By Shelton A. Gunaratne © 2010
(Background: I was an exchange instructor at Fullerton College in 1983 occupying the residence of my exchange partner, Larry Taylor, at 2903 Wellesley Court, Fullerton, a suburb of Los Angeles. I arrived with my family in California on 2 Feb. 1983, and we decided to make use of our weekends [...]

By Shelton A. Gunaratne © 2010
The final leg of our Tiki Tour focused on the Northland Region, more commonly known as the Far North or less commonly as the Winterless North (because of its mild climate). Comprising a land area of 13,789 square km, it arrogates 80 percent of the 285-km-long North Auckland Peninsula. The [...]

By Shelton A. Gunaratne 2010
On arrival in Wellington (current population 386,000), the capital and the third largest city in New Zealand, Monday (21 Dec. 1981) evening, we—my almost 2-year-old son Junius, wife Yoke-Sim and I—checked into the now defunct Waterloo Hotel. After dinner, I went for a stroll from Boulcott Street, down Willis Street, to [...]

By Shelton A. Gunaratne c 2010
In New Zealand, the West (in the sense of Horace Greeley’s “Go West, young man”) refers to the West Coast of the South Island—the area to the west of the Alpine range that you can penetrate through the Haast Pass on Highway 6, Arthur’s Pass on Highway 73, or Lewis [...]

By Shelton A. Gunaratne  c 2010
 My son Junius was barely 2 years old when my wife Yoke-Sim and I took him on a two-week-long tour of New Zealand. We landed in Christchurch, the big city of the South Island, on a Saturday (12 Dec. 1981) at 4.30 p.m. although we left Brisbane, Qld. (Australia), at [...]

By Shelton A. Gunaratne c 2010
The Forday family of Darwin—Harry Forday; his sister, Pauline; his daughter-in-law Sylvia and her daughters Penney and Leanne—gave my wife Yoke-Sim and me a warm welcome at the Darwin coach terminal on Saturday (27 Dec. 1978) early afternoon. Apparently, the Forday family of Rockhampton, headed by Albert and Winnie, had [...]

By Shelton A. Gunaratne c 2010
I participated in the AATEJ (subsequently renamed Journalism Education Association) general meeting in Perth 14-15 December 1978. Doug White transported us from Cottesloe to the meeting venue on the WAIT (subsequently renamed Curtin University of Technology) campus. The first day’s highlight was a discussion with high-school journalism teachers.
My paper elicited heated [...]

By Shelton A. Gunaratne   (C) 2010
After my wife Yoke-Sim and I settled down in Central Queensland in 1976, we decided to get better acquainted with our adopted land by criss-crossing the big island  (continent?).
Since I had considerable experience exploring the United States by Greyhound during my year (1966-67) with the World Press Institute, I convinced [...]

By Shelton A. Gunaratne @ 2010
My encounter with Germany’s Schwarzwald (Black Forest) began on Tuesday (3 March 1992) morning, when I arrived in Karlsruhe (population 289,000) in the federal state of Baden Württemberg. Karlsruhe is the country’s judicial capital or home of justice because it is the location of the Bundesverfassungsgericht (Federal Constitutional Court) and the [...]

By Shelton A. Gunaratne @2010
As a habit, I invariably combined my professional (journalistic) and scholarly interests in planning my travels. My winter 1992 tour of the Rhine Valley wine route (Wienstrasse) and the Black Forest (Schwarzwold) was no exception.
 I had made arrangements to visit the editorial office of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) one of [...]

By Shelton A. Gunaratne @2010
 Although our 1990 tour of Northern England, which covered more than 1,000 km, was not a literary tour for the egghead types, it so happened that our tour director Patrick Bennet took us through the scenic Lake District National Park, which is also closely associated with the Romantic poetry of William [...]

By Shelton A. Gunaratne Ó2010
The most memorable of our five-day tour of Scotland (16-20 June 1990), from the point of view of a 10-year-old, was our breathtaking scenic tour through the rugged highlands and lochs west and southwest of Aviemore [a small town of fewer than 70,000 people in 1990, but more than108,000 now].  From [...]

By Shelton A. Gunaratne©2010
Patrick Bennet, an Englishman, was our tour director. David Price, a Welshman, was our coach driver. Trafalgar Tours had assigned them to take good care of us and show us the best of England and Scotland over 11 days beginning June 12, 1990.
If we add up the motorway distances between the cities [...]

By Shelton A. Gunaratne©2010
When I first visited Dublin in June 1990, it impressed me as a city that takes great pride in its history and culture.  While every city has a history and a culture, not many cities can produce solid evidence to support their greatness.
Dublin is the place to visit the haunts of [...]

By Shelton A. Gunaratne©2010
I created adventure out of my global peregrinations even after I turned 50.  I was thinking as if I were a man of half that age when I got engrossed in jogging along the towpaths of the canals of London, the alleys of Tianjin, the footpaths of Happawana or around the golf [...]

By Shelton A. Gunaratne©2009
The “strangest thing” that could happen to a traveler struck me at about 4.45 p.m. on Friday, July 20, 1990. It shattered the image of London that my father had impressed on me as the “greatest” city in the world.
I purchased a few groceries from  Marks & Spencer in Hammersmith and was [...]

By Shelton A. Gunaratne©2009  Professor of mass communications emeritus Minnesota State University Moorhead
When I was a child, my father and I had a lot of fun conversing with each other in lyrical “free” verse to bemuse ourselves during walks to the Mullewatte well for bathing or on other occasions when our minds turned to leisurely [...]

By Shelton A. Gunaratne ©2009  Professor of mass communications emeritus Minnesota State University Moorhead
The Journey of a Journalist (Part 1) – FROM VILLAGE BOY TO GLOBAL CITIZEN
Monday, September 14th, 2009
By Shelton A. Gunaratne ©2009
My great ambition as a 15-year-old child was to become “one of the outstanding statesmen of the world” and to go overseas [...]

By Shelton A. Gunaratne©2009
I returned to Malaysia as an educational consultant—an external examiner for the department of communication (Jabatan Komunikasi) at  Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (National University)—more than two decades after I left my lectureship at Universiti Sains Malaysia (Science University).
Mohd Safar Hasim, head of the UKM department of communication, was at the Subang Airport in [...]

By Shelton A. Gunaratne©2009
As the external examiner in communication studies at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia in the summer of 1997, I agreed to perform two tasks:

To submit a report evaluating the UKM communication studies program based on criteria relevant to Asia in general, and Malaysia in particular.
To teach a three-hour graduate class in International Communication on [...]

By Shelton A. Gunaratne©2009
BRISBANE, Australia, 8 Nov. 2009: I arrived in Brisbane a few days ago to see my mother lying on a bed “living” her last [?] days at the Mater Hospital. The five khandhas (aggregates)—material form  (rupa), sensation (vedana), perception (sanna), mental formations (sankhara) and consciousness (vinnana)—constituting my mother (in the Buddhist sense) [...]

By Shelton A. Gunaratne©2009
On the last Friday afternoon of April 1994, David Klos and I walked to the shopping street on Nankai University campus, just behind the wall that separates Nankai from Tianjin University. There, while a street barber gave me a haircut for ¥ 2.50 (or 29 U.S. cents), Klos settled on a stool [...]

By Shelton A. Gunaratne©2009
My sojourn in China was part of my first sabbatical, which meant paid leave. In the 1990s, Moorhead State had an exchange program with Tianjin University in China that encouraged faculty on sabbatical to participate in this program. Tianjin agreed to pay me a supplementary salary of ¥ 1,500 per month and [...]

By Shelton A. Gunaratne©2009
[N.B.: I wrote part of this installment with my Peradeniya campus contemporaries of the late ’50s and early ‘60s in mind. Others may not find much significance in the names mentioned.] 
 On my return to Sri Lanka from travels Down Under, my operational headquarters shifted from Happawana to the Lodge, also called the [...]

By Shelton A. Gunaratne©2009
Happawana lies east of Galle on A17, the road that leads to Imaduwa and beyond.
At the junction where you get off the bus, a gravel road forking southward across a vast rice paddy implicitly entices you to cross over to the other side to enjoy the salubrious breeze sweeping through the paddy [...]

By Shelton A. Gunaratne
This story is best told in pictures. It’s the story of planet Earth and its place in the universe.
Once upon a time, long before the Hubble Telescope, humans thought that Earth was the center of the universe. Now we know that Earth is a mere speck in the still expanding universe, 90 [...]

Shelton A. Gunaratne ©2009
By “step land” I mean America, the land that adopted me. By motherland I mean Sri Lanka, the land of my birth. My claim to be a world citizen derives from my blend as a cultural mix of these two countries and, to a lesser extent, of the countries where I worked [...]

Shelton A. Gunaratne ©2009
 My last fling with Lake House (June 4-Aug. 16, 1991) did not work out as well as I expected because ANCL failed to honor the terms of a paid internship as stipulated by the ASNE. Observer editor H. L. D. Mahindapala expected “donated” labor at his disposal and presumed that the ASNE [...]

Shelton A. Gunaratne ©2009
As I asserted at the start of this series, I was born to be a journalist. I became a prolific and challenging scholar only during the final decade before my retirement. I will leave it up to a younger researcher to sort and analyze all of my journalistic and scholarly output. I [...]

Shelton A. Gunaratne ©2009
 On a Wednesday morning (April 17, 1985), as I rose from the bed, I got an unexpected telephone call from Moorhead State University (which became Minnesota State University Moorhead in 2000) inquiring whether I was interested in the advertised vacancy in journalism. Martin Grindeland, the new chairman of the mass communications department, [...]