| Columbia, I Went to School There |
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| Written by Matt Landau |
| Saturday, 22 May 2010 19:21 |
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“Oh you’re going to Colombia,” a longtime friend suggested. “I actually went to school there back in the 1990’s – gorgeous campus and lots of really smart people.” She was, of course, referring to Columbia the school in New York City: a world away from the country that actually had my sights. If there’s one thing the architects of Colombia’s investment and tourism plan can’t be blamed for, its being mistaken as Columbia, as in the record label, the Ivy League university, or the brand of rugged outdoor sports gear that looks nice but no one really needs. Imagine your last name Samsong or Mercedes Banz. To many, this is a hard correction to grasp. When in the United States, I’m always amazed at how bad Americans are at geography. In some cases, we confuse (or don’t know) even our own states and cities. But more often than not, it’s venturing outside the US territories that tends to leave us feeling dizzy and disoriented, as if we were turtles spun around on the half-shell, then set down somewhere atop a bookshelf. It’s this oblivion that reminds of a time a college professor was quizzing us on the countries in Africa. This introduction alone, when I say it, is usually enough to send a European friend a tizzy. “Americans are still learning African countries in college?” they ridicule. “We learned that stuff in grade school.” I’ll then have no decent excuse and instead choose to make fun of their teeth as if, by choice, at least I could correct my problem with some studies. The college quiz required us to identify a series of obscure countries in Africa like Laos and Libya and Lesotho and my personal study technique was not to actually learn the continent, but to memorize everything according to mnemonic device I invented, with each letter representing a country. Only problem was, I forgot the mnemonic and, seeing as though African country names aren’t exactly the type of things you can guess at or invent, I instead answered with a list of my favorite assassins. S was for Sirhan Sirhan. Y was for Yigal Amir. And I was for Ignacy Hryniewiecki, the guy who killed Alexander II of Russia. After getting the test back, I pointed out I had even spelled Hryniewiecki correctly to which my teacher suggested “you’ve got problems.” I’m a typical American for my notoriously poor geography. In fact, when creating this website, perhaps the worst embarrassment of all, I registered thecolumbiareport.com, a domain I may use in the future sometime to document the news and current events at a record label, or an ivy league university, or an outdoor clothing brand seeing as though I already have the South American country’s information down somewhat pat. |
