I have a short photo blog of the highlights of my weeklong trip. Simply click the photo to get a bit of the backstory, which are in general chronological order.
I didn’t take as many pictures as I would have liked, so a few things have been left out, such as my visit to the Egyptian Museum, traipsing inside the Great Pyramids, sampling local delicacies, the extraordinary marine life glimpsed while diving, etc.
No pictures today, and I apologize.I haven’t updated much recently mostly because I stopped taking pictures, and I know that no one wants to just read text. A picture tells a thousand words, and all that.
However, with an upcoming spring trip to North Africa, and another possible one to Dubai, that will change soon.
In the mean time, life here has been pleasant and busy. We met a group of other similarly-aged recent graduates from Georgetown, (one of the guys was the basketball coach, so I met him on the court during a match), and had a nice dinner. Another dinner party is planned with Atsuko hosting. It’s great for us, because of the rather stunted social scene here, and meeting new people our age was nigh impossible. The colleges here do not do a good job of reaching out to each other, Cornell especially. Apparently, Cornell here has a kind of a negative reputation among the other schools as having pretentious faculty/administrators and nerdy geeks as students. The Cornell name plus the medical track apparently puts a bit of a puff in our chests when we fraternize with other schools, or so I’ve heard. This is NOT a good thing, seeing that inter-collegiate cooperation is vital to maintaining the vitality of this whole project. We don’t get invited to events, and the Cornell administrators hold things pretty close to the chest and leave us minor-level faculty constantly confused and disorientated with what’s going on.
During lunch, the lights went out. Or so it seemed, as the lighting in the lunch room became dim in a few seconds.
But it wasn’t a electrical malfunction; what had happened that Education City had been enveloped by a sandstorm. Quietly, suddenly, an enormous wave of brown had crashed over the entire city. For someone as new to this as me, I feel closed off, compressed, unusually claustrophobic. Driving seems even more hazardous than usual, and people are walking out in clad in sunglasses and scarves over their faces. This is going to mess with my outdoor training plan.. well, there were movies I’ve been wanting to watch.
I feel like I’m snowed in by sand. I don’t know when it’s going to dissipate… some say a few days, a day, or until the next (rare) rain clears the storm.
On a lighter note, guitar jam session tonight, plus a run for charity this coming weekend. Vegweb.com still has pretty cool recipes that I’ve tried.. someday I’ll be patient enough to actually take a picture of the food before I devour it. Basketball game went this past Monday, beating a team that that we’ve apparently always lost to. The playoffs start in two weeks. I’ll be sad when the season is over… end of an era.
A few things have happened to me since my last post.
Food- No meat! I’ve had fish regularly, mostly tuna, and dairy, usually in the form of goat’s milk (also soy milk, but that’s not really dairy). I’ve been cooking more often- made myself my own curry concoctions using curry powder, potatoes, brown rice, and all sorts of vegtables. The plan was to replace meat with tofu. However, getting tofu in this country is like looking for easter eggs- you think it’s right there, peeking up out of the wild undergrowth, but the excitement turns to despair once you find that it’s actually just boxed hummus. I’ll perhaps put up a recipe someday, when I feel up to it. Speaking of recipes, I tried Atsuko’s first recipe, Easy Chinese Style Peanut Sauce Noodles, which can be found here. It’s a great recipe, simple, healthy, and tasty! Extremely versatile, as you can anything you want- I added potatoes and substituted noodles for brown rice and burgul, a local grain. Unlike the pictures though, my sauce turned a dark chocolate-y brown color- perhaps my thai brand of soy sauce was overpowering. Any saltiness however, can be diluted using extra peanut butter.
Seeing as that I am not globe-trotting the way I used to, I have decided to open up a few new lanes of communication regarding other topics.
Specifically, things that are taking up my time at the moment. I will write about my attempts at cooking. How long this will go for I don’t know; I may simply give up and start ordering out again. I will be trying my hand at some Indian food. The Indian diet just so happens to align with my current tastes for the moment.. and I love curry.
I will also try to write about American and global economies. It’s an exciting time to be an economist, and there is so much raw data to analyze and financial stories to read that I’m actually overwhelmed and have to be picky about what I read. My main sources will be the online editions of the Economist, New York Times, and whatever financial market/biography I happen to be reading, like the one on Ben Bernanke that I am reading now.
Lastly, I will write more about living here. I haven’t wrote about my job here for a while, and any new or old exciting experiences. There a few new things that I will start writing about, which I believe will be good for me to get down on paper, figuratively speaking.
I’ll leave you with a tidbit- my new committment while here! To an old love, bball.
So I’ve decided to try to eat healthier. I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, and putting it into practise intermittently the past few years.
I actually have some surplus cash + the time to shop around and cook. I thought about being straight up vegan, but that only lasted about two weeks when I was back home and my mom was there to rely on for food. Besides, being a Korean vegan is unheard of. My dad looked at me like I was crazy when he saw my plate of vegetables, and asked me why he suddenly had a rabbit for a son.
So now I eat mostly vegetables (no onions! mostly carrots, cucumbers, tomatoes), fruits, nuts, whole wheat grains (trying to avoid white bread/rice), eggs, yoghurt, tofu, and my favorite, FISH. I love fish. I eat raw fish, cooked fish, baked fish, fried fish, deep fried fish. It tastes so good and cats like it, so it must be healthy.
Most dexterous, fluid use of language I’ve ever read
Feeding the inner economist
Complex, intricate, unfinished
A study of man under seige
Noam Chomsky “What We Say Goes”- Enlightening, but does present a depressing outlook for those new to the international socioeconopolitical game. Makes you think about the bigger picture and ask, what kind of world am I living in?
Junot Diaz “the Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”- Fantastic read, and the innate historical theme of the Dominican Republic and subsequent DR immigration story to New York is fascinating. Should remind readers that no matter how bad their adolescence was, it could have been worse.
Leo Tolstoy “Anna Karenina”- Took me three months. Worth it, though. I wish I had the discipline to do some actual research on the time period, pre-communist Russia, under the Czardom. Some of the most agile and tasteful uses of words to describe everyday, common things.
Working on Ethan S. Harris’ “Ben Bernanke’s Fed”- Taking a break, as it reads like an economic textbook. It’s a good time to know how the Fed uses the funds rate, and how it affects us middle class consumers.
Thinking about retackling Thomas Mann’s “Magic Mountain” and John Updike’s “the Centaur”… both were so complex and had overlapping themes that I was overwhelmed when I first got them.
Hopefully my patience will pay off and I will get a few more interviews before I have to go back to Doha. I wish I could be traveling the world, but that’ll have to wait till summer.
So the past few weeks have gone by without much fuss or problems. I’m in a set schedule once again, efficient in my work…. and that means more time for comics!
Follow the flow chart, fellow graduates! Where are YOU in the great jungle that is life?
I was prepared to have little to nothing to do in my free time here. How did I know?
Ever person I’ve met seems to love to tell me that there is nothing, absolutely nothing, to do in Doha.. that I will most likely be very very bored.
However, knowing this tidbit of information and maintaining a go-get-em mindset, I’ve managed to rope myself a new hobby- scubadiving.
As of this day, I am certified PADI (Professional Association of Diving Instructors) Open Water Diver. A beginner, true, but on my webbed feet way to deeper and further depths and cooler sea life (I want to see a shark and a giant turtle. Preferrably together, and even better, fighting a duel to the death for supremacy). Not a cheap hobby, I’ve had to dip into my Qatari piggy- well not piggy, that would be haram (forbidden)- bank.
My instructor is a husband-wife duo, John and Patty Sellhorn, who work for Rasgas in a northwestern town of Al Khor. I am also in the Al Khor Dive Club, one of the few who live in Doha. They are quite the pair of characters- extremely friendly, extremely jovial, and extremely tanned with cool (matching) dragon tattoos. Working with them has been a pleasure. I also have two other classmates- Ralitza, a Bulgarian instructor of English and an amateur food critic and Zoey, a South African high school student with an American accent despite never having set foot in the States.. Having scuba buddies made carpools much more funner.
So I have no cool pictures of myself diving, but I will soon in the future. I can now go out on weekends and join various clubs, mostly the Al Khor crew, to go beach/boat diving. Which is extremely exhausting, and I usually sleep for the rest of the day, but also extremely exciting. I see lots of fish (including these cool blue angelfish that love bananas, right out of my hand! Pictures someday…)
