There's a Grecian marching band outside my hotel

Seriously, togas and all. And can they drum!

Well, like my friend, classmate, and colleague Matt, I too have made my way to Nicaragua. I am leading a decidedly slower paced life than him though, one that has me up daily at 6:30 and in bed pretty regularly by 9:00.

I'm staying with a local family in León where they are incredibly considerate and have made me feel quite welcome. The house itself is typical, as much outdoors as indoors. I stay in small detached section near the back of the property, in a small bedroom that abuts my personal bathroom. The room is basic, with a single bed, mosquito netting, a wardrobe, and a few small tables. The most unusual aspect of the bathroom is that the cold water shower is just a pipe sticking out of the wall. Hot water is not missed, however, for the lowest temperature I have recorded in my room was 79 degrees.

I check at all hours because a surpising number of elements are in place to wake me up. If you've heard of a cat on a hot tin roof, imagine two cats on a hot tin roof above your heard, fighting and scrambling and attracting the attention of every dog within a two block radius. This morning at 5am (5am!) my treat was the neighbors setting off the largest firecrackers I have heard since I stayed in a hotel across from a wedding in Chiquimula (I love that name!). These were ground shaking firecrackers.

The indoor-outdoor elements of the housing also leads to some interesting moments, such as my toweling off last night, only to feel something moving around in my towel. I quickly shake it open, and what drops out? A bat! I went from startled to amused to feeling a little bad, because I think it was a little stunned to have been used for drying me off. I shooed out of the bathroom.

Anyway, I am definitely improving my Spanish, which was one of the goals for being here, so that's quite exciting. And I'm feeling more and more comfortable in León, especially now that I can enjoy a great cup of coffee at Café Latino (you can pay me for the plug later, Matt). As part of my schooling experience, I've also been taking tours of the city with my instructors, and the following is a photo I took outside of the museum of myths and legends. The museum is interesting for mixing somewhat lighthearted depictions of local legends, with descriptions of methods used to torture inmates when the museum was a prison. Such are the contrasts of life here.

14 million 分之 1

Hey gang,

I'm on the 63rd floor of DiWang tower in Shenzhen, working for Dezan Shira and Associates (www.dezshira.com). It's been a real crash course in Chinese, as I'm finding I have to speak it in the office. My colleagues seem pretty stoked for the Olympics. After I mentioned at lunch today that it's been getting ridiculous amounts of coverage in China (constant promo bumps on TV for the past 5 years, like literally every 20-minute segment), their response was "Yes, the whole world is excited. Weren't you Americans excited for the Olympics in Atlanta?" Um, yea...sure.

I get my daily dose of fun and aggression during my morning commute. I take the 85 bus from Hong Ling Lu (about 3 miles from my office), and watch every morning as it pulls up to my stop COMPLETELY jam packed. On Monday, my first day attempting this commute, I quickly realized that I was up against 10-15 other Chinese urban professionals and semi-skilled workers trying to get on and compete for standing room that did not exist. I had no choice but to eat or be eaten, a true story of survival. Luckily, I am five foot eleven and a half, white (an asset in terms of scare factor), and a complete asshole. I've made it to work on time every day.

If business brings you to Hong Kong, I'm about 40 minutes away, and could stand a night out in Lan Kwai Fong. Hit me up at +86 134 8093 0740.

~~Cree

A Amazonia é nossa!

I start this post with this phrase (which means the Amazon is ours) because that's the overall feeling in Manaus right now. There have been many sustainable development initiatives for the Amazon forest in the last year and some involve the sale of forest land to foreigners who plan to conserve it and leave it untouched. Needless to say that the Manauaras are not so happy...many think they will wake up one day and be part of the E.U. =) It's very interesting to be at home again and be reminded that international opinion is at times so opposite of what the local people want, which usually will lead to no implementation.

Enough with that. So I am home, seeing friends and family and being in a permanent state of happiness for being here. The only bad part is that IRPS has managed to make be so stressed about not being stressed. I am constantly looking for more work and I am getting really frustrated with the bureaucracies of helping out with a field project. My first task was to be in touch with the national health foundation to get data on native Indian tribes in 9 municipalities of the Amazon. Well, the person in charge of the project is traveling and no one knows where she put the data and who is in charge of it now. People at the foundation probably hate me by now because I call every 2 or so hours looking for answers. So I have been getting busy with the write-ups of the project, doing some fun bibliographical reviews (bc I hadn't done those enough this past quarter!).

So I hope things get crazy busy very soon, otherwise I might just go insane. It seems that I need that old IRPS feeling again. People here just keep telling me "Pelo amor de D'us relaxa e espera!", which means for the love of G-d just relax and wait! I can't do that...

I hope you are all having a great summer and thanks so much for creating this blog Ben! 

Beijos!

Czech-ing In

So, I'm not sure if any of this will turn out the way I wanted since I can't understand any of the directions or labels because it's all in Czech, but...
Greetings from Central Europe! Hope everyone is having a great internship/vacation.

Things are certainly interesting here as last night I watched the EuroCup final with about 2,500 other people in a beer garden. Now I know what you are all thinking, Colby's just there to drink himself stupid and explore the region. And although those are two major goals of mine, I'm also in for a bit of work as I found out today.
I was told that work was 9-5 so I showed up at the "office" (really a basement in an apartment building) at around 8:45. Well I rang the bell and loitered outside on the sidewalk, catching sideways glances from Czechs that lived in the building, for over half an hour until my boss (Ivan) made his way downstairs to the office from his 4th floor flat and let me in.

Ok, no problem. I sit down with Ivan and talk briefly. He hands me two 20 page single-spaced papers on the Romani and Initiatives, both of which wer written in excruciatingly poor english. After digging through them for over 2 hours I go back to Ivan and discuss the intiative that he emailed a link to me about.
So I ask "What next?" to which he replies "You can get started." At this point I'm a bit confused since all I have been provided with is an excel spreadsheet with a proposed budget for an education de-segregation project.
"You mean, fill out the proposal forms?" I inquire to which Ivan cheerfully responds "Yes, yes" never breaking his smile.
I told him ok and plunked myself down to write a grant, which I have never 'officially' done before.
Oh, and this just isn't any grant, oh no, of course it has to be for the Soro's Foundation's Open Society Initiative.
So I started scanning through the twenty plus pages of forms of which I needed to fill out including organizational structure, financial history, past projects completed etc...
Mind you this is in my 3rd hour of work.
I brought this to the attention of Ivan and he told me to only fill out what I could.
Lonnnngggg story short, by the end of the day I hadn't even begun the 30 page project description and barely made a dent in the 20 page Organization's History form.
But once this beast is out of the way at least I can move on to News Analysis, which will hopefully be a task I can actually perform well.

Na Shledanou,
Colby
P.S. I'll post pictures when I figure out the Czech word for up-load, it's definitely not the words that mean "navigate away from this page"

The Warm Heart Way - Arrival in Phrao, Thailand

I was picked up by the Warm Heart crew Thursday night in Chiang Mai, and by the time we got to Aomodoi it was pretty late. I met my new roomie, Andrea, who is a fellow IRPSer that had been abroad all year. She's fantastic, and I'm looking forward to getting to know her over the summer. The class of '09 is lucky to have her. I also finally met up with Huyen and Areeluck who had gotten in a few days ahead of me.

The work day started out with a morning meeting, a trip to the office (in the back of two pickup trucks) and another group meeting. From there we split off, and I joined a group of engineers without borders to visit the land that is going to be transformed into a small school community. They had been sold on the idea that I was a hydrogeologist (not remotely true, as I immediately pointed out). So I had to convince them that I could be useful to the water project without an advanced knowledge of groundwater.... After a leisurely lunch break and our first visit to the town of Phrao, we spent the afternoon surveying the land and taking gps points. Good times. :-)

The evening was low key, and I joined the engineers for dinner at the resort. The food here in Thailand is great. Spicy, all stir fried, and probably going to make me gain weight.

Saturday was technically a day off, but we went to visit one of the district officials to learn about organic farming. The guys worked hard, mixing rice hay, rice husks, urea, buffalo poo and water to make fertilizer, while the girls sat in the shade and took entertaining pictures.


After lunch we all crammed into one pickup truck to visit the Bua Tong Waterfall. The waterfall was cool - the water is high in calcium and secretes limestone over everything, meaning that the waterfall was all smooth and incorporated all the rocks and logs and what not into it. It also meant that the rocks weren't slippery and we could walk up and down the waterfall.

From there we went to a Thai barbecue at another official's house. The house itself was amazing, and the food was even better! We helped out with cooking and then sat around drinking beer and whiskey and eating until we couldn't possibly fit anymore food into our stomachs.

All in all a great 2 days to start out. Everyone in the program is great and we're having a great time.


I'll be blogging here if you want to read more, and will try to occasionally add updates here.

Exotic Beach Locations

So it turns out the La Jolla is a pretty nice place. I had been wondering a bit about this over the year, as I watched scads of tourists seemingly enjoying themselves as I blearily drove back and forth from campus. Given my current lack of responsibilities, I took it upon myself to emerge from my apartment on foot to take in my environs.

My first mistake was to think that a walk downtown would be an appropriate way to "break in the sandals" or rather "break in my feet for the sandals." It all started out pleasantly enough, the stroll down the bikepath, wandering by the swim meet at the local high school. Unfortunately, somewhere about mid-downtown I realized that while my feet may one day be strengthed by the experience, they were currently in rather excruciating pain, thanks to a mile and a half of rubbing the sandals had incurred on my pearly unbesocked feet. Fortunately, there is a Vons supermarket right downtown, so I jumped in an bought some anti-rubbing band aid type things.

An interesting side note. I was recently called out for calling the supermarket "the supermarket." Apparently some folks just call it the market. I think this is ambiguous. If we really need to shorten, I say we call it the "sup'ket". Actually this side note was not interesting. Continuing.

So the anti-rubbing band aid things lasted approximately one city block. I mean, what the heck is that? I know they don't want them to permanently bond to your skin, but please. If anyone has had success with these things, let me know.

Well anyway, there was nothing for it but to take off my sandals and go barefoot back to the house at that point. As I scurried across the smoking hot pavement, I thought back to walking with my brother in Conway, Massachusetts one summer long ago. I distinctly remember him encouraging the toughening up of one's feet by walking about barefoot. As I stepped off the burning street and onto a small sharp pebble on the sidewalk, I quietly cursed him. But I was just jealous.

So all of this led me back home, where I found myself pretty much crippled and spent the next two days walking around on one foot and taking a lot of asprin. So the moral of the story is that while La Jolla may be familiar, and may be beautiful, it is also extremely dangerous and it is a good thing I spent the last nine months in front of a computer regressing Mexican educational indicators and calculating GDP's. I am in no way rationalizing. No sir.

Oh, and I also took that photo from the beach near my house. Must be what all the tourist hubbub is about.

Holed up in Hong Kong

Right, so I wasn’t let in to Shenzhen, China, where I had planned to be interning by now, on the night I landed in Hong Kong. That was a week ago… I’ve been stuck here in HK ever since!

It started with the border patrol struggling to match my face to my passport photo. Now, I don’t pretend to stand before you today the same strapping lad of 17 who posed for that photo, but come on! Quite the cruel reversal on the West’s patented “All Asian people look the same”, don’t you think?

Before I knew it I was sat down in a room answering questions. Since it was late on a Monday night, the border cops on duty didn’t speak very good English, especially the one in charge, who couldn’t have been any older than me. He seemed extremely nervous, and so we spent most of the time waiting around for the phone to ring with instructions from someone higher up. To pass the time they began searching through my luggage, examining the inside of each one of my shoes. Then the phone would ring, and the head dude would answer it. It was all very confusing.

In the end, the head guy handed my passport back to me -- a big blue “CANCELED” stamped across my beloved multiple entry visa -- and told me I had to return to Hong Kong. I was flabbergasted! Wasn’t my visa valid? Did I really appear that suspicious? Had I flirted with the female border cops for nothing?

Ultimately, I feel the reason I wasn’t let through that night was language difficulties. I just wasn’t able to communicate my purpose for entering in China clearly enough: I’m a student, I explained, but I’m not going to China to study, etc. They decided to hit the panic button and not let me in, simple as that. Probably has something to do with heightened security in preparation for the Olympics. 糟糕! If only my Chinese were better!

The past week has been spent trying everything under the sun to “smuggle (my) ass into China”, as Terry Omata, Managing Director of Trade Passages (and IRPS ’04 alum!) so delicately puts it. I’ve been in close communication with Terry and his wife Jiaying, my intended bosses this summer, every step of the way. Also, a number of you guys -- but ESPECIALLY Lihua and Samson -- have offered to help in various ways, and I thank you for this very much!

Things are looking up. My next plan is to… well… why don’t I tell you about that once I finally get in to China (if I ever do!). Thanks again for everyone's support! Good luck to others on their way to 中国!