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.

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.

So that is why I am extremely happy to have met these new nice people. In terms of basketball, we beat one of our rivals, Qatar Academy, in the first round of the playoffs in a heated, foul-heavy affair. Our next match was with the unquestioned best team, Texas A&M, whose players (which include two or three grad students from America… unfair?) pretty much handed our asses to us. Our next match for the third place trophy with the College of North Atlantic was competitive, with the minute lead changing hands every few minutes. Unfortunately, our top scorer fouled out with some questionable (read complete bullshit technical calls) and while we tied the score at the buzzer to send us into overtime with an INCREDIBLE three-pointer that rattled in from our reliable captain, we fell behind in overtime as our center sprained his ankle as well. So, we got fourth place, though I believe we outplayed the other team for most of the four quarters. We really really wanted that trophy, as one of our beloved starting small forward was a fourth-year med student who was graduating and wouldn’t get another chance. This made me REALLY want to stay here for another year to help coach our boys.

I’ve been thinking about what’ll happen once I leave, and I arrived at the conclusion that I would really miss my job, my friends, and my students here. The students here are AWESOME, especially kids in my class. I think some of the other TAS don’t like this job and can’t wait to go back, but I firmly believe that if I could defer admission to dental school, or I didn’t get in anywhere, I would stay an extra year. I could live with one of my closer TA friends (who is staying) and we would have a blast traveling around and playing with students. I could coach basketball, keep diving, travel more, save some money, live a comfortable life. But life goes on, and I don’t want to be left behind. Plus, applying for school was REALLY expensive and REALLY tiring, and I don’t really want to go through that again. Stupid dental schools… med schools let you defer, why not dental schools? Pssh.

Anyway, I’m still cooking and trying new things, but I’m too hungry after cooking to take the time to take a good picture… someday I promise I will and post them.

For the few of you that actually take the time to read this, I just want to say I miss you all greatly and can’t wait to see you in the summer.

Signing off,

Good luck and good night.

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.

Great voice + decent acoustic cover. Listen.

Hello.

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.

Namely, I am going to be in an advertisement for Stars of Science, a reality tv show about science! Nothing big, the cameraman just took clips of Atsuko and I, resplendent in our gleaming lab coats and gleaming goggles, operating a few machines and weighing things out. It’s sponsored by my employer, Qatar Foundation, and provides funding to do actually research for the best sixteen ideas/inventions submitted by the brighest young minds of Middle Eastern heritage.

The 16 finalists, once chosen, will be put through a specially designed 10 week workshop in Doha with state of the art tools and equipment, to further develop the idea. They will then be tutored by experts to develop their business skills so as to enable them to turn their inventions into reality.The winner of the competition will receive a $100,000 cash prize plus $100,000 in business support, counseling, and marketing of the idea. Four international experts will be on the jury. Quite a cool program! Check it out at http://www.starsofscience.com/phase-2/, coming to a cable television network near you.

Next, I’ve gotten much more involved with helping manage the Cornell men’s basketball team. I’ve been promoted to assisant manager and statistics keeper! I now keep logs of points, fouls, free throws, time outs, etc, etc. It’s actually not as easy as it looks, as the refs here tend to be pretty confusing with their calls and the scoreboards always seem to fail. Unfortunately, we had our worst showing last night, losing by more than ten points to the American School of Doha. As always, we had a horrible start- their full-court press gave them a ten-point lead in a few minutes that dazed us. By the time we got our bearings and things became a little more even, the point spread never went less than nine. Like always, we got fouled probably three times more often than we fouled, so our lack of free-throw shooting skill again sent us in a depressive spiral. Practise people, practice!

That’s enough for now… I have some clothes I have to wash.

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.

The First Annual CNA Invitational

Hello!

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.

Trying a yogurt + granola mixture. Tastes way too good to be good for you, but the nutrition labels don’t seem to lie.. hopefully.

I found this bread at a local supermarket called K****k*** (I dont’ remember the other letters) bread. It’s made with whole wheats, with oats, bran, sunflower seeds. It looks and tastes really healthy = good! I had it with hummus and this Indian naan bread, which I fried with olive oil. So good!

I tried goat and soy milk as an alternative to cow milk. Review? Goat milk tastes a bit sour, but apparently I will have less of an lactose reaction to it. Soy milk is just good. Still haven’t found any soybean aka edamame.

Yesterday I was at the store, and I asked one of the workers if burghul, a bag of brown rice looking things, was rice. His eyes bulged, leaned over to ask his coworker a question, and shook his head emphatically. Saudi cookie, he said. For Saudi cookie. I looked at the bag, and those small brown nuggets sure didn’t look like any kind of flour to me. But I acquiesced to his superior knowledge of local food products, and went home rice-less. Burgul is actually a local type of wheat, used as a rice substitute. It would’ve been perfect for my planned curry. Bastard.

Today, I believe I will play basketball at the local gym for a few hours, then hunt around for some brown basmati rice. And maybe some salmon. And fill my gas tank for about 8 bucks.

My life is enchanted in a weird sort of way.

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.

12/1  Fly out of Doha, Qatar

12/2-4  University of Southern California

12/5  Western University

12/6 – 12/10 DAVIS!!

12/11  Stony Brook  University

12/12  Univ. of Pennsylvania

12/13 – 12/20 ITHACA!!

12/21 – 1/13 DAVIS!!

1/8 – UC San Francisco

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.

Follow the flow chart, fellow graduates! Where are YOU in the great jungle that is life?

When I get lost in life, I read this

As as teaching assistant that does no research, I spend my work hours idling by at the whims of students. Sometimes, I wish more would come to ask questions. Just not these questions.

My ears are bleeding

Grading makes my brain explode, spraying gray and pink all over my office.

Well, I have a coworker so we split the work, but the result is the same.

Well, that’s all for now. Good luck and good night.

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…)

Doha ain’t bad, folks.