Number 25

Wandering the World in Search of Creativity

For 73 days this summer I wandered around the world in search of creative thinking, creativity and creative people. What started out as simply a dream trip to fulfill a fantasy of a life-time: travel around the world like Phineas T. Boggs did in Around the World in Eighty Days; became a research project and a business marketing tour.

My plan started with picking which countries I would visit. Initially I chose:

New Zealand
Australia
Tasmania (which I initially thought was a separate country)
Japan
China
Malaysia
Singapore
Bali
India
Turkey
Denmark
The Netherlands
England
France

For a variety of practical reasons Japan, China and Bali were dropped finally. Because of one business contact Sri Lanka was added to the my itinerary. For geographic reasons Dubai and Germany were added as well. Dubai because that is where Emirates Airlines stops to refuel between Chennai, India and Istanbul, Turkey was added. Germany was added simply because my memory of the geography of Europe was poor and I hadn't remembered that you can not travel from Copenhagen to Amsterdam by train without going through northern Germany. B- for me in world geography.

During the months of planning I designed and redesigned, set and reset goals and objectives for the wandering journey.

My personal goals were to visit a mix of unique countries, have as many new experiences as I could and to meet new people in every single country. Each were chosen to help we create a new life at 57 and challenge me creatively as much as I could over the 10 1/2 weeks. In 1977 I took a similar trip for 110 days to all the countries in Europe, plus Egypt, Yugoslavia and Greece to create a new life after my divorce. In 1978 Merry and I traveled around France, England, Scotland and Wales to help create our new life together. In 1982, I lived and taught in Italy and traveled in the Netherlands, Switzerland and Germany for 3 months with Merry and Jessica to challenge each of us.

My basic planning tool was the internet. Thank you Vice President Gore (ha ha) and all the scientists and computer engineers who created it over the past 10 to 15 years. As I was pulling together information I wrote to people I had gotten to know through cyberspace on 5 separate creative thinking discussion lists. Each had great tips. Many invited me to visit and/or stay with them once I arrived in their respective countries. Then some began to ask if I would be willing to make a presentation to groups on creative thinking, my work with creative thinking tools and my weekly Creativity Challenges from the previous 4 years.

When that started to happen is when I decided to deliberately turn the trip into a business and marketing tour as well and I started contacting people I knew in the various countries to set up professional speeches and workshops. More came through than I expected and my schedule began to fill in with presentations in 10 of the 12 countries and several in Australia in the 8 states and territories.

As my plans came together I also decided that I would attempt to meet as many creative people as I could in each city and country and interview them, visit their offices, swap books with them, and perform a simple survey study of traits of highly creative people based on one of my study projects from my doctoral program in the early 80s. Plus I decided I would try to meet different types of designers, artists, architects, land planners, cartoonists, writers, speakers everywhere I traveled.

Thanks to two highly creative friends and fellow long time faculty members of CPSI/CEF, Judy Morgan and Andre de Zanger I became aware of and joined a fantastic travel organization, SERVAS. Servas is an organization of people around the world that open their homes to fellow members as they travel to spread friendship and freedom around the world through personal contact. Using the SERVAS membership books for both New Zealand and Australia I was able to set up host homes for most of the first 6 weeks of my travels in both islands of New Zealand and 7 of the 8 states and territories of Australia. This provided me even more great opportunities to meet highly creative people by living in their homes for 2 or more days each.

That describes the design and planning of my initial Wandering Tour. Now for a country by country description of my trip and some of what I learned while actually doing and living it for 73 days. Here are sample learnings from the various countries and cities.

NEW ZEALAND

I began my wandering in Christ Church after traveling from Athens, Georgia across the U.S. to Los Angeles and from their to Auckland, New Zealand to wait for the next plane to Christ Church, a trip that lasted from Monday, 3:00 p.m., June 25tth until Wednesday, 10:00 am, June 27th. My host Phillipa, a social worker and counselor who is deliberately raising her two children to be as creative as possible, picked me up at the airport. Once settled into her and her husband's home, a city councilman for Christ Church, I was off to meet a group of professional speakers who's chapter of the New Zealand National Speakers Association that evening I was scheduled to speak to on ‘DO I HAVE TO BE CREATIVE TO BE A PROFESSIONAL SPEAKER?…..Only if you want to be paid!”

Each of the speakers in turn introduced me to highly creative friends: writers, cartoonists, artists; who I interviewed. The office of one of them, a financial planning expert, was located across from a wonderful artist workshop and colony that has been founded in a collection of gothic stone buildings that was the leading private school in Christ Church for many years.

The various studios were filled with wonderfully creative weavings, stained glass windows, sculptures, carvings, paintings, drawings, ceramics, hand made toys and prints of various kinds.

After three days and two nights I traveled southward to Dunedin, located towards the southern tip of the south island of New Zealand. It is a sea port located safely inland from the Pacific Ocean. The city is the home of the largest university in New Zealand. It was easy to see that the citizens are very proud of their city by the multiple beautiful landscaped planters, flower beds and parks. The city has a central city octagon, not a square or circle. From the octagon, the main streets radiate out up the mountainside, parallel to the mountains or towards the sea to the east. I found Arts and crafts shops nearly on every commercial street as I walked around. There was even a cyber café in the downtown McDonald's.

From there I headed in country towards Queenstown by train, bus and van. Queenstown is located in the center of a range of mountains and is very similar to what would be found in several spots in Colorado, especially Aspen. It is a year-round sports center attracting tourists and enthusiasts nearly every day, year round. Skiing, tobogganing, snowboarding, hang gliding, bungi jumping, mountain climbing, water skiing, parasailing, sky diving, extremely fast motorboating are samples of the various sports that are enjoyed. Truly people travel to Queenstown to test their creative spirits.

Then it was off to Franz Joseph through the southern mountains to the west coast and the Tasmin Sea to travel with snow covered mountains on my right and rainforests and the Tasmin Sea to my left. Nature was the creator that day with its highly contrasting forms of beautiful creations surrounding me for many hours. My imagination and reality were both challenged hour after hour by the frost covered ferns of the rain forest, the snow covered mountains, the yellow sand beaches, the wind swept rock pilings along the coast that resembled massive piles of staggered ultra thin layers of stone to the glacier that I flew to and landed on by helicopter late that afternoon.

My wandering continued for a few more days through natural scenes unlike any I have ever seen in my wanderings around the 48 mainland states of the U.S. or any of the countries of Europe or South Africa and Turkey through mountain ranges, sheep filled valleys and paddocks to the fiord like islands located between the south and north islands of New Zealand as I boated to Wellington, my first real destination in the north island.

Wellington is located at the southern end of the north island of New Zealand at the farthest western end of a very large bay. I traveled there from Nelson, a small ocean port city on the northern end of the south island by ferry boat. The experience was very much like what I experienced in the fijords in Finland many years ago: beautifully lush hills, mountains, forests, sandy beaches to either side of the straits between the two islands.

In Wellington, besides traveling all over the city, interviewing my two hosts: a practicing psychologist and a movie producer I interviewed architects, land planners, landscape architects, advertising art directors, graphic designers and writers that I met in their respective offices. This was the approach and plan I used in every city I traveled throughout my 73 days of wandering.

Each time I interviewed someone I had them complete my 32 trait survey that I created in 1980 and have used with over 140,000 people since in nearly all my audiences or groups. The results continued to produce the types of results that I have received since 1980. Everyone who fills it out indicates unused latent creative thinking traits and people who consciously work at being creative or doing creative work record multiple traits: those personally capitalized on and others left dormant.

From Wellington I flew to Rotorua to visit Maori sites and to see some of the interior countryside of the northern island of New Zealand. Rotorua is noted for its natural mineral baths and its extensive examples of Maori culture. While there I challenged my curiosity by visiting every gallery and museum devoted to the Maori culture, past and present. When I visited the state sponsored center, located near my chosen hotel I even got to be “visiting king of the day”. It is a tourist custom that is part of the daily Maori culture performances.

What stood out for me in Rotorua was the exposure to the vast creativity of the Maori people of the past and present shown through their buildings, communities, paintings and carvings.

From Rotorua I flew to Auckland, New Zealand's largest city, located towards the northern end of the north island. Auckland is an extremely modern city built in an exquisitely beautiful natural area of many high hills and vast amounts of water: ocean, bay, lakes and rivers.

In Auckland I met and interviewed several professional speakers and consultants, plus a few artists, while walking and traveling around the city. From most of the hills, multiple street levels and from its siteseeing tower I visually explored Auckland. I chose not to try the portable bungi jumping apparatus located by the base of the city tower. Some creative experiences I leave for others to enjoy.

AUSTRALIA

After enjoying 3 nights and 4 days in Auckland, completely my first two weeks that were devoted to New Zealand I flew onto Sydney to begin my four week journey around the 8 states and territories of Australia.

At the Sydney International Airport I was met by fellow creative thinking consultant, cyber friend and very creative improv actor, Ian English. Ian and I met over the internet in cyberspace several years ago and then met face to face in Stone Mountain, Georgia at one of the Innovation Network's Convergences. Before traveling to his and his wife's home in the northern suburbs far north of Sydney we drove and toured several sites in Sydney proper including: Hyde park, another park that runs for a long ways along the southern side of the Sydney Harbour from near the famed Opera House by Jorn Utzon far to the east and the Pacific Ocean, the Sydney Opera House, the “Coat Hanger” bridge that spans the Harbour and a mix of city sites.

That night Diane and Ian had planned a gathering of creative people to come to their home to meet me and each other including the creator of my first website, and his own: The Creativity Web, one of the finest websites devoted to creativity in cyberspace, Charles Cave. We played improv games as a way of getting to know each other and to encourage the use of our individual and total group creativity.

The next day Charles toured me around the south eastern suburbs, especially to Double Bay (Double Pay it is called by the locals), to the inlet of Sydney Harbour, and … Beach. In each area it was easy to city examples of the creativity of the citizens, architects and designers in Sydney.

That evening and the next day I stayed in the city and went to a performance of. At the Opera House, a very funny Australian version of a very old German Opera. That version was set in the outback during World War II. The opera was sung in Italian with Australian slang translations on an electronic screen above the stage opening which added to the humor of the actors, singers, and generally two-dimensional scenery of sheep, dogs, trees, mountains, horses, cars and trucks.

The basic story was about an elixir for love that ended up being Coca Cola which all the cast served themselves out of a giant vending machine at the grande finale of the opera.

Many forms of creativity can be experienced in Sydney proper whether along the main harbour, in the downtown areas, around Hyde Park, out at the Olympic site or out in the extensive burbs.

Off to Canberra from Sydney by cross country train through the richly colorful, rolling, often forested, countryside. Canberra, the national capital of Australia, is a “designed” city, master planned in the 20s and 30s but not really built until beginning in the late 1970s. The Australian government held an international competition looking for a designer for their new capital and found their designers, Walter Burley Griffin and his designer wife, Marion Mahoney, both working for Frank Lloyd Wright in the United States.

The actual implementation of Burley Griffin's design took many years and much politicking. The design is of a highly monumental garden filled government city filled with lush landscaping, highly design-controlled residential areas, impressive monuments, government buildings and foreign embassies. Unlike most other cities it was not designed with a single central work focused area but rather several different ones based on their functions and purposes varying in size areas with the overall intent to minimalize traffic jams and problems.

What it lacks when compared with other big cities is what gives it its unique charm and beauty: a city set in nature without destroying nature that lives more as a gigantic park than as a city.

The landscaping of each street was specified to have distinct types of trees giving the overall city an assorted combination of tree canopies as the trees matured. Add to that urban floral areas, public gardens, the individual landscaping by residents and business owners.

From the complete design atmosphere of Canberra I traveled by train and bus across a couple mountain ranges to the Snowy Mountains to spend a few days at the mountain top home of two new Australian artist friends I had first met earlier in the Spring while they were living with a mutual friend in Athens, Georgia. From a 5-level, all white plush carpeted interior townhouse I traveled to stay in the self-sufficient shed type home built 17 years ago to house Barbara and her 3 sons that now houses her and Neal, her multi-skilled and talented husband.

From a wonderfully decorated townhouse with its racks of fine wines and beautiful cars to a candle opera lighted home filled with the healing energies of its two New Age healer residents.

The days in the mountains were filled with experiencing nature: kangaroos, wombats, snakes, birds and other things that went bump in the night added to the art of my friends through their artwork and their artful living.

After many walks and drives around, up and down, their mountain and the Snowy Mountains in general through the forests, up waterfalls and along side of streams, a couple pool games and a good dinner in the local and only pub for miles we drove down the mountain one more time by to the bus stop in Holbrook, New South Wales some 60 to 70 kms away.

Then by bus and train I moved onto Melbourne to met my next hosts and new creativity friends.

MALAYSIA

August 7th it was time to leave cool to cold wintery Australia and the southern hemisphere to fly to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and hot humid summer of the northern hemisphere. I arrived around 10:00 pm after 8 hours of flying in a very new commercial airliner to be met by new hosts who I had never met except via the internet.

Each transition. Each airport. Each train subway, or bus station. Each meeting of new visually unknown hosts tended to challenge my creative thinking skills throughout the summer.

Landing in the dark of night in a brand new culture would then present a whole new set of creative experiences and ways to grow creatively.

Kuala Lumpur, home of the Petronis Towers, the recorded tallest occupied buildings in the world, site of a James Bond thriller is a city of widespread contrasts of creativity, culture, history, people, food. Looking from the window of my high rise hotel, The Cititel, I could literally see what appeared to be hundreds of individual high rise buildings every direction I looked that night and the following few days during both of my visits to K-L and P-J, adjoining Malaysian cities.

SINGAPORE

To add further variety to my overall World Wanderings plus save time and money I chose to take a night train from Kuala Lumpur to Singapore for my first visit over the weekend.

SRI LANKA

I ended my second visit to Singapore by spending the day traveling around Singapore in great detail by elevated train, subway, street car, cab, cable car, private automobile, open amusement park train, horse cart, bus and foot including the Changi area where my hotel was located to the convention center, the finance district, a mix of residential areas, the entertainment island—Sentral returning to the international airport terminal to fly that night to Sri Lanka.

Yes, Sri Lanka, where the U.S. government had said for all Americans to leave and no others go into two days before I arrived due to the two week prior rebel bombing of 5 of their commercial airlines airplanes. My plane landed around midnight Sri Lankan time. Getting through the customs and visa process took a little over an hour and was relatively fear-free. When I exited the very old and dirty terminal building a smile came to my face instantly. There standing in front of me was a stranger, a paid stranger, holding a sign with my name hand lettered in black marker on it. There stood a smiling friendly face at 1:30 am in a country like no other I have ever been in.

I often covered my eyes while riding in my privately, hired driver driven automobile as he made left and right turns through the traffic on the streets of Colombo that looked for sure would end us up in massive car accidents only to hear the uproarious laughter of my host and here husband and sometimes their 3 children. “Wait until you get to India,” was their usual refrain.

No cars ever collided. No horns were blown. No angry fists or fingers were waved by the drivers or pedestrians of Colombo. Simply all the forms of transportation existed in harmony at all times. You need to turn. You simply slowly indicated it by moving that direction and people and vehicles simply stopped and let you complete your turn.

INDIA

I arrived in Chennai in the daylight, thank the powers of the Universe I decided to do that. As I completed the moderately smooth transition through the customs, declaration and visa check points I ventured out of the terminal to the frantic sea of people waiting for arriving passengers: friends, families, wives, husbands, employers, hotel officials, fellow workers and the swarms, swarms and more swarms of cab drivers all literally climbing over each other to ask every nervous looking arriver, “taxi”, “you need taxi”, “me be your taxi driver”.

It would take another thousand or two words to describe what the next 60 or so minutes was like. It definitely tested my creative problem solving and idea generating skills. I kept my cool by saying my favorite line from Joel Goodman, “If you can say ‘some day I'll laugh about this', then why not start now!” or by using my fellow professional speakers' or storytellers' line “everything that happens to you is simply material for a future speech or story.”

The stress was generated to a higher level than necessary because of one detail that I did not know. The time zone in Chennai is not based on the hours different from Sri Lanka but rather on the half hour as Darwin (the Northern Territory) and Adelaide (Southern) are from New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland in Australia..

Sure enough on time there was my smiling, kind, great host and cyberspace Indian friend, Prakash. I simply did not know that I was early and on a different time zone or system.

Once again CPS and creative thinking training kept me from reaching extreme levels of anxiety, simply high ones that were workable with some slow, controlled breathing and repeating over and over to myself: “In What Ways Might I iiiiii?”

My creativity was expanded many ways during the 3 days I spent in Chennai and areas a couple hours south of the city. The first night I had a great dinner with Prakash and two of his closest friends at his wife's university alumni club. Over several small dishes of Indian food: some I could eat and some I chose to not eat we talked getting to know each other and watching the cricket match on television. In between their laughter at my spice-resistant eating they tried to teach me the fundamentals of cricket. During our dinner we discussed what I might see and do while I was in Chennai and southeastern India. Eventually it was decided for me that Bhad, Prakash's outdoor advertising marketing manager would meet me on Sunday morning to tour in a hired car to the southern most tip of India along the eastern shore. We went to a sociological exhibit that was comprised of wonderful examples of traditional housing from several areas of southern India, complete homes and blocks of homes including displays of life and customs within the homes and villages

One of the beautiful examples of Indian creativity was the decorative designs made from flower petals and leaves sprinkled in elaborate designs outside each house's doorstep. The woman create these designs each morning to welcome the day and visitors. No two designs were alike.

From there we went further south to a village of carvers where there is a series of religious monuments and temples all carved out of solid rock and into solid rock creating the prayer rooms. The village is primarily made up of row after row of tiny stalls/shops where you can see carvers working and displaying their finished work for sale ranging in size of 3 or 4 inch elephants to 4 to 6 foot high elephant gods or other deity figures. Except for a few shops for basic goods the entire village was made up of sculpture stalls and workshops. An entire town committed to carving.

On the return trip we stopped briefly so I could take photos of an example of Indian creativity: Dizzy World, an amusement park with gigantic plastic clown and cartoon heads forming the entrances to the park.

Back in Columbo I continued my walking tour of the area around my hotel and between their and the beach, 4 miles away. The previous day, Saturday in addition to my walking I took an inexpensive ($3.00) organized bus tour to varied sites in Columbo. There was no Taj Mahal or St. Peter's but many examples of creativity in art, crafts, paintings, clothing, pottery and merely staying alive and living. Along one of the very polluted rivers were rows of straw and wood shacks, hovels serving as homes for families who's creativity was focused on surviving. No matter how destitute things seemed compared to what I am use to in Athens, Georgia or the U.S., Europe or in the big cities of Australia or New Zealand I saw children playing, laughing, creating amusements for themselves and their friends.

DUBAI

Back on a plane. This time it was flying on Emirates Air stopping in Dubai to refuel and then onto Istanbul. Except for my feeling strange flying over the no-fly zone of Iraq in an airplane in which I was the only westerner, only American the flight was pleasant and uneventful.

We arrived in Dubai, Saudi Arabia, a desert city that has been turned into a highly contemporary and beautiful convention city, at the most modern airport I have ever seen. Their duty free shop is a huge mall filled with many shops with everything your Christmas fantasy filled mind could imagine, the largest and most modern in the world. It was nearly 50 C degrees outside. That's around 120 F degrees.

The result of the creativity of many political, developmental, business and design people is so obvious there in the desert. From the air where we had been traveling over nearly white sand for hours appeared the beautiful contemporary city of Dubai in the distance and the airport below.

TURKEY

It was good to finally be in Istanbul, Turkey once again after the rebel induced tension of Sri Lanka, the poverty stricken and extremely over populated Chennai. At the airport I was met my creativity professor friend, Esra Aslan and her mother, two smiling faces greeting me once again. My days in Istanbul were all devoted to exploration and discovery this time. In the past I had gone to Istanbul to present with creativity consultant friends at Halim Ergunalp's Creativity Conferences.

Each day I spent the early mornings and late evenings exploring the ancient section of Istanbul while living in a hotel in one of the metropols, Fatih near the Golden Horn, Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia.

Each day I walked through the streets watching people going to work by car, bus, foot, cart, boat, hovercraft as I was venturing to see the Golden Horn again and watch Istanbul wake up.

One day from the floating bridge, I walked a different route back towards my hotel through the wholesale section of Istanbul that tourists rarely visit. Everything there is usually sold in gross or larger quantities. Do you need or want an evil eye,? ha ha. No I did not buy a gross of evil eyes to carry or ship home.

The streets of Istanbul are not exactly geometrically laid out like most American cities. Even the streets of Venice are more geometric. Generally I have very good sense of direction from my architectural and drafting background. The trouble was I was using a map that was very small with almost no street names on it. Much creativity was required just to get from one point to another.

One day I ended up in the Grande Bazaar where I had not planned on going this trip. The shop/stall owners were just setting up before 9:00 am. After asking a couple different police officers I found my way closer to my destination. Then the rain came down. I hailed a cab and got back to my hotel in plenty of time to get out of my totally wet clothes, even with a gigantic umbrella, dry off and get dressed again before Esra arrived at 9:30 for our excursions around Istanbul.

Our first excursion through the city was to areas I had never seen before en route to a contemporary multi-story Mall with shops from every classy design name you can think of from Armani to Laura Ashley, Gucci, Escada....etc. We toured the mall glancing in windows and shops none that had any price tags.

Then we got up to the food court level: Burger King. KFC, Dunkin Donuts and several Turkish Fast Fod (spelled their way) shops. We ordered some Pides Kiymalý Pide (ground beef pizza) and Kasarlý Pide (cheese) and Sucuklu (Kapali) Pide (chicken and veggies) plus some chestnut sweets for our picnic lunch on the Bosphorous.

The Bosphorous separates the two sections of Istanbul: European and Asian (only city in two continents…that I know of). The Asian side is lined with enormous vacation homes (mansions) built right to the edge of the straits. The European side has almost continuous park and walking areas with the houses. fortress and other buildings built back away from the straits so that everyone can enjoy wonderfully fantastic walks and views of the Bosphorous all day long.

After enjoying our Fast Food lunch we walked all the to a small shop area, about 2 to 3 miles away where there is a very creative cartoonist that Esra knows and wanted me to meet. We spent about an hour in his shop sharing cartoon drawings, ideas and experiences. I had a collection of cartoons with me that I had drawn for Alice Lee in Kuala Lumpur for a study of creative people from around the world she is doing.

That night I spent a couple hours simply living in my little area of Fatih exercising my creativeness through touring a street fair, enjoying a progressive dinner (eating each course at a separate restaurant), buying art supplies and food for my journey to Copenhagen the next day.

For over an hour I sat on a stoop along front of my hotel just simply experiencing the evening life of Fatih trying to use all my senses to record and enjoy the life around me.

Once again living is how so many Turkish people use their creativeness.

DENMARK

After hours of flying from Istanbul to Amsterdam and then onto Denmark I arrived at my next destination Copenhagen where I would tour and give a series of presentations for Novo, a very successful Swedish medical equipment manufacturer at their offices several m miles north of Copenhagen and for the Danish Creativity Institute held at the main offices of Ericcson Electronics. The first evening I walked from my CAB INN hotel, an experiment in ship architecture applied to motel design (extra efficiently small multi-functional room for 1 to 5 with fold down and up everything) to the main train station and Tivoli, a century or more old amusement park that was one Walt Disney was inspired by in designing Disneyland in the 1950s.

The next day I was picked up by the taxi that Novo had ordered for me and driven out into the countryside to their main headquarters in Denmark. The new creativity committee had planned for my presentation to kick off a series of events that they had been planning for months. There planned entrance for me was the following. The four members and I all dressed up in medical coats. They then had me lay down on a collapsible stretcher on which they put me into an ambulance. Then with sirens blaring they raced the ambulance around from one part of their campus site to another building where I had already set up the room with my props and posters, where I was then carried into the room on the stretcher as my entrance for the session for their top scientists and inventors. The applause and laughter was fantastic.

My exploration and discovery of Copenhagen (first visit was in 1977) consisted of me wandering alone or with a combination of Rosanna, an Italian who lives in Switzerland who I met when she was a participant in the Springboard session I co-lead at CPSI in June, Arne, the director of the Danish Creativity Institute and at that time marketing expert for Ericcson and his wife.

The total beauty of the architecture, landscape, graphics, people enjoying their city once again was creatively inspiring. Everywhere you look you see or experience high levels of creativity from soup spoons to ships to buildings to amusement parks.

THE NETHERLANDS Off again by train from Copenhagen to Delft via Hamburg and Amsterdam, a day long train trip with many stops and a ferry boat ride. In Delft after several uses of my CPS and creative thinking training successfully not missing any of my multi-train connections at mis-marked platforms or gates I was met by my cyberspace creativity friend, Marc Tassoul, creator and owner of the longest continuous internet creativity list: CREA-CPS. Marc is a professor in the Delft Industrial Engineering School who teaches industrial design and creativity courses. He also works as a creativity consultant along with his wife Helga, a psychologist and long time creativity consultant.

Delft is one of my favorite towns/cities in the world. I had been there in 1977, 1982, 1990 and again this summer. The beauty of the environment: buildings, landscape, canals, food, furniture and graphics is not surpassed anywhere. The scale of Delft is just right: a very comfortable walking city.

I simply enjoyed the creativity everywhere I went by stopping periodically to sit and experience with all my senses. Walking along a line of shops facing the square between the cathedral and the town hall is creative pleasure. Sitting in a café on a canal barge at noon on an absolutely beautiful day tasting the many courses of a wonderful meal (without spice unless you really want it) provides you with tremendous creative inspiration.

Combining my wanderings with meals with Marc and Helga, discussions until the wee hours with Marc or in the early hours with Helga, touring the Delft Industrial University campus, having lunch with Marc and two of his professor associates, each involved with this December's international Idea Safari Conference or simply standing on the balcony of Helga's apartment viewing the beautifully crafted urban design of her community near Delft or lasting having a wonderful dinner in Utrecht with two Netherlanders, one form Mittelberg in the south and the other from east and north of Amsterdam, who were participants in my CPSI Springboard in June all created 3 days filled with massive amounts of creativity, creativeness and creative thinking.

ENGLAND

It was an ocean liner not a ferry boat that I road on from Rotterdam to Dover. It was like a floating casino hotel will several movie houses, bars, dining areas and play areas or rooms for children. Meeting the retired English couple who were in search of a place to sit and asked to sit at my table for four that I was guarding with my life. The ship was jammed packed with returning English travelers, heading home after their final summer holidays.

Arriving in Dover I worked my way through customs and the visa checkpoints to board my train to London, hoping to reach Stratford that evening. Due to my not using my years of training in CPS, especially in the Solution and Acceptance and Action Planning steps I got to London ending up at the wrong train station to find that the last train to Stratford had left from another train station. So I went off to Paddington Station to find a hotel for the night, where I would catch the first morning train to Stratford. After lugging my two very heavy bags for a few blocks I set up in my hotel room and went wandering around the streets of the Paddington Station area in search of food and an email café.

In the morning I arrived with bags rolled and dragged over cobblestone pavement at the station to discover that the 7:12 am train to Stratford left from another station. #$%^&*@#$. I'll need to study my Solution Finding and Action Planning skills more and learn to ask more questions and ASS-U-ME less. Two hours later after a pleasant English breakfast and another electronic meal at my local email café I was off across the countryside to Stratford, another favorite village of mine.

After wandering ineffectively I discovered an ideal B&B not far from the train station, dropped my bags and was off to rent a bicycle and begin my 24 hour tour of Stratford. Stratford is small enough that anyone can basically walk anywhere they want. With a bicycle I could go out into the countryside and hopefully revisit Warwick Castle 10 kms away and relive one of the most wonderful parts of my life with my late wife, Merry.

During the last leg of the train ride I had noticed the man across from me in the train car with cartoon books. As we were each picking up our things to exit the train I asked if he was learning to cartoon or was a cartoonist. He turned out to be a French cartoonist who had been hired to come to Stratford to teach a workshop on cartooning for children next to William Shakespeare's famous Stratford Theatre. We each shared samples of our cartooning and I purchased a copy of one of his books. Later that day he came up to me and said hello as I road up on my bicycle to the front of the Shakespearean Theatre to purchase tickets for that night's performance. We spoke again for awhile and onto my bicycle to wandering on two wheels for the day: along medieval streets, rich with history and pride of the citizens, past shop after shop, past William's birthplace and Anne Hathaway's as well, along the famous Avon canal far out into the countryside.

Stratford on the Avon is a town that exists because of the creativity of many people inspired by that of only one. Shops are filled with weavings, paintings, figurines, ceramics of every time, clocks, curios, post cards, etc all demonstrations of creativity, much of which would go unnoticed if people did not come from around the world to see the birth town of one writer.

Sometimes hero worship does help the creativity of others.

From Stratford and the 14th and 15th centuries I lept back in time several centuries, perhaps several millenium to Stonehenge near Salisbury. With another cyberspace creativity friend, John Thomas, who lives in Salisbury, I toured Stonehenge for the third time. Afterward we spent the evening in his favorite pub drinking and eating. Soon after he dropped me off at my pub, where I would sleep that night, that had a strong familiarity with the room that Ishmael and Queequeeg slept the first night in Moby Dick, I went out wandering to see the famous Salisbury Cathedral beautifully lighted at night. In the early morning I returned to watch the sunrise on the cathedral. In the past I have seen the sunrise on Stonehenge. 5000 years of spirituality in 24 hours.

People are attracted to Salisbury because of the mystical and magical creativity of people long past yet unlike Stratford, Salisbury is more of a city and less of an attraction.

Later that morning it was time to return to London for a few days where I would meet people at and tour both the offices of WHAT IF?! (creativity consulting firm) and ST. LUKE'S (highly creative advertising firm). Due to a combination of communication problems and a previously planned employee play day I wasn't able to see the St. Luke's office or meet face to face with any of their staff. Instead I wandered some in the Paddington Station area and went to spend a few hours at the offices of WHAT IF?! It was great fun to meet some of their staff and learn more about the creation and history of the company and the work they have and are doing to help their clients produce creative solutions and products.

The next day I wandered around London by foot, carriage, boat, and double decker tour bus seeing various sections of the city comprising the very old and the very, very contemporary. One creative perspective changer was riding the British Air “EYE”, the largest ferris wheel in the world. Instead of bench seats for 2 or 3 the wheel has glass bubbles that hold 30 or so standing or sitting people. The wheel continously moves throughout the daylight time at its location down and across the Thames from Parliament and Big Ben providing phenomenal 360 degree views of London for as far as you can see to the horizon. From there it was time to tour the city, museums, galleries, restaurants, shops, parks, streets, neighborhoods. All this additionally filling my richly filled mind and spirit through all my senses: one of the ways I continually expand and enrich my creativeness.

FRANCE

On an early train from Paddington Station off to the station where I would catch the train that would take me through the famous English Channel Tunnel and onward to Paris. Traveling at over 100 miles per hour was hardly noticeable most of the time.

After establishing my bearings in the first train station and Metro station in Paris, drawing French francs from the first ATM machine and buying a visitor bus and train pass I was off to my hotel 4 blocks from the Eiffel Tower. Walking along my hotel's street you look directly at the Eiffel Tower in the near distance. Once I dropped off my bags I was afoot to the Tower and to tour Paris along the Seine from the Eiffel to Notre Dame Cathedral. From the gothic cathedral I traveled to the Pompediou Centre to enjoy the general art exhibits and a fabulous exhibit of the work of Alfred Hitchcock.

A day full of art was capped off by a wonderful Chinese meal in a wonderful café at the foot of the Pompediou Centre.

The Centre is one of my favorite buildings. When I was in Paris the very first time in June 1977 I was asked if I had seen the Centre several times. So many times I decided I would find it the last night before I boarded my sleeper compartment train to Madrid. When I road up the very long escalator out from the Metro Station towards the entrance to the Centre I should have known I would miss my train that night, which I did. A void of me slept well in my sleeper that night to Madrid, while I truly enjoyed the Centre and its many exhibits.

The Pompediou Centre is an art centre for all of France and the first lending library in the country. It opened the spring of 1977 just before I arrived. Most of the people I met before I saw it complained about it. Yet when I got their I discovered it was filled with people all day long. Each morning thousands of people lined up in mass to enter the building. The problems that the French people, especially the Parisians have with it is that it is the result of an international architectural competition that was won by a team of an English and an Italian architect and it represents art in France. Oooops!

One less complaining Parisian in a café in 1977 helped me see how the Pompediou Centre and Notre Dame were so much alike though they were built in two totally different times. Both of the buildings use their structures, their substructures as the aesthetic form for them. Notre Dame it is the flying buttresses that comprise the design in stone. The Centre it is the aluminum truss structure combined with all the mechanical, air conditioning, electrical, and plumbing systems that comprise the design, both externally and internally.

From Paris I ventured out one day to my all time favorite towns/villages, Chartres. I went for the 8th time to visit and enjoy wandering the village and to visit the famous cathedral with its two separate architectural history period towers and the great English tour guide, Malcom Miller (40+ years as a tour guide) who's every twice daily guided lecture tours are new and creative.

After Chartes it was off to dinner with French CPSI friends who live in Paris and lots of creative discussions and fun.

Next morning it was time to play again. This time it was off to Disneyland Paris to let my little kid play and enjoy. Though the creative effort is mostly worked out for the visitor I still like to challenge myself and my imagination while I wander around the creative results of thousands of people while watching others do the same.

From deserts to mountains, streams, oceans, reefs, cities, towns, villages, from 5-star hotels to self-sufficient living mountain homes by foot, car, bus, cart, taxi, boat, airplane, helicopter, elevator, escalator, moving sidewalk I wandered the world this summer to experience, explore, expand and enrich creativity mine and many other people's. 73 days in all to create a life time of creative lessons to savior and learn from. My hope is that this brief overview has helped you tap into some of your own creativity and imagination. Thank you for reading along with me.

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© 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2005, 2006 Robert Alan Black, Ph.D. CSP