Culture Shock

Tribune Tower was in crisis, and the illustrations of penguins installed in the building's ornate lobby were meant as a constant reminder. With Tribune Co. revenues sliding and managers struggling to adjust to an Internet revolution, executives in early 2007 turned to a Harvard Business School professor to motivate employees. The penguins in the building's display cases stood on melting icebergs - the professor's metaphor for an industry experiencing rapid and potentially fatal change.

Tribune Tower was in crisis, and the illustrations of penguins installed in the building's ornate lobby were meant as a constant reminder. With Tribune Co. revenues sliding and managers struggling to adjust to an Internet revolution, executives in early 2007 turned to a Harvard Business School professor to motivate employees. The penguins in the building's display cases stood on melting icebergs - the professor's metaphor for an industry experiencing rapid and potentially fatal change.

Who: Nancy and Larry FittonAges: 38 and 44 respectivelyFrom: Long GreenAssignment: Honduras, 1976-79Larry taught photography at Pan American Agricultural School, known as Zamorano. Nancy taught nutrition to village women, produced audio-visual materials and conducted workshops for auxiliary nurses in the capital, Tegucigalpa.Update: She earned master's in international health at Johns Hopkins and later worked for Pan American Health Organization and World Vision in Costa Rica before becoming full-time mother to their three children.

When it comes to Jermaine Bolden, Morgan State's fireplug point guard, appearances can be, and often are, deceiving. The player known on campus as "Itchy" is listed generously at 5 feet 9 (generous by perhaps 2 inches) and 175 pounds, which is a shadow of the 199 pounds he said he weighed at the end of last season. As Bears assistant Kevin McClain noted yesterday: "He moves slow and looks like he's old, but he's in great shape." This week, the Bears are headed to Kansas City, Mo., for their first NCAA Division I tournament in school history, an accomplishment attributable in large measure to Bolden's evolving game in the backcourt.

I will be going to Asia this summer, and have the option of staying over in Japan at the end of the tour. I'd like to stay in one of the traditional inns called ryokans. Your opinion, please.Staying at a traditional Japanese inn is a great idea for traditional Japanese, but it can be a shock for the rest of us. But do it anyway.During a visit to Japan's northern island, Hokkaido, I stayed at two ryokans (pronounced ree-OH-cuns). According to travel writers' tales, it would be like this: Live briefly as the Japanese live in their homes, savor superb food, bathe luxuriously, gain serenity in the simple beauty of a tatami-matted room.

The catch-22 of American culture is that, no matter how far you go, you can never totally escape it. It is, as rapper Jay-Z once opined, a gift and a curse. Yesterday in the media room, I was sitting next to a very pleasant, very polite Japanese reporter who spoke almost no English. We exchanged a few grunts and hand motions, but for the most part, we were unable to communicate. And then her cell phone rang. I couldn't help but laugh out loud when I realized she had Eminem's "The Real Slim Shady" as her ring tone.

Most Baltimoreans, no matter what their ethnic origin, feel about as comfortable at a Chinese restaurant as they do at an American steak house. But because Baltimore has a sizable Korean-American population, Korean restaurants here don't have to modify their cuisine to fill up their dining rooms. Walk into Nam Kang, the new Korean restaurant on Maryland Avenue, and you may experience culture shock -- pleasant culture shock if you're at all adventurous.The night we ate in the brightly lit, basement restaurant it was packed, and we were the only Caucasian Americans (as my politically correct kid calls us)

"The Green Terrors are coming! The Green Terrors are coming!"Final preparations are being made for the historic trip that will make the Western Maryland College football squad the first U.S. college grid team ever to play in Russia."Going to Russia and being a part of history is a great honor forWestern Maryland College and our football program," said coach Dale Sprague, whose Green Terrors return today from a January break."It's a great opportunity, and we're excited about sharing American football with our Russian allies.

Daniel Meyer was in an unfamiliar place where he didn't know anybody. As a way to cope with culture shock and occupy his free time, he started to write songs to communicate his experiences to his American friends. This temporary diversion for the Baltimore-based music teacher got serious when he showed the songs to Jonathan Gourlay, who wanted to put the songs together into a musical story. The end result, a year later, is Welcome to Micronesia, a musical adventure in paradise. The world premiere of the full production will be at the Theatre Project tomorrow and Saturday nights.

The ''brew-ha-ha'' over suspending the open-container laws so that beer might once again flow freely through the streets of Fells Point at the community's annual festival was the first bit of local news that reminded me, after I had touched down from a five-week summer hiatus in Provence, that the culture shock upon arriving in Europe is only surpassed by the culture shock upon returning home.It may have been coincidental that my first day home turned out to be an echo of my first day in Provence.

The catch-22 of American culture is that, no matter how far you go, you can never totally escape it. It is, as rapper Jay-Z once opined, a gift and a curse. Yesterday in the media room, I was sitting next to a very pleasant, very polite Japanese reporter who spoke almost no English. We exchanged a few grunts and hand motions, but for the most part, we were unable to communicate. And then her cell phone rang. I couldn't help but laugh out loud when I realized she had Eminem's "The Real Slim Shady" as her ring tone.

Daniel Meyer was in an unfamiliar place where he didn't know anybody. As a way to cope with culture shock and occupy his free time, he started to write songs to communicate his experiences to his American friends. This temporary diversion for the Baltimore-based music teacher got serious when he showed the songs to Jonathan Gourlay, who wanted to put the songs together into a musical story. The end result, a year later, is Welcome to Micronesia, a musical adventure in paradise. The world premiere of the full production will be at the Theatre Project tomorrow and Saturday nights.

The barber leaned close so the white folks couldn't hear. How are you adjusting to the culture shock, he asked. Takes some getting used to, I replied. We were two black men in a place - the Appalachian foothills where Ohio abuts West Virginia - that is home to very few people like us. But the culture shock he spoke of wasn't about race so much as economics. It's a strange thing, he said, still leaning close, to see white people, poor. It is strange, indeed. Not that I didn't know there are white poor.

SEATTLE -- You might think John Waters has seen it all. But the Prince of Puke, the Pope of Trash -- or as he prefers to think of himself these days, "Filth Elder" -- remains amazed by the world around him. It's downright amazing how often the word "amazing" crops up in conversation with Baltimore's beloved shock-meister. He uses it to describe reunions of WJZ's former teen dance program, The Buddy Deane Show. He uses it to describe the forthcoming Broadway musical, Hairspray, adapted from his 1988 feature film about the TV show.

Until he died last year, British writer and teacher Malcolm Bradbury served as a kind of scholarly diplomatic envoy to the free world: a prolific, inspired translator of academese into rich but digestible everyday discourse (fictional and critical). Once again in his energetic posthumous novel "To the Hermitage" (Overlook, 498 pages, $27.95), Bradbury manages to make big ideas not only relevant but riotous. Two parallel journeys take place in the novel. One has a fictional Malcolm Bradbury ferrying to politically unstable St. Petersburg as part of an exclusive international conference on the French Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot.

GEORGETOWN, Del. -- A few blocks from the red brick and white columns of the government buildings that line its historic town circle, a wave of immigration is transforming this 210-year-old county seat. And the strain on two cultures is beginning to show. Mayor Bob Ricker touched a nerve recently. Mincing few words in an interview with a local paper, he complained that Latin-American immigrants, who have come by the thousands during the past 10 years for abundant jobs in the poultry industry, are dragging down the quality of life in southern Delaware.

IT HAS TAKEN a while, but I've become a Howard countian. The transformation didn't happen immediately upon my family's move to the county five years ago. It was a gradual process that sneaked up on me, like my specks of gray hair.I spent my first 28 years living in concrete-covered city neighborhoods and the last 10 adamantly contending that the only place I considered "home" was Philadelphia, specifically North and West Philly.Until now.My first step away from Philadelphia roots came in 1986 when I left Pennsylvania to take a job at a daily paper in Toledo, Ohio.

HAVANA -- Burgundy ties loosened in the tropical heat, the boys from St. Ignatius Loyola Academy of Baltimore arrived here yesterday, ready to check out the people of Cuba, the communism and, most of all, the baseball.But first things first."I want to interact with people and see how their culture is," said Jonathan Chapman, 12, dutifully repeating the intended purpose of the hastily arranged trip piggy-backing on the Baltimore Orioles' visit this Sunday. "But right now, I want to go swimming."

Sun's Hmong story was not an accurate portrayal of cultureKirsten Scharnberg's article "Surviving culture shock" (March 8) is the kind of media portrayal that caused me to start the Hmong Tribune.The article proliferates the idea that the Hmong are a backward, preliterate people who are isolated from mainstream society -- a novelty to be studied, occasionally, a group not surviving in American society.It may not be the writer's intent, but the damage was done. The article was unbalanced. This culture is full of success stories.