SPICE 2018: West Virginia University @ Universität Erfurt

Morning, group! We've still got a few more weeks in Germany of course (and you've got a major course deadline for COM416, as the final draft of all of your blogs is due on Monday 30 July). For our departure, you need to make plans with SPICE (by emailing the organization at spice@uni-erfurt.de) so that they know when you're planning to turn in your keys and (hopefully) receive your deposit back. You should plan to do this on Monday 6 August, and you will need to be at the Erfurt Hauptbahnhof no later than 11:30 am to make our train to Frankfurt. Our train details: ICE 1650, leaving Erfurt at 12:17 and arriving at Frankfurt(Main)Hbf at 14:36. We have seat reservations in Car 23, seats 51-55, 57-58 (where Dr. Banks and I will be sitting), and 61-68.  Once we get to Frankfurt, we'll make our way over to Ibis Styles Frankfurt City, where I have reserved six rooms, already paid for by WVU. The names on those keys are Baldus, Dutka, Lafitaga, Reel, Skidmore, and Wag...

As we've now been  leben in Deutschland fur sieben Wochen , we should start thinking reflectively as to how we are adapting to our new surroundings. No doubt each of us is experiencing some different level of German culture as we continue to try new foods, speak new languages, and adapt to new customs. Perhaps the easiest part of international trtavel is recognizing that you are quickly in a culture not your own - it's usually a pretty exciting experience in the beginning (the "Honeymoon Stage") until the glitz and glamour wear off and you find yourself outside the comfort zone - for me, it was (of all things) drinking seltzer water ( wasser mit gas ) when I was expecting table water ( still-wasser ). This is an incredibly small thing to "shock" over, but even these small events have you questioning future interactions - trepidation over a drink order leads to scruntiny of a foreign food menus and drives many tourists to the local McDonald's over th...

The term convergence is defined by Kincaid (2009) as "movement toward one point, toward another communicator, toward a common interest, and toward greater uniformity, never quite reaching that point." This last point - never quite reaching that point - is what distinguishes convergence from a singularity. As a popular corollary to US culture, you might consider convergence to be more like the salad bowl metaphor (separate parts, all in an US culture) as compared to the melting pot metaphor (separate peoples all blended together as one US culture). Why converge at all? Converging to one point helps us create mutual understanding of who were are as a nation and a people - making sense of our borders as less geo-political and more socio-emotional. Kincaid's convergence model was initially meant to address shortcomings of transmission-based models of communication, but we can expand it to look at cultural convergence (a topic address thoroughly by  MIT scientist H...