grade whore

I finally got my grades from last semester. So much for my track record for excellence, I flunked two classes. Not that it matters since I took a bunch of extra classes (which is partly why I flunked the two). But it's kind of embarassing since one, on transition economies in post-Soviet countries, was related to my former degree, and the other, was Spanish. Hah!

For the rest, as you might imagine I kicked ass in classes in English, and relatively poorly in French ones. I don't think it's because of the language so much as the methodology. For this one professor we had from UC Santa Barbara all we had was an essay to write, and I'd had 10 years of practice on how to write this sort of thing. I also happened to love the class, but that's also related to methodology.

Same thing for the transition economics class, except theh professor was French, and despite writing in English it's just a different way of presenting things. I was also writing a 30 page analysis of India's financial system reforms at the same time so I had different priorities. Potentially bad priorities: the class I flunked was worth twice as much as the finance class. So overloading on extra classes saved my ass, or it made life overly difficult for the ones I had to take. Whoops.

As further proof of the importance of methodology and teaching style, my research partner Marguerite did great in the typically French classes and relatively poorly in the classes with Anglo imperialists. So maybe it's nationalism? Grade inflation? Meh ...

One final detail: I barely passed the ridiculous multiple choice exam for this one terrible class we had with about 10 professors. The essay part in English, though, went well.

It's a good thing grades don't really matter at this level.

Two-month anniversary

For what it's worth, yesterday marked two months since my arrival on July 25! It sure doesn't feel like it's only been two months, which includes two weeks of vacation! Needless to say it's been an incredibly rich experience so far.

Here's to more good times ...

Back to the grind

A week in paradise concluded with 28 hours in transit back to Bogota, and real life has begun again with a vengeance. Internet was down today, so that meant that I could get back to transcribing interviews and putting the finishing touches on our first database, made up of 17 people nice enough to fill out our questionnaire as they prepared to head to Spain to sell high fashion to the rich.

If we could meet maybe 200 more emigrants from different backgrounds, and if we were actually studying the program they'll be working under, we'd have some useful data for some killer regression analysis and tables n shit for the thesis. As it is, it was helpful to try out our first questionnaire ever on interesting but useless (that is, for our research project) people.

As I wait for another group of Guinea pigs to fall into our laps, I think I'll get some sleep. I promise that a vacation update and photos will be up soon. But not before Wednesday.

quick update

On the first day of tropical paradiseness, Olivier and I spent the morning swimming and opening coconuts we found on the beach. Too bad we didn't find a bottle of sunblock, because after five hours (we'd planned to swim for maybe an hour, at 8am) I'd managed to get the worst sunburn ever. Well, maybe not ever, because I've heard that really bad sunburns blister, but I was really, really red, like a lobster (which I hope to eat for dinner tonight). But at least it was uniform, no silly looking finger marks to be found. I just hope some of this pain will turn to tan. It's gotten a lot better today but now we're heading to the desert. Gotta grab some more 45 SPF before we leave.

Photos when we get back to Bogota this weekend.

don't you wish you were here?

Now that I'm about to head off on another trip to a tropical paradise, this seems like a good time to give you the lowdown on the last trip. A friend of a friend had contacts at a San Gil extreme sports company, and after he made his pitch we turned to another friend who's close friend actually lived there and could get us a much better deal. So what started out as a weekend trip with my housemates turned into a major deal. Here are most of us at the bus station:



We arrived around 3am and walked to Solé's house. We slept on a bunch of mattresses and couch cushions they had stashed around the house, and woke up to this house with various rooms and whatnot but an open courtyard in the middle. So it's like you're outside all the time unless you close the doors.



It also happened to be right on the town square with it's nifty park:



But since there were so many of us the foreigners ended up staying at a nifty hostel up the hill. The nice Australian semi-hippy that ran the place actually gave Olivier the idea for our next trip, which starts in about two hours. Here's the view from one of the rooms (which were perfectly adequate and not too sketchy given the perfect weather:



Of course, since there were 17+ of us, everything took forever, including getting our asses in gear to do stuff. So we amused ourselves by swinging in hammocks and doing coke:



Actually, I'm not sure what they're exchanging, but it must be illicit.

Our first activity was rafting, taking me back to my early teens when I used to go to summercamp in Colorado and spend a week rafting. Gotta love those helmets. And check out my swimming trunks! National colors of both the US AND France, perfect for our international crowd. Then again, that's what I got for buying trunks 20 minutes before leaving for the bus terminal.



We docked here. Note the weird tree:



After a delicious lunch of meat, we headed off to a beautiful colonial village where we wandered around for a while and had coffee. Here are (left to right) Noemie, Claire, Olivier, and Jaime. Does it look like a music video to anyone else? Olivier walking down the street, singing, with his possee backing him up, etc. Am I crazy?



And there was this fancy church, but it didn't turn out so well in photos. So here I got all artsy with b&w (n&b in Spanish and French, you philistines!):



We ended up in a bar that, had there been light, would have had a truly spectacular view. Apparently it overlooked a beautiful valley, but the sun goes down early in Colombia so all we saw was black. We had a few beers anyway though, exhausted from the rafting and meat. Here is Jaime, the Colombian dude who helped us so much at the beginning of our trip. Next to him is Solé, who really should open a tour company. She did an amazing job organizing the whole weekend for 20 people. And she's a killer dancer too. Later that night we went to a club and she won a bottle of aguardiente, Colombian booze with alcohol halfway between California wine and vodka. Or maybe they were just passing it out and her dancing on the catwalk was just a coincidence. We'd already passed around a bottle though so I was too busy dancing to notice.



But before we got to the club we had to leave the bar and find the cars. When we got to the main square (see the stair photo above) there was this band playing and a bunch of people dancing something called cumbia, if I'm not mistaken. Sorry, you guys don't get to see me trying it out. Here's a bunch of us plus the band:



The next day we went rappeling down an 80-meter (260-foot, philistines!) cliff. The problem though was that it takes like 5 minutes to do that, and we hadn't paid to climb back up, which I think would have been much more fun. It was really frustrating. Not that you care, especially since I was napping on a rock at the bottom instead of slaving away in an office. Here's the cliff. You don't get to see more ridiculous helmet + uncomfortable harness photos.



At about 7pm we went spelunking (caving), wandering through water and mud, wearing silly helmets and generally freezing our asses off. It was really cool to be wandering around these subterrainian passageways and crawling through nasty water. At one point the water was too high to get through without swimming, and even with helmet lamps it was slightly scary to have to go 15 feet under water. The guide went first, then pulled everyone through with a rope. I unfortunately volunteered to be the guy that helps everyone get a good grip on the rope (wrap it around their wrist), which meant I was the last to go through, twice (on the way into the cave and on the way out). So not only was I neck deep in water for 15 minutes each way, I had to hang out alone with my shitty lamp for about 30 seconds each time as I waited my turn. This is not terribly fun -- bats could have eaten me and no one would have known!

Sorry, no photos of any of this though. Like a bunch of idiots, we'd left our vaste stash of waterproof camera equipment in Bogota. God, we were really kicking ourselves that day.

The next day was supposed to be paragliding, but since the wind was really crappy only the four lightest girls got to go. And it wasn't even sunny. Since I'm still bitter, you don't get photos of them either. Fine, here's one:



Poor Olivier only wanted to go swimming all day but the guides promised there'd be a river nearby. We should have thought a little harder about that, since there aren't many rivers at the tops of hills. Way off in the distance in that photo you might see something that looks like a river, but I promise it was further than that. But it was so worth it! There were natural water slides, mini-waterfalls, pools of frigid water, and, above all, rocks to jump off! It was glorious. But again, no photos, this time since the photographer has flaked and didn't send any to me. Dammit.

And at some point, I nearly kicked Claire's ass. She started it though, then chickened out. And with fists like these, who wouldn't?



There you go, some photos and adventure for ya. More in two weeks.

Just so you know

Just so you know, I'm leaving Bogota for to go hang out in the Carribbean for 10 days with Olivier and some friends from here. An 16-hour bus ride awaits, the recompense being a national park/jungle + desert and some of the best beaches in the world. Who cares about the Colonial architecture in Cartagena when I can go snorkling and sleep in a hammock on the beach?

I really promise to have pictures this time.

In case you're wondering, it's called the Parque Tyrona, and the desert, La Guajira.

Spanish, music totalitarianism, and why subsistence farming just isn't what it used to be

Ok ok, it's time for an update. It's been pretty busy lately but I'll try to cover everything. Going reverse-chronologically ...

Yesterday I did my first interview in Spanish by myself, after becoming progressively bitchy after each interview where I had trouble following along or asking many questions as Marguerite and the interviewee did their thing in great Spanish. But this time, I managed to keep an employee of the Spanish embassy talking for an hour, and if I remember correctly, he even said some interesting stuff. So screw you Ramon! And this afternoon I'll have the great pleasure of listening to my stuttering, heavily accented Spanish this afternoon as I work on the transcript. Quel bonheur!

Last Friday we had another successful party at the apartment. Pretty much the same deal as last time, with the same battles over music as one might expect from such a diverse group, but there were lots of people, and they brought booze this time! Towards 2:00am I decided to play Stalin and impose my DJ skillz on the remaining dancers, so we closed out the night with James Brown, Jamiroquai, Janis Joplin, Prince, Jackson 5, Pulp Fiction, and the Rolling Stones. Yeah! There were some amazing dancers too, and even if you're not great it's so fun to dance with someone who is, and isn't bitchy about it. I had no idea Maceo Parker could be so danceable. More importantly, however, somebody brought a brownie, for Noemie, though I didn't realize this. And as I nursed my groggy brain the next morning all I understood was that there was available chocolate, and it was sooooo good. One of the best I've had, even though it was an industrial brownie from the supermarket or something! Sorry Noemie, better luck next time. It's good to know Colombia can do brownies right.

Moving backwards, that day Marguerite and I spent the day visiting and indigenous village that has been participating in a temporary migration program between Spain and Colombia, where they go to Spain for 4-9 months and spend the rest of the year in Colombia. Jean, I have now seen subsistence farming, and I'm not sure how I feel about it. (for those of you who didn't participate in our weekend discussions of the evils of the modern world and the existential advantages of subsistence farming, as we ate waffles and cereal at the Berkeley dorm cafeteria, now you have a little idea of what I did those two years down in the People's Republic).

In essence, this is a tight-knit community of 150 people, and by community I really mean more of an extended family. The community-building programs they finance with the funds sent back from Spain are used, among other things, to educate their children in traditional medicine and agriculture, as they try to rebuild aspects of the indigenous culture that had been lost or ignored for decades. One odd aspect of the whole deal is that, if I understood correctly, they have had the help of historians, anthropologists, and biologists to help them identify some of these bits of culture. We're going back this weekend so hopefully I'll be able to clear this up, since it does seem kind of strange.

One odd part of their whole community deal is that part of the village land is owned communally, but when they talk about the funds they receive from Spain, most of which goes to the family of the worker with a quota for the village, they talk about it in purely hardcore capitalistic terms, an investment in the future, much as The Economist or Wall Street Journal would. They want to be self-sufficient and wasting hard-earned remittances on booze or TV sets is not part of the plan. They've apparently reconciled this with the intense community ties and communitarian emphasis of everyday life.

Other nuggets of info you might find amusing include: the fact that one of the guys we talked to is a photography buff, but he says that film and developing are too expensive so he'd like to get a digital camera; they want to shoot a video (in digital) with the kids of the village; the leaders we talked to all had cell phones; they want to send their kids to university one day; they have internet access and email addresses via computers in the town a few minutes away; they are getting financial and technical help from a Spanish NGO to start producing eggs locally, so they can become more self-sufficient in their food supply.

So subsistence farming just ain't what it used to be.

In any case, it was cool to see an extremely concrete example of the benefits and costs of temporary migration programs, which we've been reading about in academic journals for weeks now. Let's throw in a buzzword: globalization. In a recent email about this (I'm really lazy, don't want to write it again), I wrote that "While globalization isn't anything new, it's still impressive to see to what extent this phenomenon can affect a small, remote group of Indians that just want to sell some eggs and have enough land to truly become self-sufficient."

...

"So many little things contribute to the realization of these dreams and each step is so fragile. If the US and Europe end agricultural subsidies, will Spanish agriculture remain competitive? [and would these Indians still have jobs there?] If Spanish unemployment gets worse will the agreements that allow these programs to function smoothly remain in place? Will Catalonia still want to import foreign workers? If the price of oil keeps rising will these people be able to afford plane tickets? ... What happens to this village if the bird flu hits Colombia?"

So there you go for now. I'll have more updates about our extreme sports weekend, plus tons of photos, sometime when I'm not sick of staring at the computer screen.