. -
2021-06-18
A Linguistic Tour through Arthur Avenue
I traveled to New York this summer, and one of the places I visited was Arthur Avenue, located in the Belmont neighborhood of the Bronx and the main artery of the Bronx's Little Italy. Arthur Avenue provided a unique insight into the function of immigrant languages during the pandemic. Most of the people I heard talking as I walked down Arthur Avenue and went into the stores were speaking English, as would be expected in most of the United States. Some had an accent similar to a "standard" American accent/my Californian accent, while others spoke in New Yorker accents. I heard some people speaking Italian, mostly if not entirely elderly people, in several stores, including Cerini Coffee and Gifts. I also heard expression of language through music, in the form of a speaker in front of Mario's Restaurant playing "Tu vuò fà l'Americano" ("You Want to Be an American") and "O Sarracino" ("The Saracen"), two famous Neapolitan language songs. I didn't expect to hear music in Italian "dialect" (called so even though Neapolitan is a proper stand-alone language). However, Belmont is no longer just Little Italy. It also has a large Albanian presence. I saw a flyer on a street pole in Albanian which I presume to either be a missing sign or a flyer for a funeral. I have no idea what the flyer said because I don't know Albanian, but among the text were two pictures of an elderly man. In front of Randazzo's Seafood, I also saw a sign advertising some type of shellfish (I can't remember which) in Albanian and English, though not in Italian, which I thought was interesting since the store is owned by the grandchildren of immigrants from Sicily. There was also an Albanian television provider called TV ALB, which indicated to me that there are enough Albanian speakers in the area to sustain an Albanian-language cable or broadcast provider, even during the pandemic. I didn't hear any spoken Albanian. This could be a purely anecdotal observation, but I saw Italian primarily as a spoken language and Albanian primarily in writing. There was some writing in Italian, but most of it was either names of food items that couldn't be translated into English or sayings like "mangia bene vivi bene" ("eat well, live well", as a command; the picture of which is attached to this story) for promotional purposes. There was no actual communication occurring in written Italian. On a non-linguistic note, most of the restaurants also had outdoor seating under canopies, a consequence of COVID. -
2021-06-18
Air and land travel suspended to Arequipa, Peru
My mother-in-law has been here since last February (2020). She came for a visit from Peru and got stuck by the pandemic. She's traveling home July 1st, but Arequipa, Peru just initiated another lockdown. There's no land or air travel into Arequipa starting June 21 and lasting at least 15 days. Essentially, she'll get to Lima, Peru, and have to wait until she can travel. We considered postponing her return, but the changes in airfare are prohibitively expensive. Also, I'm pretty sure she's more than ready to get home after such an extended stay. The reason for the lockdown is the high mortality rate in Arequipa.