Vignettes from International Day at NPS

Some great food and fun conversations with people from other countries.

Every year in either late April or May, the Naval Postgraduate School, where I was on the faculty for 33 years, has International Day. It’s one of my favorite events at the school. NPS students from many countries show up in the dress from those countries and sell food associated with those countries. You buy a number of tickets that look like old theater tickets and then use them to buy the food: 2 tickets for this, 3 for that, etc.

Because I’ve been retired for almost 8 years, I sometimes lose track. But on Saturday I made it. I don’t know the students any more and ran into only one person I knew from my time there. But that didn’t stop me. I like going for the food and I also like conversations with people about their countries. The longest conversations I had were with the Germans and my fellow Canadians.

Most of the food that I ate, though, was made by Asians: South Koreans, Japanese, and Indonesians, to name three.

Now to the conversations. There were a lot of Germans at the German booth, and they chose to wear their uniforms. I noticed the difference in colors of the uniforms. I asked if one was Army, one Marines, etc. No, I was told. The different shades represented the parts of the country (world? I’m not sure) they were in. So the lighter shade meant desert-like situations (that’s why I think it was the world, not the country) and, the officer told me, for far up north the uniforms were white.

And here was the most surprising fact. I asked one officer how long he planned to be in the military. He answered that he was 4 years along on a 14-year term. I was surprised and so I asked for clarification. Yes, indeed, he had signed up for a 14-year term and this was standard. I looked online and got the answer 13 to 17 years, depending on the area and required training. So presumably this officer was answering for his specialty. I forgot to ask if that applied to enlistees also. I checked and the answer is 6 to 23 months. (By the way, Germany ended the draft in 2011. Yay!)

Then I had a fun moment with another officer. I’ll call him K. I love asking trivia questions to people about their countries, questions to which I know the answer and, I suspect, they don't. I asked him whose music was used in the German national anthem. I had in mind the anthem “Deutschland, Deutschland, Uber Alles.” I knew that had been changed after WWII because of the bad associations it had, however unjustly—it had been the anthem long before Hitler. (I checked and it was changed well after WWII.) But I thought they had kept the tune and changed the words. I started singing the words I knew and K and some other officers quickly interrupted, which was understandable, given the rules. K told me the name of the new anthem and said it was a different song. I think he got flustered. Ok, I said, but who wrote the music for the old version? K said he didn’t know. “Haydn,” I answered. “Oh, yes,” he said, “Joseph Haydn, I had forgotten.” (It turns out that it is the same music; it’s just that they use the 3^rd stanza, not the Uber Alles stanza.)

By the way, I got that impish idea of showing people I knew something about their country that they didn't from my old transportation economics professor, George Hilton at UCLA. When I was his class in the winter quarter of 1973, George found out I was from Canada. So he asked me whom the McDonald-Cartier Freeway in Ontario was named after. Without hesitation I said, “John A. Macdonald and Jacques Cartier.” “No,” he replied triumphantly, “John A. Macdonald and George-Etienne Cartier.” Macdonald and Cartier were the two main “fathers of Confederation.” The Canadian history I learned in Grade 11 came flooding back.

And that brings me nicely to Canada. Their federal election is today and, because of Donald Trump’s nasty treatment of Canada, Pierre Poilievre, the head of the Conservative Party is likely to lose to Mark Carney, the head of the Liberal Party. Although I don’t know Poilievre’s views well, I know enough to think that he might have been the most libertarian Prime Minister in my adult lifetime and maybe even in my lifetime. He has backed down from his earlier pro-immigration views lately but he’s good on many other issues.

When I went to the Canadian booth, I started by asking them where they were from and then we got into politics. They were reticent about their views, understandably, and so we talked about it as a horse race. (Later, I went back to the booth to get a picture and the woman wearing the Oilers jersey and I got talking about how bad a decision it was, even prospectively, for the Oilers manager to protest the tying goal that the Kings had scored. I told her that I had learned a new rule, which started in the 2019-20 season: when you have an unsuccessful challenge, you are assessed a minor penalty. That’s what happened and then the Oilers scored on the resulting power play.)

I had one interesting conversation with an officer in which we did get into politics. I told an officer at the Denmark booth that I opposed Trump’s plan to take over Greenland. He agreed with me and we high-fived.

Aside: I just read Glenn Greenwald on X writing that Canada uses paper ballots and they count the votes within hours. He’s right. What he leaves out is that they always vote on one thing: who will be your representative? In California, we often vote on 20 or more things. I’m not stating this to take a side on paper vs. electronic. But people who do take a side need, at a minimum, to know the facts.