Ivy League and Provincetown

It's time to wrap up Leg 1 of our whirlwind North American tour. Other than the jet lag, the first few days have been pretty good. As far as the work side of things go, we have learned a lot from the two interviews that we have done so far.

The interviews that we did in Australia last month, and most of the ones that we will do in North America on this trip, have been with children's television producers, as well as with the foundations that fund the productions. The first two interviews on this trip, however, have focused on the academic side: issues such as the influence of television on children and how to determine if a children's program is "educational". (For example, compare the Flinstones to Sesame Street.)

We talked with three of the most knowledgeable and famous university professors in this field: Dr. Alvin Poussaint at Harvard and Dr. Dorothy Singer and Dr. Jerome Singer at Yale. All three of them (as well as one of Dr. Poissant's collegues) gave us a lot of information about Children and Media that we will share with the rest of the Thai research team when we return.

We had a day off in between the interviews, so we drove the rental car from Boston out to Provincetown at the end of Cape Cod. It was a wonderful, slow drive through the historic countryside. The traffic on the winding two-lane back roads went slow enough that we were able to read the dates on all of the buildings that we passed: a church from 1734, a house from 1823, a store from 1774, on and on and on for mile after mile.

Provincetown was fun too. I often use the word "quaint", but I think that if you actually look "quaint" up in the dictionary, there will be a picture of Provincetown. The narrow main street was more of a walking path than an actual road, and it was filled with art galleries, independent clothing boutiques, shops selling pottery and household goods, and all kinds of restaurants. For a small town that is so dependent on tourism, it was nice to see that there were not any tourist shops selling tacky knick-knacks. Well, now that I think about it, there must have been at least a few, but the high quality of all the other businesses made the few t-shirt shops bearable.

So, that's all for the United States for a while. In fact, I'm actually writing this from Toronto. We'll be here for a few days and then go on to Vancouver before we return to New York. So far, so good...